Book review: Spirit of rebellion. Labor and religion in the new cotton south

International audienceThis article provides formal definitions characterizing well-formed composition of components in order to guarantee their safe deployment and execution. Our work focuses on the structural aspects of component composition; it puts together most of the concepts common to many component models, but never formalized as a whole. Our formalization characterizes correct component architectures made of functional and non-functional aspects, both structured as component assemblies. Interceptor chains can be used for a safe and controlled interaction between the two aspects. Our well-formed components guarantee a set of properties ensuring that the deployed component system has a correct architecture and can run safely. Finally, those definitions constitute the formal basis for our Eclipse-based environment for the development and specification of component-based applications

Animal venoms: a novel source of anti-Toxoplasma gondii drug candidates

Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) is a nucleated intracellular parasitic protozoan with a broad host selectivity. It causes toxoplasmosis in immunocompromised or immunodeficient patients. The currently available treatments for toxoplasmosis have significant side effects as well as certain limitations, and the development of vaccines remains to be explored. Animal venoms are considered to be an important source of novel antimicrobial agents. Some peptides from animal venoms have amphipathic alpha-helix structures. They inhibit the growth of pathogens by targeting membranes to produce lethal pores and cause membrane rupture. Venom molecules generally possess immunomodulatory properties and play key roles in the suppression of pathogenic organisms. Here, we summarized literatures of the last 15 years on the interaction of animal venom peptides with T. gondii and attempt to explore the mechanisms of their interaction with parasites that involve membrane and organelle damage, immune response regulation and ion homeostasis. Finally, we analyzed some limitations of venom peptides for drug therapy and some insights into their development in future studies. It is hoped that more research will be stimulated to turn attention to the medical value of animal venoms in toxoplasmosis

Was the extended rainy winter of 2018/2019 over the Middle and Lower reaches of the Yangtze River driven by anthropogenic forcing?

Anthropogenic forcing reduced the probability of rainfall amount in the extended rainy winter of 2018/19 over the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, China, by ~19%, but exerted no influence on the excessive rainy days, based on HadGEM3-GA6-N216 ensembles. Instead the natural variability played a large and important role in this event

Anti-<i>Toxoplasma gondii</i> Effects of Lipopeptide Derivatives of Lycosin-I

Toxoplasmosis, caused by Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), is a serious zoonotic parasitic disease. We previously found that Lycosin-I exhibited anti-T. gondii activity, but its serum stability was not good enough. In this study, we aimed to improve the stability and activity of Lycosin-I through fatty acid chain modification, so as to find a better anti-T. gondii drug candidate. The α/ε-amino residues of different lysine residues of Lycosin-I were covalently coupled with lauric acid to obtain eight lipopeptides, namely L-C12, L-C12-1, L-C12-2, L-C12-3, L-C12-4, L-C12-5, L-C12-6, and L-C12-7. Among these eight lipopeptides, L-C12 showed the best activity against T. gondii in vitro in a trypan blue assay. We then conjugated a shorter length fatty chain, aminocaproic acid, at the same modification site of L-C12, namely L-an. The anti-T. gondii effects of Lycosin-I, L-C12 and L-an were evaluated via an invasion assay, proliferation assay and plaque assay in vitro. A mouse model acutely infected with T. gondii tachyzoites was established to evaluate their efficacy in vivo. The serum stability of L-C12 and L-an was improved, and they showed comparable or even better activity than Lycosin-I did in inhibiting the invasion and proliferation of tachyzoites. L-an effectively prolonged the survival time of mice acutely infected with T. gondii. These results suggest that appropriate fatty acid chain modification can improve serum stability and enhance anti-T. gondii effect of Lycosin-I. The lipopeptide derivatives of Lycosin-I have potential as a novel anti-T. gondii drug candidate

Inter-Level Feature Balanced Fusion Network for Street Scene Segmentation

Semantic segmentation, as a pixel-level recognition task, has been widely used in a variety of practical scenes. Most of the existing methods try to improve the performance of the network by fusing the information of high and low layers. This kind of simple concatenation or element-wise addition will lead to the problem of unbalanced fusion and low utilization of inter-level features. To solve this problem, we propose the Inter-Level Feature Balanced Fusion Network (IFBFNet) to guide the inter-level feature fusion towards a more balanced and effective direction. Our overall network architecture is based on the encoder&ndash;decoder architecture. In the encoder, we use a relatively deep convolution network to extract rich semantic information. In the decoder, skip-connections are added to connect and fuse low-level spatial features to restore a clearer boundary expression gradually. We add an inter-level feature balanced fusion module to each skip connection. Additionally, to better capture the boundary information, we added a shallower spatial information stream to supplement more spatial information details. Experiments have proved the effectiveness of our module. Our IFBFNet achieved a competitive performance on the Cityscapes dataset with only finely annotated data used for training and has been greatly improved on the baseline network

RP11-495P10.1 promotes HCC cell proliferation by regulating reprogramming of glucose metabolism and acetylation of the NR4A3 promoter via the PDK1/PDH axis

The incidence and related death of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have increased over the past decades. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying HCC pathogenesis are not fully understood. Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) RP11-495P10.1 has been proven to be closely associated with the progression of prostate cancer, but its role and specific mechanism in HCC are still unknown. Here, we identify that RP11-495P10.1 is highly expressed in HCC tissues and cells and contributes to the proliferation of HCC cells. Moreover, this study demonstrates that RP11-495P10.1 affects the proliferation of HCC by negatively regulating the expression of nuclear receptor subfamily 4 group a member 3 (NR4A3). Glycometabolism reprogramming is one of the main characteristics of tumor cells. In this study, we discover that RP11-495P10.1 regulates glycometabolism reprogramming by changing the expression of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase 1 (PDK1) and pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH), thus contributing to the proliferation of HCC cells. Furthermore, knockdown of RP11-495P10.1 increases enrichment of H3K27Ac in the promoter of NR4A3 by promoting the activity of PDH and the production of acetyl-CoA, which leads to the increased transcription of NR4A3. Altogether, RP11-495P10.1 promotes HCC cell proliferation by regulating the reprogramming of glucose metabolism and acetylation of the NR4A3 promoter via the PDK1/PDH axis, which provides an lncRNA-oriented therapeutic strategy for the diagnosis and treatment of HCC