Endoribonuclease YbeY Is Essential for RNA Processing and Virulence in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Posttranscriptional regulation plays an essential role in the quick adaptation of pathogenic bacteria to host environments, and RNases play key roles in this process by modifying small RNAs and mRNAs. We find that the Pseudomonas aeruginosa endonuclease YbeY is required for rRNA processing and the bacterial virulence in a murine acute pneumonia model. Transcriptomic analyses reveal that knocking out the ybeY gene results in downregulation of oxidative stress response genes, including the catalase genes katA and katB Consistently, the ybeY mutant is more susceptible to H2O2 and neutrophil-mediated killing. Overexpression of katA restores the bacterial tolerance to H2O2 and neutrophil killing as well as virulence. We further find that the downregulation of the oxidative stress response genes is due to defective expression of the stationary-phase sigma factor RpoS. We demonstrate an autoregulatory mechanism of RpoS and find that ybeY mutation increases the level of a small RNA, ReaL, which directly represses the translation of rpoS through the 5' UTR of its mRNA and subsequently reduces the expression of the oxidative stress response genes. In vitro assays demonstrate direct degradation of ReaL by YbeY. Deletion of reaL or overexpression of rpoS in the ybeY mutant restores the bacterial tolerance to oxidative stress and the virulence. We also demonstrate that YbeZ binds to YbeY and is involved in the 16S rRNA processing and regulation of reaL and rpoS as well as the bacterial virulence. Overall, our results reveal pleiotropic roles of YbeY and the YbeY-mediated regulation of rpoS through ReaL.IMPORTANCE The increasing bacterial antibiotic resistance imposes a severe threat to human health. For the development of effective treatment and prevention strategies, it is critical to understand the mechanisms employed by bacteria to grow in the human body. Posttranscriptional regulation plays an important role in bacterial adaptation to environmental changes. RNases and small RNAs are key players in this regulation. In this study, we demonstrate critical roles of the RNase YbeY in the virulence of the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa We further identify the small RNA ReaL as the direct target of YbeY and elucidate the YbeY-regulated pathway on the expression of bacterial virulence factors. Our results shed light on the complex regulatory network of P. aeruginosa and indicate that inference with the YbeY-mediated regulatory pathway might be a valid strategy for the development of a novel treatment strategy.</p

Global Wheat Head Detection 2021: an improved dataset for benchmarking wheat head detection methods

The Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) dataset was created in 2020 and has assembled 193,634 labelled wheat heads from 4700 RGB images acquired from various acquisition platforms and 7 countries/institutions. With an associated competition hosted in Kaggle, GWHD_2020 has successfully attracted attention from both the computer vision and agricultural science communities. From this first experience, a few avenues for improvements have been identified regarding data size, head diversity, and label reliability. To address these issues, the 2020 dataset has been reexamined, relabeled, and complemented by adding 1722 images from 5 additional countries, allowing for 81,553 additional wheat heads. We now release in 2021 a new version of the Global Wheat Head Detection dataset, which is bigger, more diverse, and less noisy than the GWHD_2020 version

Modifications of Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics by Using Word Embeddings

Traditional machine translation evaluation metrics such as BLEU and WER have been widely used, but these metrics have poor correlations with human judgements because they badly represent word similarity and impose strict identity matching. In this paper, we propose some modifications to the traditional measures based on word embeddings for these two metrics. The evaluation results show that our modifications significantly improve their correlation with human judgements

Weakly-Supervised Concept-based Adversarial Learning for Cross-lingual Word Embeddings

Distributed representations of words which map each word to a continuous vector have proven useful in capturing important linguistic information not only in a single language but also across different languages. Current unsupervised adversarial approaches show that it is possible to build a mapping matrix that aligns two sets of monolingual word embeddings without high quality parallel data, such as a dictionary or a sentence-aligned corpus. However, without an additional step of refinement, the preliminary mapping learnt by these methods is unsatisfactory, leading to poor performance for typologically distant languages. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised adversarial training method to overcome this limitation, based on the intuition that mapping across languages is better done at the concept level than at the word level. We propose a concept-based adversarial training method which improves the performance of previous unsupervised adversarial methods for most languages, and especially for typologically distant language pairs

Use of scanning devices for object 3D reconstruction by photogrammetry and visualization in virtual reality

This article aims to compare two different scanning devices (360 camera and digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera) and their properties in the three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the object by the photogrammetry method. The article first describes the various stages of the process of 3D modeling and reconstruction of the object. A point cloud generated to the 3D model of the object, including textures, is created in the following steps. The scanning devices are compared under the same conditions and time from capturing the image of a real object to its 3D reconstruction. The attributes of the scanned image of the recon-structed 3D model, which is a mandarin tree in a citrus greenhouse in a daylight environment, are also compared. Both created models are also compared visually. That visual comparison reveals the possibilities in the application of both scanning devices can be found in the process of 3D reconstruction of the object by photogrammetry. The results of this research can be applied in the field of 3D modeling of a real object using 3D models in virtual reality, 3D printing, 3D visualization, image analysis, and 3D online presentation. © 2023, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.IGA/CebiaTech/2022/004; Tomas Bata University in Zlin, TBU; University of Toky

Prospective observational study on the prognosis of ureteral lesions caused by impacted stones via dual-energy spectral computed tomography

Objective: Ureteral lesions caused by impacted ureteral stones are likely to result in postoperative ureteral stricture. On this basis, the study aimed to investigate if dual-energy spectral computed tomography can predict ureteral hardening caused by impacted stones and to explore the relationship between different types of ureteral lesions and the risk of ureteral stricture. Methods: This prospective study collected data of 93 patients with impacted stones from hospital automation system during January 2018 to October 2019. They underwent an abdominal scan on a dual-energy spectral computed tomography. During surgery, the operator used ureteroscopy to identify ureteral lesions, which were classified into four categories: edema, polyps, pallor, and hardening. Seven months later, 90 patients were reviewed for the degree of hydronephrosis. Results: Endoscopic observations revealed 38 (41%) cases of ureteral edema, 20 (22%) cases of polyps, 13 (14%) cases of pallor, and 22 (24%) cases of hardening. There were significant differences in hydronephrosis, the period of impaction, the calcium concentration of the ureter, and the slope of the spectral Hounsfield unit curve between the four groups. After that, we evaluated the factors associated with ureteral hardening and found that the calcium concentration of the ureter and hydronephrosis remained independent predictors of ureteral hardening. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that 5.3 mg/cm³ calcium concentration of the ureter is an optimal cut-off value to predict ureteral hardening. The result of follow-up showed that 80 patients had complete remission of hydronephrosis, with a complete remission rate of 61.9% (13/21) in the hardening group and 97.1% (67/69) in the non-hardening group (p<0.001). Conclusion: Calcium concentration of the ureter is an independent predictor of ureteral hardening. Patients with ureteral hardening have more severe hydronephrosis after ureteroscopic lithotripsy. When the calcium concentration of the ureter is less than 5.3 mg/cm³, ureteral lesions should be actively treated

Pesticide Use and Risk Perceptions among Small-Scale Farmers in Anqiu County, China

The unsafe use and misuse of pesticides in China are major threats to farmers’ health and the environment. The purpose of this study is to evaluate small-scale farmers’ practices with regard to pesticide use and identify the determinants of their behavior in Anqiu County, China. The results show that the frequency of pesticide application by local farmers is high and that the improper disposal of pesticides after use is common in the study area. Although most farmers felt that they were at some degree of risk when using pesticides, farmers were found to overuse pesticides in the study area. The probability of pesticide overuse significantly decreased with farmers’ risk perceptions, willingness to reduce pesticide use, better social relationships, and strict government monitoring. The perception of risk can thus be an important element in education and communication efforts

An effectiveness study on trajectory similarity measures

The last decade has witnessed the prevalence of sensor and GPS technologies that produce a sheer volume of trajectory data representing the motion history of moving objects. Measuring similarity between trajectories is undoubtedly one of the most important tasks in trajectory data management since it serves as the foundation of many advanced analyses such as similarity search, clustering, and classification. In this light, tremendous efforts have been spent on this topic, which results in a large number of trajectory similarity measures. Generally, each individual work introducing a new distance measure has made specific claims on the superiority of their proposal. However, for most works, the experimental study was focused on demonstrating the efficiency of the search algorithms, leaving the effectiveness aspect unverified empirically. In this paper, we conduct a comparative experimental study on the effectiveness of six widely used trajectory similarity measures based on a real taxi trajectory dataset. By applying a variety of transformations we designed for each original trajectory, our experimental observations demonstrate the advantages and drawbacks of these similarity measures in different circumstances