Hexakis(1H-imidazole-κN 3)nickel(II) bis­(3-thienylacetate)

In the title complex, [Ni(C3H4N2)6](C6H5O2S)2, the NiII atom displays an octa­hedral coordination geometry, defined by six N atoms from the imidazole ligands. Inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen-bonding inter­actions between the cationic complex and 3-thienylacetate anions form a three-dimensional network architecture. The two 3-thienylacetate anions are disordered, with occupancy ratios of circa 0.774 (1):0.226 (1) and ca 0.753 (5):0.247 (5)

Analysis of interspecies adherence of oral bacteria using a membrane binding assay coupled with polymerase chain reaction-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis profiling.

Information on co-adherence of different oral bacterial species is important for understanding interspecies interactions within oral microbial community. Current knowledge on this topic is heavily based on pariwise coaggregation of known, cultivable species. In this study, we employed a membrane binding assay coupled with polymerase chain reaction-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE) to systematically analyze the co-adherence profiles of oral bacterial species, and achieved a more profound knowledge beyond pairwise coaggregation. Two oral bacterial species were selected to serve as "bait": Fusobacterium nucleatum (F. nucleatum) whose ability to adhere to a multitude of oral bacterial species has been extensively studied for pairwise interactions and Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans) whose interacting partners are largely unknown. To enable screening of interacting partner species within bacterial mixtures, cells of the "bait" oral bacterium were immobilized on nitrocellulose membranes which were washed and blocked to prevent unspecific binding. The "prey" bacterial mixtures (including known species or natural saliva samples) were added, unbound cells were washed off after the incubation period and the remaining cells were eluted using 0.2 mol x L(-1) glycine. Genomic DNA was extracted, subjected to 16S rRNA PCR amplification and separation of the resulting PCR products by DGGE. Selected bands were recovered from the gel, sequenced and identified via Nucleotide BLAST searches against different databases. While few bacterial species bound to S. mutans, consistent with previous findings F. nucleatum adhered to a variety of bacterial species including uncultivable and uncharacterized ones. This new approach can more effectively analyze the co-adherence profiles of oral bacteria, and could facilitate the systematic study of interbacterial binding of oral microbial species

Law Article-Enhanced Legal Case Matching: a Causal Learning Approach

Legal case matching, which automatically constructs a model to estimate the similarities between the source and target cases, has played an essential role in intelligent legal systems. Semantic text matching models have been applied to the task where the source and target legal cases are considered as long-form text documents. These general-purpose matching models make the predictions solely based on the texts in the legal cases, overlooking the essential role of the law articles in legal case matching. In the real world, the matching results (e.g., relevance labels) are dramatically affected by the law articles because the contents and the judgments of a legal case are radically formed on the basis of law. From the causal sense, a matching decision is affected by the mediation effect from the cited law articles by the legal cases, and the direct effect of the key circumstances (e.g., detailed fact descriptions) in the legal cases. In light of the observation, this paper proposes a model-agnostic causal learning framework called Law-Match, under which the legal case matching models are learned by respecting the corresponding law articles. Given a pair of legal cases and the related law articles, Law-Match considers the embeddings of the law articles as instrumental variables (IVs), and the embeddings of legal cases as treatments. Using IV regression, the treatments can be decomposed into law-related and law-unrelated parts, respectively reflecting the mediation and direct effects. These two parts are then combined with different weights to collectively support the final matching prediction. We show that the framework is model-agnostic, and a number of legal case matching models can be applied as the underlying models. Comprehensive experiments show that Law-Match can outperform state-of-the-art baselines on three public datasets.Comment: 10 pages accepted by SIGIR202

Diaqua­bis­(4-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-5-carboxyl­ato-κ2 N 3,O 4)cobalt(II) N,N-dimethyl­formamide disolvate

In the title complex, [Co(C8H9N2O4)2(H2O)2]·2C3H7NO, the CoII cation (site symmetry ) is six-coordinated by two 5-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-4-carboxyl­ate ligands and two water mol­ecules in a distorted octa­hedral environment. In the crystal structure, the complex mol­ecules and dimethyl­formamide solvent mol­ecules are linked by extensive O—H⋯O and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonding into sheets lying parallel to (21)

Aqua­bis(1H-imidazole-κN 3)bis­(4-methyl­benzoato-κ2 O,O′)cadmium(II)

In the title compound, [Cd(C8H7O2)2(C3H4N2)2(H2O)], the CdII atom is coordinated by four carboxyl­ate O atoms from two bidentate chelating 4-methyl­benzoate ligands, two N atoms from two imidazole ligands and one water mol­ecule in a distorted penta­gonal bipyramidal geometry. Inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds between the coordinated water mol­ecule and the carboxyl­ate O atoms of 4-methyl­benzoate lead to an infinite chain. These chains are further self-assembled into a two-dimensional layer through N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds between the imidazole ligands and carboxyl­ate groups. One of the imidazole ligands is disordered over two positions with site-occupancy factors of 0.737 (4) and 0.263 (4)

Aqua­bis(4-methyl­benzoato)-κO;κ2 O,O′-bis­(pyridine-κN)nickel(II)

In the title mononuclear complex, [Ni(C8H7O2)2(C5H5N)2(H2O)], the NiII atom is in a distorted octa­hedral arrangement, coordinated by three carboxylate O atoms from one bidentate 4-methyl­benzoate ligand and one monodentate 4-methyl­benzoate ligand, two N atoms from pyridine ligands, axially positioned, and a water mol­ecule. The equatorially positioned water mol­ecule and uncoordinated carb­oxylate O atom form an intra­molecular hydrogen bond. An inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bond between the coordinated water mol­ecule and carboxylate O atom of the 4-methyl­benzoate ligand forms infinite chains along the b axis. These chains are connected by C—H⋯π inter­actions