Wilayat al-Qawkaz - The Islamic State in the North Caucasus. Frames, Strategies and Credibility of Radical Islamist Propaganda Videos

The growing influence of the terror organization “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) on Russian speaking communities has come to fruition in the North Caucasus. ISIS has not only managed to attract individuals from the North Caucasus to join the jihad in Syria and Iraq, but further to establish the regional branch “Wilayat al-Qawkaz”. Now, as a major international event in Russia 2018, the FIFA World Cup poses an attractive target for ISIS that has been threatened through ISIS’s online channels. In order to reach different target groups, ISIS has produced several high-quality propaganda videos. According to Benford and Snow (2000), social movements perceive social phenomena differently and communicate their interpretation of reality by using frames. To sustain or increase the number of followers, ISIS spreads a narrative that identifies problems, proposes solutions and offers incentives to join. Benford and Snow describe this pattern as the three frame dimensions: diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frame. This research paper aims to highlight the strategies of ISIS's propaganda videos in the North Caucasus by identifying the main topics within the three frame dimensions. Based on the analysis of five propaganda videos, it points out the main frames addressing the oppression of Muslims as the problem, jihad as the solution, religious duty and rewards in this world and the next as the incentives. Considering that persuasion of propaganda is only effective with credible frames, it can be observed that this requires references to real events and more important the use of reputable speakers that can be religious or militant leaders, as well as ordinary but authentic jihadists. Taking the visual frame analysis into account, the visualization of violence and community plays a huge role to create credibility, offer identity and to claim relevance as a serious opponent

The meningococcal vaccine antigen GNA2091 is an analogue of YraP and plays key roles in outer membrane stability and virulence

K.L.S. was supported by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) C. J. Martin Fellowship and Career Development Fellowship. A.F.H. was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship (PIEF-GA-2012-328377). F.O., L.F., and S.B. were recipients of Novartis fellowships from the Ph.D. program of the University of Siena (Siena, Italy) and University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy), respectively.GNA2091 is one of the components of the 4-component meningococcal serogroup B vaccine (4CMenB) vaccine and is highly conserved in all meningococcal strains. However, its functional role has not been fully characterized. Here we show that nmb2091 is part of an operon and is cotranscribed with the nmb2089, nmb2090, and nmb2092 adjacent genes, and a similar but reduced operon arrangement is conserved in many other gram-negative bacteria. Deletion of the nmb2091 gene causes an aggregative phenotype with a mild defect in cell separation; differences in the outer membrane composition and phospholipid profile, in particular in the phosphoethanolamine levels; an increased level of outer membrane vesicles; and deregulation of the zinc-responsive genes such as znuD. Finally, the Δ2091 strain is attenuated with respect to the wild-type strain in competitive index experiments in the infant rat model of meningococcal infection. Altogether these data suggest that GNA2091 plays important roles in outer membrane architecture, biogenesis, homeostasis, and in meningococcal survival in vivo, and amodel for its role is discussed. These findings highlight the importance of GNA2091 as a vaccine component.PostprintPeer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The meningococcal vaccine antigen GNA2091 is an analogue of YraP and plays key roles in outer membrane stability and virulence

GNA2091 is one of the components of the 4-component meningococcal serogroup B vaccine (4CMenB) vaccine and is highly conserved in all meningococcal strains. However, its functional role has not been fully characterized. Here we show that nmb2091 is part of an operon and is cotranscribed with the nmb2089, nmb2090, and nmb2092 adjacent genes, and a similar but reduced operon arrangement is conserved in many other gram-negative bacteria. Deletion of the nmb2091 gene causes an aggregative phenotype with a mild defect in cell separation; differences in the outer membrane composition and phospholipid profile, in particular in the phosphoethanolamine levels; an increased level of outer membrane vesicles; and deregulation of the zinc-responsive genes such as znuD. Finally, the ∆2091 strain is attenuated with respect to the wild-type strain in competitive index experiments in the infant rat model of meningococcal infection. Altogether these data suggest that GNA2091 plays important roles in outer membrane architecture, biogenesis, homeostasis, and in meningococcal survival in vivo, and a model for its role is discussed. These findings highlight the importance of GNA2091 as a vaccine component.—Seib, K. L., Haag, A. F., Oriente, F., Fantappiè, L., Borghi, S., Semchenko, E. A., Schulz, B. L., Ferlicca, F., Taddei, A. R., Giuliani, M. M., Pizza, M., Delany, I. The meningococcal vaccine antigen GNA2091 is an analogue of YraP and plays key roles in outer membrane stability and virulence. Neisseria meningitidis, a gram-negative β-proteobacteria, is a leading cause of bacterial sepsis and meningitis worldwide (1). The meningococcal protein Genome-derived Neisseria Antigen 2091 (GNA2091) was first described during the N. meningitidis serogroup B reverse vaccinology project as a lipoprotein predicted to be surface exposed in some meningococcal strains, which is able to induce passive protection in the adult mouse model of meningococcal bacteraemia (2). The function of GNA2091 is still unknown, but because of its protective properties, it was selected for inclusion in the 4-component meningococcal serogroup B vaccine (4CMenB; trade name Bexsero) (3). The 4CMenB vaccine is widely licensed and used to protect against invasive meningococcal disease from MenB and has also been introduced in the United Kingdom for mass vaccination of infants (4). 4CMenB contains 3 recombinant proteins [factor H binding protein (fHbp), Neisseria heparin binding antigen (NHBA), and Neisserial adhesin A] and outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) derived from New Zealand strain NZ 98/254 (2, 5). The immunogenicity and stability of the recombinant antigens was optimized by generating protein-protein fusions of fHbp-GNA2091 and NHBA-GNA1030, which induce higher serum bactericidal activity titers than those induced by the individual antigens alone (2). fHbp, Neisserial adhesin A, and NHBA have been extensively characterized and shown to be involved in meningococcal virulence (6–11). The accessory protein GNA1030 has recently been characterized as a Neisseria ubiquinone binding protein (NUbp) (12). However, the role of GNA2091 has not yet been characterized in detail. GNA2091 has been shown to be localized at the periplasmic side of the outer membrane, where it is proposed to be required for the efficient assembly of a subset of outer membrane proteins (OMPs), including porin (Por)A, PorB, pili associated protein Q (PilQ), and the β-barrel assembly machinery (Bam) complex, with accumulation of misassembled monomeric proteins seen in a gna2091 mutant strain (13). The gna2091 mutant is also sensitive to detergent stress, indicating compromised membrane integrity (14). Here we further characterize the expression and functional role of GNA2091 in vitro and in the in vivo infant rat model of meningococcal bacteraemia

Engineering a humanized bone organ model in mice to study bone metastases

Current in vivo models for investigating human primary bone tumors and cancer metastasis to the bone rely on the injection of human cancer cells into the mouse skeleton. This approach does not mimic species-specific mechanisms occurring in human diseases and may preclude successful clinical translation. We have developed a protocol to engineer humanized bone within immunodeficient hosts, which can be adapted to study the interactions between human cancer cells and a humanized bone microenvironment in vivo. A researcher trained in the principles of tissue engineering will be able to execute the protocol and yield study results within 4–6 months. Additive biomanufactured scaffolds seeded and cultured with human bone-forming cells are implanted ectopically in combination with osteogenic factors into mice to generate a physiological bone 'organ', which is partially humanized. The model comprises human bone cells and secreted extracellular matrix (ECM); however, other components of the engineered tissue, such as the vasculature, are of murine origin. The model can be further humanized through the engraftment of human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that can lead to human hematopoiesis within the murine host. The humanized organ bone model has been well characterized and validated and allows dissection of some of the mechanisms of the bone metastatic processes in prostate and breast cancer