Land Quality and Landscape Processes

This monograph contains a selection of scientific papers presented on the conference on Land Quality and Landscape Processes, hold in Keszthely, Hungary. It covers topics related to various aspects of land quality including : concepts of assessment; evaluation of biomass productivity ; bioindicators of land quality ; quality assessment of degraded land ; land use related data processingJRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen

Candida parapsilosis secreted lipase as an important virulence factor

The prevalence of Candida parapsilosis, an opportunistic human pathogenic fungal species, is increasing at an alarming rate in the hospital environment. Patients at risk for C. parapsilosis infection include those with immunosuppression, such as individuals with cancer, AIDS, and low birth weight premature neonates as well as patients that had undergone abdominal surgery. Neonatal candidiasis caused by C. parapsilosis has been widely reported across the globe. Various reports have shown that, compared to other Candida species, certain C. parapsilosis clinical isolates were less susceptible to antifungals such as amphotericin B, fluconazole, and caspofungin. In addition, some studies have even reported multi-echinocandin or multi-azole resistant strains of C. parapsilosis. C. parapsilosis has several virulence factors that contribute to its capacity for host invasion and among these factors extracellular lipases have a major role in pathogenesis. In this review we have collected all the recent relevant studies that confirm the involvement of secreted lipases in C. parapsilosis pathogenesis, using both in vitro and in vivo models of infection. Of particular note, an available lipase deficient C. parapsilosis strain has been utilized to demonstrate that the lack of secreted lipases decreased virulence, reduced tissue damage, and was less able to survive within phagocytes or mice compared to the wild type. Since fungal secreted lipases have different characteristics than lipolytic enzymes present in humans, C. parapsilosis extracellular lipases may be potential targets for the development of novel antifungal drugs

Canine Saliva as a Possible Source of Antimicrobial Resistance Genes

While the One Health issues of intensive animal farming are commonly discussed, keeping companion animals is less associated with the interspecies headway of antimicrobial resistance. With the constant advance in veterinary standards, antibiotics are regularly applied in companion animal medicine. Due to the close coexistence of dogs and humans, dog bites and other casual encounters with dog saliva (e.g., licking the owner) are common. According to our metagenome study, based on 26 new generation sequencing canine saliva datasets from 2020 and 2021 reposited in NCBI SRA by The 10,000 Dog Genome Consortium and the Broad Institute within Darwin's Ark project, canine saliva is rich in bacteria with predictably transferable antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs). In the genome of potentially pathogenic Bacteroides, Capnocytophaga, Corynebacterium, Fusobacterium, Pasteurella, Porphyromonas, Staphylococcus and Streptococcus species, which are some of the most relevant bacteria in dog bite infections, ARGs against aminoglycosides, carbapenems, cephalosporins, glycylcyclines, lincosamides, macrolides, oxazolidinone, penams, phenicols, pleuromutilins, streptogramins, sulfonamides and tetracyclines could be identified. Several ARGs, including ones against amoxicillin-clavulanate, the most commonly applied antimicrobial agent for dog bites, were predicted to be potentially transferable based on their association with mobile genetic elements (e.g., plasmids, prophages and integrated mobile genetic elements). According to our findings, canine saliva may be a source of transfer for ARG-rich bacteria that can either colonize the human body or transport ARGs to the host bacteriota, and thus can be considered as a risk in the spread of antimicrobial resistance.European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [874735]The research was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 874735 (VEO)

The Beta-1-Receptor Blocker Nebivolol Elicits Dilation of Cerebral Arteries by Reducing Smooth Muscle [Ca2+]i

RATIONALE: Nebivolol is known to have beta-1 blocker activity, but it was also suggested that it elicits relaxation of the peripheral arteries in part via release of nitric oxide (NO). However, the effect of nebivolol on the vasomotor tone of cerebral arteries is still unclear. OBJECTIVE: To assess the effects of nebivolol on the diameter of isolated rat basilar arteries (BA) in control, in the presence of inhibitors of vasomotor signaling pathways of know action and hemolysed blood. METHODS AND RESULTS: Vasomotor responses were measured by videomicroscopy and the intracellular Ca2+ by the Fura-2 AM ratiometric method. Under control conditions, nebivolol elicited a substantial dilation of the BA (from 216±22 to 394±20 μm; p CONCLUSIONS: Nebivolol seems to have an important dilator effect in cerebral arteries, which is mediated via several vasomotor mechanisms, converging on the reduction of smooth muscle Ca2+ levels. As such, nebivolol may be effective to improve cerebral circulation in various diseased conditions, such as hemorrhage

Charmonium spectral functions from 2+1 flavour lattice QCD

Finite temperature charmonium spectral functions in the pseudoscalar and vector channels are studied in lattice QCD with 2+1 flavours of dynamical Wilson quarks, on fine isotropic lattices (with a lattice spacing of 0.057 fm), with a non-physical pion mass of $m_{\pi} \approx$ 545 MeV. The highest temperature studied is approximately $1.4 T_c$. Up to this temperature no significant variation of the spectral function is seen in the pseudoscalar channel. The vector channel shows some temperature dependence, which seems to be consistent with a temperature dependent low frequency peak related to heavy quark transport, plus a temperature independent term at \omega>0. These results are in accord with previous calculations using the quenched approximation.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, 2 table

A Cloud-based Machine Learning Pipeline for the Efficient Extraction of Insights from Customer Reviews

The efficiency of natural language processing has improved dramatically with the advent of machine learning models, particularly neural network-based solutions. However, some tasks are still challenging, especially when considering specific domains. In this paper, we present a cloud-based system that can extract insights from customer reviews using machine learning methods integrated into a pipeline. For topic modeling, our composite model uses transformer-based neural networks designed for natural language processing, vector embedding-based keyword extraction, and clustering. The elements of our model have been integrated and further developed to meet better the requirements of efficient information extraction, topic modeling of the extracted information, and user needs. Furthermore, our system can achieve better results than this task's existing topic modeling and keyword extraction solutions. Our approach is validated and compared with other state-of-the-art methods using publicly available datasets for benchmarking