Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Biocontrol of Cucumber Fusarium Wilt by Combined Application of New Antagonistic Bacteria Bacillus amyloliquefaciens B2 and Phenolic Acid-Degrading Fungus Pleurotus ostreatus P5

Continuous monoculture of cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) typically leads to the frequent incidence of Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cucumerinum (FOC). As potent allelochemicals, phenolic acids are believed to be associated with soilborne diseases. This study aimed to investigate the effect of single or co-inoculation of antagonistic bacteria Bacillus amyloliquefaciens B2 and phenolic acid-degrading fungus Pleurotus ostreatus P5 on the suppression of cucumber Fusarium wilt. The strain B2 was identified as B. amyloliquefaciens based on biochemical, physiological, and 16S rDNA and gyrB gene sequence analyses. Strain B2 showed indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) and siderophore production and phosphate solubilization in in vitro assays. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) imaging showed the ability of strain B2 to adhere to the root surface of cucumber. P. ostreatus P5 could effectively degrade mixed phenolic acids as its sole source of carbon and energy for growth in liquid medium. In a pot experiment, four treatments were established as follows: (1) CK, uninoculated control; (2) B2, inoculation of strain B2; (3) P5, inoculation of strain P5; and (4) B2 + P5, co-inoculation of strain B2 and strain P5. At the end of the 60-day pot experiment, the B2, P5, and B2 + P5 treatments significantly reduced disease incidence by 48.1, 22.2, and 63.0%, respectively, compared to the CK treatment (p < 0.05). All three inoculation treatments significantly increased the growth of cucumber seedlings and suppressed the FOC population compared to the control (p < 0.05). High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis showed that total phenolic acids were decreased by 18.9, 35.9, and 63.2% in the B2, P5, and B2 + P5 treatments, respectively. The results from this study suggest that combined application of B. amyloliquefaciens B2 and P. ostreatus P5 could be a promising strategy for suppressing Fusarium wilt and improving plant growth of cucumber seedlings under continuous cropping conditions.
The Specific NLRP3 Antagonist IFM-514 Decreases Fibrosis and Inflammation in Experimental Murine Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis

Background and Aims: Activation of the inflammasome NLRP3 (NOD-, LRR- and pyrin domain containing 3) contributes to the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and progression to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Therefore, this study explored the therapeutic effects of a novel and selective NLRP3 antagonist in a murine dietary model of NASH. Methods: Groups of 12-week-old ApoE -/- mice were fed ad lib for 7 weeks with a methionine/choline deficient (MCD) and western diet (WD). After 3 weeks of diet-induced injury, mice were injected i. p. with the NLRP3 antagonist IFM-514 (100 mg/kg body weight) or vehicle (0.5% carmellose) every day, 5 days/week for a further 4 weeks. Several markers of inflammation, fibrosis and steatosis were evaluated. Whole transcriptome sequencing and panel RNA expression analysis (NanoString) were performed. Results: IFM-514 inhibited IL-1β production in mice challenged with 20 mg/kg lipopolysaccharide, and in mouse and human inflammatory cells in vitro. IFM-514 inhibited hepatic inflammation in the in vivo non-alcoholic steatohepatitis model assessed by H&E staining and in the hepatic gene expression of inflammasome-related proinflammatory cytokines. This effect was associated with significant reduction in caspase-1 activation. Similarly, IFM-514 was efficacious in vivo in MDC-fed ApoE -/- mice, markedly reducing portal pressure, Sirius red staining and 4-hydroxyproline content compared to vehicle-treated mice. Moreover, IFM-514 significantly reduced hepatic steatosis in MCD-fed ApoE -/- mice, as evidenced by NAFLD scores, oil red O staining, hepatic triglycerides and gene expression. In WD treated animals, similar trends in inflammation and fibrosis were observed, although not sufficient IFM-514 levels were reached. Conclusion: Overall, IFM-514 reduced liver inflammation and fibrosis, with mild effects on liver steatosis in experimental murine NASH. Blocking of NLRP3 may be an attractive therapeutic approach for NASH patients.
Association Between Changes in Physical Activity and New-Onset Atrial Fibrillation After ICD/CRT-D Implantation

Background: Changes in physical activity (PA) after implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-D) implantation were unknown. The association of PA changes with new-onset atrial fibrillation (AF), cardiac death and all-cause mortality was unclear in patients at high risk of sudden cardiac death. Methods: Patients receiving ICD/CRT-D implantation from SUMMIT registry were retrospectively analyzed. Changes in PA were considered from baseline status to 1 year after implantation. New-onset AF was defined as the first atrial high-rate episode ≥1% of the daily AF burden detected after implantation. Results: Over a mean follow-up of 50.3 months, 124 new-onset AF events (36.2%), 61 cardiac deaths (17.8%), and 87 all-cause deaths (25.4%) were observed in 343 patients with ICD/CRT-D implantation. PA at 1 year after implantation was increased compared with PA at baseline (11.97 ± 5.83% vs. 10.82 ± 5.43%, P = 0.008), and PA at 1 year was improved in 210 patients (61.2%). Per 1% decrease in PA was associated with 12.4, 18.3, and 14.3% higher risks of new-onset AF, cardiac death and all-cause mortality, regardless of different baseline characteristics. Patients with decreased PA had 2-fold risks of new-onset AF (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.972, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.352–2.877, P < 0.001) as high as those with unchanged/increased PA. Decreased PA was an independent risk factor for cardiac death (HR = 3.358, 95% CI: 1.880–5.996, P < 0.001) and all-cause mortality (HR = 2.803, 95% CI:1.732–4.535, P < 0.001). Conclusion: PA decrease after ICD/CRT-D implantation is associated with a higher incidence of new-onset AF, resulting in worsened outcomes in cardiac death and all-cause mortality.
Electromagnetic Torque Improvement of Doubly Salient Permanent Magnet Machine Using Pole Ratio Adjustment Technique

This paper introduces the pole ratio adjustment technique to improve the torque characteristics of the doubly salient permanent magnetic machine (DSPM). The electrical characteristics of the machine, namely the magnetic field distribution, flux linkage, back-electromotive force (EMF), and cogging torque, were obtained under open-circuit conditions. The electromagnetic torque and ripple torque were examined under the loaded condition. The simulations, based on the 2D-finite element method, show that the optimal pole ratio for the DSPM structure is with 18 stator teeth and 15 rotor poles. This optimal structure achieves a larger phase back-EMF than the conventional structure, as well as had a better magnetic flux path with a reasonable cogging torque. The on-load test also confirmes that the proposed optimal structure can produce a significantly higher electromagnetic torque than the conventional machine while maintaining a satisfactory torque ripple. Furthermore, an experimental prototype of the DSPM structure having 18/15 stator/rotor poles was fabricated and tested to verify the simulations. The experimental results were in good agreement with the simulations. The design technique and the fabricated prototype demonstrate the DSPM utilization for low-speed/high torque applications.
Monoclonal Antibodies From Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis Patient as a Tool to Study Autoimmune Seizures

Anti-N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor encephalitis manifests with precipitous cognitive decline, abnormal movements, and severe seizures that can be challenging to control with conventional anti-seizure medications. We previously demonstrated that intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of cerebrospinal fluid from affected patients, or purified NMDA receptor antibodies from encephalitis patients to mice precipitated seizures, thereby confirming that antibodies are directly pathogenic for seizures. Although different repertoires of anti-NMDA receptor antibodies could contribute to the distinct clinical manifestations in encephalitis patients, the role of specific antibodies in the expression of seizure, motor, and cognitive phenotypes remains unclear. Using three different patient-derived monoclonal antibodies with distinct epitopes within the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the NMDA receptor, we characterized the seizure burden, motor activity and anxiety-related behavior in mice. We found that continuous administration of 5F5, 2G6 or 3C11 antibodies for 2 weeks precipitated seizures, as measured with continuous EEG using cortical screw electrodes. The seizure burden was comparable in all three antibody-treated groups. The seizures were accompanied by increased hippocampal C-C chemokine ligand 2 (CCL2) mRNA expression 3 days after antibody infusion had stopped. Antibodies did not affect the motor performance or anxiety scores in mice. These findings suggest that neuronal antibodies targeting different epitopes within the NMDA receptor may result in a similar seizure phenotype.
Single-Molecule Insights Into the Dynamics of Replicative Helicases

Helicases are molecular motors that translocate along single-stranded DNA and unwind duplex DNA. They rely on the consumption of chemical energy from nucleotide hydrolysis to drive their translocation. Specialized helicases play a critically important role in DNA replication by unwinding DNA at the front of the replication fork. The replicative helicases of the model systems bacteriophages T4 and T7, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been extensively studied and characterized using biochemical methods. While powerful, their averaging over ensembles of molecules and reactions makes it challenging to uncover information related to intermediate states in the unwinding process and the dynamic helicase interactions within the replisome. Here, we describe single-molecule methods that have been developed in the last few decades and discuss the new details that these methods have revealed about replicative helicases. Applying methods such as FRET and optical and magnetic tweezers to individual helicases have made it possible to access the mechanistic aspects of unwinding. It is from these methods that we understand that the replicative helicases studied so far actively translocate and then passively unwind DNA, and that these hexameric enzymes must efficiently coordinate the stepping action of their subunits to achieve unwinding, where the size of each step is prone to variation. Single-molecule fluorescence microscopy methods have made it possible to visualize replicative helicases acting at replication forks and quantify their dynamics using multi-color colocalization, FRAP and FLIP. These fluorescence methods have made it possible to visualize helicases in replication initiation and dissect this intricate protein-assembly process. In a similar manner, single-molecule visualization of fluorescent replicative helicases acting in replication identified that, in contrast to the replicative polymerases, the helicase does not exchange. Instead, the replicative helicase acts as the stable component that serves to anchor the other replication factors to the replisome.
Literacy Level and Executive Control in Healthy Older Peruvian Adults

Introduction: Early-life educational experiences are associated with cognitive performance in aging. Early literacy seems to improve executive control mechanisms, however, it is not clear whether early education would still be an advantage in countries like Peru, where access to and quality of education is highly variable. Aim: Our objective was to analyze the association of literacy level with executive control factors. Method: We evaluated 93 healthy older adults with a clinical protocol that included the Mini-Mental State Examination, the Geriatric Depression Scale and Global Dementia Staging. We also used a neuropsychological executive function battery which included the Trail-Making Test parts A and B, the Stroop Test, phonological and semantic verbal fluency tasks, Forward and Backward Digits, Numbers and Letters of the Wechsler Scale, and the Go/No-Go task. We used a principal component analysis for the dimensional reduction of the variables. To measure the level of literacy we used the word accentuation test (WAT). Results: We observed statistically significant correlations between the principal components (PCs) of working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control with the WAT scores. Furthermore, we observed that processing speed and WAT predict the scores on PCs factors better than years of education and age. Conclusions: Literacy level correlates more closely with better cognitive performance than years of education and thus, might improve executive control factors that could compensate and protect against brain changes in cognitive decline and dementia.
Tomatidine Suppresses the Destructive Behaviors of Fibroblast-Like Synoviocytes and Ameliorates Type II Collagen-Induced Arthritis in Rats

Fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLSs) are the prominent non-immune cells in synovium and play a pivotal role in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) pathogenesis. Searching for natural compounds that may suppress the pathological phenotypes of FLSs is important for the development of RA treatment. Tomatidine (Td), a steroidal alkaloid derived from the solanaceae family, has been reported to have anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor and immunomodulatory effects. However, its effect on RA remains unknown. Here, we examined the inhibitory effect of Td on TNFα-induced arthritic FLSs, and subsequently investigated its therapeutic effect on collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) rats. Our results revealed that Td significantly inhibited TNFα-induced proliferation and migration of arthritic FLSs. In addition, we found that Td treatment could efficaciously ameliorate synovial inflammation and joint destruction of rats with CIA. Both in vitro and in vivo studies showed that Td significantly suppressed the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines including IL-1β, IL-6 and TNFα, and downregulated the expression of MMP-9 and RANKL. Further molecular mechanism studies revealed that the inhibitory effect of Td on RA might attribute to the decreased activations of MAPKs (ERK and JNK) and NF-κB. These findings provide evidence that Td has the potential to be developed into a complementary or alternative agent for RA therapy.
Taking a Computational Cultural Neuroscience Approach to Study Parent-Child Similarities in Diverse Cultural Contexts

Parent-child similarities and discrepancies at multiple levels provide a window to understand the cultural transmission process. Although prior research has examined parent-child similarities at the belief, behavioral, and physiological levels across cultures, little is known about parent-child similarities at the neural level. The current review introduces an interdisciplinary computational cultural neuroscience approach, which utilizes computational methods to understand neural and psychological processes being involved during parent-child interactions at intra- and inter-personal level. This review provides three examples, including the application of intersubject representational similarity analysis to analyze naturalistic neuroimaging data, the usage of computer vision to capture non-verbal social signals during parent-child interactions, and unraveling the psychological complexities involved during real-time parent-child interactions based on their simultaneous recorded brain response patterns. We hope that this computational cultural neuroscience approach can provide researchers an alternative way to examine parent-child similarities and discrepancies across different cultural contexts and gain a better understanding of cultural transmission processes.
Underwater Crawling Robot With Hydraulic Soft Actuators

Benthic operation plays a vital role in underwater applications, where crawling robots have advantages compared with turbine-based underwater vehicles, in locomotion accuracy, actuation efficiency, current resistance, and in carrying more payloads. On the other hand, soft robots are quickly trending in underwater robotic design, with their naturally sealed body structure and intrinsic compliance both desirable for the highly unstructured and corrosive underwater environment. However, the limitations resulting directly from the inherent compliance, in structural rigidity, actuation precision, and limited force exertion capability, have also restricted soft robots in underwater applications. To date soft robots are adopted mainly as grippers and manipulators for atraumatic sampling, rather than as locomotion platforms. In this work, we present a soft-robotic approach to designing underwater crawling robots, with three main innovations: 1) using rigid structural components to strategically reinforce the otherwise omni-directionally flexible soft actuators, drastically increasing their loading capability and actuation precision; 2) proposing a rigid–soft hybrid multi-joint leg design, with quasi-linear motion range and force exertion, while maintaining excellent passive impact compliance by exploiting the inherent flexibility of soft actuators; 3) developing a novel valve-free hydraulic actuation system with peristaltic pumps, achieving a compact, lightweight, and untethered underwater crawling robot prototype with a 5:1 payload-to-weight ratio and multi-gait capability. The prototype was tested for design verification and showcasing the advantages of the proposed hybrid mechanism and actuation approach.
Leader Forgiveness and Employee’s Unethical Pro-organizational Behavior: The Roles of Gratitude and Moral Identity

Leader forgiveness refers to the abandonment of anger, resentment, and the desire to revenge against the offender, and it not only means forgiving errors or mistakes made by employees, but also means empathizing and understanding employees, and to see things from another point of view. This research examines the possible “dark side” of leader forgiveness by examining its influence on employee’s unethical pro-organizational behavior, as well as the mediating effect of gratitude and the moderating effect of moral identity. We used questionnaire survey methodology to collect data from 263 Chinese employees to test our hypotheses. Results show that leader forgiveness had a positive influence on employee’s unethical pro-organizational behavior, and gratitude mediated the influence of leader forgiveness on unethical pro-organizational behavior. The relationship between gratitude and unethical pro-organizational behavior, and the indirect influence of leader forgiveness on unethical pro-organizational behavior through gratitude, were moderated by moral identity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Overview of ImageCLEFtuberculosis 2021 - CT-based Tuberculosis Type Classification

ImageCLEF is a part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) initiative and includes a variety of tasks dedicated to multimodal image information retrieval, including image classification and annotation. The tuberculosis (TB) task is one of the ImageCLEF tasks which started in 2017 and changed from year to year. The 2021 edition was dedicated to the automatic classification of five TB types: Infiltrative, Focal, Tuberculoma, Miliary, Fibro-cavernous. The task itself repeated one of the original subtasks from 2017 but the dataset was significantly changed. In 2021, 11 groups from 9 countries participated in the task and submitted at least one successful run. The task results can be compared to the TB type classification task results in the 2017 and 2018 editions. Although top scores were not improved compared to the previous editions, the participants’ results allow us to analyze the effectiveness of applying recent deep learning approaches to the task.
Consumer Health Search at CLEF eHealth 2021

This paper details materials, methods, results, and analyses of the Consumer Health Search Task of the CLEF eHealth 2021 Evaluation Lab. This task investigates the effectiveness of information retrieval (IR) approaches in providing access to medical information to laypeople. For this a TREC -style evaluation methodology was applied: a shared collection of documents and queries is distributed, participants’ runs received, relevance assessments generated, and participants’ submissions evaluated. The task generated a new representative web corpus including web pages acquired from a 2021 CommonCrawl and social media content from Twitter and Reddit, along with a new collection of 55 manually generated layperson medical queries and their respective credibility, understandability, and topicality assessments for returned documents. This year’s task focused on three subtask: (i) ad-hoc IR, (ii) weakly supervised IR, and (iii) document credibility prediction. In total, 15 runs were submitted to the three subtasks: eight addressed the ad-hoc IR task, three the weakly supervised IR challenge, and 4 the document credibility prediction challenge. As in previous years, the organizers have made data and tools associated with the task available for future research and development.
Bi-Objective Search with Bi-directional A* (Extended Abstract)

Bi-objective search is a problem of finding a set of optimal solutions in a two-dimensional domain. This study proposes several enhancements to the state-of-the-art bi-objective search with A* and develops its bi-directional variant. Our experimental results on benchmark instances show that our enhanced algorithm is on average five times faster than the state of the art bi-objective search algorithms.
Learning to rank for Consumer Health Search

CLEF 2021 eHealth Consumer Health Search task aims to investigate the effectiveness of the information retrieval systems in providing health information to common health consumers. Compared to previous years, this year’s task includes three sub-tasks and adopts a new data corpus and set of queries. This paper presents the work of the Zhongyuan University of Technology participating in Subtask 1. It explores the use of learning to rank techniques in consumer health search. A number of retrieval features are used, and eight different learning to rank algorithms are then applied to train the models. The best four models are used to re-rank the documents and four runs are submitted to the subtask.
University of Regensburg at CheckThat! 2021: Exploring Text Summarization for Fake News Detection

We present our submission to the CLEF 2021 CheckThat! challenge. More specifically, we took part in Task 3a, Multi-class fake news detection of news articles . The conceptual idea of our work is that (a) transformer-based approaches represent a strong foundation for a broad range of NLP tasks including fake news detection, and that (b) compressing the original input documents into some form of automatically generated summary before classifying them is a promising approach. The official results indicate that this is indeed an interesting direction to explore. They also confirm that oversampling to address the class imbalance was effective to further improve the results. We also note that both abstractive and extractive summarization approaches score way better when we do not apply hypertuning of parameters suggesting that the small scale of the test collection leads to overfitting.
Using N-grams and Statistical Features to Identify Hate Speech Spreaders on Twitter

In this notebook, we summarize our work process of preparing a software for the PAN 2021 Profiling Hate Speech Spreaders on Twitter task. Our final software was a stacking ensemble classifier of different machine learning models; a mixture of models using word n-grams as features and models based on statistical features extracted from the Twitter feeds. Our software uploaded to the TIRA platform achieved an accuracy of 70% in English and 79% in Spanish