Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dissecting the susceptibility/resistance mechanism of Vitis vinifera for the future control of downy mildew

The Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera), a species cultivated worldwide for high-quality wine production, is extremely susceptible to the agent of downy mildew, Plasmopara viticola. Nevertheless, germplasm from Georgia (Southern Caucasus, the first grapevine domestication centre), characterized by a high genetic variability, showed resistance traits to P. viticola. The cultivar Mgaloblishvili exhibited the most promising phenotype in terms of resistance against P. viticola. Its defence response results in: i) low disease intensity; ii) low sporulation; iii) damaged mycelium; iv) production of antimicrobial compounds such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), whose effectiveness on the pathogen was evaluated by leafdisc assays. At the transcriptomic level, its resistance mechanism is determined by the differential expression of both resistance and susceptible genes. The resistance genes are related to: i) pathogen recognition through PAMP, DAMP and effector receptors; ii) ethylene signalling pathway; iii) synthesis of antimicrobial compounds (VOCs) and fungal wall degrading enzymes; iv) development of structural barriers (cell wall reinforcement). The first putative susceptible gene was the transcription factor VviLBDIf7 gene, whose validation was carried out by dsRNA (double-stranded RNA) assay. In this work, these unique results on plant-pathogen interaction are reviewed with the aim of developing new strategies to control the disease.
Feature Attention Parallel Aggregation Network for Single Image Haze Removal

Images captured in hazy weather often suffer from color distortion and texture blur due to turbid media suspended in the atmosphere. In this paper, we propose a Feature Attention Parallel Aggregation Network (FAPANet) to restore a clear image directly from the corresponding hazy input. It adopts the encoder-decoder structure while incorporating residual learning and attention mechanism. FAPANet consists of two key modules: a novel feature attention aggregation module (FAAM) and an adaptive feature fusion module (AFFM). FAAM recalibrates features by integrating channel attention and pixel attention in parallel to stimulate useful information and suppress redundant features. The shallow and deep layers of neural networks tend to characterize the low-level and high-level semantic features of images, respectively, so we introduce AFFM to fuse these two features adaptively. Meanwhile, a joint loss function, composed of L1 loss, perceptual loss, and structural similarity (SSIM) loss, is employed in the training stage for better results with more vivid colors and richer details. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate the impressive performance of the proposed approach.
Maior tempo de estocagem aumenta a digestibilidade do amido em silagem de milho?

O milho brasileiro é predominantemente duro (vítreo), e apresenta uma menor digestibilidade do amido em relação aos híbridos (farináceos). Para contornar esta situação, é realizada uma ensilagem, pois a degradabilidade efetiva do amido é maior em milho ensilado do que no milho fresco. O objetivo desta revisão é apresentar os efeitos do armazenamento prolongado da silagem na digestibilidade ruminal in vitro do amido. Um bom material estocado de silagem de milho irá contar com uma rápida queda do pH, favorecendo a fermentação láctica. Quando se prolonga os dias de fermentação de 120 para 240 dias, é observado um aumento da concentração de acetato e lactato, o que pode justificar o aumento gradual da digestibilidade à medida que a fermentação progrediu. Apesar de ser um alimento energético, onde a proteína bruta não apresenta níveis importantes na silagem, esse parâmetro também apresentou aumento em sua concentração com um armazenamento prolongado, sugerindo implicação na formulação da dieta. O prolongamento da ensilagem tem uma relação positiva para a digestibilidade do amido, porém deve- se avaliar o efeito do tempo de armazenamento no desempenho animal.
A Review on Emerging Therapeutic Interventions for Corona Virus

The Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is one of the deadliest viruses of current era and is identified as the causative agent of novel coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). This disease stances a severe risk to mankind due to its unexplored pathologies. It was declared as a COVID-19 pandemic by the world health organization. This outbreak has challenged the public health concerns at large, killing the most vulnerable person, causing generalized panic and become a top debate among scientists, clinicians, physicians, pathologists, economists, athletes and politicians. Anti-viral vaccines and target drugs to treat this virus are unavailable due to its diverse genetic instability. Currently, its prevention, control and treatment are questionable as no proven remedies have been effective for its cure so far. From a research assessment, many number of drugs or medicines are being manufactured and tested at fast pace, goals and objectives are being celebrated on daily basis, and also many drugs are be subjected to clinical tests. Scientists are interested about how to provide the better care to everyone before a vaccine can be made available to common community. To stop COVID-19, effective solutions (i.e., personal protection elements, vaccines, drugs, etc.) are needed urgently. Red bells are ringing but there is no way out. Current review focuses on the ongoing regimes and therapeutic interventions for better combat with COVID-19.
Platelet–Leucocyte Aggregates as Novel Biomarkers in Cardiovascular Diseases

Simple Summary Cardiovascular diseases are the most common cause of death worldwide. Hence, novel biomarkers are urgently needed to improve diagnosis and treatment. Platelet–leucocyte aggregates are conglomerates of platelets and leucocytes and are widely investigated as biomarkers in cardiovascular diseases. Platelet–leucocytes aggregates are present in health, but increase in patients with cardiovascular risk factors and acute or stable coronary syndromes, making them a potential diagnostic marker. Moreover, platelet–leucocyte aggregates predict outcomes after surgery or percutaneous treatment and could be used to monitor antiplatelet therapy. Emerging data about the participation of platelet–leucocyte aggregates in cardiovascular diseases pathogenesis make them an attractive target for novel therapies. Furthermore, simple detection with conventional flow cytometry provides accurate and reproducible results, although requires specific sample handling. The main task for the future is to determine the standardized protocol to measure blood concentrations of platelet–leucocyte aggregates and subsequently establish their normal range in health and disease. Abstract Platelet–leucocyte aggregates (PLA) are a formation of leucocytes and platelets bound by specific receptors. They arise in the condition of sheer stress, thrombosis, immune reaction, vessel injury, and the activation of leukocytes or platelets. PLA participate in cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Increased levels of PLA were revealed in acute and chronic coronary syndromes, carotid stenosis cardiovascular risk factors. Due to accessible, available, replicable, quick, and low-cost quantifying using flow cytometry, PLA constitute an ideal biomarker for clinical practice. PLA are promising in early diagnosing and estimating prognosis in patients with acute or chronic coronary syndromes treated by percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). PLA were also a reliable marker of platelet activity for monitoring antiplatelet therapy. PLA consist also targets potential therapies in CVD. All of the above potential clinical applications require further studies to validate methods of assay and proof clinical benefits.
Calculation of Pressure Fields from Arbitrarily Shaped, Apodized, and Excited

A method for the simulation of pulsed pressure fields from arbitrarily shaped, apodized and excited ultrasound transducers is suggested. It relies on the Tupholme-Stepanishen method for calculating pulsed pressure fields, and can also handle the continuous wave and pulse-echo case. The field is calculated by dividing the surface into small rectangles and then summing their response. A fast calculation is obtained by using the far- field approximation. Examples of the accuracy of the approach and actual calculation times are given.
Data-mining techniques for traffic accident modeling and prediction in the United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT Road traffic accidents are among the leading causes of death and injury worldwide. In Abu Dhabi, in 2014, 971 traffic accidents were recorded, which contributed to 121 fatalities and 135 severe injuries. Several factors contribute to injury severity, including driver-related factors, road-related factors, and accident-related factors. In this article, data-mining techniques were employed to establish models (classifiers) to predict the injury severity of any new accident with reasonable accuracy, based on 5,973 traffic accident records in Abu Dhabi over a 6-year period from 2008 to 2013. Additionally, the research aimed to establish a set of rules that can be used by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Traffic Agencies to identify the main factors that contribute to accident severity. Using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data mining software, four well-known classification algorithms were employed to model the severity of injury. These algorithms included: Decision Tree (DT) (J48), Rule Induction (PART), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). The effectiveness of each method in predicting accident severity was evaluated in three different ways. First, the entire data set was used as a training set for the algorithm. Second, accuracy was evaluated using cross-validation with 10-fold. Third, to overcome the problems that resulted from the imbalanced distribution of accident severity in our data set, the data set was resampled to bias the accident severity distribution toward a uniform distribution, and then cross-validation with 10-fold was used again to evaluate the performance. Furthermore, to establish the main contributing factors for road accidents severity, rules generated by the DT J48 algorithm were further explored. The results showed that the overall accuracy of the DT J48 classifier, the PART classifier, and the MLP classifier in predicting the severity of injury resulting from traffic accidents, using 10-fold cross-validation, were similar. The NB classifier exhibited less accuracy. Additionally, the prediction accuracy of the classifiers was enhanced after resampling the training set. The results indicated that the most important factors associated with fatal severity were age, gender, nationality, year of accident, casualty status, and collision type. 18- to 30-year-olds were the most vulnerable age group to traffic accidents. There was a clear trend in accident reduction over the period of the study. Drivers were involved more frequently in traffic accidents than passengers and pedestrians. Male drivers were involved more frequently in traffic accidents than female drivers. UAE, Asian, and Arab nationalities had the highest traffic accident frequency; Gulf and other nationalities had lower traffic accident frequency. The highest number of traffic accidents occurred at right angles. Pedestrian–vehicle type collisions had the next highest number of traffic accidents, followed by rear-end collisions and sideswipe collisions.
WS-OPE: Weakly Supervised 6D Object Pose Regression using Relative Multi-Camera Pose Constraints

Precise annotation of 6D poses in real data is intricate and time-consuming, however, an essential requirement to train pose estimation pipelines. We propose a way for scalable, end-to-end 6D pose regression with weak supervision to avoid this problem. Our method requires neither 3D models nor 6D object poses as ground truth. Instead, we use 2D bounding boxes and object sizes as the only labels and constrain the problem with multiple images of known relative poses during training. A novel Rotated-IoU loss brings together a pose prediction from an image with labeled 2D bounding boxes of the corresponding object in other views. Our rotation estimation combines an initial coarse pose classification with an offset regression using a continuous rotation parametrization that allows for direct pose estimation. At test time, the model still uses only a single image to predict a 6D pose. We observe that multi-view constraints and our rotation representation used during training lead to better learning of 6D pose embeddings in comparison to fully supervised methods. Experiments on several datasets show that the proposed method is capable of predicting poses of good quality, in spite being trained with only weak labels. Direct pose regression without the need for a consecutive refinement stage thereby ensures real-time performance.
Crateva unilocularis Buch. shoots attenuate D-galactose-induced brain injury and cognitive disorders of mice through the PI3K/Akt/Nrf2 pathway.

Crateva unilocularis and C. unilocularis Buch. shoots are traditionally served as a vegetable with many health-promoting benefits. The aim of the current investigation was designed to study the preventive effect of ethanol extract from C. unilocularis shoots (CSE) on D-galactose (D-gal) induced brain and liver injury and cognitive disorders of mice, and to illuminate the potential molecular mechanisms. Results exhibited that CSE, especially at a dose of 600 mg kg-1 b.w. , remarkably improved the morphology and number of hippocampal neurons against impairment caused by D-gal (p < 0.05). Biochemical parameters displayed that CSE, especially at a high dose, substantially increased SOD (by about 35.37%, 24.98% and 45.51%), CAT (by about 45.73%, 31.44% and 30.70%), and GSH-Px (by about 36.47%, 17.68% and 52.87%) activities and decreased the level of MDA (by about 22.58%, 23.38% and 27.69%) in the plasma, liver, and brain, respectively (p < 0.05). The AChE content in mice administered a high dose of CSE decreased by about 44.48%. Further mechanism results revealed that the prevention by CSE might be achieved by upregulating the expressions of p-PI3K/PI3K, p-Akt/Akt, Nrf2, HO-1, and NQO1 proteins (p < 0.05). In addition, behavioral experiments showed that CSE at a dose of 600 mg kg-1 could significantly improve the anxiety status and impairment of learning and memory caused by D-gal (p < 0.05). These results substantially proved that C. unilocularis shoots could effectively attenuate D-gal-induced brain and liver injury and cognitive disorders of mice and could be applied to develop new functional foods to encounter aging-related impairments in brain function.
Spectrophotometric Folin-Ciocalteu and Aluminium Chloride Method Validation for the Determination of Phenolic Acid, Flavan-3-ol, Flavonol, and Anthocyanin Content

Spectrophotometric methods for the determination of total polyphenols and total flavonoids are often used because they are simple, sensitive, and precise. Before using these methods, they must be validated to ensure the quality of the obtained data and to prove that the method is suitable for its purpose. The aim of this study was to validate the spectrophotometric methods for total polyphenols and total flavonoids. The method for total polyphenols has been validated according to polyphenol standards, which belong to the groups of phenolic acids (p-hydroxybenzoic acid, sinapic acid, ferulic acid), flavan-3-ols ((-)-epicatechin), flavonols (myricetin, kaempferol), and anthocyanins (cyanidin-3-glucoside). For the validation of the method for total flavonoids, the same polyphenol standards belonging to flavan-3-ols, flavonols, and anthocyanins have been used. The validation parameters were linearity, sensitivity, limit of detection, limit of quantification, precision, and accuracy. The results of the validation for both methods were in acceptable ranges, except for kaempferol in the method for total flavonoids. In conclusion, these methods can be used for the determination of total polyphenols and total flavonoids by using calibration curves of studied polyphenol standards, except for the kaempferol standard in the method for total flavonoids, due to lower sensitivity
Sustainable Silage Maize Integrated Protection against the European Corn Borer Ostrinia nubilalis and the Corn Earworm Helicoverpa armigera Employing the Farm Irrigation System

Silage corn is an important source of feed in animal husbandry, often affected by the feeding action of diverse corn borers that can compromise harvest quality and quantity. According to the need to reduce the use of chemical insecticides, the main purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of different IPM programs comparing microbial (Btk and baculovirus) and chemical control methods, alone or combined, against O. nubilalis and H. armigera. Assessments were based on counting the number of larvae, inspecting plants superficially and inside the stem, and estimating the derived damages. All tested products proved to be effective in containing the density of these lepidopteran species, with microbial control agents having comparable efficacy in respect to the reference chemical substances (lambda-cialotrina and chlorantraniliprole), even if periodic treatment repetition was required to ensure over-time protection until harvest. Both Btk and HaNPV were successfully applied by the irrigation system during flowering and fruit development periods, when plant height did not allow the use of a tractor-mounted spray bar. This biocontainment approach appears to be sustainable and technically compatible with farm needs.
Stress resilience is established during development and is regulated by complement factors

Individuals in a population respond differently to stressful situations. While resilient individuals recover efficiently, others are susceptible to the same stressors. However, it remains challenging to identify resilience in mammalian embryos to determine if stress resilience is established as a trait during development or acquired later in life. Using a new behavioural paradigm in zebrafish larvae, we show that resilience is a trait that is determined and exhibited early in life. Resilient and susceptible individuals retained these traits throughout life and passed them on to the next generation. Resilient larvae showed higher expression of resilience-associated genes and larvae lacking neuropeptide Y and miR218 were significantly under-represented in the resilient population. Unbiased transcriptome analysis revealed that multiple factors of the innate immune complement cascade were downregulated in resilient larvae in response to stressors. Pharmacological inhibition and genetic knockouts of critical complement factors led to an increase in resilience. We conclude that resilience is established early during development as a stable trait, and that neuropeptides and the complement pathway play positive and negative roles in determining resilience respectively. Why some individual individuals recover better than others from stressful situations is unclear. We show that resilience to stress is established during zebrafish development as a stable and heritable trait. Resilience is augmented by brain-derived neuropeptides and attenuated by innate immune complement factors specifically expressed in the liver. Highlights Wildtype zebrafish larvae show differences in their dynamics of recovering from stress, with some being more resilient than others. Resilience is a stable and heritable trait. Resilient fish show specific stress-responsive transcriptional changes. Neuropeptide Y and miRNA218 positively affect resilience, while innate immune complement factors attenuate resilience.
Axillary Bud Fate Shapes Plant Architecture in Horticultural Crops

Above-ground plant architecture is dictated to a large extent by the fates and growth rates of aerial plant meristems. Shoot apical meristem gives rise to the fundamental plant form by generating new leaves. However, the fates of axillary meristems located in leaf axils have a great influence on plant architecture and affect the harvest index, yield potential and cultural practices. Improving plant architecture by breeding facilitates denser plantations, better resource use efficiency and even mechanical harvesting. Knowledge of the genetic mechanisms regulating plant architecture is needed for precision breeding, especially for determining feasible breeding targets. Fortunately, research in many crop species has demonstrated that a relatively small number of genes has a large effect on axillary meristem fates. In this review, we select a number of important horticultural and agricultural plant species as examples of how changes in plant architecture affect the cultivation practices of the species. We focus specifically on the determination of the axillary meristem fate and review how plant architecture may change even drastically because of altered axillary meristem fate. We also explain what is known about the genetic and environmental control of plant architecture in these species, and how further changes in plant architectural traits could benefit the horticultural sector.
‘A prison is no place for a party’: Neoliberalism, charitable fundraising, carceral enjoyments and abolitionist killjoys

ABSTRACT This paper explores a case study of the struggle over the cultural meanings of charity and imprisonment related to United Way’s 2019 Rockin’ The Big House fundraising concert in partnership with Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the City of Kingston at Kingston Penitentiary. Contributing to literature at the intersection of penality, prison tourism, and the charitable sector, we examine how staging authenticity and fostering penal spectatorship were central to driving ticket sales for and encouraging enjoyment at the concert held on the grounds of Canada’s first penitentiary. Based on an analysis of internal government records and CSC communications with United Way, we demonstrate how event planning and advertising relied on denigrating stereotypes regarding criminalized persons. Highlighting the value of collective organizing, action research, and newsmaking interventions aimed at opposing carceral enjoyments, we illustrate how cultural meanings of penality can be confronted as a means to advance abolitionist politics.
Adaptive Kalman Filter-based Robot 6DOF Uncalibrated Vision Positioning

Robot 6 degree of freedom vision positioning is a popular and difficult topic in the field of robot visual servoing for its property of strong coupling and nonlinearity. A robot 6-degree of freedom uncalibrated vision positioning method was proposed using an adaptive kalman filter. Firstly, a set of image moments was designed to represent the relative translation and rotation motion between camera and object. Then, an adaptive kalman filter was designed to estimate the image Jacobian matrix on-line in the uncalibrated hand-eye coordination systems and visual control law was designed to calculate the motion control quantity of the robot. Finally, the Simulink model for a robot 6DOF uncalibrated vision positioning system with eye-to-hand configuration was built using Matlab. After this, the 6-degree of freedom vision positioning of robot was achieved. The experiment results of 6- degree of freedom vision positioning show that the adaptive kalman filter can guide the robot to the desired position with high accuracy under the partial known noises.