Autophagy plays an antiviral defence role against tomato spotted wilt orthotospovirus and is counteracted by viral effector NSs.

Autophagy, an intracellular degradation process, has emerged as a crucial innate immune response against various plant pathogens, including viruses. Tomato spotted wilt orthotospovirus (TSWV) is a highly destructive plant pathogen that infects over 1000 plant species and poses a significant threat to global food security. However, the role of autophagy in defence against the TSWV pathogen, and whether the virus counteracts this defence, remains unknown. In this study, we report that autophagy plays an important role in antiviral defence against TSWV infection; however, this autophagy-mediated defence is counteracted by the viral effector NSs. Transcriptome profiling revealed the up-regulation of autophagy-related genes (ATGs) upon TSWV infection. Blocking autophagy induction by chemical treatment or knockout/down of ATG5/ATG7 significantly enhanced TSWV accumulation. Notably, the TSWV nucleocapsid (N) protein, a major component of the viral replication unit, strongly induced autophagy. However, the TSWV nonstructural protein NSs was able to effectively suppress N-induced autophagy in a dose-dependent manner. Further investigation revealed that NSs inhibited ATG6-mediated autophagy induction. These findings provide new insights into the defence role of autophagy against TSWV, a representative segmented negative-strand RNA virus, as well as the tospoviral pathogen counterdefence mechanism.

Research on the application of AHP-FAST-FBS in the design of home entrance disinfection devices in the post-pandemic era.

With the outbreak and continued spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, people's demand for daily disinfection products has increased rapidly, and its innovative design has received widespread attention. In this context, this study aims to propose a design methodology for home entrance disinfection devices based on AHP-FAST-FBS. Firstly, the design requirements of the home entrance disinfection device were collected and analyzed through in-depth interviews and the KJ method, and a hierarchical model of design demand indicators was constructed. Secondly, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to quantify these design demand indicators, and core design demands for home entrance disinfection devices were identified by weight calculations. On this basis, the Functional Analysis System Technique (FAST) method was combined to rationally transform the design demands into product functional indicators, constructing a functional system model for the home entrance disinfection device through systematic decomposition and categorization. Lastly, based on the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) theoretical model, the mapping of each function of the product to its structure was realized, the product structure modules were determined, and the comprehensive design and output of the innovative design scheme for the home entrance disinfection device were completed. The results of this study indicate that the design methodology combining AHP-FAST-FBS can effectively improve the scientific rigor and effectiveness of the home entrance disinfection device design, thereby generating an ideal product design scheme. This study provides systematic theoretical guidance and practical reference for designers of subsequent related disinfection products and also offers a new path for improving social health and safety.

Different viral effectors hijack TCP17, a key transcription factor for host Auxin synthesis, to promote viral infection.

Auxin is an important class of plant hormones that play an important role in plant growth development, biotic stress response, and viruses often suppress host plant auxin levels to promote infection. However, previous research on auxin-mediated disease resistance has focused mainly on signaling pathway, and the molecular mechanisms of how pathogenic proteins manipulate the biosynthetic pathway of auxin remain poorly understood. TCP is a class of plant-specific transcription factors, of which TCP17 is a member that binds to the promoter of YUCCAs, a key rate-limiting enzyme for auxin synthesis, and promotes the expression of YUCCAs, which is involved in auxin synthesis in plants. In this study, we reported that Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) infection suppressed the expression of YUCCAs through its interaction with TCP17. Further studies revealed that the NSs protein encoded by TSWV disrupts the dimerization of TCP17, thereby inhibit its transcriptional activation ability and reducing the auxin content in plants. Consequently, this interference inhibits the auxin response signal and promotes the TSWV infection. Transgenic plants overexpressing TCP17 exhibit resistance against TSWV infection, whereas plants knocking out TCP17 were more susceptible to TSWV infection. Additionally, proteins encoded by other RNA viruses (BSMV, RSV and TBSV) can also interact with TCP17 and interfere with its dimerization. Notably, overexpression of TCP17 enhanced resistance against BSMV. This suggests that TCP17 plays a crucial role in plant defense against different types of plant viruses that use viral proteins to target this key component of auxin synthesis and promote infection.

Research on an innovative design and evaluation method of Chinese tea sets based on GT-AHP-FCE.

AIMS: In order to explore new consumer demands for Chinese tea set products, propose an innovative tea set product design and evaluation method to improve the user experience and satisfaction of the produced tea sets, thereby promoting the development of the tea set market and the promotion of tea culture. METHODS: Firstly, grounded theory (GT) was used to analyze interview data to extract consumer demand indicators and construct a design evaluation hierarchical model. Secondly, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to calculate the weights of the indicators, determine their priority of importance, and obtain several indicators that have a greater impact on the tea set design to guide innovative design practice. Lastly, the tea set design schemes were evaluated using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to select the optimal design scheme and also to act as a guideline for further design optimization. CONCLUSION: This study explores the innovative design and evaluation method for tea set products based on GT-AHP-FCE and validates the feasibility of this approach through a practical example of tea set design inspired by "The Classic of Mountains and Seas.". It provides innovative theoretical and practical guidance for designers of subsequent tea set products and also provides a new path for the inheritance and innovation of traditional culture.

Research on cultural and creative design method of 2022 World Cup lamps based on AHP-FCE.

AIMS: Through an in-depth study of Qatari culture, to explore the application of the essence of the unique national culture to World Cup creative design, and to provide new ideas and reference design framework and ideas for the integration of culture and World Cup creative design. METHOD: Carry out design practice with Qatari culture, and discuss in detail the specific strategy of integrating national culture into the cultural and creative design of the World Cup. First, conduct user interviews based on grounded theory to collect and evaluate demand indicators and establish a hierarchical model, and then use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to analyze user needs, construct design elements for the World Cup cultural and creative design, and calculate the weight of each design element to determine the design Ordering among elements. Finally, the optimal scheme is selected by scoring the scheme through fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method (FCE), so as to determine the final design scheme of the product. CONCLUSION: The article explores the specific practice method of integrating culture and design, and provides a solution reference for how to integrate excellent national culture into the World Cup cultural and creative design, which not only improves the cultural and spiritual connotation of the product, but also effectively realises the heritage and innovation of culture.

Lightweight and efficient dual-path fusion network for iris segmentation.

In order to tackle limitations of current iris segmentation methods based on deep learning, such as an enormous amount of parameters, intensive computation and excessive storage space, a lightweight and efficient iris segmentation network is proposed in this article. Based on the classical semantic segmentation network U-net, the proposed approach designs a dual-path fusion network model to integrate deep semantic information and rich shallow context information at multiple levels. Our model uses the depth-wise separable convolution for feature extraction and introduces a novel attention mechanism, which strengthens the capability of extracting significant features as well as the segmentation capability of the network. Experiments on four public datasets reveal that the proposed approach can raise the MIoU and F1 scores by 15% and 9% on average compared with traditional methods, respectively, and 1.5% and 2.5% on average compared with the classical semantic segmentation method U-net and other relevant methods. Compared with the U-net, the proposed approach reduces about 80%, 90% and 99% in terms of computation, parameters and storage, respectively, and the average run time up to 0.02 s. Our approach not only exhibits a good performance, but also is simpler in terms of computation, parameters and storage compared with existing classical semantic segmentation methods.

Digital Twin in Healthcare: A Study for Chronic Wound Management.

Although the concept of digital twin technology has been in existence for nearly half a century, its application in healthcare is a relatively recent development. In healthcare, the utilization of digital twin and data-driven models has proven to enhance clinical decision support, particularly in the treatment and assessment of chronic wounds, leading to improved clinical outcomes. This article proposes the implementation of a digital twin in the domain of healthcare, specifically in the management of chronic wounds, by leveraging artificial intelligence techniques. The digital twin is composed of data collection, data processing, and AI models dedicated to wound healing. A novel AI pipeline is utilized to track the healing of chronic wounds. The digital twin, serving as a virtual representation of the actual wound, simulates and replicates the healing process. Furthermore, the proposed wound-healing prediction model effectively guides the treatment of chronic wounds. Additionally, by comparing the actual wound with its digital twin, the system enables early identification of non-healing wounds, facilitating timely adjustments and modifications to the treatment plan. By incorporating a digital twin in healthcare, the proposed system enables personalized and tailored treatments, potentially playing a crucial role in proactive problem identification.

An XAI approach for COVID-19 detection using transfer learning with X-ray images.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has continued to cause severe challenges during this unprecedented time, affecting every part of daily life in terms of health, economics, and social development. There is an increasing demand for chest X-ray (CXR) scans, as pneumonia is the primary and vital complication of COVID-19. CXR is widely used as a screening tool for lung-related diseases due to its simple and relatively inexpensive application. However, these scans require expert radiologists to interpret the results for clinical decisions, i.e., diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. The digitalization of various sectors, including healthcare, has accelerated during the pandemic, with the use and importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dramatically increasing. This paper proposes a model using an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) technique to detect and interpret COVID-19 positive CXR images. We further analyze the impact of COVID-19 positive CXR images using heatmaps. The proposed model leverages transfer learning and data augmentation techniques for faster and more adequate model training. Lung segmentation is applied to enhance the model performance further. We conducted a pre-trained network comparison with the highest classification performance (F1-Score: 98%) using the ResNet model.

NLR surveillance of pathogen interference with hormone receptors induces immunity.

Phytohormone signalling pathways have an important role in defence against pathogens mediated by cell-surface pattern recognition receptors and intracellular nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat class immune receptors1,2 (NLR). Pathogens have evolved counter-defence strategies to manipulate phytohormone signalling pathways to dampen immunity and promote virulence3. However, little is known about the surveillance of pathogen interference of phytohormone signalling by the plant innate immune system. The pepper (Capsicum chinense) NLR Tsw, which recognizes the effector nonstructural protein NSs encoded by tomato spotted wilt orthotospovirus (TSWV), contains an unusually large leucine-rich repeat (LRR) domain. Structural modelling predicts similarity between the LRR domain of Tsw and those of the jasmonic acid receptor COI1, the auxin receptor TIR1 and the strigolactone receptor partner MAX2. This suggested that NSs could directly target hormone receptor signalling to promote infection, and that Tsw has evolved a LRR resembling those of phytohormone receptors LRR to induce immunity. Here we show that NSs associates with COI1, TIR1 and MAX2 through a common repressor-TCP21-which interacts directly with these phytohormone receptors. NSs enhances the interaction of COI1, TIR1 or MAX2 with TCP21 and blocks the degradation of corresponding transcriptional repressors to disable phytohormone-mediated host immunity to the virus. Tsw also interacts directly with TCP21 and this interaction is enhanced by viral NSs. Downregulation of TCP21 compromised Tsw-mediated defence against TSWV. Together, our findings reveal that a pathogen effector targets TCP21 to inhibit phytohormone receptor function, promoting virulence, and a plant NLR protein has evolved to recognize this interference as a counter-virulence strategy, thereby activating immunity.

Eutectics and Salt of Dapsone With Hydroxybenzoic Acids: Binary Phase Diagrams, Characterization and Evaluation.

Poor solubility and low dissolution rate of pharmaceuticals in many cases largely limit their bioavailability and efficacy. One of the promising approaches to improve dissolution behavior is to develop new multicomponent solid forms. Herein we use this strategy to synthesize new multicomponent solids of dapsone (DAP), which belongs to BCS class IV, with a series of hydroxybenzoic acid coformers. A new salt of DAP with 2,6-dihydroxybenzoic acid (26DHBA) and 4 eutectics with other hydroxybenzoic acids were reported through comprehensive characterizations using powder X-ray diffraction DSC, and vibrational spectroscopy techniques. The salt formation was evidenced by the presence of ionic interactions detected using FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy, and the stoichiometric ratio was determined to be 1:1. Binary phase diagrams were established to determine the composition of eutectics. The cause for salt and eutectic selection was further understood by computing molecular electrostatic potential (MEP) surface where 26DHBA shows the greatest acidity. Moreover, the powder dissolution study and microenvironment pH measurement reveal that both salt and eutectics of DAP display improvements on the dissolution rate and equilibrium concentration in which the acidity of coformers plays a dominant role. Our findings provide a direction for future coformer screening of multicomponent solids with improved pharmaceutical properties.

RF Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: RF Environment, Device Hardware and Practical Issues.

Radio frequency (RF) based wireless power transfer provides an attractive solution to extend the lifetime of power-constrained wireless sensor networks. Through harvesting RF energy from surrounding environments or dedicated energy sources, low-power wireless devices can be self-sustaining and environment-friendly. These features make the RF energy harvesting wireless communication (RF-EHWC) technique attractive to a wide range of applications. The objective of this article is to investigate the latest research activities on the practical RF-EHWC design. The distribution of RF energy in the real environment, the hardware design of RF-EHWC devices and the practical issues in the implementation of RF-EHWC networks are discussed. At the end of this article, we introduce several interesting applications that exploit the RF-EHWC technology to provide smart healthcare services for animals, wirelessly charge the wearable devices, and implement 5G-assisted RF-EHWC.

Nanoparticle fouling and its combination with organic fouling during forward osmosis process for silver nanoparticles removal from simulated wastewater.

The increasing and wide application of silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) has resulted in their appearance in wastewater. In consideration of their potential toxicity and environmental impacts, it is necessary to find effective technology for their removal from wastewater. Here, forward osmosis (FO) membrane was applied for Ag NPs removal from wastewater, and single and combined fouling of nanoparticles and organic macromolecules were further investigated during the FO process. The findings demonstrated that FO membrane can effectively remove Ag NPs from wastewater due to its high rejection performance. Fouling tests indicated that water flux declined appreciably even at the beginning of the single Ag NPs fouling test, and more remarkable flux decline and larger amounts of deposited Ag NPs were observed with an increase of Ag NPs concentration. However, the addition of bovine serum albumin (BSA) could effectively alleviate the FO membrane fouling induced by Ag NPs. The interaction between Ag NPs and BSA was responsible for this phenomenon. BSA can easily form a nanoparticle-protein corona surrounded nanoparticles, which prevented nanoparticles from aggregation due to the steric stabilization mechanism. Furthermore, the interaction between BSA and Ag NPs occurred not only in wastewater but also on FO membrane surface.

Comparison of biofouling mechanisms between cellulose triacetate (CTA) and thin-film composite (TFC) polyamide forward osmosis membranes in osmotic membrane bioreactors.

There are two types of popular forward osmosis (FO) membrane materials applied for researches on FO process, cellulose triacetate (CTA) and thin film composite (TFC) polyamide. However, performance and fouling mechanisms of commercial TFC FO membrane in osmotic membrane bioreactors (OMBRs) are still unknown. In current study, its biofouling behaviors in OMBRs were investigated and further compared to the CTA FO membrane. The results indicated that ß-D-glucopyranose polysaccharides and microorganisms accounted for approximately 77% of total biovolume on the CTA FO membrane while ß-D-glucopyranose polysaccharides (biovolume ratio of 81.1%) were the only dominant biofoulants on the TFC FO membrane. The analyses on the biofouling structure implied that a tighter biofouling layer with a larger biovolume was formed on the CTA FO membrane. The differences in biofouling behaviors including biofoulants composition and biofouling structure between CTA and TFC FO membranes were attributed to different membrane surface properties.