Insights into starch synthesis and amino acid composition of common buckwheat in response to phosphate fertilizer management strategies.

To investigate the response and the regulatory mechanism of common buckwheat starch, amylose, and amylopectin biosynthesis to P management strategies, field experiments were conducted in 2021 and 2022 using three phosphorus (P) levels. Results revealed that the application of 75 kg hm-2 phosphate fertilizer significantly enhanced amylopectin and total starch content in common buckwheat, leading to improved grain weight and starch yield, and decreased starch granule size. The number of upregulated differentially expressed proteins induced by phosphate fertilizer increased with the application rate, with 56 proteins identified as shared differential proteins between different P levels, primarily associated with carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism. Phosphate fertilizer inhibited amylose synthesis by downregulating granule-bound starch synthase protein expression and promoted amylopectin accumulation by upregulating 1,4-alpha-glucan branching enzyme and starch synthase proteins expression. Additionally, Phosphate fertilizer primarily promoted the accumulation of hydrophobic and essential amino acids. These findings elucidate the mechanism of P-induced starch accumulation and offer insights into phosphate fertilizer management and high-quality cultivation of common buckwheat.

UArch: A Super-Resolution Processor With Heterogeneous Triple-Core Architecture for Workloads of U-Net Networks.

High-resolution medical images are of critical significance to improve disease diagnosis. Limited by the camera and power of medical devices, medical images often have very low resolution. For example, wireless capsule endoscopes, often used to diagnose diseases of the small bowel, can only capture low-resolution endoscopic images. The existing super-resolution (SR) networks perform exceptionally well in recovering high-resolution images, but they are computationally expensive and require high bandwidth, which can result in unacceptable latency and bandwidth requirements for embedded medical devices. In this paper, we propose a U-Net-based SR (USR) network structure and an SR processor named UArch. The USR-s, which is the lightweight version of USR, has an SR performance of 42.68 dB for ×2 scale SR. The USR-s has 0.3 dB higher PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) than the SR algorithm, which is often used in recent SR hardware. Based on well-designed strategies, including heterogeneous triple-core architecture, fine-grained on-chip memory allocation, out-of-order execution, and sub-tensor-based processing flow, the UArch, designed for U-Net networks, can fulfill ×2, ×3, and ×4 scale SR by deploying USR-s, achieving high throughput of 60 fps and low latency of 25 ms for ×2 scale 1920 × 1080 output image SR at 156 MHz. The UArch achieves high energy efficiency which is 2264.5 GOPS/W when synthesized and evaluated under the TSMC 28 nm process and which is 199.3 GOPS/W when implemented on Xilinx ZCU111. Our SR processor is capable of reconstructing high-quality endoscopic images and is more efficient than the previous state-of-the-art SR processors.

ORFV can carry TRAP gene expression via intracellular CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology.

Orf is an acute and highly contracted human and animal infection caused by orf virus (ORFV), which mainly affects sheep, goats, and other species. Clinically, opportunistic or conditional pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) are often detected in cases of orf, which greatly increases the risk of disease progression and clinical death. It has been reported that TRAP gene products of S. aureus can broadly influence bacterial life and pathogenicity in vivo, and introduction of exogenous TRAP genes may help to inhibit the proliferation of bacteria. In order to achieve the combined control of ORFV and S. aureus, a novel approach to design a S. aureus TRAP gene vaccine using a live attenuated ORFV vector is proposed. In this study, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology was used to disable vascular endothelial growth factor E of ORFV (VEGF-v) and introduced TRAP gene into this position. TRAP gene expression was detected in keratinocytes infected with recombinant virus. The construction and experimental verification of recombinant ORFV (ORFV-v/TRAP) will provide a reference for in-depth studies on the prevention and control of mixed infectious disease.

Preparation and Experimental Investigations of Low-Shrinkage Commercial Concrete for Tunnel Annular Secondary Lining Engineering.

Secondary lining concrete is frequently used in underground tunnels. Due to the internal restriction of the annular concrete segment, micro-cracks may be caused by temperature stress and volume deformation, thus affecting the safe transportation of the tunnel. The purpose of this study is to provide a concrete experimental basis with low hydration heat and low shrinkage for tunnel engineering with different construction requirements. Different amounts of expansion agent (EA), shrinkage-reducing agent (SRA), and superabsorbent polymer (SAP) were considered in commercial concrete. It was found that EA elevated the degree of hydration and the hydration exothermic rate, while SRA and SAP showed the opposite regularity. SRA has the optimum shrinkage reduction performance with a 79% reduction in shrinkage, but the strength decreases significantly compared to EA and SAP groups. The effect of the combination of different shrinkage reducing components in commercial concrete is instructive for the hydration rate and shrinkage compensation in secondary lining engineering.

Immunogenicity of multi-epitope vaccines composed of epitopes from Streptococcus dysgalactiae GapC.

Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase C (GapC) of Streptococcus dysgalactiae (S. dysgalactiae) is a highly conserved surface protein that can induce a protective immune response against S. dysgalactiae infection. To investigate the immune response and protective efficacy induced by epitope-vaccines against S. dysgalactiae infection, we constructed epitope-vaccines GTB1, GB1B2, and GTB1B2 using a T cell epitope (GapC63-77, abbreviated as GT) and two B cell epitopes (GapC30-36, abbreviated as GB1, and GapC97-103, abbreviated as GB2), which were identified in GapC1-150 of S. dysgalactiae in tandem by a GSGSGS linker. BALB/c mice were immunized via an intramuscular injection with the epitope vaccines. The levels of the cytokines, IFN-γ, IL-4, and IL-17, secreted by splenic lymphocytes and the antibody levels in the sera of the immunized mice were detected by ELISA. The immunized mice were subsequently challenged with S. dysgalactiae, and the bacterial colonization in the immunized-mouse organs was examined using the plate counting method. The results showed that the level of the cytokines induced by GTB1B2 was lower than that induced by GapC1-150, but higher than that induced by other epitope vaccines. The level of IgG induced by GTB1B2 was lower than that induced by GapC1-150, but higher than the levels induced by other epitope vaccines. The bacterial colonization numbers in the organs of the mice immunized with GTB1B2 were higher those of the mice immunized with GapC1-150, but significantly lower than those from the mice immunized with other epitope-vaccines. Our results demonstrated that the T cell and B cell epitopes in the epitope-vaccines worked synergistically against bacterial challenge. The multi-epitope vaccine, GTB1B2, could induce stronger cellular and humoral immune responses, and provide a better protective effect against S. dysgalactiae infection.

MC-LSTM: Real-Time 3D Human Action Detection System for Intelligent Healthcare Applications.

Due to the movement expressiveness and privacy assurance of human skeleton data, 3D skeleton-based action inference is becoming popular in healthcare applications. These scenarios call for more advanced performance in application-specific algorithms and efficient hardware support. Warnings on health emergencies sensitive to response speed require low latency output and action early detection capabilities. Medical monitoring that works in an always-on edge platform needs the system processor to have extreme energy efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the MC-LSTM, a functional and versatile 3D skeleton-based action detection system, for the above demands. Our system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on trimmed and untrimmed cases of general-purpose and medical-specific datasets with early-detection features. Further, the MC-LSTM accelerator supports parallel inference on up to 64 input channels. The implementation on Xilinx ZCU104 reaches a throughput of 18 658 Frames-Per-Second (FPS) and an inference latency of 3.5 ms with the batch size of 64. Accordingly, the power consumption is 3.6 W for the whole FPGA+ARM system, which is 37.8x and 10.4x more energy-efficient than the high-end Titan X GPU and i7-9700 CPU, respectively. Meanwhile, our accelerator also keeps a 4  âˆ¼ 5x energy efficiency advantage against the low-power high-performance Firefly-RK3399 board carrying an ARM Cortex-A72+A53 CPU. We further synthesize an 8-bit quantized version on the same hardware, providing a 48.8% increase in energy efficiency under the same throughput.

Laboratory Diagnosis of a NZ7-like Orf Virus Infection and Pathogen Genetic Characterization, Particularly in the VEGF Gene.

Orf is a widespread contagious epithelial viral disease found particularly in most sheep breeding countries in the world. Recently, an orf virus (ORFV) strain OV-HLJ05 was isolated from an outbreak in northeast China. Three genes of interest including ORFV011 (B2L), ORFV059 (F1L), and ORFV132 (VEGF) of ORFV, were recruited to identify and genetically characterize this newly isolated virus. Amino acid (aa) sequence compared with the ORFV references listed in GenBank, both B2L and F1L of OV-HLJ05 showed less microheterogeneity from their references. In contrast, the VEGF gene was included in the NZ7-VEGF like group as previously considered by Mercer in 2002. Unexpectedly, further multiple VEGF matches were made, using 34 published sequences from China and India, resulting in 27 strains of the NZ7 members. Based on Karki's report in 2020, NZ7-VEGF like viruses are emerging more and more frequently in these two countries, damaging the Asian sheep industry. Obvious heterogeneity with the NZ2, insertion of two oligopeptides TATI(L)QVVVAI(L) and SSSS(S) motif were found in the NZ7-like VEGF protein. These VEGFs are divided mainly into two types and a significant increase in the number of hydrogen bonds within the NZ7-like VEGF dimers was observed. The NZ7-like ORFV apparently favors the goat as a host and an emphasis on this in future epidemiological and pathological studies should be considered, focusing on the NZ7-like virus.

Swimming Exercise Protects against Insulin Resistance via Regulating Oxidative Stress through Nox4 and AKT Signaling in High-Fat Diet-Fed Mice.

Nonpharmaceutical therapies such as exercise training and diet intervention are widely used for the treatment of insulin resistance (IR). Although the skeletal muscle is the major peripheral tissue of glucose metabolism under insulin stimulation, the mechanism underlying muscle IR is poorly understood. Using a high-fat diet-induced IR mouse model, we here show that NADPH oxidase 4 (Nox4) upregulation mediates the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that causes metabolic syndrome featuring IR. The Nox4 expression level was markedly elevated in IR mice, and Nox4 overexpression was sufficient to trigger IR. Conversely, downregulation of Nox4 expression through exercise training prevented diet-induced IR by reducing the production of ROS and enhancing the AKT signaling pathway. Thus, this study indicates that exercise might improve IR through a reduction of Nox4-induced ROS in the skeletal muscle and enhancement of AKT signal transduction.

Structural Features of a Conformation-dependent Antigen Epitope on ORFV-B2L Recognized by the 2E4 mAb.

Previously, we successfully prepared a monoclonal antibody (mAb) named 2E4, that directly recognizes the major envelope protein B2L of the orf virus (ORFV), but there is little information about its epitope. Here, we meticulously mapped the 2E4 epitope through combinatorial programs and identified the functional binding domain and a key amino acid residue. Briefly, the simulated epitope peptide closely resembles 84VDVQSKDKDADELR97 located at the N-terminus of B2L, strongly suggesting that the epitope is conformationally or spatially structure-dependent. Subsequently, we combined these findings with the results from the antigenicity prediction of B2L to design three truncated fragments of B2L (F1, F2 and F3) selected using 2E4, and only the F1 fragment was found to be eligible for the advanced stage. Alanine-scanning mutagenesis suggested that the D94 residue is structurally crucial for the 2E4 epitope. The other participating residues, including K61, E62, and D92, together with D94 were responsible for enabling 2E4 binding and served as factors that synergistically enabled binding to the whole 2E4 epitope. In this paper, we describe, for the first time, the architecture of an ORFV conformational epitope, and it is also expected that mAb 2E4 and its epitope can be used for applications relating to orf control.