Practical NTRU Signcryption in the Standard Model.

Based on the NTRU trapdoor used in NIST's Falcon, a signcryption scheme following the sign-then-encrypt paradigm is constructed. The existing partitioning technique based on Waters hash over the lattice can not complete the security reduction in the standard model for the signature part due to the "partiality" of the pre-image generated with the NTRU trapdoor. To address this, a variant of Waters hash over small integers is proposed and, the probability of the successful reduction is analyzed. The resulting signcryption achieves existential unforgeability under the adaptive chosen-message attacks. By utilizing the uniqueness of the secret and the noise in an NTRU instance, the tag used in encryption is eliminated. Furthermore, a method to construct tamper-sensitive lattice public key encryption is proposed. This approach implants the ciphertext-sensitive information into the lattice public key encryption and binds it to the encrypted information. The malleability to the public key ciphertext triggers the change of the message-signature pair so that the IND-CCA2 security of the entire ciphertext can be guaranteed by the signature for the message. Thanks to the rational design and the efficiency of the NTRU trapdoor, the computational overhead of the proposed scheme is reduced significantly compared to the existing lattice-based signcryption scheme, reaching orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency. The experiment shows that the proposed scheme is efficient.

Minimizing the Anticodon-Recognized Loop of Methanococcus jannaschii Tyrosyl-tRNA Synthetase to Improve the Efficiency of Incorporating Noncanonical Amino Acids.

In the field of genetic code expansion (GCE), improvements in the efficiency of noncanonical amino acid (ncAA) incorporation have received continuous attention. By analyzing the reported gene sequences of giant virus species, we noticed some sequence differences at the tRNA binding interface. On the basis of the structural and activity differences between Methanococcus jannaschii Tyrosyl-tRNA Synthetase (MjTyrRS) and mimivirus Tyrosyl-tRNA Synthetase (MVTyrRS), we found that the size of the anticodon-recognized loop of MjTyrRS influences its suppression activity regarding triplet and specific quadruplet codons. Therefore, three MjTyrRS mutants with loop minimization were designed. The suppression of wild-type MjTyrRS loop-minimized mutants increased by 1.8-4.3-fold, and the MjTyrRS variants enhanced the activity of the incorporation of ncAAs by 15-150% through loop minimization. In addition, for specific quadruplet codons, the loop minimization of MjTyrRS also improves the suppression efficiency. These results suggest that loop minimization of MjTyrRS may provide a general strategy for the efficient synthesis of ncAAs-containing proteins.

An Adaptive Model Filtering Algorithm Based on Grubbs Test in Federated Learning.

Federated learning has been popular for its ability to train centralized models while protecting clients' data privacy. However, federated learning is highly susceptible to poisoning attacks, which can result in a decrease in model performance or even make it unusable. Most existing defense methods against poisoning attacks cannot achieve a good trade-off between robustness and training efficiency, especially on non-IID data. Therefore, this paper proposes an adaptive model filtering algorithm based on the Grubbs test in federated learning (FedGaf), which can achieve great trade-offs between robustness and efficiency against poisoning attacks. To achieve a trade-off between system robustness and efficiency, multiple child adaptive model filtering algorithms have been designed. Meanwhile, a dynamic decision mechanism based on global model accuracy is proposed to reduce additional computational costs. Finally, a global model weighted aggregation method is incorporated, which improves the convergence speed of the model. Experimental results on both IID and non-IID data show that FedGaf outperforms other Byzantine-robust aggregation rules in defending against various attack methods.

Interaction of isoquinoline alkaloids with pyrimidine motif triplex DNA by mass spectrometry and spectroscopies reveals diverse mechanisms.

Isoquinoline alkaloids represent an important class of molecules due to their broad range of pharmacology and clinical utility. Prospective development and use of these alkaloids as effective anticancer agents have elicited great interest. In this study, in order to reveal structure-activity relationship, we present the characterization of bioactive isoquinoline alkaloid-DNA triplex interactions, with particular emphasis on the sequence selectivity and preference of binding to the two types of DNA triplexes, by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) and various spectroscopic techniques. The six alkaloids, including coptisine, columbamine, epiberberine, berberrubine, jateorhizine, and fangchinoline, were selected to explore their interactions with the TC and TTT triplex DNA structures. Berberrubine, fangchinoline, coptisine, columbamine, and epiberberine have preference for TC rich DNA sequences compared to TTT rich DNA triplex based on affinity values in MS. The experimental results from different fragmentation modes in tandem MS, subtractive and hyperchromic effects in UV absorption spectra, fluorescence quenching and enhancement in fluorescence spectra, and strong conformational changes in circular dichroism (CD) hinted that the interaction between isoquinoline alkaloid-TC/TTT DNA had diverse mechanisms including at least two different binding modes: the electrostatic binding and the intercalation binding. Interestingly, columbamine, berberrubine, and fangchinoline can stabilize TTT triplex as inferred from optical thermal melting profiles, while it was not the case in TC triplex. These results provide new insights into binding of isoquinoline alkaloids to pyrimidine motif triplex DNA.

A Lightweight Intelligent Network Intrusion Detection System Using One-Class Autoencoder and Ensemble Learning for IoT.

Network intrusion detection technology is key to cybersecurity regarding the Internet of Things (IoT). The traditional intrusion detection system targeting Binary or Multi-Classification can detect known attacks, but it is difficult to resist unknown attacks (such as zero-day attacks). Unknown attacks require security experts to confirm and retrain the model, but new models do not keep up to date. This paper proposes a Lightweight Intelligent NIDS using a One-Class Bidirectional GRU Autoencoder and Ensemble Learning. It can not only accurately identify normal and abnormal data, but also identify unknown attacks as the type most similar to known attacks. First, a One-Class Classification model based on a Bidirectional GRU Autoencoder is introduced. This model is trained with normal data, and has high prediction accuracy in the case of abnormal data and unknown attack data. Second, a multi-classification recognition method based on ensemble learning is proposed. It uses Soft Voting to evaluate the results of various base classifiers, and identify unknown attacks (novelty data) as the type most similar to known attacks, so that exception classification becomes more accurate. Experiments are conducted on WSN-DS, UNSW-NB15, and KDD CUP99 datasets, and the recognition rates of the proposed models in the three datasets are raised to 97.91%, 98.92%, and 98.23% respectively. The results verify the feasibility, efficiency, and portability of the algorithm proposed in the paper.

Combination of bioleaching by gross bacterial biosurfactants and flocculation: A potential remediation for the heavy metal contaminated soils.

Combining bioleaching by the gross biosurfactants of Burkholderia sp. Z-90 and flocculation by poly aluminium chloride (PAC) was proposed to develop a potential environment-friendly and cost-effective technique to remediate the severely contaminated soils by heavy metals. The factors affecting soil bioleaching by the gross biosurfactants of Burkholderia sp. Z-90 were optimized. The results showed the optimal removing efficiencies of Zn, Pb, Mn, Cd, Cu, and As by the Burkholderia sp. Z-90 leachate were 44.0, 32.5, 52.2, 37.7, 24.1 and 31.6%, respectively at soil liquid ratio of 1:20 (w/v) for 5 d, which were more efficient than that by 0.1% of rhamnolipid. The amounts of the bioleached heavy metals by the Burkholderia sp. Z-90 leachate were higher than that by other biosurfactants in the previous studies, although the removal efficiencies of the metals by the leachate were relatively lower. It was suggested that more heavy metals caused more competitive to chelate with function groups of the gross biosurfactants and the metal removal efficiencies by biosurfactants in natural soils were lower than in the artificially contaminated soils. Moreover, the Burkholderia sp. Z-90 leachate facilitated the metals to be transformed to the easily migrating speciation fractions. Additional, the results showed that PAC was efficient in the following flocculation to remove heavy metals in the waste bio-leachates. Our study will provide support for developing a bioleaching technique model to remediate the soils extremely contaminated by heavy metals.

Conjugation of paclitaxel to C-6 hexanediamine-modified hyaluronic acid for targeted drug delivery to enhance antitumor efficacy.

Polymer-based paclitaxel (PTX) conjugates have demonstrated application potentials to improve the water solubility and enhance the efficiency of drug delivery. In this study, a novel HA-based drug conjugate, HA-6-PTX, was designed and successfully synthesized by chemically grafting PTX to the C-6 position of N-acetyl-d-glucosamine (GlcNAc) of hyaluronic acid (HA) using hexanediamine as the linker. Leaving the carboxylate of HA chain unaffected, the conjugate with drug loading as high as 21.8% showed an excellent water solubility of 168mg/mL and exhibited increased drug release in the presence of hyaluronidase. Compared to free PTX, HA-6-PTX demonstrated increased cytotoxicity and enhanced apoptosis-inducing effect against HepG2 and A549 cells due to the increased cellular uptake of drug via HA-receptor mediated endocytosis. It was concluded that the HA-6-PTX conjugate could be potentially utilized for further exploration as targeted drug delivery to enhance antitumor efficacy.

A Context-Aware S-Health Service System for Drivers.

As a stressful and sensitive task, driving can be disturbed by various factors from the health condition of the driver to the environmental variables of the vehicle. Continuous monitoring of driving hazards and providing the most appropriate business services to meet actual needs can guarantee safe driving and make great use of the existing information resources and business services. However, there is no in-depth research on the perception of a driver's health status or the provision of customized business services in case of various hazardous situations. In order to constantly monitor the health status of the drivers and react to abnormal situations, this paper proposes a context-aware service system providing a configurable architecture for the design and implementation of the smart health service system for safe driving, which can perceive a driver's health status and provide helpful services to the driver. With the context-aware technology to construct a smart health services system for safe driving, this is the first time that such a service system has been implemented in practice. Additionally, an assessment model is proposed to mitigate the impact of the acceptable abnormal status and, thus, reduce the unnecessary invocation of the services. With regard to different assessed situations, the business services can be invoked for the driver to adapt to hazardous situations according to the services configuration model, which can take full advantage of the existing information resources and business services. The evaluation results indicate that the alteration of the observed status in a valid time range T can be tolerated and the frequency of the service invocation can be reduced.

High-throughput screening of triplex DNA binders from complicated samples by 96-well pate format in conjunction with peak area-fading UHPLC-Orbitrap MS.

Conventional strategies for the screening of DNA triplex binders cannot be used for complicated samples, such as ligand libraries created by combinatorial chemistry or from natural product extracts. In the current study, an ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with an Orbitrap mass spectrometry (UHPLC-Orbitrap-MS)-based approach, which we call peak area-fading (PAF) UHPLC-Orbitrap-MS and was designed for just such a purpose, is reported. The triplex DNA modified 96-well plate and the single stranded oligonucleotide modified 96-well plate (as control) were incubated with ligand libraries, and the unbound ligands were directly determined via UHPLC-ESI-MS. The binders were detected through the decrease (fading) in the peak areas compared to those of the control group. Several factors, such as incubation time, incubation temperature, and buffer, which might affect the binding affinity and reproducibility, were optimized. The potential of the approach was examined using the extracts of Rhizoma Coptidis and Phellodendron chinense Schneid cortexe. The triplex DNA-binding capabilities of the five components (epiberberine, coptisine, jatrorrhizine, berberrubine, and columbamine) were found for the first time, indicating their efficiency for the analysis of complicated samples. In contrast to our previous study, which suffered from a serious drawback of poor reproducibility, this method is more robust and more suitable for high-throughput measurements, opening a new experimental strategy in assessing large libraries of potential drug candidates that work by forming a drug/DNA complex.

Differentiation of Disaccharide Isomers by Temperature-Dependent In-Source Decay (TDISD) and DART-Q-TOF MS/MS.

Helium direct analysis in real time (He-DART) mass spectrometry (MS) of some compounds, polysaccharides, for example, usually tends to be challenging because of the occurrence of prominent in-source decay (ISD), which was considered as an undesired side reaction, as it complicated the resulting mass spectra. Our approach is to take advantage of an efficient and practical method termed the temperature-dependent ISD (TDISD) technique combined with fragmentation of the dehydrated dimers using DART Q-TOF tandem mass spectrometry for differentiation of disaccharide isomers. In this study, cross-ring cleavages and non-ovalent complexes were detected in the spectra of the saccharides. It was observed that the gas heater temperature had a significant effect on the absence or presence of signal in DART spectra. At high gas temperature, ions in high mass region began to appear. Based on the types of cross-ring cleavages and noncovalent complexes, disaccharide isomers with different linkage positions can be differentiated in both positive and negative ion modes at a lower DART gas temperature. Additionally, anomeric configurations were assigned on the basis of the relative abundance ratio of m/z 198:342 obtained by the comparison of the positive ion mode tandem mass spectrum of an α isomer dimer generated at higher DART gas temperature and that of the corresponding ß one. In general, this method is easy, fast, effective, and robust for identifying disaccharide isomers.

Arsenic immobilization in the contaminated soil using poorly crystalline Fe-oxyhydroxy sulfate.

A low crystalline Fe-oxyhydroxy sulfate (FeOS) was used to immobilize arsenic (As) in soils in this study. The effects of FeOS amount, treatment time and soil moisture on As immobilization were investigated. The results showed that water-soluble and NaHCO3-extractable As were immobilized by 53.4-99.8 and 13.8-73.3% respectively, with 1-10% of FeOS addition. The highest immobilization of water-soluble (98.5%) and NaHCO3-extractable arsenic (47.2%) was achieved under condition of 4% of FeOS and 80% of soil moisture. Further, more amounts of FeOS addition resulted in less time requirement for As immobilization. Sequential chemical extraction experiment revealed that easily mobile arsenic phase was transferred to less mobile phase. The FeOS-bonded As may play a significant role in arsenic immobilization. Under leaching with simulated acid rain at 60 times pore volumes, accumulation amount of As release from untreated soil and soil amended with FeOS were 98.4 and 1.2 mg, respectively, which correspond to 7.69 and 0.09% of total As amounts in soil. The result showed that the low crystalline FeOS can be used as a suitable additive for arsenic immobilization in soils.

Preparation and characterization of fucoidan-chitosan nanospheres by the sonification method.

Fucoidan was chosen a substitute for alginate in chitosan-based polyelectrolytes or polyiones because it is negatively charged and possesses pharmacological properties. The fucoidan-chitosan nanospheres were prepared by the sonification method, and different formulation variables were investigated to get regular and round microspheres. Single factor and orthogonal experiments were carried out in this process, and nanospheres were finally prepared successfully. Stability tests revealed that some of the spheres were stable over one week. Combined with the drug loading/release profiles when using bovine serum albumin and capecitabine as model drugs for peptide and small molecule drug respectively, it can be concluded that the nanospheres may have potential applications in drug delivery.

Construction and characterization of a potent, long-lasting recombinant human serum albumin-interferon α1 fusion protein expressed in Pichia pastoris.

The main obstacles to using Interferon a1 as an antiviral agent are its low stability and fast clearance. Here, we prepared a long-lasting recombinant human serum albumin-interferon α1 fusion protein. It was expressed in methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris with HSA's natural signal peptide and purified by dye affinity chromatography and ion exchange chromatography. The physicochemical, biological, and pharmaceutical characteristics of HSA-IFN α1 were then evaluated in vitro and in vivo. The purity of HSA-IFN α1 was about 95% analyzed by SDS-PAGE. Molecular weight determined by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry was 86,582. Western blot analysis showed that the expressed HSA-IFN α1 had the antigenicity of HSA. The N-terminal acid amino sequence was identical to predicted sequence. The antivirus activity in vitro evaluated by cytopathic effect assay was (1.63±0.06)×10(5) IU/mg. After administered in rats, the biological activity of HSA-IFN α1 were enhanced and maintained for 6days in serum. Overall, these studies demonstrate the feasibility of using albumin-fusion technology to development a long-lasting, antiviral protein HSA-IFN α1 with high antivirus activity.

[Expression and characterization of soluble recombinant Ulp1p with glutathione S-transferase tag in Escherichia coli].

The aim of the study is to obtain an efficient expression of recombinant ubiquitin-like specific protease 1 (Ulp1) by gene engineering. We cloned the Ulp1p, active fragment (403 aa-621 aa) of Ulp1, from Saccharomyces cerevisia, and subcloned into pGEX/Rosetta (DE3) to form an expression plasmid, pGEX-Ulp1p-His6. In order to enhance the solubility of GST-Ulp1p-His6, we purified the fusion protein GST-Ulp1p-His6 by either glutathione S-transferase agarose or Ni-NTA resin chromatography, the purity was up to 98%. We utilized the protein to cleave the SUMO fusions, and the specific activity of GST-Ulp1p-His6 was 1.375 x 10(4) U/mg. This study showed that the recombinant protein GST-Ulp1p-His6 displayed high specificity and activity.

[Expression of human insulin gene in vitro and in vivo].

The transfection of mutated human insulin gene was studied using the complex of different proportion of plasmid and Liposome. Hepatic cell was used as the target cell in vitro,isolation of Hepatic cell including insulin gene was carried out by G418, the expression level of insulin in medium was measured by RIA method. The portal vein was cannulated with therapeutic gene in vivo, the blood glucose of the model was regularly examined and the insulin level was detected on the seventh day after transfection. The results showed that the target gene was transferred into the hepatic cell, expression of mature insulin was detected both in vivo and in vitro. It reached the peak 10.45microIU/ml on the 24th hour after transfection with the proportion 1:6 of plasmid and Liposome in hepatic cell. Diabetic symptom of the model was improved after transgene, the blood glucose could decrease 55% at the most.