Analysis of the sulfate permease family in Bursaphelenchus xylophilus in the nematode development and stress adaptation

IntroductionPine wilt disease (PWD), caused by the pine wood nematode (PWN) Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, poses a significant threat to global pine forests. The sulfate permease (SULP) family is essential for sulfate transport, sulfur assimilation and cellular homeostasis, yet it remains uncharacterized in B. xylophilus. This study aimed to comprehensively identify all members of the SULP family in B. xylophilus and to elucidate their roles in nematode development and stress adaptation.MethodsThrough genomic data analysis, we identified 10 members of the SULP family in B. xylophilus and conducted a comprehensive characterization of their physicochemical properties, conserved motifs, protein structures, and gene expression profiles across different developmental stages.ResultsThe results revealed Bx-sulps were located on 5 chromosomes of B. xylophilus. Phylogenetic analysis unveiled both conserved and divergent evolutionary patterns of these proteins compared to counterparts in other nematodes. Expression analysis demonstrated upregulation of Bx-sulps during the dauer third-instar larva (D3) stage, suggesting their involvement in stress response and diapause. Moreover, certain Bx-sulps exhibited high expression levels in adult stages, indicating a potential role in reproductive processes.DiscussionThe study presents the first comprehensive examination of BxSULP family, shed light on its significance in nematode development and stress adaptation. These findings provide the groundwork for further functional investigations and may aid in the development of targeted strategies for managing PWD

Determination of Picogram Levels of Roxithromycin in Pharmaceutical, Human Serum, and Urine by Flow-Injection Chemiluminescence

A sensitive chemiluminescence (CL) method, based on the inhibitory effect of roxithromycin (ROX) on the CL reaction between luminol and dissolved oxygen in a flow-injection system, was first proposed for the determination of ROX at picogram levels. The decrement of CL intensity was linearly proportional to the logarithm of ROX concentrations ranging from 0.1 to 100 pg mL-1, giving the limit of detection (LOD) of 0.03 pg mL-1(3σ). At a flow rate of 2.0 mL min-1, a complete analytical procedure including sampling and washing could be performed within 0.5 min, with relative standard deviations (RSDs) of less than 5.0% (n=5). The proposed procedure was applied successfully to the determination of ROX in pharmaceutical, human serum, and urine with the recoveries ranging from 90.0 to 110.0%.</jats:p

An Axial Compression Transformer for Efficient Human Pose Estimation

Transformer has a wide range of applications in human posture estimation. It can model the global dependence relationship of images through the self-attention mechanism to obtain key human body information. However, Transformer consumes a lot of computation. An axial compression pose transformer (ACPose) method is proposed to reduce part of the computational cost of Transformer by the axial compression of the input matrix, while maintaining the global receptive field by feature fusion. A Local Enhancement Module is constructed to avoid the loss of too much feature information in the compression process. In the COCO dataset experiment, there was a significant reduction in computational cost compared to those of state-of-the-art transformer-based algorithms

Advancements in M&uuml;ller Glia Reprogramming: Pioneering Approaches for Retinal Neuron Regeneration

M&uuml;ller glia exhibit a remarkable regenerative capacity in zebrafish through spontaneous reprogramming post-injury but remain limited in mammals. This review highlights the key mechanisms underlying M&uuml;ller glia reprogramming, including gene regulatory networks, cytokine signaling, signal transduction pathways, epigenetic modifications, and transcriptional regulation. Cross-species analyses have uncovered conserved gene networks that suppress neurogenesis in mammals, while injury-induced transcriptional profiles reveal divergent regenerative strategies. Combinatorial approaches may enhance the reprogramming of mammalian M&uuml;ller glia into functional neurons. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain, such as variability in the efficacy of direct reprogramming methods and the limited regeneration of cone photoreceptors, even in regenerative species. We conclude that targeting epigenetic barriers and species-specific regulatory pathways offers promising avenues for clinical translation in retinal disorders such as glaucoma and retinitis pigmentosa. Moving forward, research efforts should prioritize the functional integration of regenerated neurons and the development of standardized methodologies to accelerate therapeutic advancements

Safety distance for preventing hot particle ignition of building insulation materials

AbstractTrajectories of flying hot particles were predicted in this work, and the temperatures during the movement were also calculated. Once the particle temperature decreased to the critical temperature for a hot particle to ignite building insulation materials, which was predicted by hot-spot ignition theory, the distance particle traveled was determined as the minimum safety distance for preventing the ignition of building insulation materials by hot particles. The results showed that for sphere aluminum particles with the same initial velocities and diameters, the horizontal and vertical distances traveled by particles with higher initial temperatures were higher. Smaller particles traveled farther when other conditions were the same. The critical temperature for an aluminum particle to ignite rigid polyurethane foam increased rapidly with the decrease of particle diameter. The horizontal and vertical safety distances were closely related to the initial temperature, diameter and initial velocity of particles. These results could help update the safety provision of firework display

Adaptive Filter Updating for Energy-Efficient Top- Queries in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Gaussian Process Regression

Adopting filtering mechanism of dynamic filtering windows installed on sensor nodes to process top- k queries is an important research direction in wireless sensor networks. The mechanism can reduce transmissions of redundant data by utilizing filters. However, existing algorithms based on filters consume a vast amount of energy due to filter updating. In this paper, an energy-efficient top- k query technique based on adaptive filters is proposed. Due to updating filters consuming a large amount of energy, an algorithm named FUGPR based on Gaussian process regression to process top- k queries is provided for saving energy. When the filters change, the sensor readings are predicted to calculate the updating costs of filters; then FUGPR decides whether the filters need to be updated or not. Thus, the energy consumption for updating filters is decreased. Experimental results show that our approach can reduce energy consumption efficiently for updating filters on two distinct real datasets

Histogram Estimation for Optimal Filter Skyline Query Processing in Wireless Sensor Networks

The skyline query processing technique plays an increasingly important role for multicriteria decision making applications in wireless sensor networks. The technique of saving energy to prolong the lifetime of sensor nodes is one of the dominating challenges to resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient skyline query processing algorithm, called the histogram filter based algorithm (HFA), to efficiently retrieve skyline results from a sensor network. First, we use historical data at the base station to construct histograms for further estimating the probability density distributions of the sensor data. Second, the dominance probability of each tuple is computed based on the histograms, and the optimal tuple which has the largest possibility of dominance/filtering capability is obtained using in-network aggregation approach. After that, the base station broadcasts the optimized tuple as the global filter to each sensor node. Then, the tuples which do not satisfy the skyline query semantics are discarded to avoid unnecessary data transmissions. An extensive experimental study demonstrates that the proposed HFA algorithm performs more efficiently than existing algorithms on reducing data transmissions during skyline query processing, which saves the energy and prolongs the lifetime of wireless sensor networks