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We previously reported that the two-component system MacRS regulates morphogenesis and production of the blue-pigmented antibiotic actinorhodin (ACT) in Streptomyces coelicolor. In this study, the role of MacRS was further extended to include control of the production of the red-pigmented antibiotic undecylprodigiosin (RED) and the calcium-dependent antibiotic (CDA), and control of other important cellular activities. Our data indicated that disruption of the MacRS TCS reduced production not only of ACT but also of RED and CDA. RNA-Seq analysis revealed that genes involved in both secondary metabolism and primary metabolism are differentially expressed in the MacRS deletion mutant ΔmacRS. Moreover, we found that genes of the Zur regulon are also markedly downregulated in ΔmacRS, suggesting a role for macRS in zinc homeostasis. In addition to previously identified MacR sites with strong matches to the MacR consensus recognition sequence, a genome-wide search revealed over one hundred less-stringent matches, including potential sites upstream of absR1, crgA, and smeA. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays demonstrated that MacR binds some of these sites in vitro. Although there is no strong MacR site upstream of the ACT regulatory gene actII-orf4 (sco5085), we showed that an engineered MacR site enhanced ACT production, providing an approach for modulating production of useful compounds. Altogether, our work suggests an important role for MacRS in a range of cellular activities in Streptomyces and its potential application in strain engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new streptovaricin analogue, namely 3-desmethyl protostreptovaricin I (1), was isolated from the culture of the genetically engineered strain ΔstvM2 derived from Streptomyces spectabilis CCTCC M2017417. Its structure was elucidated on the basis of extensive spectroscopic analyses, including 1D and 2D NMR tests, and high resolution mass spectrometry analysis. Compound 1 is the first example of 3-desmethyl streptovaricin analogues reported so far, however, it showed no antibacterial activities against Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 29213. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the temporal variations in mental workload level (MWL) is crucial for enhancing the safety of human-machine system operations, especially when there is cognitive overload or inattention of human operator. This paper proposed a cost-sensitive majority weighted minority oversampling strategy to address the imbalanced MWL data classification problem. Both the inter-class and intra-class imbalance problems are considered. For the former, imbalance ratio is defined to determine the number of the synthetic samples in the minority class. The latter problem is addressed by assigning different weights to borderline samples in the minority class based on the distance and density meaures of the sample distribution. Furthermore, multi-label classifier is designed based on an ensemble of binary classifiers. The results of analyzing 21 imbalanced UCI multi-class datasets showed that the proposed approach can effectively cope with the imbalanced classification problem in terms of several performance metrics including geometric mean (G-mean) and average accuracy (ACC). Moreover, the proposed approach was applied to the analysis of the EEG data of eight experimental participants subject to fluctuating levels of mental workload. The comparative results showed that the proposed method provides a competing alternative to several existing imbalanced learning algorithms and significantly outperforms the basic/referential method that ignores the imbalance nature of the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]