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We investigated bacteria that have a nutritional symbiotic relationship with respect to milk oligosaccharides in gut microbiota of suckling rats, with specific reference to sialyllactose (SL) degrading Enterococcus gallinarum. Our next generation sequencing analysis of the colonic contents of 12-day-old suckling rats revealed that almost half of the bacteria in the microbiota belonged to the Lactobacillaceae family. Major Lactobacillus species in the contents were identified as L. johnsonii, L. murinus, and L. reuteri. We then monitored changes in numbers of the above Lactobacillus species, E. gallinarum, and the bacteria belonging to the family Enterobacteriaceae (i.e., enterobacteria) in the colonic contents of infant rats at 7, 12, 21, 28, and 35 days of age by using real-time PCR assays targeting these bacterial groups. The 7-day-old infant rats had a gut microbiota in which enterobacteria were predominant. Such dominance was replaced by L. johnsonii and the concomitant E. gallinarum markedly increased in those of 12 and 21 days of ages. During this period, the number of enterobacteria declined dramatically, but that of L. reuteri surged dramatically. Our separate in vitro experiment showed that supplementation of culture media with SL promoted the growth of L. johnsonii and E. gallinarum, with marked production of lactic acid. These findings revealed possible milk oligosaccharide-mediated cross-feeding between E. gallinarum and L. johnsonii, with the former degrading SL to release lactose to be utilized by the latter.

We applied a switching hybrid dynamical system to tennis singles matches to find hysteresis in the movements of the players. Players’ movements in nine international soft-tennis matches were analyzed from the viewpoint of a coupled switching hybrid dynamical system. First, the cycle, external input pattern, and state variables were defined. The cycle was defined as the interval of sequential opponent hitting and the external input pattern was defined as the deuce side or the advantage side, depending on the opponent hitting course. The state variables were defined as the angle and the tangential velocity in polar coordinates for which the origin was the center of the court. We considered the second-order sequence effect and the trajectories in hyper cylindrical state space using the state variables corresponding to the four kinds of external input for all rallies and the final rally of each point. Poincaré maps were depicted and analyzed. Hysteresis of the players’ movements during the matches could not be revealed because, in disadvantage situations, players would adopt a strategy to overcome the disadvantage. This result suggests that players in ball-over-net games or reciprocal interpersonal competitions tend to clear the hysteresis and adopt the “not to lose” strategy.

Participation in club activity presents an opportunity to active with Shutaisei, builds good human relationships, and facilitates goal orientation of junior high school students. Advisor teachers influence student’ psychological growth greatly; such teachers emphasize that it is important to foster Shutaisei . Therefore the purpose of our study was to investigate how advisor teachers recognized Shutaisei, and what they considered to be appropriate club activities and behaviors. We conducted semi-structured interviews of eight advisor teachers. We asked ,“How do you recognize Shutaisei”, and “What kind of action that your students work on their club activity with Shutaisei”. As a result of having analyzed a reaction provided in our interview, we showed it as follows. 1) The advisor teacher who participated in this study thought that Shutaisei was the attitude and action to face one’s goals and problems voluntarily and intentionally without receiving the instructions from others. 2) The action that the students work on the club activities with Shutaisei were consisted of four categories; a) to analyze the results of their game or set their goal by themselves, b) to have the interest to the skill acquisition and to make trial and error until to gain the skills, c) to engage in their practice positively, d) and self-assertion and to build a human relationship.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Principal component analysis plot of metabolites with Kellgren-Lawrence grade. The 99.999% confidence interval of each component is shown as a circle around the dot plot. An outlier was omitted for the statistical analysis. Figure S2. Heatmap of metabolites in relation with Kellgren-Lawrence grade. Z-scores of detected metabolites are presented in each row, and samples that were sorted with the Kellgren–Lawrence grade are presented in each column. Table S1. Results of the first PLS-ROG loading in correlation with the Kellgren-Lawrence grade. Table S2. Metabolite set enrichment analysis to detect metabolic pathway with severity of knee osteoarthritis. “All” includes the number of metabolites registered in metabolic pathway list. “Detected” includes the number of detected metabolites. “Selected” includes statistically significant metabolites with a p < 0.05. The p-value was computed by Fisher’s exact test and the q-value is its multiple comparison correction by Benjamini-Hochberg method. Table S3. Demographic data of participants according to their effusion-synovitis score. Data are presented as the mean ± standard deviation. Groups are compared by analysis of variance and Tukey test. BMI: body mass index.