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The morphology of cells is dynamic and mediated by genetic and environmental factors. Characterizing how genetic variation impacts cell morphology can provide an important link between disease association and cellular function. Here, we combined genomic and high-content imaging approaches on iPSCs from 297 unique donors to investigate the relationship between genetic variants and cellular morphology to map what we term cell morphological quantitative trait loci (cmQTLs). We identified novel associations between rare protein altering variants inWASF2, TSPAN15, andPRLRwith several morphological traits related to cell shape, nucleic granularity, and mitochondrial distribution. Knockdown of these genes by CRISPRi confirmed their role in cell morphology. Analysis of common variants yielded one significant association and nominated over 300 variants with suggestive evidence (P-6) of association with one or more morphology traits. Our results showed that, similar to other molecular phenotypes, morphological profiling can yield insight about the function of genes and variants.

The 2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge, hosted by Amazon.com’s Last Mile Research team, and scientifically supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, prompted participants to leverage real operational data to find new and better ways to solve a real-world routing problem. In this article, we describe the data set released for the research challenge, which includes route-, stop-, and package-level features for 9,184 historical routes performed by Amazon drivers in 2018 in five metropolitan areas in the United States. This real-world data set excludes any personally identifiable information: all route and package identifiers have been randomly regenerated and related location data have been obfuscated to ensure anonymity. Although multiple synthetic benchmark data sets are available in the literature, the data set of the 2021 Amazon Last Mile Routing Research Challenge is the first large and publicly available data set to include instances based on real-world operational routing data.

Because of its many desirable properties, such as its ability to control effects and thus potentially disastrous race conditions, functional programming offers a viable approach to programming modern multicore computers. Over the past decade several parallel functional languages, typically based on dialects of ML and Haskell, have been developed. These languages, however, have traditionally underperformed procedural languages (such as C and Java). The primary reason for this is their hunger for memory, which only grows with parallelism, causing traditional memory management techniques to buckle under increased demand for memory. Recent work opened a new angle of attack on this problem by identifying a memory property of determinacy-race-free parallel programs, called disentanglement, which limits the knowledge of concurrent computations about each other’s memory allocations. The work has showed some promise in delivering good time scalability. In this paper, we present provably space-efficient automatic memory management techniques for determinacy-race-free functional parallel programs, allowing both pure and imperative programs where memory may be destructively updated. We prove that for a program with sequential live memory of R * , any P -processor garbage-collected parallel run requires at most O ( R * · P ) memory. We also prove a work bound of O ( W + R * P ) for P -processor executions, accounting also for the cost of garbage collection. To achieve these results, we integrate thread scheduling with memory management. The idea is to coordinate memory allocation and garbage collection with thread scheduling decisions so that each processor can allocate memory without synchronization and independently collect a portion of memory by consulting a collection policy, which we formulate. The collection policy is fully distributed and does not require communicating with other processors. We show that the approach is practical by implementing it as an extension to the MPL compiler for Parallel ML. Our experimental results confirm our theoretical bounds and show that the techniques perform and scale well.

Background: Concrete mixtures are normally poured in single layers without intentional changes in the mixture properties within the thickness of the layers. Objective: In this research paper, alternative approach is introduced with Functionally Layered Concrete (FLC) composites, which have their known functions to achieve the maximum performance index. Methods: The performance index can be defined as the ratio of characteristics to the consumption of resources, fibres and additives. The steel fibre, polypropylene fibre, and silica fume are used in cement composites to make multilayer samples on which mechanical properties evaluations are conducted and compared to that of Mono-Layered Concrete (MLC) samples. Results: It is observed from the results that FLC samples have superior mechanical characteristics compared to MLC samples in terms of compressive strength, flexural strength and elastic modulus. Conclusion: Given that the use of fibres/additives in FLC composites is diminished, acquiring better mechanical performance with minimised consumption of resources would be possible via functionally layered composite method.

Genetic studies have revealed that autoimmune susceptibility variants are over-represented in memory CD4+ T cell regulatory elements1–3. Understanding how genetic variation affects gene expression in different T cell physiological states is essential for deciphering genetic mechanisms of autoimmunity4,5. Here, we characterized the dynamics of genetic regulatory effects at eight time points during memory CD4+ T cell activation with high-depth RNA-seq in healthy individuals. We discovered widespread, dynamic allele-specific expression across the genome, where the balance of alleles changes over time. These genes were enriched fourfold within autoimmune loci. We found pervasive dynamic regulatory effects within six HLA genes. HLA-DQB1 alleles had one of three distinct transcriptional regulatory programs. Using CRISPR–Cas9 genomic editing we demonstrated that a promoter variant is causal for T cell–specific control of HLA-DQB1 expression. Our study shows that genetic variation in cis-regulatory elements affects gene expression in a manner dependent on lymphocyte activation status, contributing to the interindividual complexity of immune responses.

This paper is aimed to review the nutritional evaluation of insect’s pupae-larvae and its utilization in poultry compound feed, using an appropriate keyword search in agricultural and biological science. The paper surveys previous studies on the nutrient composition of insect’s pupae-larvae and its utilization in poultry compound feed. The literature review shows that most of the insect species have higher nutritional values and amino acid profiles than the regularly used feed such as fishmeal and soybean meal. In addition, studies find that the broiler chicken quality is not affected or even improved in some scenarios when insect-based feed substitutes the conventional feed by 10% - 100%. However, the growth performance of laying chickens is limited using the insect-based feed.

In a neural network, the weights act as parameters to determine the output(s) from a set of inputs. The weights are used to find the activation values of nodes of a layer from the values of the previous layer. Finding the ideal set of these weights for training a Multi-layer Perceptron neural network such that it minimizes the classification error is a widely known optimization problem. The presented article proposes a Hybrid Wolf-Bat algorithm, a novel optimization algorithm, as a solution to solve the discussed problem. The proposed algorithm is a hybrid of two already existing nature-inspired algorithms, Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm and Bat algorithm. The novel introduced approach is tested on ten different datasets of the medical field, obtained from the UCI machine learning repository. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the recently developed nature-inspired algorithms: Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm, Cuckoo Search, Bat Algorithm, and Whale Optimization Algorithm, along with the standard Back-propagation training method available in the literature. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other bio-inspired algorithms in terms of both speed of convergence and accuracy.

Apart from being relied upon for feeding the entire world, the agricultural sector is also responsible for a third of the global Gross-Domestic-Product (GDP). Additionally, a majority of developing nations depend on their agricultural produce as it provides employment opportunities for a significant fraction of the poor. This calls for methods to ensure the accurate and efficient diagnosis of plant disease, to minimize any adverse effects on the produce. This paper proposes the recognition and classification of maize plant leaf diseases by application of the Deep Forest algorithm. The Automated novel approach and accurate classification using the Deep Forest technique are a significant step-up from the existing manual classification and other techniques with less accuracy. The proposed approach has outperformed Deep Neural models and other traditional machine learning algorithms in terms of accuracy. It justifies its low dependency on extensive Hyper-parameter tuning and the size of the dataset as against other Deep Learning Models based on neural networks.