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Ketosis is a prevalent metabolic disease in the peripartum period of dairy cows, that causes considerable losses in milk production. In particular, the changes in the gut microbiome influence the occurrence of cow ketosis. In this study, the hindgut microbial communities of ketotic and healthy cows were compared and analyzed using 16S rRNA sequencing. Community composition analysis reveal that the predominant phyl in both groups were Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. At the genus level, Bifidobacterium were more abundant in healthy cows than in ketotic cows. Conversely, the ketotic group exhibited a greater abundance of Bacteroides and Treponema than the healthy group. Differential hindgut fecal bacterial taxa in healthy and ketotic cows were identified by linear discriminant analysis effect size, with increases in Treponema, Bacteroides, and Peptococcaceae and decreases in Christensenellales, Chloroflexi, and Paenibacillaceae in ketotic cows. A distance-based redundancy analysis was conducted to further explore the connection between the gut microbiome, blood β-hydroxybutyrate levels, and milk production traits. The results suggested that the hindgut microflora was significantly correlated with blood β-hydroxybutyrate concentration and somatic cell score. These results improve our understanding of rectal microbes, and may help prevent ketosis in cows.

DNA methylation and gene alternative splicing drive spermatogenesis. In screening DNA methylation markers and transcripts related to sperm motility, semen from three pairs of full-sibling Holstein bulls with high and low motility was subjected to reduced representation bisulphite sequencing. A total of 948 DMRs were found in 874 genes (gDMRs). Approximately 89% of gDMR-related genes harboured alternative splicing events, including SMAD2, KIF17, and PBRM1. One DMR in exon 29 of PBRM1 with the highest 5mC ratio was found, and hypermethylation in this region was related to bull sperm motility. Furthermore, alternative splicing events at exon 29 of PBRM1 were found in bull testis, including PBRM1-complete, PBRM1-SV1 (exon 28 deletion), and PBRM1-SV2 (exons 28–29 deletion). PBRM1-SV2 exhibited significantly higher expression in adult bull testes than in newborn bull testes. In addition, PBRM1 was localized to the redundant nuclear membrane of bull sperm, which might be related to sperm motility caused by sperm tail breakage. Therefore, the hypermethylation of exon 29 may be associated with the production of PBRM1-SV2 in spermatogenesis. These findings indicated that DNA methylation alteration at specific loci could regulate gene splicing and expression and synergistically alter sperm structure and motility.

Summary: Acyl-protein thioesterases 1 and 2 (APT1 and APT2) reverse S-acylation, a potential regulator of systemic glucose metabolism in mammals. Palmitoylation proteomics in liver-specific knockout mice shows that APT1 predominates over APT2, primarily depalmitoylating mitochondrial proteins, including proteins linked to glutamine metabolism. miniTurbo-facilitated determination of the protein-protein proximity network of APT1 and APT2 in HepG2 cells reveals APT proximity networks encompassing mitochondrial proteins including the major translocases Tomm20 and Timm44. APT1 also interacts with Slc1a5 (ASCT2), the only glutamine transporter known to localize to mitochondria. High-fat-diet-fed male mice with dual (but not single) hepatic deletion of APT1 and APT2 have insulin resistance, fasting hyperglycemia, increased glutamine-driven gluconeogenesis, and decreased liver mass. These data suggest that APT1 and APT2 regulation of hepatic glucose metabolism and insulin signaling is functionally redundant. Identification of substrates and protein-protein proximity networks for APT1 and APT2 establishes a framework for defining mechanisms underlying metabolic disease.

SARS-CoV-2 is an emerging viral pathogen and a major global public health challenge since December of 2019, with limited effective treatments throughout the pandemic. As part of the innate immune response to viral infection, type I interferons (IFN-I) trigger a signaling cascade that culminates in the activation of hundreds of genes, known as interferon stimulated genes (ISGs), that collectively foster an antiviral state. We report here the identification of a group of type I interferon suppressed genes, including fatty acid synthase (FASN), which are involved in lipid metabolism. Overexpression of FASN or the addition of its downstream product, palmitate, increased viral infection while knockout or knockdown of FASN reduced infection. More importantly, pharmacological inhibitors of FASN effectively blocked infections with a broad range of viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 and its variants of concern. Thus, our studies not only suggest that downregulation of metabolic genes may present an antiviral strategy by type I interferon, but they also introduce the potential for FASN inhibitors to have a therapeutic application in combating emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

With the development of big data and cloud computing technology, more and more users choose to store data on cloud servers, which brings much convenience to their management and use of data, and also the risk of data leakage. A common method to prevent data leakage is to encrypt the data before uploading it, but the traditional encryption method is often not conducive to data sharing and querying. In this paper, a new kind of Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) scheme, which is called the Sub-String Searchable ABE (SSS-ABE) scheme, is proposed for the sharing and querying of the encrypted data. In the SSS-ABE scheme, the data owner encrypts the data under an access structure, and only the data user who satisfies the access structure can query and decrypt it. The data user can make a substring query on the whole ciphertext without setting keywords in advance. In addition, the outsourcing method is also introduced to reduce the local computation of the decryption process so that the outsourcing SSS-ABE scheme can be applied to IoT devices.

Public opinion inversion and other nonlinear phenomena often occur during online social network information dissemination (OSNID) in modern society. To explore the influence of overconfidence on OSNID, we develop a multi-agent simulation model integrating overconfidence and evolutionary games, as previous research has scarcely paid any attention to irrational behavior in information dissemination. This integrated paradigm provides an effective tool for managers to control the spread of OSNID and reduce the harm caused by rumors. The theoretical model is constructed from the perspective of an evolutionary game and, combined with overconfidence theory, three overconfidence scenarios are designed: benefit overconfidence, cost overconfidence, and both benefit and cost overconfidence. Then, a multi-agent simulation model of OSNID under different overconfidence scenarios is realized. The proposed simulation model exhibited better performance (e.g., faster diffusion speed) than the traditional Bass model; its performance was also validated by comparison with real-world cases. The results demonstrate that (1) with increasing benefit overconfidence, the convergence speed of OSNID will be accelerated, and the user group will reach stability at a faster speed. (2) With increasing cost overconfidence, the user’s decision will change from adopting dominant to tit-for-tat, and the adoption ratio will gradually decrease. (3) Compared with overconfidence in earnings, overconfidence in costs is more conducive to improving stability. This study attempts to provide new ideas for OSNID and attempts to propose an integration framework for behavioral theory and simulation methods.

Abstract Background Neutrophils are the first effectors of inflammatory response triggered by mastitis infection, and are important defense cells against pathogenic Escherichia coli (E. coli). DNA methylation, as a critical epigenetic mechanism for regulating gene function, is involved in bovine mastitis. Results In this study, we sequenced the blood neutrophils of healthy and E. coli-infected mastitic half-sib cows for the overall DNA methylation levels using transcriptome sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. The methylation levels in the mastitis cows (MCs) were decreased compared with healthy cows (HCs). A total of 494 differentially methylated regions were identified, among which 61 were up-methylated and 433 were down-methylated (MCs vs. HCs). The expression levels of 1094 differentially expressed genes were up-regulated, and 245 genes were down-regulated. Twenty-nine genes were found in methylation and transcription data, among which seven genes’ promoter methylation levels were negatively correlated with expression levels, and 11 genes were differentially methylated in the exon regions. The bisulfite sequencing PCR and quantitative real-time PCR validation results demonstrated that the promoter methylation of CITED2 and SLC40A1 genes affected differential expression. The methylation of LGR4 exon 5 regulated its own alternative splicing. The promoter methylation of bta-miR-15a has an indirect effect on the expression of its target gene CD163. The CITED2, SLC40A1, and LGR4 genes can be used as candidates for E. coli-induced mastitis resistance. Conclusions This study explored the roles of DNA methylation in affecting transcription of protein-coding genes and miRNAs in E. coli-induced mastitis, thereby helping explain the function of DNA methylation in the pathogenesis of mastitis and provided new target genes and epigenetic markers for mastitis resistance breeding in dairy cattle.

Oblivious transfer (OT) is a significant primitive with wide use in secure two-party computation, private set intersection private and other cryptographic schemes. In the past ten years, different variants of OT primitive like cut-and-choose OT (CCOT) and outsourced OT (OOT), have been proposed so as to satisfy various emerging models. In this paper, we firstly propose and formalize a new primitive called permutable cut-and-choose OT (PCCOT) which generalizes the original CCOT functionality. Furthermore, we construct an efficient PCCOT protocol in the presence of malicious adversaries using the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) hard assumption. It is worth mentioning that we apply the PCCOT primitive to the efficient construction of secure wildcard pattern matching (WPM) protocol. The WPM functionality allows a party to determine the locations of its pattern with wildcard characters occurs in a long text of another party while revealing nothing to either party in addition to the length of their own inputs. Our proposed secure WPM protocol via PCCOT is secure against semi-honest adversary with 2 rounds and has identical communication cost as the the state-of-the-art scheme.

The rapid development of online social media has significantly promoted product diffusion in online social networks (PDOSN). However, prior studies focusing on irrational behavior, such as overconfidence, in PDOSN are scarce. To investigate the effect of overconfidence on PDOSN, this study combined overconfidence and an evolutionary game to conduct a multiagent simulation on PDOSN. This combined method provided an effective reference to examine product diffusion in the context of irrational behavior. After careful consideration, this study identified three overconfidence scenarios, benefit, cost, and benefit and cost overconfidence, developed a multiagent simulation model for PDOSN using various overconfidence scenarios, and conducted a comparison with real-world cases to validate the model’s feasibility. The findings indicated that adoption benefits and betrayal penalties had a positive effect on the results in all models, while adoption costs had the opposite effect. When benefit and cost overconfidence occurred simultaneously, benefit overconfidence offset the negative effect of cost overconfidence. Moderate connectivity, a large number of core nodes, and high reconnection probability fully promoted product diffusion. Benefit overconfidence and cost overconfidence had a significant impact on the results in different networks. As such, this study combined psychological theory with simulation methods, providing insights for future research on product diffusion.

In recent years, privacy has received increasing attention to the development of the Internet. Yet, the problem still exists in the field of image processing that needs to be solved urgently. The cloud server has an abundant resource on computation for the specified computing tasks. With the rapid growth of personal and enterprise image data, more and more computing tasks are difficult to handle locally and are usually be outsourced to the cloud server for computing. Therefore, private image data protection while image processing has become our main concern. To solve this problem, we propose a scheme to extract secure Haar feature for privacy-preserving images, which can be applied to the face detection task. This paper solves the problem of extracting Haar feature from privacy-preserved images for the first time. Besides, we compare the numerical values in the ciphertext domain with double encryption protocols based on homomorphic encryption. In this scheme, we adopt Li et al.’s homomorphic encryption algorithm to protect image privacy. The security analysis of Li et al.’s encryption algorithm shows that the scheme we proposed is secure under the known plaintext attack and ciphertext attack. The experimental results show that the scheme can be implemented in polynomial time.

With the continuous development of the Internet of Things (IoT), various IoT devices create an incomprehensible amount of data all the time. However, the IoT devices have limited computing and storage resources and are difficult to process massive data locally, so they often introduce servers to help them for calculating or analyzing data. At present, the “IoT + Cloud” mode has been widely accepted. How to protect users' privacy in the public cloud environment has become critical. Among the common methods of processing data in the server, pattern matching is an important one which aims to identify the appearance and location of a string (called pattern) within a larger string or text. There are a lot of studies on privacy-preserving pattern matching protocols, but most protocols are constructed using heavy public-key cryptographic operations, which are not applicable to IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a new protocol using secret sharing and oblivious transfer (OT) and latter improve its efficiency with OT extension, so it is very efficient for lightweight IoT devices. In addition, our protocol also supports query with wildcards which can be used for the batch search. This protocol is provable-secure against honest-but-curious adversaries. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that our protocol can be used in real-world IoT applications.

Vascular disease contributes to neurodegeneration, which is associated with decreased blood pressure in older humans. Plasmalogens, ether phospholipids produced by peroxisomes, are decreased in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders. However, the mechanistic links between ether phospholipids, blood pressure, and neurodegeneration are not fully understood. Here, we show that endothelium-derived ether phospholipids affect blood pressure, behavior, and neurodegeneration in mice. In young adult mice, inducible endothelial-specific disruption of PexRAP, a peroxisomal enzyme required for ether lipid synthesis, unexpectedly decreased circulating plasmalogens. PexRAP endothelial knockout (PEKO) mice responded normally to hindlimb ischemia but had lower blood pressure and increased plasma renin activity. In PEKO as compared with control mice, tyrosine hydroxylase was decreased in the locus coeruleus, which maintains blood pressure and arousal. PEKO mice moved less, slept more, and had impaired attention to and recall of environmental events as well as mild spatial memory deficits. In PEKO hippocampus, gliosis was increased, and a plasmalogen associated with memory was decreased. Despite lower blood pressure, PEKO mice had generally normal homotopic functional connectivity by optical neuroimaging of the cerebral cortex. Decreased glycogen synthase kinase-3 phosphorylation, a marker of neurodegeneration, was detected in PEKO cerebral cortex. In a co-culture system, PexRAP knockdown in brain endothelial cells decreased glycogen synthase kinase-3 phosphorylation in co-cultured astrocytes that was rescued by incubation with the ether lipid alkylglycerol. Taken together, our findings suggest that endothelium-derived ether lipids mediate several biological processes and may also confer neuroprotection in mice.

Copy number variations (CNVs) have been demonstrated as crucial substrates for evolution, adaptation and breed formation. Chinese indigenous cattle breeds exhibit a broad geographical distribution and diverse environmental adaptability. Here, we analyzed the population structure and adaptation to high altitude of Chinese indigenous cattle based on genome-wide CNVs derived from the high-density BovineHD SNP array. We successfully detected the genome-wide CNVs of 318 individuals from 24 Chinese indigenous cattle breeds and 37 yaks as outgroups. A total of 5,818 autosomal CNV regions (683 bp–4,477,860 bp in size), covering ~14.34% of the bovine genome (UMD3.1), were identified, showing abundant CNV resources. Neighbor-joining clustering, principal component analysis (PCA), and population admixture analysis based on these CNVs support that most Chinese cattle breeds are hybrids of Bos taurus taurus (hereinafter to be referred as Bos taurus) and Bos taurus indicus (Bos indicus). The distribution patterns of the CNVs could to some extent be related to the geographical backgrounds of the habitat of the breeds, and admixture among cattle breeds from different districts. We analyzed the selective signatures of CNVs positively involved in high-altitude adaptation using pairwise Fst analysis within breeds with a strong Bos taurus background (taurine-type breeds) and within Bos taurus×Bos indicus hybrids, respectively. CNV-overlapping genes with strong selection signatures (at top 0.5% of Fst value), including LETM1 (Fst = 0.490), TXNRD2 (Fst = 0.440), and STUB1 (Fst = 0.420) within taurine-type breeds, and NOXA1 (Fst = 0.233), RUVBL1 (Fst = 0.222), and SLC4A3 (Fst=0.154) within hybrids, were potentially involved in the adaptation to hypoxia. Thus, we provide a new profile of population structure from the CNV aspects of Chinese indigenous cattle and new insights into high-altitude adaptation in cattle.

This paper presents a new zero voltage switching (ZVS) tuning method for the double-sided inductor/capacitor/capacitor (LCC) compensated wireless power transfer (WPT) system. An additional capacitor is added in the secondary side of the double-sided LCC compensation network in order to tune the network to realize ZVS operation for the primary-side switches. With the proposed tuning method, the turn off current of the primary-side switches at the low input voltage range can be reduced compared with the previous ZVS tuning method. Consequently, the efficiency of the WPT at the low input voltage range is improved. Moreover, the relationship between the input voltage and the output power is more linear than that of the previous ZVS tuning method. In addition, the proposed method has a lower start-up voltage. The analysis and validity of the proposed tuning method are verified by simulation and experimental results. A WPT system with up to 3.5 kW output power is built, and 95.9% overall peak efficiency is achieved.

CFAP58 is a testis-enriched gene that plays an important role in the sperm flagellogenesis of humans and mice. However, the effect of CFAP58 on bull semen quality and the underlying molecular mechanisms involved in spermatogenesis remain unknown. Here, we identified two single-nucleotide polymorphisms (rs110610797, A>G and rs133760846, G>T) and one indel (g.-1811_ g.-1810 ins147bp) in the promoter of CFAP58 that were significantly associated with semen quality of bulls, including sperm deformity rate and ejaculate volume. Moreover, by generating gene knockout mice, we found for the first time that the loss of Cfap58 not only causes severe defects in the sperm tail, but also affects the manchette structure, resulting in abnormal sperm head shaping. Cfap58 deficiency causes an increase in spermatozoa apoptosis. Further experiments confirmed that CFAP58 interacts with IFT88 and CCDC42. Moreover, it may be a transported cargo protein that plays a role in stabilizing other cargo proteins, such as CCDC42, in the intramanchette transport/intra-flagellar transport pathway. Collectively, our findings reveal that CFAP58 is required for spermatogenesis and provide genetic markers for evaluating semen quality in cattle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]