Search

Abstract The change of fracture propagation direction caused by stress interference between fractures is one of the main reasons that affect shale gas productivity. Natural fractures will be damaged by the induced stress, and the induced stress field produced by natural fracture damage will in turn affect the propagation of hydraulic fractures. Previous studies usually ignored the impact of stress field variation caused by natural fracture damage, leading to inaccurate fracture propagation simulation results. A new model for simulating hydraulic fracturing-induced stress field is established with consideration of the influence of natural fracture damage. Then, the natural fracture-induced stress is analyzed in open and closed fracture states. Through superposition of stress fields of natural fractures and hydraulic fractures, the interaction among open and closed natural fractures, reservoir and hydraulic fracture, and the corresponding fracture property evolution are studied. The results demonstrate that induced stress is not affected by elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio of the rock. The induced stress difference at the fracture tip is proportional to the net pressure and the length of hydraulic fractures. The results provide guidance for the optimal design of fracturing. When the deflection angle of hydraulic fracture is less than 90°, the maximum induced stress difference at the fracture tip decreases with the reduction in the deflection angle. When the deflection angle of hydraulic fracture is smaller than 90° or the deflection angle of natural fracture is smaller than 45°, the steering of hydraulic fracture is less hindered, which is beneficial to the formation of complex fracture network.

Affective data is the basis of emotion recognition, which is mainly acquired through extrinsic elicitation. To investigate the enhancing effects of multi-sensory stimuli on emotion elicitation and emotion recognition, we designed an experimental paradigm involving visual, auditory, and olfactory senses. A multimodal emotional dataset (OVPD-II) that employed the video-only or video-odor patterns as the stimuli materials, and recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG) signals, was created. The feedback results reported by subjects after each trial demonstrated that the video-odor pattern outperformed the video-only pattern in evoking individuals’ emotions. To further validate the efficiency of the video-odor pattern, the transformer was employed to perform the emotion recognition task, where the highest accuracy reached 86.65% (66.12%) for EEG (EOG) modality with the video-odor pattern, which improved by 1.42% (3.43%) compared with the video-only pattern. What’s more, the hybrid fusion (HF) method combined with the transformer and joint training was developed to improve the performance of the emotion recognition task, which achieved classify accuracies of 89.50% and 88.47% for the video-odor and video-only patterns, respectively.

Transformer-based methods have achieved superior performance in multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA). However, recent studies have used it more to focus on the potential mutual adaptation between unimodal modalities, while ignoring intra-modal interactions and complementarity between potential fusion representations. To address this problem, this study proposes a two-stage stacked transformer framework for MSA. The framework decomposes the fusion into two stages, each of which concentrates on a subset of multimodal signals to simultaneously capture the communication information between the unimodal modalities and the interaction information between fusion representations. Further, stacked transformers are the core components of the framework. Two transformer layers are used to model the cross-modal interaction and intra-modal interaction of multimodal input. For cross-modal attention, we propose an attention weight accumulation mechanism to further improve the ability of the framework. Experimental results on 3 benchmark datasets (MOSI [Multimodal Opinion-level Sentiment Intensity], MOSEI [Multimodal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity], and SIMS) show performance superior or comparable to the state-of-the-art models, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) and barbel chub (Squaliobarbus curriculus)—both Leuciscinae subfamily species—demonstrate differences in grass carp reovirus (GCRV) infection resistance. We infected barbel chubs with type II GCRV and subjected their liver, spleen, head kidney, and trunk kidney samples to investigate anti-GCRV immune mechanisms via RNA sequencing and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). We identified 139, 970, 867, and 2374 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the liver, spleen, head kidney, and trunk kidney, respectively. Across all four tissues, gene ontology analysis revealed significant immune response-related DEG enrichment, and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analysis revealed pattern recognition receptor (PRR) and cytokine-related pathway enrichment. We noted autophagy pathway enrichment in the spleen, head kidney, and trunk kidney; apoptosis pathway enrichment in the spleen and trunk kidney; and complement- and coagulation-cascade pathway enrichment in only the spleen. Comparative transcriptome analysis between GCRV-infected barbel chubs and uninfected barbel chubs comprehensively revealed that PRR, cytokine-related, complement- and coagulation-cascade, apoptosis, and autophagy pathways are potential key factors influencing barbel chub resistance to GCRV infection. qRT-PCR validation of 11 immune-related DEGs confirmed our RNA-seq data’s accuracy. These findings provide a theoretical foundation and empirical evidence for the understanding of GCRV infection resistance in barbel chub and hybrid grass carp–barbel chub breeding.

Death of grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella) caused by grass carp reovirus (GCRV) infection severely restricts the development of the grass carp industry. The interaction of C5a and C5a receptor (C5aR) in the complement system promotes inflammation and aggravates bleeding in grass carps. To reveal the regulatory mechanism of the C5a/C5aR pro-inflammatory response after GCRV infection, the expression of C5 in the liver and muscle tissues of grass carp after GCRV infection was analyzed using immunofluorescence. The effects of over expression of C5a and the C5aR antagonist PMX205 in grass carp kidney cell line (CIK) on the phosphorylation of p38 and ERK and the gene and protein expression of IL-6 and TNF-α were also analyzed using RT-qPCR and western blot. The results showed that the expression of the C5a protein in the liver and muscle of grass carp infected with GCRV first increased and then decreased, and the C5a protein level peaked on the 5th day after infection. In CIK cells, over expression of C5a significantly increased C5aR expression, phosphorylation of p38 and ERK, and overexpression of IL-6 and TNF-α. Treatment of CIK cells with PMX205 significantly decreased the expression of C5a and C5aR, phosphorylation of p38 and ERK proteins, and expression of IL-6 and TNF-α after GCRV infection. These results implied that the interaction of C5a and C5aR in grass carp resulted in the phosphorylation of p38 and ERK proteins, a significant increase in the expression of IL-6 and TNF-α, and ultimately induction of an inflammatory response of grass carp infected with GCRV. These results provide a theoretical basis for relieving grass carp hemorrhagic diseases by regulating the interaction of C5a and C5aR.

$\textit {Objective:}$ This study aims to develop a flexible myoelectric pattern recognition (MPR) method based on one-shot learning, which enables convenient switching across different usage scenarios, thereby reducing the re-training burden. $\textit {Methods}$ : First, a one-shot learning model based on a Siamese neural network was constructed to assess the similarity for any given sample pair. In a new scenario involving a new set of gestural categories and/or a new user, just one sample of each category was required to constitute a support set. This enabled the quick deployment of the classifier suitable for the new scenario, which decided for any unknown query sample by selecting the category whose sample in the support set was quantified to be the most like the query sample. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated by experiments conducting MPR across diverse scenarios. Results: The proposed method achieved high recognition accuracy of over 89% under the cross-scenario conditions, and it significantly outperformed other common one-shot learning methods and conventional MPR methods ( ${p} < 0.01$ ). $\textit {Conclusion}$ : This study demonstrates the feasibility of applying one-shot learning to rapidly deploy myoelectric pattern classifiers in response to scenario change. It provides a valuable way of improving the flexibility of myoelectric interfaces toward intelligent gestural control with extensive applications in medical, industrial, and consumer electronics.

Collecting emotional physiological signals is significant in building affective Human-Computer Interactions (HCI). However, how to evoke subjects’ emotions efficiently in EEG-related emotional experiments is still a challenge. In this work, we developed a novel experimental paradigm that allows odors dynamically participate in different stages of video-evoked emotions, to investigate the efficiency of olfactory-enhanced videos in inducing subjects’ emotions; According to the period that the odors participated in, the stimuli were divided into four patterns, i.e., the olfactory-enhanced video in early/later stimulus periods (OVEP/OVLP), and the traditional videos in early/later stimulus periods (TVEP/TVLP). The differential entropy (DE) feature and four classifiers were employed to test the efficiency of emotion recognition. The best average accuracies of the OVEP, OVLP, TVEP, and TVLP were 50.54%, 51.49%, 40.22%, and 57.55%, respectively. The experimental results indicated that the OVEP significantly outperformed the TVEP on classification performance, while there was no significant difference between the OVLP and TVLP. Besides, olfactory-enhanced videos achieved higher efficiency in evoking negative emotions than traditional videos. Moreover, we found that the neural patterns in response to emotions under different stimulus methods were stable, and for Fp1, FP2, and F7, there existed significant differences in whether adopt the odors.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1011320.].

ABSTRACT Temperature dependency of viral diseases in ectotherms has been an important scientific issue for decades, while the molecular mechanism behind this phenomenon remains largely mysterious. In this study, deploying infection with grass carp reovirus (GCRV), a double-stranded RNA aquareovirus, as a model system, we demonstrated that the cross talk between HSP70 and outer capsid protein VP7 of GCRV determines temperature-dependent viral entry. Multitranscriptomic analysis identified HSP70 as a key player in the temperature-dependent pathogenesis of GCRV infection. Further biochemical, small interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown, pharmacological inhibition, and microscopic approaches revealed that the primary plasma membrane-anchored HSP70 interacts with VP7 to facilitate viral entry during the early phase of GCRV infection. Moreover, VP7 functions as a key coordinator protein to interact with multiple housekeeping proteins and regulate receptor gene expression, concomitantly facilitating viral entry. This work illuminates a previously unidentified immune evasion mechanism by which an aquatic virus hijacks heat shock response-related proteins to enhance viral entry, pinpointing targeted preventives and therapeutics for aquatic viral diseases. IMPORTANCE The seasonality of viral diseases in ectotherms is a prevailing phenomenon in the aquatic environment, which causes huge economic losses every year worldwide and hinders sustainable development of the aquaculture industry. Nevertheless, our understanding of the molecular mechanism of how temperature determines the pathogenesis of aquatic viruses remains largely unexplored. In this study, by deploying grass carp reovirus (GCRV) infection as a model system, we demonstrated that temperature-dependent, primarily membrane-localized HSP70 interacts with major outer capsid protein VP7 of GCRV to bridge the virus-host interaction, reshape the host’s behaviors, and concomitantly facilitate viral entry. Our work unveils a central role of HSP70 in the temperature-dependent pathogenesis of aquatic viruses and provides a theoretical basis for the formulation of prevention and control strategies for aquatic viral diseases.

Viral seasonality in the aquaculture industry is an important scientific issue for decades. While the molecular mechanisms underpinning the temperature-dependent pathogenesis of aquatic viral diseases remain largely unknown. Here we report that temperature-dependent activation of IL6-STAT3 signaling was exploited by grass carp reovirus (GCRV) to promote viral entry via increasing the expression of heat shock protein 90 (HSP90). Deploying GCRV infection as a model system, we discovered that GCRV induces the IL6-STAT3-HSP90 signaling activation to achieve temperature-dependent viral entry. Further biochemical and microscopic analyses revealed that the major capsid protein VP7 of GCRV interacted with HSP90 and relevant membrane-associated proteins to boost viral entry. Accordingly, exogenous expression of either IL6, HSP90, or VP7 in cells increased GCRV entry in a dose-dependent manner. Interestingly, other viruses (e.g., koi herpesvirus, Rhabdovirus carpio, Chinese giant salamander iridovirus) infecting ectothermic vertebrates have evolved a similar mechanism to promote their infection. This work delineates a molecular mechanism by which an aquatic viral pathogen exploits the host temperature-related immune response to promote its entry and replication, instructing us on new ways to develop targeted preventives and therapeutics for aquaculture viral diseases.

Abstract In order to solve the problem that the existing methods cannot effectively capture the semantic emotion of the sentence when faced with the lack of cross‐language corpus, it is difficult to effectively perform cross‐language sentiment analysis, we propose a neural network architecture called the Attention‐Based Hybrid Robust Neural Network. The proposed architecture includes pre‐trained word embedding with fine‐tuning training to obtain prior semantic information, two sub‐networks and attention mechanism to capture the global semantic emotional information in the text, and a fully connected layer and softmax function to jointly perform final emotional classification. The Convolutional Neural Networks sub‐network captures the local semantic emotional information of the text, the BiLSTM sub‐network captures the contextual semantic emotional information of the text, and the attention mechanism dynamically integrates the semantic emotional information to obtain key emotional information. We conduct experiments on Chinese (International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing) and English (SST) datasets. The experiment is divided into three subtasks to evaluate the superiority of our method. It improves the recognition accuracy of single sentence positive/negative classification from 79% to 86% in the single‐language emotion recognition task. The recognition performance of fine‐grained emotional tags is also improved by 9.6%. The recognition accuracy of cross‐language emotion recognition tasks has also been improved by 1.5%. Even in the face of faulty data, the performance of our model is not significantly reduced when the error rate is less than 20%. These experimental results prove the superiority of our method.

Using the second comprehensive scientific expedition of the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau "Land-Atmosphere Interaction and Climate Effect" three-dimensional comprehensive enhanced observation experiment May， July and October 2019 sounding data at the Mount Everest， Nyingchi， Nagqu， Shiquanhe sites and ERA5 reanalysis data.The characteristics of the atmospheric boundary layer structure of the plateau and its relationship with sensible heat and latent heat flux under the control of different wind fields in the south branch of the westerly wind and the plateau monsoon are discussed.Results show that the height of the atmospheric boundary layer at each station under the westerly south branch wind field is higher than that under the summer monsoon wind field.The height of the convective boundary layers of Mount Everest， Nyingchi， Nagqu and Shiquan River in the southwest wind field are 3250， 2250， 2760 and 3500 m respectively.while the height of the convective boundary layers of Mount Everest， Nyingchi， Nagqu and Shiquan River under the plateau monsoon field are 2000 m， 2100 m， 1650 m and 2000 m.The specific humidity of the surface layer at all site is larger on July than it on other months.The specific humidity of the surface layer in Linzhi area is larger than that of the other three regions， and it reaches 12.88 g·kg-1 at the maximum.The wind direction on Mount Everest over 1200 m is dominated by westerly winds in May and October.The wind direction on Nyingchi above 1500 m is dominated by westerly winds in May and October， and in July， winds above 1200 m is dominated by southerly winds.The wind direction of Shiquan River in May and October is dominated by west-southwest wind， and the wind direction of Shiquan River in July is dominated by west-northwest wind.The high-altitude wind speeds of Mount Everest， Nyingchi and Shiquanhe in May and October are much stronger than those in July.The sensible heat flux at each station under the west wind south branch wind field is dominated， and the latent heat flux at each station under the plateau summer wind field is dominated.

Moral elevation, the emotion that arises when individuals observe others’ moral behaviors, plays an important role in determining moral behaviors in real life. While recent research has demonstrated the potential to decode basic emotions with brain signals, there has been limited exploration of affective computing for moral elevation, an emotion related to social cognition. To address this gap, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) signals from 23 participants while they viewed videos that were expected to elicit moral elevation. More than 30,000 danmaku comments were extracted as a crowdsourcing tagging method to label moral elevation continuously at a 1-s temporal resolution. Then, by employing power spectra features and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regularized regression analyses, we achieved a promising prediction performance for moral elevation (prediction r = 0.44 ± 0.11). Our findings indicate that it is possible to decode moral elevation using EEG signals. Moreover, the small-sample neural data can predict the continuous moral elevation experience conveyed in danmaku comments from a large population.

Immunocyte migration to infection sites is important for host cellular defense, but the main types of migrating hemocytes and their mechanisms against pathogen invasions are unclear in invertebrates. In the present study, a population of hemocytes in the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas labeled with a fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-conjugated Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD)-containing peptide was sorted. RGD+ hemocytes were characterized by a smaller cell size and cytoplasmic-nucleo ratio, fewer cytoplasmic granules, and higher levels of myeloperoxidase, reactive oxygen species, and intracellular free calcium concentration. RGD+ hemocytes exhibited a high level of migration activity, which was further induced after V. splendidus infection. Transcriptome analysis revealed that RGD+ hemocytes highly expressed a series of migration-related genes, which together with migration-promoting genes were significantly upregulated after V. splendidus infection. The neuroendocrine system was also proven to regulate the migration activity of RGD+ hemocytes, especially with the excitatory neuroendocrine factor dopamine, which promoted migration activity as confirmed by receptor blocking assays. Meanwhile, RGD+ hemocytes could highly express immunomodulatory factor interleukin (IL)-17s and their receptor genes, which was positively related to the production of antimicrobial peptides in whole hemocytes after V. splendidus infection. Collectively, this study identified a specific hemocyte population, i.e., RGD+ hemocytes, that shows high migration activity in response to pathogen infection and exerts a potential immunomodulatory role by highly expressing IL-17s that might enhance the hemocytes’ antimicrobial peptide production in oysters.

The volume fracturing technology along with horizontal well is the main technology to obtain commercial oil flow in shale reservoirs because of the low porosity and low permeability. Whether the fracturing fluid has the potential of shale matrix imbibition oil recovery after a large amount of slickwater injected into the reservoir is a research hotspot at present. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the law of imbibition and replacement during the shut-in time. Aiming at the Jimsar area, there are several steps in this study in order to explore the new law of fracturing fluid imbibition and oil recovery in shale reservoirs. Primarily, the distribution of pressure and saturation during fracturing time and shut-in time is accurately described by the numerical simulation method. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis is carried out from two aspects of geological and fracture factors. Eventually, the evaluation of optimal shut-in time is taken by imbibition replacement balance. According to the numerical simulation results, the pressure diffuses rapidly among the matrix during the shut-in time in the hydrophilic reservoir. After 65 days of well shut-in, the whole reservoir tends to be at the same pressure and reaches the equilibrium of imbibition replacement. Contrarily, the pressure of the lipophilic reservoir diffuses slowly and only propagates in the secondary fracture or the matrix near the fractures. The fracture system remains a “high-pressure area” for a long time during shut-in. Additionally, the optimal shut-in time chart of different geological parameters and fracture parameters is drawn to optimize the shut-in time. This research work has a certain reference value for the optimization of shut-in time after fracturing in Jimsar and similar shale oil wells.

Volatilization causes measurement deviations of physicochemical properties for volatiles-containing slag at high temperature. Hence, investigating the degree of volatilization and identifying the volatilization mechanism and deviation rules are crucial to improve the accuracy of the measured properties. Here, PbO-FeOx-CaO-SiO2-ZnO slag system was selected as a research subject. The volatile characteristics and non-isothermal intrinsic kinetic models of high-temperature volatilization for lead slag were established by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and the volatilization mechanism and deviation in the measured properties were determined by analyzing the phase and chemical composition of the residues. In addition, experimental measurements of the melting temperature/ viscosity were compared with theoretically calculated results. The volatilization of PbO decreased the lead-containing phase, but increased the amount of precipitated spinel phase, which led to the deviation in the measured physicochemical properties of the studied slags. The volatilization kinetics for PbO in the slags followed three-dimensional diffusion. The diffusion of PbO gas from PbO-FeOx-CaO-SiO2-ZnO slag was the restrictive step of volatile reaction, and mechanism function was g(α)=1-(1-α)1⁄3. Moreover, during the slag properties measurement at high temperatures, a high heating rate and protective gas can be used to reduce volatilization of lead slag and avoid consequent properties deviation.

Exascale computing requires accelerators with ultrahigh power efficiency. Digital signal processors (DSPs), the most important embedded processors widely known for high power efficiency, are rarely explored in the HPC community. We propose a 64-bit general purpose DSP architecture, FT-Matrix2000, which not only integrates the main features of DSPs but also presents several novel enhancements for scientific computing. The FT-Matrix2000 architecture comprises multiple FT-Matrix2 cores and optional RISC CPU cores. The FT-Matrix2 core utilizes a VLIW+SIMD architecture, provides support for double precision operations, and optimizes both the data and control path for scientific computing. Our evaluations show that the performance and efficiency of FT-Matrix2000 are 1107GFLOPS and 92.25%. Compared with the MIC and a 40nm process GPU, FT-Matrix2000 improves the GEMM power efficiency with a factor of 1.49 and 2.68, respectively. We build up a prototype supercomputer with FT-Matrix2000/12. Its HPL efficiency achieves 62.2%, and the performance power ratio is 5.33 GFLOPS/W, which can rank the fourth in the latest Green500 list. These results validate that the FT-Matrix2000 architecture is suitable for scientific computing while maintaining the efficiency of signal processing well. Moreover, the enhancement of FT-Matrix2000 in vector and matrix related computations also enable it to efficiently support deep learning related applications. We have implemented some typical DCNN models on FT-Matrx2000, NVIDIA GPUs, and Vision P6 DSP. The experiments demonstrate that the average computation efficiency of the proposed architecture based on Matrix2000 is about 20 ~ 35% and 8% higher respectively than GPUs and Cadence Vision P6 DSP.

The semi-formal verification method, in which the functionality is formally specified and the checking is undertaken through the formal model-based simulation, has been a promising choice for the functional verification of hardware designs. The existing methods derive the formal model from design implementation. This causes poor scalability and practicality. A more feasible solution is to derive the formal model directly from the specification. In this paper, we propose a specification-based semi-formal method for functional verification. The proposed semi-formal method uses a stage transition graph (STG) model to formally describe the function points in the specification. Meanwhile, we propose an automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) method to generate the test vectors based on the STG model. The proposed STG-based ATPG method can reach possible corner cases and ensure exhaustive exploration of functionality for both control-dominated designs and data-dominated designs. Moreover, we develop an STG-based tool for automatic verification. Our experiments show that our method can automatically verify the functional correctness from the specification while achieving similar code coverage as implementation-based semi-formal approaches.

DM9 refers to an uncharacterized protein domain that is originally discovered in Drosophila melanogaster. Two proteins with DM9 repeats have been recently identified from Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas as mannose-specific binding pattern-recognition receptors (PRRs). In the present study, a novel member of DM9 domain containing protein (designated as CgDM9CP-4) was identified from C. gigas. CgDM9CP-4, about 16 kDa with only two tandem DM9 domains, was highly enriched in hemocytes and gill. The transcripts level of CgDM9CP-4 in circulating hemocytes were decreased after LPS, PGN and Vibrio splendidus stimulations. The recombinant protein of CgDM9CP-4 (rCgDM9CP-4) displayed a broad binding spectrum towards various pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) (LPS, PGN, β-glucan and Mannose) and microorganisms (Staphylococcus aureus, Micrococcus luteus, V. splendidus, V. anguillarum, Escherichia coli, Pichia pastoris and Yarrowia lipolytica). CgDM9CP-4 was mostly expressed in gill and some of the hemocytes. Flow cytometry analysis demonstrated that the CgDM9CP-4-positive hemocytes accounted for 7.3% of the total hemocytes, and they were small in size and less in granularity. CgDM9CP-4 was highly expressed in non-phagocytes (~82% of total hemocytes). The reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the expression levels of cytokines in CgDM9CP-4-positive hemocytes were much lower than that in CgDM9CP-4-negative hemocytes. The mRNA expression level of CgDM9CP-4 in hemocytes was decreased after RNAi of hematopoietic-related factors (CgGATA, CgRunt, CgSCL, and CgNotch). In addition, CgDM9CP-4-positive cells were found to be much more abundant in hemocytes from gill than that from hemolymph, with most of them located in the gill filament. All these results suggested that CgDM9CP-4 was a novel member of PRR that expressed in undifferentiated pro-hemocytes to mediate immune recognition of pathogens.

The existence of residual lithium compounds (RLCs) on the surface of layered Ni-rich materials will deteriorate the electrochemical properties and cause safety problem. This work presents an effective surface washing method to remove the RLCs from LiNi0.90Co0.06Mn0.04O2 material surface, via ethyl alcohol solution that contains low concentration of boric acid. It is a low-cost process because the filter liquor can be recycled. The optimal parameters including washing time, boric acid concentration, and solid–liquid ratio were systematically studied. It has been determined by powder pH and Fourier transform infrared spectra results that the amount of RLCs was reduced effectively, and the storage performance was significantly enhanced for the washed samples. The 150th capacity retentions after storing had increased from 68.39% of pristine material to 85.46–94.84% of the washed materials. The performance enhancements should be ascribed to the surface washing process, which removed not only the RLCs, but also the loose primary particles effectively.

Studies on invertebrate immune receptors can provide insights into characteristics specific to innate immune system. Here, eight α and three β integrins are identified from an invertebrate, the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas, and their possible immune functions are studied. Oyster α/β integrins exhibit a higher degree of sequence and structural variability than the members from Homo sapiens and Drosophila melanogaster. The analysis reveals that oyster RGD- and laminin-binding receptor homologs are present in the phylogenetic tree of α integrins, but the other six oyster α integrins mainly form a species-specific branch; meanwhile, oyster β integrins are clustered with insect β integrins but distinct from a member from the mollusk Biomphalaria glabrata. Although phylogenetically lacking the important α integrin branches of LDV-binding, PS3-type, and αI-containing integrins, oyster integrins can bind to most ECM ligands, including RGDCP, LDVCP, GFOGERCP, and laminin protein in a distinct binding pattern. Besides, oyster integrins are distributed in different hemocyte subpopulations, while only specific integrins are selectively involved in hemocyte phagocytosis, migration, and encapsulation, and some of them participate in more than one immune response in a sophisticated pattern. Especially, oyster β integrins are arranged in the core to mediate complex immune responses, unlike the counterparts in humans that mainly depend on αI-containing integrins to incite immune reactions. This study represents the first comprehensive attempt to reveal the structural and evolutionary features of the integrin family and their involvement in cellular immune responses in the non-model invertebrate C. gigas and sheds light on the characteristics specific to the innate immune system in the integrin family.

Tripartite motif proteins (TRIMs), especially B30.2 domain-containing TRIMs (TRIMs-B30.2), are increasingly well known for their antiviral immune functions in mammals, while antiviral TRIMs are far from being identified in teleosts. In the present study, we identified a total of 42 CiTRIMs from the genome of grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella, an important cultured teleost in China, based on hmmsearch and SMART analysis. Among these CiTRIMs, the gene loci of 37 CiTRIMs were located on different chromosomes and shared gene collinearities with homologous counterparts from human and zebrafish genomes. They possessed intact conserved RBCC or RB domain assemblies at their N-termini and eight different domains, including the B30.2 domain, at their C-termini. A total of 19 TRIMs-B30.2 were identified, and most of them were clustered into a large branch of CiTRIMs in the dendrogram. Tissue expression analysis showed that 42 CiTRIMs were universally expressed in various grass carp tissues. A total of 11 significantly differentially expressed CiTRIMs were found in two sets of grass carp transcriptomes during grass carp reovirus (GCRV) infection. Three of them, including Cibtr40, CiTRIM103 and CiTRIM109, which all belonged to TRIMs-B30.2, were associated with the type I interferon response during GCRV infection by weighted network co-expression and gene expression trend analyses, suggesting their involvement in antiviral immunity. These findings may offer useful information for understanding the structure, evolution, and function of TRIMs in teleosts and provide potential antiviral immune molecule markers for grass carp.

Although hemorrhagic sepsis caused by Aeromonas hydrophila infection is the dominant disease in the aquaculture of Chinese soft-shelled turtle, information on its molecular pathology is seriously limited. In this study, ninety turtles intraperitoneally injected with A. hydrophila exhibited two different phenotypes based on the pathological symptoms, referred to as active and inactive turtles. Comparative transcriptomes of liver and spleen from these two groups at 6, 24, and 72 h post-injection (hpi) were further analyzed. The results showed that cytokine–cytokine receptor interaction, PRRs mediated signaling pathway, apoptosis, and phagocytosis enriched in active and inactive turtles were significantly different. Pro-inflammatory cytokines, the TLR signaling pathway, NLR signaling pathway, and RLR signaling pathway mediating cytokine expression, and apoptosis-related genes, were significantly up-regulated in inactive turtles at the early stage (6 hpi). The significant up-regulation of phagocytosis-related genes occurred at 24 hpi in inactive turtles and relatively lagged behind those in active turtles. The anti-inflammatory cytokine, IL10, was significantly up-regulated during the tested periods (6, 24, and 72 hpi) in active turtles. These findings offer valuable information for the understanding of molecular immunopathogenesis after A. hydrophila infection, and facilitate further investigations on strategies against hemorrhagic sepsis in Chinese soft-shelled turtle T. sinensis.

Eye movements have been proven the most frequent of all human activities; therefore, research on a relationship between different eye movement patterns become a hotspot in human-computer interface fields. The motivation of this paper is to develop a reading auxiliary apparatus by measuring and analyzing the electrooculography signals. We first describe the saccade detection algorithm based on the wavelet packet decomposition and the derivation blink detection algorithm. Furthermore, consecutive blinks were used to control the system's working state and a magnifier, whose position is adjusted according to the results of saccade detection. Experiential results on six participants show that recognition accuracy ratio (F1 score) is 90.096%, which reveal that the proposed system has a good recognition performance on reading activity detection and analysis.

Eye movement is proven to be the most frequent activities of human beings; as a result research on recognition of unit eye movement has become a hotspot in human activity recognition. In this paper, we propose a robust online saccade recognition algorithm, which integrates electrooculography (EOG) and video together. Initially, EOG signals and video data are collected simultaneously from eight saccadic directions. Then online active eye movement segment detection algorithm is developed to detect the effective saccadic signal from ongoing eyeball activities. Furthermore, we extract features from different modalities and explore two fusion strategies [i.e., feature level fusion (FLF) and decision level fusion (DLF)]. In laboratory environment, the average recognition accuracy of FLF and DLF achieves 89.37% and 89.96%, respectively, which reveals that the proposed method can improve the performance of consecutive saccade recognition in comparison with sole modality.

Giving a robot the ability to perceive emotion in its environment can improve human-robot interaction (HRI), thereby facilitating more human-like communication. To achieve emotion recognition in different built environments for adolescents, we propose a multi-modal emotion intensity perception method using an integration of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movement information. Specifically, we first develop a new stimulus video selection method based on computation of normalized arousal and valence scores according to subjective feedback from participants. Then, we establish a valence perception sub-model and an arousal sub-model by collecting and analyzing emotional EEG and eye movement signals, respectively. We employ this dual recognition method to perceive emotional intensities synchronously in two dimensions. In the laboratory environment, the best recognition accuracies of the modality fusion for the arousal and valence dimensions are 72.8 and 69.3%. The experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed multi-modal emotion recognition method for environment emotion intensity perception. This promising tool not only achieves more accurate emotion perception for HRI systems but also provides an alternative approach to quantitatively assess environmental psychology.

An eight-week feeding trial was conducted to investigate the effects of dietary andrographolide on the growth performance, antioxidant capacity in the liver, intestinal inflammatory response and microbiota of Monopterus albus. A total of 900 health fish (25.00 ± 0.15 g) were randomly divided into five groups: AD1 (the basal diet) as the control, and AD2, AD3, AD4 and AD5 groups, which were fed the basal diet supplemented with 75, 150, 225 and 300 mg/kg andrographolide, respectively. The results showed that compared with the control group, dietary andrographolide supplementation (1) significantly increased trypsin and lipase activities in the intestine, and increased the weight gain rate but not significantly; (2) significantly increased the levels of glutathione reductase (GR), glutathione (GSH) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and the content of in the liver; significantly decreased the contents of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and malondialdehyde (MDA); remarkably upregulated the Nrf2, SOD1, GSTK and GSTO mRNA levels in the liver; downregulated the Keap1 mRNA level; (3) significantly increased the villi length and goblet cell numbers in the intestine, remarkably upregulated the Occludin mRNA level in the intestine, downregulated the Claudin-15 mRNA level; (4) remarkably upregulated the IL-10, TGF-β1 and TGF-β3 mRNA levels in the intestine; downregulated the IL-12β and TLR-3 mRNA levels; (5) significantly decreased the richness and diversity of the intestinal microbioma, increased the percentages of Fusobacteria and Firmicutes and significantly decreased the percentages of Cyanobacteria and Proteobacteria. In conclusion, these results showed that dietary low-dose andrographolide (75 and 150 mg/kg) promoted growth and antioxidant capacity, regulated the intestinal microbioma, enhanced intestinal physical and immune barrier function in rice field eel.

As the Moore’s law era will draw to a close, some domain-specific architectures even non-Von Neumann systems have been presented to keep the progress. This paper proposes novel annealing in memory (AIM) architecture to implement Ising calculation, which is based on Ising model and expected to accelerate solving combinatorial optimization problem. The Ising model has a symmetrical structure and realizes phase transition by symmetry breaking. AIM draws annealing calculation into memory to reduce the cost of information transfer between calculation unit and the memory, improves the ability of parallel processing by enabling each Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) array to perform calculations. An approximate probability flipping circuit is proposed to avoid the system getting trapped in local optimum. Bit-serial design incurs only an estimated 4.24% area above the SRAM and allows the accuracy to be easily adjusted. Two vision applications are mapped for acceleration and results show that it can speed up Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) by 780× and Multiple People Head Detection (MPHD) by 161× with only 0.0064% and 0.031% energy consumption respectively over approximate algorithms.

As invertebrates lack an adaptive immune system, they depend to a large extent on their innate immune system to recognize and clear invading pathogens. Although phagocytes play pivotal roles in invertebrate innate immunity, the molecular mechanisms underlying this killing remain unclear. Cells of this type from the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas were classified efficiently in this study via fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) based on their phagocytosis of FITC-labeled latex beads. Transcriptomic and quantitative proteomic analyses revealed a series of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and proteins present in phagocytes; of the 352 significantly high expressed proteins identified here within the phagocyte proteome, 262 corresponding genes were similarly high expressed in the transcriptome, while 140 of 205 significantly low expressed proteins within the proteome were transcriptionally low expressed. A pathway crosstalk network analysis of these significantly high expressed proteins revealed that phagocytes were highly activated in a number of antimicrobial-related biological processes, including oxidation–reduction and lysosomal proteolysis processes. A number of DEGs, including oxidase, lysosomal protease, and immune receptors, were also validated in this study using quantitative PCR, while seven lysosomal cysteine proteases, referred to as cathepsin Ls, were significantly high expressed in phagocytes. Results show that the expression level of cathepsin L protein in phagocytes [mean fluorescence intensity (MFI): 327 ± 51] was significantly higher (p

It is becoming increasingly clear that neurotransmitters impose direct influence on regulation of the immune process. Recently, a simple but sophisticated neuroendocrine–immune (NEI) system was identified in oyster, which modulated neural immune response via a “nervous-hemocyte”-mediated neuroendocrine immunomodulatory axis (NIA)-like pathway. In the present study, the de novo synthesis of neurotransmitters and their immunomodulation in the hemocytes of oyster Crassostrea gigas were investigated to understand the autocrine/paracrine pathway independent of the nervous system. After hemocytes were exposed to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation, acetylcholine (ACh), and norepinephrine (NE) in the cell supernatants, both increased to a significantly higher level (2.71- and 2.40-fold, p

Independent component analysis (ICA) as a promising spatial filtering method can separate motor-related independent components (MRICs) from the multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, the unpredictable burst interferences may significantly degrade the performance of ICA-based brain-computer interface (BCI) system. In this study, we proposed a new algorithm frame to address this issue by combining the single-trial-based ICA filter with zero-training classifier. We developed a two-round data selection method to identify automatically the badly corrupted EEG trials in the training set. The "high quality" training trials were utilized to optimize the ICA filter. In addition, we proposed an accuracy-matrix method to locate the artifact data segments within a single trial and investigated which types of artifacts can influence the performance of the ICA-based MIBCIs. Twenty-six EEG datasets of three-class motor imagery were used to validate the proposed methods, and the classification accuracies were compared with that obtained by frequently used common spatial pattern (CSP) spatial filtering algorithm. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed optimizing strategy could effectively improve the stability, practicality and classification performance of ICA-based MIBCI. The study revealed that rational use of ICA method may be crucial in building a practical ICA-based MIBCI system.

Facing the adolescents and detecting their emotional state is vital for promoting rehabilitation therapy within an E-Healthcare system. Focusing on a novel approach for a sensor-based E-Healthcare system, we propose an eye movement information-based emotion perception algorithm by collecting and analyzing electrooculography (EOG) signals and eye movement video synchronously. Specifically, we extract the time-frequency eye movement features by firstly applying the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) to raw multi-channel EOG signals. Subsequently, in order to integrate time domain eye movement features (i.e., saccade duration, fixation duration, and pupil diameter), we investigate two feature fusion strategies: feature level fusion (FLF) and decision level fusion (DLF). Recognition experiments have been also performed according to three emotional states: positive, neutral, and negative. The average accuracies are 88.64% (the FLF method) and 88.35% (the DLF with maximal rule method), respectively. Experimental results reveal that eye movement information can effectively reflect the emotional state of the adolescences, which provides a promising tool to improve the performance of the E-Healthcare system.

Refractory high-entropy alloys (RHEAs) represented by WTaCrV are excellent candidates for future nuclear reactor structures. Both the preexisting edge dislocations (EDs) and screw dislocations (SDs) can significantly impact the irradiation performance of RHEAs. To explore the influence of preexisting dislocations on the generation and evolution of irradiation point defects in the RHEA WTaCrV, the interactions between preexisting dislocations (including EDs and SDs) and displacement cascades are studied by molecular dynamics simulations in this work. In addition, the results of the RHEA WTaCrV without preexisting dislocations and of pure W with preexisting dislocations are included for comparison. It is found that the presence of preexisting dislocations leads to a significant increase in the number of remained point defects after the cascades. However, the absorption of vacancies by dislocation cores in the RHEA WTaCrV is more significant than that in the pure W. Therefore, preexisting dislocations can reduce the possibility of void formation and act as sites for recombination of vacancies and interstitials in the subsequent long-term evolution. For the preexisting EDs in the RHEA WTaCrV, the local pinning of EDs, the attraction of vacancies, and the severe lattice distortion jointly cause the bowing out of EDs, which is conductive to accommodate vacancies. For the preexisting SDs, the abundant cross kinks tend to bind vacancies or interstitials, promoting the motion of SDs as well as the annihilation of point defects. In this sense, the preexisting dislocations in the RHEA WTaCrV can significantly enhance the irradiation resistance. The results of this research can provide design guidance for regulating the anti-irradiation performance of RHEAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread existence of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) has been reported in various animals with comprehensive biological activities, which is consistent with the important roles of AMPs as the first line of host defense system. However, no big-data-based analysis on AMPs from any fish species is available. In this study, we identified 507 AMP transcripts on the basis of our previously reported genomes and transcriptomes of two representative amphibious mudskippers, Boleophthalmus pectinirostris (BP) and Periophthalmus magnuspinnatus (PM). The former is predominantly aquatic with less time out of water, while the latter is primarily terrestrial with extended periods of time on land. Within these identified AMPs, 449 sequences are novel; 15 were reported in BP previously; 48 are identically overlapped between BP and PM; 94 were validated by mass spectrometry. Moreover, most AMPs presented differential tissue transcription patterns in the two mudskippers. Interestingly, we discovered two AMPs, hemoglobin β1 and amylin, with high inhibitions on Micrococcus luteus. In conclusion, our high-throughput screening strategy based on genomic and transcriptomic data opens an efficient pathway to discover new antimicrobial peptides for ongoing development of marine drugs.