GTP Binding Protein Gtr1 Cooperating with ASF1 Regulates Asexual Development in Stemphylium eturmiunum.

The Gtr1 protein was a member of the RagA subfamily of the Ras-like small GTPase superfamily and involved in phosphate acquisition, ribosome biogenesis and epigenetic control of gene expression in yeast. However, Gtr1 regulation sexual or asexual development in filamentous fungi is barely accepted. In the study, SeGtr1, identified from Stemphylium eturmiunum, could manipulate mycelial growth, nuclear distribution of mycelium and the morphology of conidia in Segtr1 silenced strains compared with its overexpression transformants, while the sexual activity of Segtr1 silenced strains were unchanged. SeASF1, a H3/H4 chaperone, participated in nucleosome assembly/disassembly, DNA replication and transcriptional regulation. Our experiments showed that deletion Seasf1 mutants produced the hyphal fusion and abnormal conidia. Notably, we characterized that Segtr1 was down-regulated in Se∆asf1 mutants and Seasf1 was also down-regulated in SiSegtr1 strains. We further confirmed that SeGtr1 interacted with SeASF1 or SeH4 in vivo and vitro, respectively. Thus, SeGtr1 can cooperate with SeASF1 to modulate asexual development in Stemphylium eturmiunum.

The application of patient-centered care bundle significantly reduces incidence of perioperative respiratory complications in hip fracture patients aged 80 and over.

This study was designed as a pilot test to analyze the effect of patient-centered care (PCC) bundle intervention on perioperative respiratory complications and other outcomes in hip fracture patients aged ≥80. Between Jan 2018 and Dec 2019, 198 patients comprised the routine care group and 187 comprised the PCC bundle group. After propensity score matching, 151 remained in each group. Incidence of perioperative respiratory complications in the PCC bundle group was significantly lower than in the routine care group (all P < 0.05). Furthermore, significant reductions were observed in surgery delay, length of stay, incidence of arrhythmia, hypoproteinemia, and electrolyte disturbance (all P < 0.05) in the PCC bundle group. Age-Adjusted Charlson Comorbidity Index score was related, but only weakly, to length of stay and the number of perioperative complications. These results suggested that the PCC bundle might be a more suitable care modality for patients ≥80 with hip fracture.

DA-LSTM-VAE: Dual-Stage Attention-Based LSTM-VAE for KPI Anomaly Detection.

To ensure the normal operation of the system, the enterprise's operations engineer will monitor the system through the KPI (key performance indicator). For example, web page visits, server memory utilization, etc. KPI anomaly detection is a core technology, which is of great significance for rapid fault detection and repair. This paper proposes a novel dual-stage attention-based LSTM-VAE (DA-LSTM-VAE) model for KPI anomaly detection. Firstly, in order to capture time correlation in KPI data, long-short-term memory (LSTM) units are used to replace traditional neurons in the variational autoencoder (VAE). Then, in order to improve the effect of KPI anomaly detection, an attention mechanism is introduced into the input stage of the encoder and decoder, respectively. During the input stage of the encoder, a time attention mechanism is adopted to assign different weights to different time points, which can adaptively select important input sequences to avoid the influence of noise in the data. During the input stage of the decoder, a feature attention mechanism is adopted to adaptively select important latent variable representations, which can capture the long-term dependence of time series better. In addition, this paper proposes an adaptive threshold method based on anomaly scores measured by reconstruction probability, which can minimize false positives and false negatives and avoid adjustment of the threshold manually. Experimental results in a public dataset show that the proposed method in this paper outperforms other baseline methods.

Log Sequence Anomaly Detection Method Based on Contrastive Adversarial Training and Dual Feature Extraction.

The log messages generated in the system reflect the state of the system at all times. The realization of autonomous detection of abnormalities in log messages can help operators find abnormalities in time and provide a basis for analyzing the causes of abnormalities. First, this paper proposes a log sequence anomaly detection method based on contrastive adversarial training and dual feature extraction. This method uses BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and VAE (Variational Auto-Encoder) to extract the semantic features and statistical features of the log sequence, respectively, and the dual features are combined to perform anomaly detection on the log sequence, with a novel contrastive adversarial training method also used to train the model. In addition, this paper introduces the method of obtaining statistical features of log sequence and the method of combining semantic features with statistical features. Furthermore, the specific process of contrastive adversarial training is described. Finally, an experimental comparison is carried out, and the experimental results show that the method in this paper is better than the contrasted log sequence anomaly detection method.

Phytophthora capsici PcFtsZ2 Is Required for Asexual Development and Plant Infection.

In bacteria, FtsZ proteins form a Z ring that is the initial step preceding septal fission. FtsZ proteins enable the division of mitochondria in early eukaryotes and are present in some kingdoms but have been lost in animals, fungi, and plants. Here, we have identified two Phytophthora capsici ortholog genes of Escherichia coli FtsZs, designated PcFtsZ1 and PcFtsZ2. Overexpression of PcFtsZ2 in E. coli fully complemented the overexpression phenotype of EcFtsZ. In contrast, overexpression of PcFtsZ1 in E. coli had minimal impact on cell division and separation. Thus, we focused on evaluating the impact of altered expression of PcFtsZ2 in P. capsici, as it exhibited the strongest phenotype. PcFtsZ2 was expressed at the highest levels in mycelia, sporangia, and germinating cysts, as well as in late infection. PcFtsZ2 mis-expression lines showed aberrant asexual growth and development of P. capsici. Alterations in the expression of PcFtsZ2 changed the distribution of mitochondria in hyphae and sporangia and, also, affected the number, size, and shape of actin plaques. Silencing of PcFtsZ2 restrained growth and development of invasive structures, especially cysts and sporangia, substantially inhibiting the ability of transformants to cause blight lesions. In overexpressed transformant lines, cyst and sporangial germination rates were only half that of controls, but hyphal growth from direct germination of sporangia was more rapid than controls. These transformant lines were only slightly impaired in virulence relative to controls. This study emphasizes the essential role of the evolutionarily conserved FtsZ2 proteins in affecting cytoskeleton dynamics.

An Autonomous Path Planning Model for Unmanned Ships Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has excellent performance in continuous control problems and it is widely used in path planning and other fields. An autonomous path planning model based on DRL is proposed to realize the intelligent path planning of unmanned ships in the unknown environment. The model utilizes the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm, through the continuous interaction with the environment and the use of historical experience data; the agent learns the optimal action strategy in a simulation environment. The navigation rules and the ship's encounter situation are transformed into a navigation restricted area, so as to achieve the purpose of planned path safety in order to ensure the validity and accuracy of the model. Ship data provided by ship automatic identification system (AIS) are used to train this path planning model. Subsequently, the improved DRL is obtained by combining DDPG with the artificial potential field. Finally, the path planning model is integrated into the electronic chart platform for experiments. Through the establishment of comparative experiments, the results show that the improved model can achieve autonomous path planning, and it has good convergence speed and stability.

Crystal structure and expression patterns of prolyl 4-hydroxylases from Phytophthora capsici.

Prolyl 4-hydroxylases (P4Hs) are members of the Fe2+ and 2-oxoglutarate- dependent oxygenases family, which play central roles in the collagen stabilization, hypoxia sensing, and translational regulation in eukaryotes. Thus far, nothing is known about the role of P4Hs in development and pathogenesis in oomycetes. Here we show that the Phytophthora capsici genome contains five putative prolyl 4-hydroxylases. In mycelia, all P4Hs were downregulated in response to hypoxia, but the expression of PcP4H1 was most affected. Strikingly, Pc4H1 was upregulated more than 110 fold at the onset of infection, and Pc4H5 was upregulated seven fold, while the expression of other P4H's were unchanged. Similar to well-characterized P4H proteins, the crystallographic structure of PcP4H1 contains a highly conserved double-stranded ß-helix core fold and catalytic residues. However, the binding affinity of 2-oxoglutarate to PcP4H1 is very low. The extended C-terminal α-helix bundle and longer ß2-ß3 disordered substrate binding loop may help in confirming the peptide target of this enzyme.

Disturbance in biosynthesis of arachidonic acid impairs the sexual development of the onion blight pathogen Stemphylium eturmiunum.

The formation of sexual fruiting bodies for plant pathogenic fungi is a key strategy to propagate their progenies upon environmental stresses. Stemphylium eturmiunum is an opportunistic plant pathogen fungus causing blight in onion. This self-fertilizing filamentous ascomycete persists in the soil by forming pseudothecia, the sexual fruiting body which helps the fungus survive in harsh environments. However, the regulatory mechanism of pseudothecial formation remains unknown. To uncover the mechanism for pseudothecial formation so as to find a practical measure to control the propagation of this onion pathogen, we tentatively used DNA methyltransferase inhibitor 5-azacytidine (5-AC) to treat S. eturmiunum. 5-AC treatment silenced the gene-encoding monoacylglycerol lipase (magl) concomitant with the presence of the inheritable fluffy phenotype and defectiveness in pseudothecial development. Moreover, the silence of magl also resulted in a reduction of arachidonic acid (AA) formation from 27 ± 3.1 µg/g to 9.5 ± 1.5 µg/g. To correlate the biosynthesis of AA and pseudothecial formation, we created magl knockdown and overexpression strains. Knockdown of magl reduced AA to 11 ± 2.4 µg/g, which subsequently disabled pseudothecial formation. In parallel, overexpression of magl increased AA to 37 ± 3.4 µg/g, which also impaired pseudothecial formation. Furthermore, exogenous addition of AA to the culture of magl-silenced or magl knockdown strains rescued the pseudothecial formation but failed in the gpr1 knockdown strain of S. eturmiunum, which implicates the involvement of AA in signal transduction via a putative G protein-coupled receptor 1. Thus, AA at a cellular level of 27 ± 3.1 µg/g is essential for sexual development of S. eturmiunum. Disturbance in the biosynthesis of AA by up- and down-regulating the expression of magl disables the pseudothecial development. The specific requirement for AA in pseudothecial development by S. eturmiunum provides a hint to curb this onion pathogen: to impede pseudothecial formation by application of AA.

Crystal structure of the RxLR effector PcRxLR12 from Phytophthora capsici.

RxLR genes are a prominent class of effectors in oomycetes, and almost half of these proteins contain a conserved sequence motif termed the WY domain, that may exist singly, or as divergent tandem repeats in different effectors. Here we describe the crystal structure of PcRxLR12 (63-488) from Phytophthora capsici at 3.0 Šresolution. The structure consists of five tandemly arrayed WY-domains linked to each other by short connecting helices. Superposition of the WY-2 domain on the other four domains of PcRxLR12, show that the first α-helix termed the K motif, and Loop 3 which connects α3 and α4 are the key regions of structural divergence between the WY domains. A similar pattern was observed when WY-2 was superposed on the 11 WY domains from other oomycete effectors. We also note that an added connecting helix between WY domains in some RXLR effectors, ensures that the WY domains are oriented in the same direction.

Microwave ablation versus hepatic resection for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma and oesophageal variceal bleeding in cirrhotic patients.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to compare the results of microwave ablation (MWA) and hepatic resection (HR) when combined with pericardial devascularisation plus splenectomy (PCDV) for the treatment of patients with cirrhosis complicated by small hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and oesophageal variceal bleeding (EVB). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Between 2001 and 2013, 73 patients (median age 53.2 years, 67% male) with small HCC and concomitant EVB who underwent MWA or HR for HCC and PCDV for cirrhotic portal hypertension were selected retrospectively for inclusion in this study. The overall survival curves and recurrence-free survival curves were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared using log-rank tests. Multivariate analysis was performed using the Cox regression model. RESULTS: The 1-, 3- and 5-year overall survival rates were 95.2%, 71.4% and 38.1% and 96.7%, 53.3% and 43.3% for the HR and MWA groups, respectively; these did not differ significantly between the two groups. However, patients in the HR group had more post-operative complications (52.3% vs. 13.7%; p = 0.002). Multivariate analysis identified albumin and bilirubin levels and tumour size to be statistically significant and independent prognostic factors for overall survival, while BCLC stage was associated with poor recurrence-free survival. Furthermore, albumin levels were shown to be an independent predictive factor for post-operative complications. CONCLUSIONS: For patients with small HCC and concomitant EVB, MWA plus PCDV may reduce the incidence of post-operative complications relative to and provide similar therapeutic benefits as HR plus PCDV, especially for patients with low albumin levels.