Research Progress on the Correlation of Atopic Dermatitis with Gut Microbiota.

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common skin disease, the pathogenesis of which has not been fully elucidated. The gut microbiota is the largest micro-ecosystem in the human body that affects the immune system and skin barrier function. Recent studies have shown that in addition to the environmental factors, skin barrier, genetic factors and immune response, gut microbiota disturbance may also cause AD. This review described the correlation of AD with gut microbiota and existing research status of AD treatment via targeting gut microbiota.

A New Biocontrol Agent Bacillus velezensis SF334 against Rubber Tree Fungal Leaf Anthracnose and Its Genome Analysis of Versatile Plant Probiotic Traits.

Natural rubber is an important national strategic and industrial raw material. The leaf anthracnose of rubber trees caused by the Colletotrichum species is one of the important factors restricting the yields of natural rubber. In this study, we isolated and identified strain Bacillus velezensis SF334, which exhibited significant antagonistic activity against both C. australisinense and C. siamense, the dominant species of Colletotrichum causing rubber tree leaf anthracnose in the Hainan province of China, from a pool of 223 bacterial strains. The cell suspensions of SF334 had a significant prevention effect for the leaf anthracnose of rubber trees, with an efficacy of 79.67% against C. siamense and 71.8% against C. australisinense. We demonstrated that SF334 can lead to the lysis of C. australisinense and C. siamense mycelia by causing mycelial expansion, resulting in mycelial rupture and subsequent death. B. velezensis SF334 also harbors some plant probiotic traits, such as secreting siderophore, protease, cellulase, pectinase, and the auxin of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), and it has broad-spectrum antifungal activity against some important plant pathogenic fungi. The genome combined with comparative genomic analyses indicated that SF334 possesses most genes of the central metabolic and gene clusters of secondary metabolites in B. velezensis strains. To our knowledge, this is the first time a Bacillus velezensis strain has been reported as a promising biocontrol agent against the leaf anthracnose of rubber trees caused by C. siamense and C. australisinense. The results suggest that B. velezensis could be a potential candidate agent for the leaf anthracnose of rubber trees.

The DREAM Dataset: Supporting a data-driven study of autism spectrum disorder and robot enhanced therapy.

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervised by a therapist. The other half, constituting a control group, interacted directly with a therapist. Both groups followed the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) protocol. Each session was recorded with three RGB cameras and two RGBD (Kinect) cameras, providing detailed information of children's behavior during therapy. This public release of the dataset comprises body motion, head position and orientation, and eye gaze variables, all specified as 3D data in a joint frame of reference. In addition, metadata including participant age, gender, and autism diagnosis (ADOS) variables are included. We release this data with the hope of supporting further data-driven studies towards improved therapy methods as well as a better understanding of ASD in general.

Gabor Feature Based LogDemons with Inertial Constraint for Nonrigid Image Registration.

Nonrigid image registration plays an important role in the field of computer vision and medical application. The methods based on Demons algorithm for image registration usually use intensity difference as similarity criteria. However, intensity based methods can not preserve image texture details well and are limited by local minima. In order to solve these problems, we propose a Gabor feature based LogDemons registration method in this paper, called GFDemons. We extract Gabor features of the registered images to construct feature similarity metric since Gabor filters are suitable to extract image texture information. Furthermore, because of the weak gradients in some image regions, the update fields are too small to transform the moving image to the fixed image correctly. In order to compensate this deficiency, we propose an inertial constraint strategy based on GFDemons, named IGFDemons, using the previous update fields to provide guided information for the current update field. The inertial constraint strategy can further improve the performance of the proposed method in terms of accuracy and convergence. We conduct experiments on three different types of images and the results demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve better performance than some popular methods.

Identification and validation of differentially expressed proteins in serum of CSU patients with different duration of wheals using an iTRAQ labeling, 2D-LC-MS/MS.

Chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) is one of the most common types of chronic urticaria (CU), with symptoms that recur easily, migrate and are refractory. It is unclear whether association between the differentiation of protein expression levels in the serum of CSU patients and the different duration of wheals exists. In the present study the samples were divided according to the duration of the wheals into group A (wheal duration <2 h) and group B (wheal duration 12-24 h). Differentially expressed proteins in sera of CSU patients with different durations of wheals were identified and validated with isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) in combination with two-dimensional liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (2D-LC-MS/MS). Three hundred and seventy CSU serum-related proteins were initially identified. Among these proteins, ~30 had significant differences between the groups. According to the classification of biological functions and upregulated/downregulated values, serum amyloid A (SAA), CFL1, TPM4 and monocyte differentiation antigen (CD14) were chosen and validated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The expression levels of CD14 in sera were not significantly different among the groups. SAA, CFL1 and TPM4 were associated with the wheal duration in CSU patients and therefore could be considered as new potential inflammatory biomarkers associated with CSU.

Simultaneous Calibration: A Joint Optimization Approach for Multiple Kinect and External Cameras.

Camera calibration is a crucial problem in many applications, such as 3D reconstruction, structure from motion, object tracking and face alignment. Numerous methods have been proposed to solve the above problem with good performance in the last few decades. However, few methods are targeted at joint calibration of multi-sensors (more than four devices), which normally is a practical issue in the real-time systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method and a corresponding workflow framework to simultaneously calibrate relative poses of a Kinect and three external cameras. By optimizing the final cost function and adding corresponding weights to the external cameras in different locations, an effective joint calibration of multiple devices is constructed. Furthermore, the method is tested in a practical platform, and experiment results show that the proposed joint calibration method can achieve a satisfactory performance in a project real-time system and its accuracy is higher than the manufacturer's calibration.

Gain-of-function in Arabidopsis (GAINA) for identifying functional genes in Hevea brasiliensis.

BACKGROUND: Forward genetics approaches are not popularly applied in non-model plants due to their complex genomes, long life cycles, backward genetic studies etc. Researchers have to adopt reverse genetic methods to characterize gene functions in non-model plants individually, the efficiency of which is usually low. RESULTS: In this study, we report a gain-of-function in Arabidopsis (GAINA) strategy which can be used for batch identification of functional genes in a plant species. This strategy aims to obtain the gain-of-function of rubber tree genes through overexpressing transformation ready full-length cDNA libraries in Arabidopsis. An initial transformation test produced about two thousand independent transgenic Arabidopsis lines, in which multiple obvious aberrant phenotypes were observed, suggesting the gain-of-function of rubber tree genes. The transferred genes were further isolated and identified. One gene identified to be metallothionein-like protein type 3 gene was further transferred into Arabidopsis and reproduced a similar aberrant phenotype. CONCLUSION: The GAINA system proves to be an efficient tool for batch identification of functional genes in Hevea brasiliensis, and also applicable in other non-model plants.

Functional Characterization of Hevea brasiliensis CRT/DRE Binding Factor 1 Gene Revealed Regulation Potential in the CBF Pathway of Tropical Perennial Tree.

Rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) are susceptible to low temperature and therefore are only planted in the tropical regions. In the past few decades, although rubber trees have been successfully planted in the northern margin of tropical area in China, they suffered from cold injury during the winter. To understand the physiological response under cold stress, we isolated a C-repeat binding factor 1 (CBF1) gene from the rubber tree. This gene (HbCBF1) was found to respond to cold stress but not drought or ABA stress. The corresponding HbCBF1 protein showed CRT/DRE binding activity in gel shift experiment. To further characterize its molecular function, the HbCBF1 gene was overexpressed in Arabidopsis. The HbCBF1 over expression (OE) line showed enhanced cold resistance and relatively slow dehydration, and the expression of Arabidopsis CBF pathway downstream target genes, e.g. AtCOR15a and AtRD29a, were significantly activated under non-acclimation condition. These data suggest HbCBF1 gene is a functional member of the CBF gene family, and may play important regulation function in rubber tree.