Enhancement of an entomopathogenic fungal virulence against the seedcorn maggot, Delia platura, by suppressing immune responses with a bacterial culture broth of Photorhabdus temperata subsp. temperata.

In Korea, there are two maggot species in the Delia genus that commonly infest the roots and stems of the Welsh onion, thus causing serious economic damage on the crop at the seedling stage. In this study, the seedcorn maggot (Delia platura) was detected in onion fields in two different localities in Korea. After overwintering, maggot infestations occurred throughout the entire growing seasons from transplantation to harvest, but their specific patterns of occurrence varied in the two localities examined. Entomopathogenic fungi induced significant virulence against the maggot larvae, in which a strain of Beauveria bassiana was effective, though it exhibited limited mortality in its insecticidal activity. To enhance this insecticidal activity, a culture broth from an entomopathogenic bacterium, Photorhabdus temperata temperata (Ptt), was added to B. bassiana treatment. The addition of Ptt broth significantly increased the insecticidal activity of B. bassiana in a dose-dependent manner. To elucidate this enhancement in insecticidal activity, the immunosuppressive activity of Ptt broth was assessed by identifying the immune responses of the seedcorn maggots. The seedcorn maggots possessed at least three different hemocytes with plasmatocytes, crystal cells, and lamellocytes. These hemocytes exhibited nodule formation in response to the fungal infection. In addition to the cellular immunity, the maggots exhibited inducible expressions of antimicrobial peptide (AMP) genes such as cecropin and defensin. The addition of Ptt broth suppressed the nodule formation and the AMP expressions in response to the fungal infection. Altogether, this study demonstrated the innate immune responses in a non-model insect, D. platura, along with the application of immunosuppression to develop a highly efficient biological control by enhancing the virulence of B. bassiana.

Multitask Siamese Network for Remote Photoplethysmography and Respiration Estimation.

Heart and respiration rates represent important vital signs for the assessment of a person's health condition. To estimate these vital signs accurately, we propose a multitask Siamese network model (MTS) that combines the advantages of the Siamese network and the multitask learning architecture. The MTS model was trained by the images of the cheek including nose and mouth and forehead areas while sharing the same parameters between the Siamese networks, in order to extract the features about the heart and respiratory information. The proposed model was constructed with a small number of parameters and was able to yield a high vital-sign-prediction accuracy, comparable to that obtained from the single-task learning model; furthermore, the proposed model outperformed the conventional multitask learning model. As a result, we can simultaneously predict the heart and respiratory signals with the MTS model, while the number of parameters was reduced by 16 times with the mean average errors of heart and respiration rates being 2.84 and 4.21. Owing to its light weight, it would be advantageous to implement the vital-sign-monitoring model in an edge device such as a mobile phone or small-sized portable devices.

Optimization of Saliva Collection and Immunochromatographic Detection of Salivary Pepsin for Point-of-Care Testing of Laryngopharyngeal Reflux.

Salivary pepsin is a promising marker for the non-invasive diagnosis of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR). For reliable results regarding pepsin in saliva, it is critical to standardize the collection, storage, and pre-processing methods. In this study, we optimized the saliva collection protocols, including storage conditions, i.e., solution, temperature, and time, and the pre-processing filter for pepsin. Moreover, we prepared a simple immunochromatographic strip for the rapid detection of pepsin and evaluated its sensing performance. As a result, we selected a polypropylene (PP) filter as the pre-processing filter for salivary pepsin in low resource settings, such as those where point of care testing (POCT) is conducted. This filter showed a similar efficiency to the centrifuge (standard method). Finally, we detected the pepsin using gold nanoparticles conjugated with monoclonal pepsin antibody. Under optimized conditions, the lower limit of detection for pepsin test strips was determined as 0.01 µg/mL. Furthermore, we successfully detected the salivary pepsin in real saliva samples of LPR patients, which were pre-processed by the PP filter. Therefore, we expect that our saliva collection protocol and pepsin immunochromatographic strip can be utilized as useful tools for a non-invasive diagnosis/screening of LPR in POCT.