Agriculture provides humanity with food, fibers, fuel, and raw materials that are paramount for human livelihood. Today, this role must be satisfied within a context of environmental sustainability ...and climate change, combined with an unprecedented and still-expanding human population size, while maintaining the viability of agricultural activities to ensure both subsistence and livelihoods. Remote sensing has the capacity to assist the adaptive evolution of agricultural practices in order to face this major challenge, by providing repetitive information on crop status throughout the season at different scales and for different actors. We start this review by making an overview of the current remote sensing techniques relevant for the agricultural context. We present the agronomical variables and plant traits that can be estimated by remote sensing, and we describe the empirical and deterministic approaches to retrieve them. A second part of this review illustrates recent research developments that permit to strengthen applicative capabilities in remote sensing according to specific requirements for different types of stakeholders. Such agricultural applications include crop breeding, agricultural land use monitoring, crop yield forecasting, as well as ecosystem services in relation to soil and water resources or biodiversity loss. Finally, we provide a synthesis of the emerging opportunities that should strengthen the role of remote sensing in providing operational, efficient and long-term services for agricultural applications.
•We make a review of agronomical variables and plant traits that can be estimated from remote sensing.•We describe different methodological approaches to retrieve them.•We discuss how these variables are employed by different stakeholders for specific applications.•We conclude with an overview of caveats and future challenges.
Microsporidiosis in Humans Han, Bing; Pan, Guoqing; Weiss, Louis M
Clinical microbiology reviews,
12/2021, Letnik:
34, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Microsporidia are obligate intracellular pathogens identified ∼150 years ago as the cause of pébrine, an economically important infection in silkworms. There are about 220 genera and 1,700 species of ...microsporidia, which are classified based on their ultrastructural features, developmental cycle, host-parasite relationship, and molecular analysis. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that microsporidia are related to the fungi, being grouped with the Cryptomycota as a basal branch or sister group to the fungi. Microsporidia can be transmitted by food and water and are likely zoonotic, as they parasitize a wide range of invertebrate and vertebrate hosts. Infection in humans occurs in both immunocompetent and immunodeficient hosts, e.g., in patients with organ transplantation, patients with advanced human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, and patients receiving immune modulatory therapy such as anti-tumor necrosis factor alpha antibody. Clusters of infections due to latent infection in transplanted organs have also been demonstrated. Gastrointestinal infection is the most common manifestation; however, microsporidia can infect virtually any organ system, and infection has resulted in keratitis, myositis, cholecystitis, sinusitis, and encephalitis. Both albendazole and fumagillin have efficacy for the treatment of various species of microsporidia; however, albendazole has limited efficacy for the treatment of Enterocytozoon bieneusi. In addition, immune restoration can lead to resolution of infection. While the prevalence rate of microsporidiosis in patients with AIDS has fallen in the United States, due to the widespread use of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), infection continues to occur throughout the world and is still seen in the United States in the setting of cART if a low CD4 count persists.
How the central innate immune protein, STING, is activated by its ligands remains unknown. Here, using structural biology and biochemistry, we report that the metazoan second messenger 2′3′-cGAMP ...induces closing of the human STING homodimer and release of the STING C-terminal tail, which exposes a polymerization interface on the STING dimer and leads to the formation of disulfide-linked polymers via cysteine residue 148. Disease-causing hyperactive STING mutations either flank C148 and depend on disulfide formation or reside in the C-terminal tail binding site and cause constitutive C-terminal tail release and polymerization. Finally, bacterial cyclic-di-GMP induces an alternative active STING conformation, activates STING in a cooperative manner, and acts as a partial antagonist of 2′3′-cGAMP signaling. Our insights explain the tight control of STING signaling given varying background activation signals and provide a therapeutic hypothesis for autoimmune syndrome treatment.
Display omitted
•cGAMP binding to STING causes C-terminal tail release and polymerization•Disease-causing STING mutant R284S is unable to sequester STING C-terminal tail•Ligand-activated STING polymer is disulfide bridge stabilized at C148•Bacterial ligand CDG is a partial inhibitor of cGAMP-mediated STING signaling
cGAMP binding induces human STING homodimer closing and polymer formation via C-terminal tail release. Disease-causing hyperactive STING mutations affect tail release and STING polymerization, while the bacterial ligand CDG induces an alternative active conformation and acts as a partial inhibitor of cGAMP-mediated STING signaling.
Abstract
To better understand the orbital dynamics of exoplanets around close binary stars, i.e., circumbinary planets (CBPs), we applied techniques from dynamical systems theory to a physically ...motivated set of solutions in the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP). We applied Floquet theory to characterize the linear dynamical behavior—static, oscillatory, or exponential—surrounding planar circumbinary periodic trajectories (limit cycles). We computed prograde and retrograde limit cycles and analyzed their geometries, stability bifurcations, and dynamical structures. Orbit and stability calculations are exact computations in the CR3BP and reproducible through the open-source Python package
pyraa
. The periodic trajectories (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7532982) produce a set of noncrossing, dynamically cool circumbinary orbits conducive to planetesimal growth. For mass ratios
μ
∈ 0.01, 0.50, we found recurring features in the prograde families. These features include (1) an innermost near-circular trajectory, inside which solutions have resonant geometries, (2) an innermost stable trajectory (
a
c
≈ 1.61 − 1.85
a
bin
) characterized by a tangent bifurcating limit cycle, and (3) a region of dynamical instability (
a
≈ 2.1
a
bin
; Δ
a
≈ 0.1
a
bin
), the exclusion zone, bounded by a pair of critically stable trajectories bifurcating limit cycles. The exterior boundary of the exclusion zone is consistent with prior determinations of
a
c
around a circular binary. We validate our analytic results with
N
-body simulations and apply them to the Pluto–Charon system. The absence of detected CBPs in the inner stable region, between the prograde exclusion zone and
a
c
, suggests that the exclusion zone may inhibit the inward migration of CBPs.
Studies of exoplanet demographics require large samples and precise constraints on exoplanet host stars. Using the homogeneous Kepler stellar properties derived using the Gaia Data Release 2 by ...Berger et al., we recompute Kepler planet radii and incident fluxes and investigate their distributions with stellar mass and age. We measure the stellar mass dependence of the planet radius valley to be / = , consistent with the slope predicted by a planet mass dependence on stellar mass (0.24-0.35) and core-powered mass loss (0.33). We also find the first evidence of a stellar age dependence of the planet populations straddling the radius valley. Specifically, we determine that the fraction of super-Earths (1-1.8 ) to sub-Neptunes (1.8-3.5 ) increases from 0.61 0.09 at young ages (<1 Gyr) to 1.00 0.10 at old ages (>1 Gyr), consistent with the prediction by core-powered mass loss that the mechanism shaping the radius valley operates over Gyr timescales. Additionally, we find a tentative decrease in the radii of relatively cool (Fp < 150 ) sub-Neptunes over Gyr timescales, which suggests that these planets may possess H/He envelopes instead of higher mean molecular weight atmospheres. We confirm the existence of planets within the hot sub-Neptunian "desert" (2.2 R⊕ < Rp < 3.8 , Fp > 650 ) and show that these planets are preferentially orbiting more evolved stars compared to other planets at similar incident fluxes. In addition, we identify candidates for cool (Fp < 20 ) inflated Jupiters, present a revised list of habitable zone candidates, and find that the ages of single and multiple transiting planet systems are statistically indistinguishable.
Smartphones and smartwatches, which include powerful sensors, provide a readily available platform for implementing and deploying mobile motion-based behavioral biometrics. However, the few studies ...that utilize these commercial devices for motion-based biometrics are quite limited in terms of the sensors and physical activities that they evaluate. In many such studies, only the smartwatch accelerometer is utilized and only one physical activity, walking, is investigated. In this study we consider the accelerome-ter and gyroscope sensor on both the smartphone and smartwatch, and determine which combination of sensors performs best. Furthermore, eighteen diverse activities of daily living are evaluated for their bio-metric efficacy and, unlike most other studies, biometric identification is evaluated in addition to biometric authentication. The results presented in this article show that motion-based biometrics using smartphones and/or smartwatches yield good results, and that these results hold for the eighteen activities. This suggests that zero-effort continuous biometrics based on normal activities of daily living is feasible, and also demon-strates that certain easy-to-perform activities, such as clapping, may be a viable alternative (or supplement) to gait-based biometrics.
The fields of photonic crystals and plasmonics have taken two different approaches to increasing light–matter interaction. Photonic crystal cavities increase temporal confinement of light in a ...material, as represented by their high quality factor, while plasmonic structures increase spatial confinement, as represented by their low mode volume. However, the inability to simultaneously attain extreme temporal and spatial confinement of light remains a barrier to realizing ultimate control of light in a material and maximum performance in photonic devices. Here, by engineering the photonic crystal unit cell to incorporate deep subwavelength dielectric inclusions, we show that it is possible in a single structure to achieve a mode volume commensurate with plasmonic elements while maintaining a quality factor that is characteristic of traditional photonic crystal cavities. Manipulating the geometric design of the unit cell leads to precise control of the band structure and mode distribution in the photonic crystal. With a dielectric bow-tie unit cell, photonic crystals can achieve a mode volume as small as 0.0005 (λ/n)3 with a quality factor as large as 1.75 × 106. Our results demonstrate that there exists a promising alternative to lossy metals for extreme light concentration and manipulation.
During tumor progression, cancer cells come into contact with various non-tumor cell types, but it is unclear how tumors adapt to these new environments. Here, we integrate spatially resolved ...transcriptomics, single-cell RNA-seq, and single-nucleus RNA-seq to characterize tumor-microenvironment interactions at the tumor boundary. Using a zebrafish model of melanoma, we identify a distinct "interface" cell state where the tumor contacts neighboring tissues. This interface is composed of specialized tumor and microenvironment cells that upregulate a common set of cilia genes, and cilia proteins are enriched only where the tumor contacts the microenvironment. Cilia gene expression is regulated by ETS-family transcription factors, which normally act to suppress cilia genes outside of the interface. A cilia-enriched interface is conserved in human patient samples, suggesting it is a conserved feature of human melanoma. Our results demonstrate the power of spatially resolved transcriptomics in uncovering mechanisms that allow tumors to adapt to new environments.
Text Mining Damerau, Fred; Indurkhya, Nitin; Weiss, Sholom M ...
2004
eBook
The growth of the web can be seen as an expanding public digital library collection. Online digital information extends far beyond the web and its publicly available information. Huge amounts of ...information are private and are of interest to local communities, such as the records of customers of a business. This information is overwhelmingly text and has its record-keeping purpose, but an automated analysis might be desirable to find patterns in the stored records. Analogous to this data mining is text mining, which also finds patterns and trends in information samples but which does so with far less structured--though with greater immediate utility for users--ingredients. This book focuses on the concepts and methods needed to expand horizons beyond structured, numeric data to automated mining of text samples. It introduces the new world of text mining and examines proven methods for various critical text-mining tasks, such as automated document indexing and information retrieval and search. New research areas are explored, such as information extraction and document summarization, that rely on evolving text-mining techniques. TOC:Overview of text mining.- From textual information to numerical vectors.- Using text for prediction.- Information retrieval and text mining.- Finding structure in a document collection.- Looking for information in documents.- Case studies.- Emerging directions.- Appendix: software notes.- References.- Author and subject indexes.
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