There is no scientific consensus about whether and how species' evolutionary age, or the elapsed time since their origination, might affect their probability of going extinct. Different age-dependent ...extinction (ADE) patterns have been proposed in theoretical and empirical studies, while the existence of a consistent and universal pattern across the tree of life remains debated. If evolutionary age predicts species extinction probability, then the study of ADE should comprise the elapsed time and the ecological process acting on species from their origin to their extinction or to the present for extant species. Additionally, given that closely related species share traits associated with fitness, evolutionary proximity could generate similar ADE patterns. Considering the historical context and extinction selectivity based on evolutionary relatedness, we build on previous theoretical work to formalize the Clade Replacement Theory (CRT) as a framework that considers the ecological and evolutionary aspects of species age and extinction probability to produce testable predictions on ADE patterns. CRT's domain is the diversification dynamics of two or more clades competing for environmental space throughout time, and its propositions or derived hypotheses are as follows: (i) incumbency effects by an early arriving clade that limit the colonization and the diversification of a younger clade leading to a negative ADE scenario (younger species more prone to extinction than older ones) and (ii) an ecological shift triggered by an environmental change that imposes a new selective regime over the environmental space and leads to a positive ADE scenario (extinction probability increasing with age). From these propositions, we developed the prediction that the ADE scenario would be defined by whether an ecological shift happens or not. We discuss how the CRT could be tested with empirical data and provide examples where it could be applied. We hope this article will provide a common ground to unify results from different fields and foster new empirical tests of the mechanisms derived here while providing insights into CRT theoretical structuration.
Temporal scale and biodiversity components define how temporal variation influences biodiversity. For Brazilian Savannah riparian zones, litter input is controlled by rainfall fluctuations among ...climatic periods, whereas the dominance and diversity components represent the litter biodiversity. We hypothesize that the litter dominance components would respond more to temporal variation. In contrast, the diversity components would differ more among the input compartments due to a heterogeneous riparian forest. We conducted an experiment in a Brazilian savannah riparian forest during four climatic periods, sampling litter dynamics and functional traits once at the beginning of each period and across different input compartments. Sixteen plant species contributed to the litter input during the study; however, only six contributed with ~ 88%of the total litter input. We found an effect of the temporal periods over two dominance components, CWM
Phenols
and CWM
Leaf Width
, whereas none of the diversity components responded temporally. For input compartments, we found an effect over one diversity component, Functional Divergence (FDiv), and over two dominance components, CWM
Nitrogen
and CWM
Leaf Width
. Our results supported our hypothesis that for this species-rich ecosystem temporal variation affected the dominance components. Interestingly, temporal variation did not affect evenness, whereas the ones that responded were the components that do not assume species equivalence, suggesting that the effect over the ecosystem is based on dominant trait alternation. Likewise, diversity and dominance components responded to input compartments, implying a heterogeneous riparian forest in a reduced local spatial scale, which would affect the decomposer community resource supply.
In rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the activation of T and B cell clones specific for self-antigens leads to the chronic inflammation of the synovium. Here, we perform an in-depth quantitative analysis of ...the seven chains that comprise the adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR) in RA.
In comparison to controls, we show that RA patients have multiple and strong differences in the B cell receptor repertoire including reduced diversity as well as altered isotype, chain, and segment frequencies. We demonstrate that therapeutic tumor necrosis factor inhibition partially restores this alteration but find a profound difference in the underlying biochemical reactivities between responders and non-responders. Combining the AIRR with HLA typing, we identify the specific T cell receptor repertoire associated with disease risk variants. Integrating these features, we further develop a molecular classifier that shows the utility of the AIRR as a diagnostic tool.
Simultaneous sequencing of the seven chains of the human AIRR reveals novel features associated with the disease and clinically relevant phenotypes, including response to therapy. These findings show the unique potential of AIRR to address precision medicine in immune-related diseases.
To evaluate adalimumab therapy in refractory uveitis.
Prospective case series.
A total of 131 patients with refractory uveitis and intolerance or failure to respond to prednisone and at least 1 other ...systemic immunosuppressive drug participated.
Patients received a 40 mg adalimumab subcutaneous injection every other week for 6 months. The associated immunosuppressants were tapered after administering 3 adalimumab injections (week 6).
Degree of anterior and posterior chamber inflammation (Standardization of Uveitis Nomenclature Working Group criteria), immunosuppression load (as defined by Nussenblatt et al), visual acuity (logarithm of the minimal angle of resolution logMAR), and macular thickness (optical coherence tomography).
There were 61 men and 70 women (mean age, 27.3 years). The most common causes were juvenile idiopathic arthritis in 39 patients, pars planitis in 16 patients, and Behçet's disease in 13 patients. Twenty-seven patients had uveitis of idiopathic origin. Inflammation in the anterior chamber was present in 82% of patients and in the vitreous cavity in 59% of patients. Anterior chamber inflammation and vitreous inflammation decreased significantly (P < 0.001) from a mean of 1.51 and 1.03 at baseline to 0.25 and 0.14, respectively, at 6 months. Macular thickness was 296 (102) μ at baseline versus 240 (36) μ at the 6-month visit (P < 0.001). Visual acuity improved by -0.3 logMAR in 32 of 150 eyes (21.3%) and worsened by +0.3 logMAR (-15 letters) in 5 eyes (3.3%). The dose of corticosteroids also decreased from 0.74 (3.50) to 0.20 (0.57) mg/kg/day (P < 0.001). Cystoid macular edema, which was present in 40 eyes at baseline, showed complete resolution in 28 eyes at 6 months. The mean suppression load decreased significantly (8.81 5.05 vs 5.40 4.43; P < 0.001). Six months after the initiation of the study, 111 patients (85%) were able to reduce at least 50% of their baseline immunosuppression load. Only 9 patients (6.9%) had severe relapses during the 6 months of follow-up.
Adalimumab seems to be well tolerated and helpful in decreasing inflammatory activity in refractory uveitis and may reduce steroid requirement. Further controlled studies of adalimumab for uveitis are warranted.
The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of anti-TNF-α therapy in refractory uveitis due to Behçet's disease (BD).
We performed a multicentre study of 124 patients with BD uveitis refractory ...to conventional treatment including high-dose corticosteroids and at least one standard immunosuppressive agent. Patients were treated for at least 12 months with infliximab (IFX) (3-5 mg/kg at 0, 2 and 6 weeks and then every 4-8 weeks) or adalimumab (ADA) (usually 40 mg every 2 weeks). The main outcome measures were degree of anterior and posterior chamber inflammation, visual acuity, macular thickness and immunosuppression load.
Sixty-eight men and 56 women (221 affected eyes) were studied. The mean age was 38.6 years (s.d. 10.4). HLA-B51 was positive in 66.1% of patients and uveitis was bilateral in 78.2%. IFX was the first biologic agent in 77 cases (62%) and ADA was first in 47 (38%). In most cases anti-TNF-α drugs were used in combination with conventional immunosuppressive drugs. At the onset of anti-TNF-α therapy, anterior chamber and vitreous inflammation was observed in 57% and 64.4% of patients, respectively. In both conditions the damage decreased significantly after 1 year. At baseline, 50 patients (80 eyes) had macular thickening optical coherence tomography (OCT) >250 μm and 35 (49 eyes) had cystoid macular oedema (OCT>300 μm) that improved from 420 μm (s.d. 119.5) at baseline to 271 μm (s.d. 45.6) at month 12 (P < 0.01). The best-corrected visual acuity and the suppression load also showed significant improvement. After 1 year of follow-up, 67.7% of patients were inactive. Biologic therapy was well tolerated in most cases.
Anti-TNF-α therapy is effective and relatively safe in refractory BD uveitis.
TFHE is a fast fully homomorphic encryption scheme proposed by Chillotti et al. in Asiacrypt’ 2018. Integer-wise TFHE is a generalized version of TFHE that can encrypt the plaintext of an integer ...that was implicitly presented by Chillotti et al., and Bourse et al. presented the actual form of the scheme in CRYPTO’ 2018. However, Bourse et al.’s scheme provides only homomorphic integer additions and homomorphic evaluations of a sign function. In this paper, we construct a technique for operating any 1-variable function in only one bootstrapping of the integer-wise TFHE. For applications of the scheme, we also construct a useful homomorphic evaluation of several integer arithmetics: division, equality test, and multiplication between integer and binary numbers. Our implementation results show that our homomorphic division is approximately 3.4 times faster than any existing work and that its run time is less than 1 second for 4-bit integer inputs.
To identify patterns (clusters) of damage manifestations within a large cohort of SLE patients and evaluate the potential association of these clusters with a higher risk of mortality.
This is a ...multicentre, descriptive, cross-sectional study of a cohort of 3656 SLE patients from the Spanish Society of Rheumatology Lupus Registry. Organ damage was ascertained using the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics Damage Index. Using cluster analysis, groups of patients with similar patterns of damage manifestations were identified. Then, overall clusters were compared as well as the subgroup of patients within every cluster with disease duration shorter than 5 years.
Three damage clusters were identified. Cluster 1 (80.6% of patients) presented a lower amount of individuals with damage (23.2 vs 100% in clusters 2 and 3, P < 0.001). Cluster 2 (11.4% of patients) was characterized by musculoskeletal damage in all patients. Cluster 3 (8.0% of patients) was the only group with cardiovascular damage, and this was present in all patients. The overall mortality rate of patients in clusters 2 and 3 was higher than that in cluster 1 (P < 0.001 for both comparisons) and in patients with disease duration shorter than 5 years as well.
In a large cohort of SLE patients, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal damage manifestations were the two dominant forms of damage to sort patients into clinically meaningful clusters. Both in early and late stages of the disease, there was a significant association of these clusters with an increased risk of mortality. Physicians should pay special attention to the early prevention of damage in these two systems.
On the complexity of the BKW algorithm on LWE Albrecht, Martin R.; Cid, Carlos; Faugère, Jean-Charles ...
Designs, codes, and cryptography,
02/2015, Letnik:
74, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This work presents a study of the complexity of the Blum–Kalai–Wasserman (BKW) algorithm when applied to the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, by providing refined estimates for the data and ...computational effort requirements for solving
concrete
instances of the LWE problem. We apply this refined analysis to suggested parameters for various LWE-based cryptographic schemes from the literature and compare with alternative approaches based on lattice reduction. As a result, we provide new upper bounds for the concrete hardness of these LWE-based schemes. Rather surprisingly, it appears that BKW algorithm outperforms known estimates for lattice reduction algorithms starting in dimension
n
≈
250
when LWE is reduced to SIS. However, this assumes access to an unbounded number of LWE samples.
The Belgian block cipher Rijndael was chosen in 2000 by the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be the successor to the Data Encryption Standard. Rijndael was ...subsequently standardized as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is potentially the world's most important block cipher. In 2002, some new analytical techniques were suggested that may have a dramatic effect on the security of the AES. Existing analytical techniques for block ciphers depend heavily on a statistical approach, whereas these new techniques are algebraic in nature. Algebraic Aspects of the Advanced Encryption Standard, appearing five years after publication of the AES, presents the state of the art for the use of such algebraic techniques in analyzing the AES. The primary audience for this work includes academic and industry researchers in cryptology, the book is also suitable for advanced-level students.
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