To examine the ocean acidification of coastal water as the result of the oceanic uptake of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2, we initiated acidification monitoring in the eastern part of the Tsugaru ...Strait, through which the Tsugaru Warm Current flows eastward from the Sea of Japan to the North Pacific. Annual mean pH and CaCO3 saturation state during 2012–2019 decreased considerably throughout all depths at rates of 0.0030–0.0051 and 0.017–0.036 years−1, respectively. These rates of decrease are faster than those caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and faster than those observed during previous research. These fast rates are attributed to an enhanced increase in dissolved inorganic carbon concurrently with increases in salinity and density caused by elevated mixing of the upper and deeper waters from the Sea of Japan at the western part of the strait. The elevated mixing is attributable to the strengthening of the Tsugaru Warm Current.
Plain Language Summary
Approximately 30% of the total amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere by human activities has accumulated in the global ocean. This oceanic uptake of CO2 has resulted in ocean acidification. In coastal waters, the acidification affects marine organisms, thus coastal ecosystems may be more vulnerable to acidification than the open ocean. To examine the extent to which acidification has advanced in the eastern part of the Tsugaru Strait, through which the Tsugaru Warm Current passes from the Sea of Japan to the North Pacific, we initiated a time‐series observation of acidification. The pH reduction is found to have enhanced considerably across the whole depth during 2012–2019 at a rate faster than that caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and at the highest rates observed during previous research. The rapid pH reduction is found to be attributable to the enhanced rate of increase of dissolved inorganic carbon concurrently with increases in salinity and density caused by elevated mixing of the upper and deeper waters from the Sea of Japan at the western strait due to the strengthening of the Tsugaru Warm Current. In other straits that are connected to the open ocean, the strengthening of their throughflow may also accelerate acidification.
Key Points
The eastern part of the Tsugaru Strait has become significantly more acidic throughout its depth during 2012–2019
The pH reduction is occurring at faster rates than reported elsewhere and faster than expected for oceanic uptake of anthropogenic CO2
Rapid pH reduction is caused by enhanced increase of dissolved inorganic carbon, owing to a strengthened Tsugaru Warm Current
We present a multi‐view stereo reconstruction technique that directly produces a complete high‐fidelity head model with consistent facial mesh topology. While existing techniques decouple shape ...estimation and facial tracking, our framework jointly optimizes for stereo constraints and consistent mesh parameterization. Our method is therefore free from drift and fully parallelizable for dynamic facial performance capture. We produce highly detailed facial geometries with artist‐quality UV parameterization, including secondary elements such as eyeballs, mouth pockets, nostrils, and the back of the head. Our approach consists of deforming a common template model to match multi‐view input images of the subject, while satisfying cross‐view, cross‐subject, and cross‐pose consistencies using a combination of 2D landmark detection, optical flow, and surface and volumetric Laplacian regularization. Since the flow is never computed between frames, our method is trivially parallelized by processing each frame independently. Accurate rigid head pose is extracted using a PCA‐based dimension reduction and denoising scheme. We demonstrate high‐fidelity performance capture results with challenging head motion and complex facial expressions around eye and mouth regions. While the quality of our results is on par with the current state‐of‐the‐art, our approach can be fully parallelized, does not suffer from drift, and produces face models with production‐quality mesh topologies.
The periodontal pathogen Porphyromonas gingivalis is known to express 2 distinct types of fimbriae: FimA and Mfa1 fimbriae. However, we previously reported that fimbria-like structures were found in ...a P. gingivalis strain in which neither FimA nor Mfa1 fimbriae were detected. In this study, we identified a major protein in the bacterial lysates of the strain, which has been reported as the 53-kDa major outer membrane protein of P. gingivalis (53K protein) and subsequently reported as a major fimbrilin of a novel-type fimbria. Sequencing of the chromosomal DNA of the strain showed that the 53k gene (encoding the 53K protein) was located at a locus corresponding to the mfa1 gene (encoding the Mfa1 protein, which is a major fimbrilin of Mfa1 fimbriae) of the ATCC 33277 type strain. However, the 53K and Mfa1 proteins showed a low amino acid sequence homology and different antigenicity. The 53K protein was detected in 34 of 84 (41%) P. gingivalis strains, while the Mfa1 protein was detected in 44% of the strains. No strain expressed both 53K and Mfa1 proteins. Additionally, fimbriae were normally expressed in mutants in which the 53k and mfa1 genes were interchanged. These results indicate that the 53K protein is another major fimbrilin of Mfa1 fimbriae in P. gingivalis.
Fimbriae are protein-based filamentous appendages that protrude from the bacterial cell surface and facilitate host adhesion. Two types of fimbriae, FimA and Mfa1, of the periodontal pathogen ...Porphyromonas gingivalis are responsible for adherence to other bacteria and to host cells in the oral cavity. Both fimbrial forms are composed of 5 proteins, but there is limited information about their polymerization mechanisms. Here, the authors evaluated the function of Mfa5, one of the Mfa1 fimbrial accessory proteins. Using mfa5 gene disruption and complementation studies, the authors revealed that Mfa5 affects the incorporation of other accessory proteins, Mfa3 and Mfa4, into fibers and the expression of fimbriae on the cell surface. Mfa5 is predicted to have a C-terminal domain (CTD) that uses the type IX secretion system (T9SS), which is limited to this organism and related Bacteroidetes species, for translocation across the outer membrane. To determine the relationship between the putative Mfa5 CTD and the T9SS, mutants were constructed with in-frame deletion of the CTD and deletion of porU, a C-terminal signal peptidase linked to T9SS-mediated secretion. The ∆CTD-expressing strain presented a similar phenotype to the mfa5 disruption mutant with reduced expression of fimbriae lacking all accessory proteins. The ∆porU mutants and the ∆CTD-expressing strain showed intracellular accumulation of Mfa5. These results indicate that Mfa5 function requires T9SS-mediated translocation across the outer membrane, which is dependent on the CTD, and subsequent incorporation into fibers. These findings suggest the presence of a novel polymerization mechanism of the P. gingivalis fimbriae.
Detection of drug-target proteins and biomarkers that are expressed in cancer tissue has significant potential for both diagnosis and treatment of cancer. However, current immuno-histochemical and ...cytogenetic analyses of biopsy specimens for pre-operational diagnosis are highly invasive and often difficult to apply to lung cancer patients. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the possible utility of determining epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression on exosomal membranes using a targeted ELISA with an anti-CD81 antibody as a capture antibody for lung cancer diagnosis. While soluble EGFR (sEGFR) levels in plasma were not remarkably different between lung cancer patients and normal controls, significantly higher exosomal EGFR expression levels were observed in 5/9 cancer cases compared to normal controls. These results suggest that measurement of exosomal protein levels could be useful for in vitro diagnosis, and that exosomal EGFR is a possible biomarker for characterization of lung cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) can be divided into six subtypes. Among these subtypes, the basal-like 2 (BL2) subtype shows the lowest five-year survival rate and highest risk of metastasis. ...Alpha-crystallin B chains (αB-crystallin), a small heat shock protein that is known to be involved in breast cancer metastasis, is highly expressed in the basal-like subtype but not in the other non-basal subtypes. Thus, we hypothesized that αB-crystallin may be an important factor involved in the worse prognosis of the BL2 subtype compared with those of the other TNBC subtypes. Here, we examined the role of αB-crystallin in cell motility in two TNBC cell lines: HCC1806 (BL2 subtype) and, as control, MDA-MB-436 (mesenchymal stem-like subtype). HCC1806 showed greater cell migration capacity and a higher expression level of the gene encoding αB-crystallin (
) than did MDA-MB-436. Short interfering RNA-mediated silencing of
expression significantly reduced the cell migration capacity of HCC1806 cells, whereas it had no effect in MDA-MB-436 cells, indicating that αB-crystallin is essential for the migration of HCC1806 cells. Thus, high αB-crystallin expression may be a contributing factor to the poor prognosis of BL2 TNBC.
A
bstract
Two-particle azimuthal correlations have been measured in neutral current deep inelastic
ep
scattering with virtuality
Q
2
>
5 GeV
2
at a centre-of-mass energy
s
= 318 GeV recorded with the ...ZEUS detector at HERA. The correlations of charged particles have been measured in the range of laboratory pseudorapidity
−
1
.
5
< η <
2
.
0 and transverse momentum 0
.
1
< p
T
<
5
.
0 GeV and event multiplicities
N
ch
up to six times larger than the average 〈
N
ch
〉 ≈ 5. The two-particle correlations have been measured in terms of the angular observables
c
n
{2}
= 〈〈
cosn
Δ
φ
〉〉, where
n
is between 1 and 4 and ∆
φ
is the relative azimuthal angle between the two particles. Comparisons with available models of deep inelastic scattering, which are tuned to reproduce inclusive particle production, suggest that the measured two-particle correlations are dominated by contributions from multijet production. The correlations observed here do not indicate the kind of collective behaviour recently observed at the highest RHIC and LHC energies in high-multiplicity hadronic collisions.
We have proposed a new floor supply air conditioning system, using phase change material to augment building mass thermal storage. A scale model was constructed for such a system. Granules containing ...phase change material (PCM), with a phase change temperature of about 20
°C, were made from foamed glass beads and paraffin waxes. Results from measurements simulating an air conditioning schedule in office buildings indicate that 89% of daily cooling load could be stored each night in a system that used a 30
mm thick packed bed of the granular PCM.
The periodontitis-associated pathogen Porphyromonas gingivalis colonizes and forms a biofilm in gingival crevices through fimbriae. It is known that the often-used strains ATCC 33277 and 381 produce ...long FimA fimbriae. We found a possible nonsense mutation within fimB, immediately downstream from fimA, coding a major subunit of FimA fimbriae of the strains. Indeed, P. gingivalis strains, except for ATCC 33277 and 381, universally expressed FimB, the gene product of fimB. Electron micrographs revealed that a FimB-restored strain had short and dense, “toothbrush”-like, FimA fimbriae. FimA overexpression elongated the fimbriae, whereas FimB overexpression shortened them. FimB restoration increased production of FimA and its accessory proteins. Thus, FimB regulates the length and expression of FimA fimbriae. Additionally, FimB restoration significantly reduced the release of FimA fimbriae from the cell surface, suggesting that FimB functions as an anchor of the fimbriae. The restoration enhanced adherent activity as well.
A new measurement of inclusive-jet cross sections in the Breit frame in neutral current deep inelastic scattering using the ZEUS detector at the HERA collider is presented. The data were taken in the ...years 2004–2007 at a centre-of-mass energy of
318
GeV
and correspond to an integrated luminosity of
347
pb
-
1
. The jets were reconstructed using the
k
t
-algorithm in the Breit reference frame. They have been measured as a function of the squared momentum transfer,
Q
2
, and the transverse momentum of the jets in the Breit frame,
p
⊥
,
Breit
. The measured jet cross sections are compared to previous measurements and to perturbative QCD predictions. The measurement has been used in a next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD analysis to perform a simultaneous determination of parton distribution functions of the proton and the strong coupling, resulting in a value of
α
s
(
M
Z
2
)
=
0.1142
±
0.0017
(experimental/fit)
-
0.0007
+
0.0006
(model/parameterisation)
-
0.0004
+
0.0006
(scale)
, whose accuracy is improved compared to similar measurements. In addition, the running of the strong coupling is demonstrated using data obtained at different scales.
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