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Antagonistic interactions between phage and host factors control arbitrium lysis–lysogeny decision
Get PDFPhages can use a small-molecule communication arbitrium system to coordinate lysis–lysogeny decisions, but the underlying mechanism remains unknown. Here we determined that the arbitrium system in Bacillus subtilis phage phi3T modulates the bacterial toxin–antitoxin system MazE–MazF to regulate the phage life cycle. We show that phi3T expresses AimX and YosL, which bind to and inactivate MazF. AimX also inhibits the function of phi3T_93, a protein that promotes lysogeny by binding to MazE and releasing MazF. Overall, these mutually exclusive interactions promote the lytic cycle of the phage. After several rounds of infection, the phage-encoded AimP peptide accumulates intracellularly and inactivates the phage antiterminator AimR, a process that eliminates aimX expression from the aimP promoter. Therefore, when AimP increases, MazF activity promotes reversion back to lysogeny, since AimX is absent. Altogether, our study reveals the evolutionary strategy used by arbitrium to control lysis–lysogeny by domesticating and fine-tuning a phage-defence mechanism
Editorial: Perceptions of pseudepigraphy across the ancient Mediterranean
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Comparing organisational patterns for innovation between Scottish and French firms: an exploratory study
No full textTraditional indicators, such as R&D expenditures and patent applications, are not necessarily the most relevant to measure the innovative capability of companies. Hence, this study aims at understanding how the conversion of ideas and inventions into commercialisation of products and services is managed, with an emphasis on internal processes and structures. To this purpose, a question sheet and a guide for semi-structured interviews have been developed derived from the model for the dynamic adaptation capability. Surprisingly, the findings from five French and five Scottish firms point to differences in innovative capabilities between French and Scottish firms that can be understood from autopoietic principles (following the law of parsimony) and the myopic versus dynamic approach for the context of the national innovation system. Additionally, the extent of the instrument indicates that a major effort is required to understand the innovative capabilities of firms and that this cannot be reduced to simplified measures as traditionally done
The extinction of primary polyarteritis nodosa: a modern science success story?
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FEDRKG: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Recommendation Framework via Knowledge Graph Enhancement
No full textFederated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach for preserving data privacy in recommendation systems by training models locally. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have gained popularity in recommendation tasks due to their ability to capture highorder interactions between users and items. However, privacy concerns prevent the global sharing of the entire user-item graph. To address this limitation, some methods create pseudo-interacted items or users in the graph to compensate for missing information for each client. Unfortunately, these methods introduce random noise and raise privacy concerns.
In this paper, we propose FedRKG, a novel federated recommendation system, where a global knowledge graph (KG) is constructed and maintained on the server using publicly available item information, enabling higher-order user-item interactions. On the client side, a relation-aware GNN model leverages diverse KG relationships. To protect local interaction items and obscure gradients, we employ pseudo-labeling and Local Differential Privacy (LDP). Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach compared to centralized algorithms while ensuring privacy preservation. Moreover, FedRKG achieves an average accuracy improvement of 4% compared to existing federated learning baselines
A multiplexed, confinable CRISPR/Cas9 gene drive can propagate in caged Aedes aegypti populations
Get PDFAedes aegypti is the main vector of several major pathogens including dengue, Zika and chikungunya viruses. Classical mosquito control strategies utilizing insecticides are threatened by rising resistance. This has stimulated interest in new genetic systems such as gene drivesHere, we test the regulatory sequences from the Ae. aegypti benign gonial cell neoplasm (bgcn) homolog to express Cas9 and a separate multiplexing sgRNA-expressing cassette inserted into the Ae. aegypti kynurenine 3-monooxygenase (kmo) gene. When combined, these two elements provide highly effective germline cutting at the kmo locus and act as a gene drive. Our target genetic element drives through a cage trial population such that carrier frequency of the element increases from 50% to up to 89% of the population despite significant fitness costs to kmo insertions. Deep sequencing suggests that the multiplexing design could mitigate resistance allele formation in our gene drive system
Tackling cardiovascular healthcare disparities for LGBTQIA+ population: a call to action in the European Society of Cardiology
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A Lightweight Artificial Cognition Model for Socio-Affective Human-Robot Interaction
Get PDFThe software submission presents a fully working artificial cognition model, which controls a NAO social robot. The model was specifically designed to control a socio-affective companion robot for use in a medical setting. It was deployed using embedded hardware: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Jetson Nano Board, and an external RGB-D camera. Based on the ROS operating system, this software package includes components for social signal processing, behaviour selection, affective behaviour rendering, and a web-based user interface. The robot's behaviours are selected by a planning system, which generates the robot's behaviours based on the state of the interaction, the progress of the medical procedure, and the user's affective state. The system has been tested in simulated environments and is currently being used in two clinics to perform a usability test and will subsequently be used to carry out a series of clinical trial
Prospective study design and data analysis in UK Biobank
No full textPopulation-based prospective studies, such as UK Biobank, are valuable for generating and testing hypotheses about the potential causes of human disease. We describe how UK Biobank’s study design, data access policies, and approaches to statistical analysis can help to minimize error and improve the interpretability of research findings, with implications for other population-based prospective studies being established worldwide
Out-of-Device Privacy Unveiled: Designing and Validating the Out-of-Device Privacy Scale (ODPS)
Get PDFThis paper proposes an Out-of-Device Privacy Scale (ODPS) - a reliable, validated psychometric privacy scale that measures users’ importance of out-of-device privacy. In contrast to existing scales, ODPS is designed to capture the importance individuals attribute to protecting personal information from out-of-device threats in the physical world, which is essential when designing privacy protection mechanisms. We iteratively developed and refined ODPS in three high-level steps: item development, scale development, and scale validation, with a total of N=1378 participants. Our methodology included ensuring content validity by following various approaches to generate items. We collected insights from experts and target audiences to understand response variability. Next, we explored the underlying factor structure using multiple methods and performed dimensionality, reliability, and validity tests to finalise the scale. We discuss how ODPS can support future work predicting user behaviours and designing protection methods to mitigate privacy risks