Search Results (1,379)

Bacterial communication or quorum sensing (QS) is a common yet complex system where multiple factors influence the extent to how this chemical dialog is transferred from a single clone to the larger community of microbes in the population. More often, when bacteria are in large concentrations, their genetic and subsequent biochemical response to different chemical cues is influenced by not only which microorganisms are present but also the environmental variables that surround those individuals. This is especially relevant when symbiotic bacteria are dependent upon host functions yet are in high enough concentrations that can manifest their own behaviors in response to the present host prior, during, and after colonization. This review will examine the various abiotic and biotic factors that regulate QS when bacteria are in the process of detecting, colonizing, and persisting in a host that uptakes its microbial partner from the environment, as well as the consequences of multiple stressors on this dynamic communication process. Full article

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colorectal cancer (CRC) are heterogeneous intestinal disorders that pose significant threats to human health and share common pathological features, including intestinal mucosal barrier disruption and gut microbiota dysbiosis, in which fucosylation acts as a critical regulatory mediator. Fucosylation is a highly conserved post-translational glycosylation modification involving the enzymatic transfer of fucose residues to glycoproteins and glycolipids. This tightly regulated process plays essential roles in maintaining intestinal homeostasis, mediating host–microbiota interactions and regulating immune responses. This review adopts a physiology-to-pathology framework, delineating fucosylation’s operational principles in healthy intestines and its dysregulation in IBD and CRC. It summarizes the spatial distribution of fucosylation, its regulatory mechanisms, and its roles in disease pathogenesis, and also discusses its potential as a diagnostic biomarker and therapeutic target. Finally, this review highlights future research directions to bridge mechanistic insights with clinical translation, emphasizing the promise of fucosylation in the precision diagnosis and treatment of intestinal disorders. Full article

Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) resolves the internal physicochemical processes of lithium-ion batteries across timescales—from ohmic conduction through charge-transfer kinetics to solid-state diffusion. Despite this analytical power, EIS deployment remains largely confined to laboratory electrochemical workstations that are bulky, expensive, and incapable of online multi-cell operation under dynamic DC bias conditions. This study presents a multi-channel EIS measurement device that simultaneously addresses three requirements for practical battery diagnostics: workstation-grade measurement accuracy, multi-cell synchronous acquisition, and tolerance to the DC bias voltage present across battery terminals during operation. The device employs a master–slave distributed architecture: each slave unit is built around the DNB1101 battery-dedicated impedance measurement chip with a Kelvin four-wire sensing configuration, while the STM32F407-based master controller coordinates measurement scheduling and data communication under FreeRTOS. A four-channel slave board with a differential daisy-chain communication topology and hardware broadcast trigger mechanism supports multi-cell synchronous acquisition. The device operates over a frequency range of 0.01 Hz to 5620 Hz with logarithmic spacing, and a C#-based host application provides real-time Nyquist and Bode visualization along with MATLAB R2024a-based post-processing for outlier rejection and data smoothing. Validation was conducted using Panasonic NCR18650 ternary (NCA) and LiFePO₄ (LFP) 18650 cells, benchmarked against a CorrTest CS350 electrochemical workstation at SOC = 40% and 25 °C. The device achieves a maximum impedance magnitude error of 1.55% and a maximum phase error of 1.22%. Equivalent circuit model fitting via ZSimpWin yields parameter differences below 1% between the device and the reference workstation. Under online conditions with a 3.6 V DC bias, the impedance measurement deviation of a 20 mΩ precision resistor remains below 0.69% across the full frequency range. Multi-channel synchronous measurements across four cells demonstrate inter-channel amplitude variance below 2.13%. Cross-chemistry validation with LiFePO₄ cells yields magnitude and phase errors below 0.92%. These results demonstrate that the proposed device provides laboratory-grade EIS accuracy with multi-channel, online, and cross-chemistry capabilities, offering a practical platform for integrating EIS-based diagnostics into next-generation battery management systems. Full article

Chiral supramolecular polymers offer a versatile platform for constructing dynamic functional materials, yet their development in aqueous media remains challenging due to weak host–guest interactions and limited chiral macrocyclic systems. Herein, we report a water-soluble chiral luminescent supramolecular polymer assembled from a pair of chiral macrocycle ((R)-/(S)-C[4]B) and an achiral bis-thiazole orange guest. The ultrahigh binding affinity between the host and guest enables stable one-dimensional polymerization in water. Efficient chirality transfer from the macrocyclic host to the achiral luminophore gives rise to pronounced circular dichroism (CD) and circularly polarized luminescence (CPL). The resulting polymer exhibits red emission (625 nm) with a luminescence dissymmetry factor of 8.5 × 10⁻³. This work provides an effective strategy for the development of aqueous CPL-active supramolecular polymers through ultrastrong host–guest recognition. Full article

On edge devices, convolutional neural network (CNN) inference is bottlenecked mainly by memory bandwidth, owing to the frequent memory accesses to feature maps and parameters. To address this challenge, we propose a memory-efficient hardware accelerator for depthwise separable convolution that minimizes off-chip memory traffic and parameter storage. The proposed architecture employs three key techniques: (1) a 64-bit run-length coding (RLC) packet compression that exploits feature-map sparsity after ReLU, (2) a mixed-precision scheme that represents feature maps and weights at different precisions, and (3) separated depthwise and pointwise convolution units. In particular, feature maps are transferred in RLC-compressed form, which reduces the amount of data exchanged with the host. The compressed data are decoded row by row, so the on-chip buffers hold only the rows required for computation rather than a complete feature map. In software simulation on ImageNet, the mixed-precision scheme reduced the parameter storage by 49.22% at a cost of 6.24 percentage points (pp) in Top-1 accuracy, and the RLC reduced the data by up to 56.07% in the deeper layers. Implemented on a Xilinx ZCU-104 FPGA, the proposed accelerator performs the depthwise separable convolution with a small number of logic resources and on-chip memory, confirming its feasibility for resource-constrained edge devices. Full article

The gut microbiota is a metabolically active ecosystem that influences host physiology through bioactive metabolites and interactions with host signaling pathways. Recent research has established a bidirectional gut–muscle axis in which microbial metabolites and muscle-derived factors (myokines) regulate muscle protein synthesis, degradation, regeneration, fiber-type specification, and overall muscle performance. Studies using germ-free, antibiotic-treated, probiotic-supplemented, and fecal microbiota transplantation models demonstrate that the gut microbiota is a critical determinant of skeletal muscle mass and function. Key mediators include short-chain fatty acids, bile acids, aromatic amino acid metabolites, microbial-associated molecular patterns, and methylamine metabolites. This review summarizes current mechanistic knowledge of gut–muscle communication and its relevance to livestock production. In monogastric livestock, particularly pigs and poultry, microbiota transplantation experiments and targeted probiotic interventions provide causal evidence that gut microbial communities influence muscle growth, muscle fiber composition, intramuscular fat deposition, carcass traits, and meat quality, including tenderness, marbling, water-holding capacity, and flavor. Several studies have also identified specific microbial taxa and metabolites capable of transferring desirable production phenotypes. In contrast, evidence in ruminants remains largely associative and originates mainly from multi-omics and dietary intervention studies. Future research should validate causal mechanisms, identify robust microbial biomarkers, and develop species-specific microbiome-based strategies for precision livestock production. Full article

Mycotoxin contamination remains a persistent threat to food and feed safety owing to the chemical stability of many mycotoxins, frequent co-occurrence, and matrix-dependent risks. Enzymatic detoxification enables structure-targeted transformation of toxicity-determining motifs, such as epoxide rings, reactive double bonds, amide linkages, and lactone structures. However, free mycotoxin-degrading enzymes are often constrained by poor operational stability, difficult recovery, and limited adaptability to complex matrices. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) provide programmable microenvironments for enzyme immobilization through tunable pore structures, interfacial chemistry, and confinement effects. This review links toxic structural motifs with enzymatic transformation targets, discusses MOF–enzyme interface engineering and representative host–enzyme compatibility, and evaluates application modes including single-enzyme systems, multi-enzyme co-immobilization or cascade systems, adsorption–degradation coupling, and detection–degradation integration. Key bottlenecks involving enzyme leakage, mass-transfer limitation, real-matrix stability, scalable preparation, and biosafety are critically discussed. Rather than treating MOFs as passive enzyme carriers, this review proposes an application-oriented framework that integrates toxin structure, enzyme function, MOF interface regulation, matrix compatibility, and safety validation to guide the development of MOF-immobilized degrading enzymes for practical mycotoxin detoxification. Full article

Lanthanide-doped Ca₂Nb₂O₇ offers versatile and tunable luminescence properties. Previous studies have shown that Pr³⁺-doped and Pr³⁺/Er³⁺ co-doped Ca₂Nb₂O₇ ceramics exhibit non-destructive mechanoluminescence, up- and down-conversion luminescence, and thermoluminescence, with potential for optical temperature sensing. However, to date, niobate glass–ceramics (GCs) remain largely unexplored, although they would offer excellent temperature resistance, high chemical durability, controllable crystallization, and the possibility to combine functional properties. This study investigates Pr³⁺ single doping and Pr³⁺/Er³⁺ co-doping in glass–ceramics prepared from niobium-containing calcium aluminosilicate glasses with the composition 55CaO-(35-x)Al₂O₃-10SiO₂-xNb₂O₅ (mol%, where x = 0, 10). The aim is to obtain glass–ceramics containing Ca₂Nb₂O₇ crystals with a layered perovskite structure and to evaluate their suitability as hosts for rare-earth ions. The luminescence properties of both parent glasses and GCs were investigated, and it is shown that the glasses show intrinsic luminescence which, when doped, enables sensitization of rare-earth elements via charge transfer. Furthermore, several interesting photoluminescence mechanisms were observed in the doped GCs, including (i) Er³⁺ up-conversion from the NIR to the visible, (ii) variations in the relative intensities of Er³⁺ hypersensitive transitions, reflecting changes in site symmetry, and (iii) a charge transfer process to the activator ions under UV excitation. These phenomena extend the accessible excitation range for rare-earth emission. Overall, the developed Ca₂Nb₂O₇ GCs demonstrate efficient dopant integration, confirming their suitability as lanthanide hosts for advanced photonic, sensing and energy conversion applications. Full article

SARS-CoV-2 relies on a virus-encoded RNA capping pathway to produce 5′ cap structures that are essential for mRNA stability, efficient translation, and evasion of host innate immune surveillance. Within this pathway, nonstructural protein 14 (nsp14) catalyzes N7 methylation of the guanine cap, a key step that converts the cap core into a functional Cap-0 structure and enables subsequent maturation. Owing to its essential role in viral replication and its high conservation across coronaviruses, nsp14 has emerged as an attractive antiviral target. Recent structural and biochemical studies have elucidated the architecture of the nsp14 N7-methyltransferase domain, revealing an S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM)-dependent fold with a defined cofactor-binding site and an adjacent cap-binding pocket that orients the RNA substrate for methyl transfer. These insights have guided the development of diverse inhibitor classes, including SAM-competitive analogs, bisubstrate-like compounds, and non-nucleoside inhibitors identified through screening approaches. While early SAM-like inhibitors demonstrated target tractability, their therapeutic potential has been limited by challenges in selectivity and cellular permeability. More recent inhibitors that target the cap-binding pocket or exploit product-assisted ternary complex mechanisms highlight alternative strategies for achieving improved potency and specificity. Despite these advances, current structural models rely on truncated RNA substrates and isolated protein constructs, which may not fully capture the native catalytic environment. Future efforts to resolve nsp14 within the replication–transcription complex and develop novel inhibition strategies will be critical for advancing mechanistic understanding and antiviral development. Full article

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a key instrument for sustainable ocean governance in Europe, yet the spatial distribution of socioeconomic benefits and trade-offs remains poorly documented. This study applies and extends the Spatial Economic Benefit Analysis (SEBA) framework to offshore wind energy and capture fisheries in France, with a focus on the North Atlantic–Western Channel (NAMO) façade. Three extensions are introduced relative to earlier single-sector, single-scale SEBA applications: simultaneous dual-sector comparison, nesting of project-level firm mapping within regional analysis, and delivery through an open, updatable visualization platform that allows planners to re-run the analysis as registries are updated. Twelve indicator families were selected against four explicit criteria (relevance to a SEBA step, spatial attributability, traceability to a planning instrument, and public availability) and cross-validated against independent registries. Offshore wind employment is more unevenly distributed across regions than fishery revenue (Gini 0.59 versus 0.42), and firm presence is a weak proxy for employment: Brittany hosts 26.6% of mapped offshore wind firms but only 6.5% of sectoral full-time equivalents (2.1 FTE per firm), whereas Île-de-France hosts 4.8% of firms and 19.6% of employment (34.6 FTE per firm). Fishery revenue and offshore wind firm counts are positively rank-correlated across coastal regions (Spearman ρ = 0.90, n = 5, p = 0.037), indicating co-location rather than causation: offshore wind constitutes an additional spatial pressure on a sector already contracting (−9.5% employment 2012–2022; −29% vessels 2000–2023). Uncertainty was addressed through a three-tier data confidence classification and sensitivity testing; concentration rankings were robust to extreme reassignments of multi-role firms (ΔGini ≤ 0.06). The analysis is deliberately restricted to the distribution of economic benefits and does not assess ecological impacts, which must be integrated before SEBA outputs inform zoning. Outputs are directly interpretable for façade plan revision, tender local content scoring, and compensation design, and the workflow is transferable to any jurisdiction with public corporate registries and landings statistics. Full article

Urban coastal cities face compounded flood hazards driven by sea-level rise, intense precipitation, and dense impervious surfaces. This study develops and demonstrates a cloud-native Python 3.12 GIS framework for flood susceptibility screening and critical facility exposure analysis in Miami, Florida, one of the most flood-exposed coastal cities in the United States. Defined here as a geospatial workflow that retrieves data dynamically from cloud-hosted APIs and executes entirely within a hosted computing environment, the framework integrates three open-source spatial indicators: terrain elevation from the USGS 3D Elevation Programme via py3dep; Euclidean distance to water bodies from OpenStreetMap via OSMnx; and building footprint density as an impervious surface proxy, also from OpenStreetMap. Indicators were standardised and combined using literature-informed MCDA weights (water proximity: 0.40; elevation: 0.35; building density: 0.25) into a continuous flood susceptibility index, classified at the 33rd- and 66th-percentile thresholds. In this proof-of-concept application, high-susceptibility zones cover 48.66 km² (34.0%) of the city, concentrated along coastal waterfronts and inland canal corridors. Overlaying critical facility locations on the classified surface indicates that 9 of 16 hospitals (56.2%), 61 of 244 schools (25.0%), and 5 of 17 fire stations (29.4%) fall within high-susceptibility zones; because this overlay uses centroid-based facility points that have not been cross-checked against official municipal or state facility registries, these counts should be read as indicative rather than definitive. Exact binomial testing shows that the school exposure deficit is statistically significant (p = 0.00), while elevated hospital exposure, although substantively notable, does not reach significance at the current sample size (p = 0.07). The susceptibility surface itself has not been quantitatively validated against external benchmarks such as FEMA flood maps or historical inundation records, the MCDA weights have not been sensitivity-tested, and spatial autocorrelation in the index has not been assessed; concrete protocols for each of these steps are specified as subsequent calibration work rather than as prerequisites for the architecture demonstrated here. The contribution of this paper is the reproducible, cloud-native workflow architecture and its proof-of-concept application, not a validated operational assessment tool; we present it explicitly as a methodological protocol and workflow demonstration, not as an evaluation of flood risk. The framework is fully reproducible, low-cost, and transferable to other US coastal cities. Full article

RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRPs) are essential enzymes involved in RNA virus replication and eukaryotic RNA silencing. They are generally absent in vertebrates but present in some invertebrate lineages, such as nematodes and certain arthropods. Brevipalpus yothersi is a phytophagous mite of agricultural relevance due to its role as a vector of plant-infecting viruses. We have identified two RdRPs on the genome of this mite species that, unexpectedly, are not of eukaryotic origin. Phylogenetic reconstruction and comparisons of 3D protein structures revealed similarity with viral RdRPs of the Partitiviridae family. Both RdRPs retain conserved catalytic motifs at the protein sequence level, and expression was confirmed by RNAseq and qPCR across mite developmental stages, with a peak during the nymphal stage. K-mer profiles showed similarity with mite endogenous genes, suggesting gene amelioration after the integration, or being derived from a viral donor already adapted to the mite. Our study also identified orthologs in other Brevipalpus species, but not in other Acari relatives, supporting that the horizontal gene transfer event is circumscribed to the Brevipalpus genus. These findings highlight an intriguing case of viral gene domestication in arthropods that might influence their developmental biology and the host–virus interaction. Full article

Plants and their endophytic microbiota form a functional holobiont, wherein host-dependent endophytes (HDEs) are proposed to serve as persistent microbial components associated with host continuity. Using long-term in vitro grapevine plantlets, we investigated HDE redistribution and reassembly across successive agar-based subcultures and during the transition to soil-based cultivation. Results showed that the initial tissue niche (shoot-tip versus root-base) imprinted a persistent compositional signature on HDE communities, with distinct cultivar-dependent effects. Numerous microbial amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) remained shared across agar-based and soil-based habitats, demonstrating high persistence of HDE-associated lineages. Bacterial communities exhibited marked plasticity, with plant-associated bacterial lineages contributing substantially to soil community assembly. Notably, 204 root-enriched bacterial ASVs, comprising 10.8–14.3% of the soil community, were recovered, revealing a robust “Root-Specific Legacy”. Bacterial HDEs showed higher redistribution potential (43.3%), whereas fungal transfer was significantly lower (10.4%). Functional profiling suggested habitat-associated functional patterns, with the anaerobic phenotype enriched in soil and predicted enhancements in membrane transport, nucleotide metabolism, glycan biosynthesis, and biosynthesis of secondary metabolites in roots. Cladosporium and Fusarium remained dominant in the fungal core taxa, and habitat transition altered their predicted trophic profiles. Our findings establish HDEs as a resilient biological reservoir capable of niche-specific expansion, contributing to the ecological reassembly of the plant holobiont. Full article

Background: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a leading cause of anovulatory infertility and a frequent indication for in vitro fertilization/intracytoplasmic sperm injection (IVF/ICSI). Multivariable regression estimates adjusted associations, whereas association rule mining (ARM) can describe frequently co-occurring attributes; however, ARM outputs are unadjusted and may be sensitive to analytic specification. Objectives: We used ARM alongside multivariable logistic regression and internal robustness analyses to describe combinations of clinical and treatment-related variables that co-occurred with clinical pregnancy failure among women with PCOS undergoing IVF/ICSI. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 733 deidentified patients with PCOS from the Reproductive Hospital of Guangxi. The original one-hot-encoded analytic file was linked to a supplemental clinical record file containing continuous age, BMI, infertility duration, anti-Müllerian hormone, total gonadotropin dose, fertilization method, embryo-transfer day, number of embryos transferred, and embryo score. Embryo quality was derived from D3 cleavage-stage and blastocyst morphology records. Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted associations. ARM results were assessed using Fisher’s exact test, Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) correction, 1000 bootstrap resamples, fivefold cross-validation, and threshold/cutoff sensitivity analyses. Results: In the multivariable model (n = 730), age remained associated with clinical pregnancy failure (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 1.04 per year, 95% CI 1.00–1.08, p = 0.031), whereas BMI was not independently associated with failure (aOR = 1.00 per kg/m², 95% CI 0.96–1.05, p = 0.860). Transfer of two embryos (aOR = 0.55, 95% CI 0.35–0.85, p = 0.008), D5 blastocyst transfer (aOR = 0.49, 95% CI 0.32–0.75, p = 0.001), and transfer of at least one high-quality embryo (aOR = 0.63, 95% CI 0.43–0.93, p = 0.020) were associated with lower odds of failure. Under the primary host-factor specification, age > 35 years + BMI ≥ 24 kg/m² + pelvic adhesion defined 48 patients, 30 of whom had clinical pregnancy failure (support = 0.07; confidence = 0.63; lift = 1.38; FDR q = 0.098). In the secondary treatment-inclusive analysis, infertility duration > 5 years + no high-quality embryo transferred defined 43 patients with 30 failures (support = 0.06; confidence = 0.70; lift = 1.54; FDR q = 0.026). Lift represents the subgroup failure proportion divided by the overall failure proportion and is not an adjusted risk ratio. The rule composition and the number of FDR-supported rules changed under alternative cutoffs and confidence thresholds. Conclusions: ARM described transparent but specification-sensitive co-occurrence profiles that complement, rather than compete with, regression. Treatment-inclusive profiles combine baseline and downstream cycle characteristics and are therefore especially exploratory. These findings require prospective multicenter validation before any clinical decision-support use. Full article

Deep drilling equipment operates under high-load, strong-vibration, intermittent-impact, and variable environmental conditions, which motivate sensing systems that provide low-noise acquisition, synchronized triaxial measurements, local data integrity, and quantitative measurement-chain characterization. This paper presents a Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC-based triaxial vibration sensing station for deep drilling equipment applications. The modular station integrates conditioned-voltage triaxial accelerometer interfaces, analog signal conditioning, 24-bit simultaneous analog-to-digital conversion, electrical isolation, local solid-state-drive storage, Ethernet/wireless communication, and GPS-disciplined oven-controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO) timing. The programmable logic performs deterministic acquisition, GPS pulse processing, oscillator calibration, and DMA transfer, while the processing system facilitates storage, network communication, device-state management, and host computer interaction. The sensing electronics are evaluated through zero-input noise, an experiment-specific input-amplitude-to-noise ratio, gain linearity, thermal stability, repeatability, and station-to-station local-PPS timing tests. The characterized electronics achieve a mean equivalent input noise of 0.31 microvolts, a test-derived ratio of 135.08 dB, and a mean station-to-station local-PPS falling-edge difference of 0.34 microseconds. A lightweight post-acquisition interpretation workflow using learnable multichannel weighted fusion, a convolutional autoencoder, a training-distribution-based quantile threshold, and an auxiliary classification branch achieves 0.9705 accuracy and 0.9704 F1-score on a public triaxial bearing dataset under the reported protocol. A crane-based experiment evaluates deployment feasibility and the sensing–analysis workflow using controlled operating events and a removable stationary mass disturbance. The results provide an engineering sensing basis for distributed monitoring studies on deep drilling equipment. Full article