Insights into the role of bacteria in vitamin A biosynthesis: Future research opportunities

Abstract

Significant efforts have been made to address the hidden hunger challenges due to iron, zinc, iodine, and vitamin A since the beginning of the 21st century. Prioritizing the vitamin A deficiency (VAD) disorders, many countries are looking for viable alternative strategies such as biofortification. One of the leading causes of VAD is the poor bioconversion of β-carotene into retinoids. This review is focused on the opportunities of bacterial biosynthesis of retinoids, in particular, through the gut microbiota. The proposed hypothesis starts with the premise that an animal can able to store and timely convert carotenoids into retinoids in the liver and intestinal tissues. This theory is experimental with many scientific insights. The syntrophic metabolism, potential crosstalk of bile acids, lipocalins and lipopolysaccharides of gut microbiota are reported to contribute significantly to the retinoid biosynthesis. The gut bacteria respond to these kinds of factors by genetic restructuring driven mainly by events like horizontal gene transfer. A phylogenetic analysis of β-carotene 15, 15′-mono (di) oxygenase enzymes among a selected group of prokaryotes and eukaryotes was carried out to validate the hypotheses. Shedding light on the probiotic strategies through non-genetically modified organism such as gut bacteria capable of synthesizing vitamin A would address the VAD disorders.     

Factors affecting bulk to total bacteria ratio in drinking water distribution systems

Bacteria in drinking water systems can grow in bulk water and as biofilms attached to pipe walls, both causing regrowth problems in the distribution system. While studies have focused on evaluating the factors influencing the bacteria in bulk water and in biofilms separately, there is a need for understanding biofilm characteristics relative to the bulk water phase. The current study evaluated the effects of chlorine and residence time on the presence of culturable bacteria in biofilms relative to that in bulk water. The results showed that when no chlorine residual was present in the system, the median ratio of bulk to total bacteria was 0.81, indicating that 81% of the bacteria were present in bulk water, whereas only 19% were present in the biofilm. As chlorine concentration increased to 0.2, 0.5, and 0.7 mg/L, the median percentage of bacteria present in bulk water decreased to 37, 28, and 31, respectively. On the other hand, as the residence times increased to 8.2, 12, 24, and 48h, the median percentage of bacteria present in bulk water increased to 7, 37, 58, and 88, respectively, in the presence of a 0.2mg/L chlorine residual. The common notion that biofilms dominate the distribution system is not true under all conditions. These findings suggest that bulk water bacteria may dominate in portions of a distribution system that have a low chlorine residual.     

A comparison of statistical relational learning and graph neural networks for aggregate graph queries

Statistical relational learning (SRL) and graph neural networks (GNNs) are two powerful approaches for learning and inference over graphs. Typically, they are evaluated in terms of simple metrics such as accuracy over individual node labels. Complex aggregate graph queries (AGQ) involving multiple nodes, edges, and labels are common in the graph mining community and are used to estimate important network properties such as social cohesion and influence. While graph mining algorithms support AGQs, they typically do not take into account uncertainty, or when they do, make simplifying assumptions and do not build full probabilistic models. In this paper, we examine the performance of SRL and GNNs on AGQs over graphs with partially observed node labels. We show that, not surprisingly, inferring the unobserved node labels as a first step and then evaluating the queries on the fully observed graph can lead to sub-optimal estimates, and that a better approach is to compute these queries as an expectation under the joint distribution. We propose a sampling framework to tractably compute the expected values of AGQs. Motivated by the analysis of subgroup cohesion in social networks, we propose a suite of AGQs that estimate the community structure in graphs. In our empirical evaluation, we show that by estimating these queries as an expectation, SRL-based approaches yield up to a 50-fold reduction in average error when compared to existing GNN-based approaches.

     

Extraction of fission palladium by Aliquat 336 and electrochemical studies on direct recovery from ionic liquid phase

The wide electrochemical window and ion exchange properties of a room-temperature ionic liquid (RTIL) have been exploited for the extraction of palladium from nitric acid medium into ionic liquid phase — followed by direct electrodeposition of the metal from the organic phase. Extraction of palladium by commercial Aliquat 336 ionic liquids, tri-n-octylmethylammonium chloride (TOMAC) and tri-n-octylmethylammonium nitrate (TOMAN), was studied as a function of [HNO₃], [NO₃⁻] and [TOMAN]. The distribution ratio (D_Pd(II)) of palladium in TOMAN increased with an increase in the concentration of nitric acid and passed through a maximum at 1.0 M nitric acid. In contrast, the D_Pd(II) value of palladium in TOMAC decreased continuously with an increase in the concentration of nitric acid. Substantial amounts of water and nitric acid were also co-extracted into the organic phase with palladium.     

Simple schemes for parallel acquisition of spreading sequences inDS/SS systems

Suboptimal parallel schemes for the acquisition of spreading sequences in chip-asynchronous spread-spectrum systems are considered. These acquisition schemes estimate the unknown delay of the received signal with respect to a locally generated spreading code. Two schemes are presented which are considerably easier to implement than the optimal estimator. An analytical expression is given for the error probability of the simpler of the two schemes, and it is shown that the average error probability of this scheme decreases exponentially with the signal-to-noise ratio. Numerical results show that the performance of both suboptimal estimators is comparable to that of the optimal estimator     

Improved authentication and computation of medical data transmission in the secure IoT using hyperelliptic curve cryptography

The Journal of Supercomputing - Data transmission is a great challenge in any network environment. However, medical data collected from IoT devices need to be transmitted at high speed to ensure...     

Entanglement in two-site Bose–Hubbard model with non-linear dissipation

In this paper, we study the decoherence and entanglement properties for the two-site Bose–Hubbard model in the presence of a non-linear damping. We apply the techniques of thermo field dynamics and then use Hartree-Fock approximation to solve the corresponding master equation. The expectation values of the approximated field operators appearing in the solution of master equation are computed self-consistently. We solve this master equation for a small time t so that we get the analytical solution, thereby we compute the decoherence and entanglement properties of the solution of the two-mode bosonic system. We have found that for a small initial time t, the entanglement of the system increases but at the same time the system decoheres exponentially.     

锌-三氧化二铬复合镀层的特性

采用由氧化锌12g/L、氢氧化钠94 g/L、2-氨基-3-羧基吡啶4.2 g/L、四乙烯五胺17g/L、三乙醇胺2g/L、专利表面活性剂0.5 g/L及碳三氧化二铬(粒径2μm)0～ 11 g/L组成的镀液,于温度50℃、pH 6.5和电流密度4A/dm2的条件下,在低碳钢上电镀Zn-Cr2O3复合镀层.其显微硬度采...     

Preparation of TEM foils from Nb-10 a/o Si.

Ductile phase toughened composites contain phases with significantly different physical properties. Consequently, these phases thin at different rates depending on the sample preparation procedure. A new TEM foil preparation method for the ductile phase toughened Nb-10 a/o Si material has been developed. The method involves chemical thinning in a 70% nitric acid/30% hydrofluoric acid solution followed by electropolishing in a 12.5% sulfuric acid/87.5% methanol electrolyte at -40 degrees C. This procedure for making TEM foils results in large thin areas with the minimum of artifacts. Mechanical grinding of a sample followed by either ion milling, dimpling, or electropolishing produced foils with large electron transparent areas, but with uncharacteristic features of the original Nb-10 a/o Si alloy microstructure. These artifacts were identified as dislocations, surface mottling, and antiphase domains.