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Objective After manually polishing the surface of railway vehicle carbodies and subsequently repairing paint defects, because of uncertainties in the vehicle operating environment and varying degrees of paint deterioration, the surface maintenance process becomes difficult to control, leading to instability in the process. Therefore, it is necessary to study the maintenance technology for the surface quality of railway vehicle carbodies. Method A rail vehicle carbody grinding robot process system is established, employing visual sensors to detect surface paint defects such as yellow spots, scratches, and peeling along the grinding path. The defects are processed through image analysis, and converted into central coordinates of the paint defect areas. The 'nine-point method' is applied for hand-eye calibration of the robot to calculate the transformation matrix. The central coordinates obtained from image acquisition are transformed into the robot working space coordinates. Using an improved adaptive genetic algorithm based on the shortest path principle, the robot coordinates are optimized for path planning to form the most efficient route for defect grinding on vehicle carbody surface. Result & Conclusion The system automatically extracts defect area central coordinates from captured images and converts them into end-effector movement coordinates in robot workspace. Through the optimization of robot defect grinding paths using the above algorithm, the system improves the efficiency of manual operation while enhancing the stability of surface quality maintenance technology for vehicle carbodies.

Objective: Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy experience disturbances in the gut microbiota. This study intends to find out the correlation between gut microbiota and clinical indices before and after radiotherapy for NSCLC. Methods: Ten patients with primary NSCLC were screened, and plasma and fecal samples were collected before and after radiotherapy, respectively. Inflammatory indices in plasma were detected. Genomic DNA was extracted from fecal specimens and sequenced on on Illumina HiSeq2000 sequencing platform. Thee sequenced data were subjected to Metagenome assembly, gene prediction, species annotation, and gene function analysis to study and analyze gut microbiota and metabolic functions. The correlation between the diversity of gut microbiota and the clinical indicators of NSCLC patients was evaluated, and the changes of gut microbiota before and after radiotherapy were observed. Results: The diversity of gut microbiota in NSCLC patients did not correlate with smoking, pathology, and inflammatory markers. The abundance of phylum (p)_Bacteroidetes increased; p_Firmicutes and p_Bacteroidetes accounted for the highest proportion in NSCLC patients, and the abundance of both was dominantly exchanged after radiotherapy. There was a decrease in genus (g)_Bifidobacterium after radiotherapy in NSCLC patients. There was no significant correlation between the diversity of gut microbiota after radiotherapy and radiotherapy sensitivity, and the structural composition and abundance of gut microbiota remained stable. Conclusion: The diversity of gut microbiota is altered after radiotherapy in NSCLC patients, showing an increase in harmful bacteria and a decrease in beneficial bacteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has confirmed that individuals with social anxiety (SA) show an attentional bias towards threat‐related stimuli. However, the extent to which this attentional bias depends on top‐down cognitive control processes remains controversial. The present study investigated the effect of working memory (WM) load on selective attention to emotional faces in both high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) groups by manipulating WM load through the inclusion of forward counting in multiples of two (low load) or backward counting in multiples of seven (high load) within a modified flanker task. In the flanker task, emotional faces (angry, happy, or neutral faces) were used as targets and distractors. A total of 70 participants (34 HSA participants; 36 LSA participants) completed the flanker task in the laboratory. The results showed that the HSA individuals performed worse when responding to angry targets. Relative to LSA individuals, HSA individuals showed interference from angry distractors in the flanker task, resulting in significantly lower accuracy in identifying angry targets compared to happy targets. These results were unaffected by the manipulation of WM load. The findings imply HSA individuals have impaired attentional control, and that their threat‐related attentional bias relies more on the bottom‐up automatic attentional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E3 ubiquitin ligases play important roles in plant immunity, but their role in soybean has not been investigated previously. Here, we used Bean pod mottle virus (BPMV)-mediated virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) to investigate the function of GmSAUL1 (Senescence-Associated E3 Ubiquitin Ligase 1) homologs in soybean. When two closely related SAUL1 homologs were silenced simultaneously, the soybean plants displayed autoimmune phenotypes, which were significantly alleviated by high temperature, suggesting that GmSAUL1a/1b might be guarded by an R protein. Interestingly, silencing GmSAUL1a/1b resulted in the decreased activation of GmMPK6, but increased activation of GmMPK3 in response to flg22, suggesting that the activation of GmMPK3 is most likely responsible for the activated immunity observed in the GmSAUL1a/1b-silenced plants. Furthermore, we provided evidence that GmSAUL1a is a bona fide E3 ligase. Collectively, our results indicated that GmSAUL1 plays a negative role in regulating cell death and immunity in soybean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vimentin expression in tumor tissues and the tumor–stroma ratio (TSR) have been demonstrated as strong prognostic factors for cancer patients, but whether they are predictive markers of neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (nCRT) outcome in locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) patients is poorly understood. This study aimed to explore the predictive significance of vimentin and TSR combined for nCRT response in LARC patients. Imaging mass cytometry (IMC) was performed to determine the association of vimentin and TSR with nCRT response in six LARC patients [three achieved pathological complete response (pCR), three did not]. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) for vimentin and TSR on biopsy tissues before nCRT and logistic regression analysis were performed to further evaluate their predictive value for treatment responses in a larger patient cohort. A trend of decreased vimentin expression and increased TSR in the pCR group was revealed by IMC. In the validation group, vimentin [odds ratio (OR) 0.260, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.102–0.602, p = 0.002] and TSR (OR 4.971, 95% CI 1.933–15.431, p = 0.002) were associated with pCR by univariate analysis. Patients in the vimentin‐low/TSR‐low or vimentin‐high/TSR‐high (OR 5.211, 95% CI 1.248–35.582, p = 0.042) and vimentin‐low/TSR‐high groups (OR 11.846, 95% CI 3.197–77.079, p = 0.001) had significantly higher odds of pCR. By multivariate analysis, only the combination of vimentin and TSR was an independent predictor for nCRT response (OR 9.324, 95% CI 2.290–63.623, p = 0.006). Our study suggested that the combined assessment of vimentin and TSR can provide additive significance and may be a promising indicator of nCRT response in LARC patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Tracy R. Rosebrock [1, 2]; Lirong Zeng [1]; Jennifer J. Brady [1]; Robert B. Abramovitch [1, 2]; Fangming Xiao [1]; Gregory B. Martin (corresponding author) [1, 2] Many bacterial [...]

The broad-spectrum rice blast resistance gene Pi9 was cloned using a map-based cloning strategy. Sequencing of a 76-kb bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) contig spanning the Pi9 locus led to identification of six tandemly arranged resistance-like genes with a nucleotide-binding site (NBS) and leucine-rich repeats (LRRs) (Nbs1-Pig--Nbs6-Pi9). Analysis of selected Pi9 deletion mutants and transformation of a 45-kb fragment from the BAC contig into the susceptible rice cultivar TP309 narrowed down Pi9 to the candidate genes Nbs2-Pi9 and Nbs3-Pi9. Disease evaluation of the transgenic lines carrying the individual candidate genes confirmed that Nbs2-Pi9 is the Pi9 gene. Sequence comparison analysis revealed that the six paralogs at the Pi9 locus belong to four classes and gene duplication might be one of the major evolutionary forces contributing to the formation of the NBS--LRR gene cluster. Semiquantitative reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR analysis showed that Pi9 was constitutively expressed in the Pi9-resistant plants and was not induced by blast infection. The cloned Pi9 gene provides a starting point to elucidate the molecular basis of the broadspectrum disease resistance and the evolutionary mechanisms of blast resistance gene clusters in rice.