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Brevibacillus brevis is one of the most common biocontrol strains with broad applications in the prevention and control of plant diseases and insect pests. In order to deepen our understanding of B. brevis genomes, describe their characteristics comprehensively, and mine secondary metabolites, we retrieved the genomic sequences of nine B. brevis strains that had been assembled into complete genomes from the NCBI database. These genomic sequences were analyzed using phylogenetic analysis software, pan-genome analysis software, and secondary metabolite mining software. Results revealed that the genome size of B. brevis strains ranged from 6.16 to 6.73 Mb, with GC content ranging from 47.0% to 54.0%. Phylogenetic analysis classified the nine B. brevis strains into three branches. The analyses of ANI and dDDH showed that B. brevis NEB573 had the potential to become a new species of Brevibacillus and needed further research in the future. The pan-genome analysis identified 10032 gene families, including 3257 core gene families, 3112 accessory gene families, and 3663 unique gene families. In addition, 123 secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters of 20 classes were identified in the genomes of nine B. brevis strains. The major types of biosynthetic gene clusters were non-ribosomal peptide synthase (NRPS) and transAT polyketide synthase (transAT-PKS). Furthermore, a large number of untapped secondary metabolites were identified in B. brevis. In summary, this study elucidated the pan-genome characteristics of the biocontrol bacterium B. brevis and identified its secondary metabolites, providing valuable insights for its further development and utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitrogen loss is an unavoidable problem during organic waste composting, while exogenous microbial inoculation is a promising strategy for reducing nitrogen loss and improving compost quality. This study was designed to probe available nitrogen levels, bacterial community composition, and the levels of nitrogen functional genes present when composting cattle manure with or without the addition of Bacillus coagulans X3. Bacterial supplementation was associated with the prolongation of the thermophilic stage and improved maturity of the resultant compost. At the maturity stage, samples to which B. coagulans X3 had been added exhibited significant increases in ammonium nitrogen, nitrate nitrogen, and total nitrogen levels. The dominant bacterial phyla observed in these composting samples were Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteriota, and Chloroflexi. B. coagulans X3 addition resulted in significant increases in relative Firmicutes abundance during the thermophilic and cooling stages while also increasing amoA and nosZ gene abundance and reducing nirS gene levels over the course of composting. Together, these data suggest that B. coagulans X3 supplementation provides an effective means of enhancing nitrogen content in the context of cattle manure composting through the regulation of nitrification and denitrification activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning is a privacy-preserving machine learning framework where multiple data owners collaborate to train a global model under the orchestra of a central server. The local training results from trainers should be submitted to the central server for model aggregation and update. Busy central server and malicious trainers can introduce the issues of a single point of failure and model poisoning attacks. To address the above issues, the trusty decentralized federated learning (called TrustDFL) framework has been proposed in this paper based on the zero-knowledge proof scheme, blockchain, and smart contracts, which provides enhanced security and higher efficiency for model aggregation. Specifically, Groth 16 is applied to generate the proof for the local model training, including the forward and backward propagation processes. The proofs are attached as the payloads to the transactions, which are broadcast into the blockchain network and executed by the miners. With the support of smart contracts, the contributions of the trainers could be verified automatically under the economic incentive, where the blockchain records all exchanged data as the trust anchor in multi-party scenarios. In addition, IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is introduced to alleviate the storage and communication overhead brought by local and global models. The theoretical analysis and estimation results show that the TrustDFL efficiently avoids model poisoning attacks without leaking the local secrets, ensuring the global model's accuracy to be trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the distributed ledger technology underlying cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain has empowered various industries, such as supply chain management, healthcare, government services, e-voting, etc. However, the ever-growing ledger on each node has been the main bottleneck for blockchain scalability as the network scale expands, which worsens in blockchain-enabled IoT scenarios with resource-limited devices. With the support of the Reed–Solomon (RS) code, the Cuckoo-Store (CS), a ledger storage optimization engine, is proposed in this paper to dramatically decrease the storage burden on each node by encoding the ledger as data segments with redundancy and distributing them to multiple nodes. These distributed data segments can be collected and decoded using RS code to recover the original ledger. Furthermore, the Cuckoo filter (CF) is used to guarantee the integrity of the encoded segments, which helps detect the forged segments and facilitates the process of ledger recovery. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the CS engine can decrease the storage in each node by more than 94%, and the original ledger can be recovered efficiently with acceptable communication overheads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to find an efficient and economical wetland substrate to treat mine wastewater containing various heavy metals, and effectively realize the resource utilization of water treatment residuals, in this paper, the treatment efficiency of mine wastewater containing various heavy metals was investigated using unburned ceramsite prepared from water treatment residuals (UCWTR) and clay ceramsite. The continuous dynamic test results showed that the removal rate of Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, and Fe can reach more than 98.5% after the UCWTR-based CWs runs for 56 days, and its concentration was 30.05%, 24.85%, 20.82%, 14.63%, and 7.91% lower than that of the clay ceramsite-based CWs, respectively. SEM, XPS, and FT-IR showed that the characteristic peaks of two ceramsites were basically similar. The ceramsite undergoes ion exchange, coordination complexation, and chelation reaction with Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, and Fe under the action of the gel of internal groups -OH, C=O, Al-OH, Si-Fe-O and C-S-H. Compared with clay ceramsite, the ion exchange reaction and chelation reaction of -OH effect and the coordination reaction of C=O effect of carboxyl group in UCWTR were enhanced. In conclusion, using UCWTR as a CWs substrate can effectively enhance the adsorption capacity of heavy metals, providing a scientific basis for the application of UCWTR-based CWs in mine wastewater treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A yellow, Gram-stain-negative, aerobic, non-spore-forming, motile, and rod-shaped bacterial strain designated M6T was isolated from fully weathered granitic soil. The strain showing the highest 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity to M6T was Sandaracinobacteroides hominis SZY PN-1T (96.3%), the only species in the genus Sandaracinobacteroides. The average nucleotide identity and digital DNA-DNA hybridization value between these two strains were 72.6% and 18.0% respectively. Growth was inhibited by NaCl (≥0.1% (w/v)). Strain M6T contained C18:1ω7c (33.8%), C14:0 2-OH (16.6%), summed feature 3 (15.8%), and C16:0 (12.6%) as the major fatty acids. The polar lipids profile consisted of phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, an unidentified glycolipid, four unidentified phospholipids, and four unidentified lipids. The genome of strain M6T was 3.4 Mb with 67.7% GC content. Further genomic analysis revealed a biosynthetic gene cluster for zeaxanthin, the production of which was verified by a high-resolution mass spectrum. The existence of multiple genes for aromatic ring-hydroxylating dioxygenases implies the potential ability for organic pollution controlling. The morphological, physiological, chemotaxonomic, and phylogenetic analysis clearly distinguished this strain from its phylogenetic neighbors, thus strain M6T represents a novel species of the genus Sandaracinobacteroides, for which the name Sandaracinobacteroides saxicola sp. nov. is proposed. The type of strain is M6T (=CGMCC 1.19164T=NBRC 115420T). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision transformers (ViTs) demonstrate exceptional performance in numerous computer vision tasks owing to their self-attention modules. Despite improved network performance, transformers frequently require significant computational resources. The increasing need for data privacy has encouraged the development of federated learning (FL). Traditional FL places a computing burden on edge devices. However, ViTs cannot be directly applied through FL on resource-constrained edge devices. To utilize the powerful ViT structure, we reformulated FL as a federated knowledge distillation training algorithm called FedVKD. FedVKD uses an alternating minimization strategy to train small convolutional neural networks on edge nodes and periodically transfers their knowledge to a large server-side transformer encoder via knowledge distillation. FedVKD affords the benefits of reduced edge-computing load and improved performance for vision tasks, while preserving FedGKT-like asynchronous training. We used four datasets and their non-IID variations to test the proposed FedVKD. When utilizing a larger dataset, FedVKD achieved higher accuracy than FedGKT and FedAvg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) parameter, charge voltage has a significant influence on the microstructure and properties of hard coatings. In this work, the Mo–Cu–V–N coatings were prepared at various charge voltages using HIPIMS technique to study their mechanical and tribological properties. The microstructure was analyzed by scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The mechanical and tribological properties were investigated by nano-indentation and ball-on-disc tribometer. The results revealed that all the coatings showed a solid-solution phase of B1-MoVN, the V atoms dissolved into face-centered cubic (FCC) B1-MoN lattice by partial substitution of Mo, and formed a solid-solution phase. Even at a high Cu content (~8.8 at. %), the Cu atoms existed as an amorphous phase. When the charge voltage increased, more energy was put into discharge, and the microstructure changed from coarse structure into dense columnar structure, resulting in the highest hardness of 28.2 GPa at 700 V. An excellent wear performance with low friction coefficient of 0.32 and wear rate of 6.3 × 10−17 m3/N·m was achieved at 750 V, and the wear mechanism was dominated by mild abrasive and tribo-oxidation wear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phytopathogenic fungi infect crops, presenting a worldwide threat to agriculture. Polyene macrolides are one of the most effective antifungal agents applied in human therapy and crop protection. In this study, we found a cryptic polyene biosynthetic gene cluster in Actinokineospora spheciospongiae by genome mining. Then, this gene cluster was activated via varying fermentation conditions, leading to the discovery of new polyene actinospene (1), which was subsequently isolated and its structure determined through spectroscopic techniques including UV, HR-MS, and NMR. The absolute configuration was confirmed by comparing the calculated and experimental electronic circular dichroism (ECD) spectra. Unlike known polyene macrolides, actinospene (1) demonstrated more versatile post-assembling decorations including two epoxide groups and an unusual isobutenyl side chain. In bioassays, actinospene (1) showed a broad spectrum of antifungal activity against several plant fungal pathogens as well as pathogenic yeasts with minimum inhibitory concentrations ranging between 2 and 10 μg/mL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]