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Microcin C7 (McC) as a viable form of antimicrobial has gained substantial attention due to its distinctive antimicrobial activity, by targeting aspartyl tRNA synthetase. McC can be a potential solution against pathogenic microbial infections in the postantibiotic era. However, considering that degradation by digestive enzymes can disrupt the function of this peptide in the gastrointestinal tract, in this study, we attempt to design McC variants to overcome several barriers that may affect its stability and biological activity. The mccA gene encoding the McC peptide precursor was mutated and 12 new McC variants with trypsin resistance were found. The Yej+rimL− strain was used as an indicator to determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs). The results showed that three variants, including R2A, R2T and R2Q, among 12 variants formed by the replacement of the second arginine of the McC peptide with different amino acids, were resistant to trypsin and had an outstanding antimicrobial ability, with MIC values of 12.5, 25, and 25 μg/mL, respectively. Taken together, our findings show that the engineering of the site-directed mutagenesis of McC significantly enhances McC trypsin resistance and maintains a great antimicrobial activity.

The application of multi-label text classification in charge prediction aims at forecasting all kinds of charges related to the content of judgment documents according to the actual situation, which plays a vital role in the judgment of criminal cases. Existing classification algorithms have high accuracy for the single-charge prediction, but their accuracy for the multi-charge prediction is low. To solve this problem, in this paper we introduce a novel hierarchical nested attention structure model with relevant law article information to predict the multi-charge classification of legal judgment documents. By considering the correlation between different charges, the accuracy of multi-charge prediction is greatly improved. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant and consistent improvements over other state-of-the-art baselines.

Multi-label text classification (MLC) task, as one of the sub-tasks of natural language processing, has broad application prospects. On the basis of studying the previous research work, this research takes the relationship among text information, leading label information and predictive label information as the frame and analyzes the information loss of original text and leading label, decoding error accumulation. We propose an improved multi-step multi-classification model to mitigate the phenomenon of error prediction, label repetition and error accumulation. The model uses multi-step and multi-classification task to complete multi-label prediction. It uses the leading label and the original text as input, and the next to-be-predicted label as output. The co-attention mechanism is operated between the original text and the leading label. The attention of the original text to the leading label is helpful to filter out the error accumulation problem caused by the error prediction. The features is combined in a manner of difference and concatenation, which highlights the auxiliary effect of the model structure on feature extraction. In order to avoid the influence of the feature dimension on the performance of long short-term memory (LSTM), a multi-layer fully-connected classifier is used instead to predict the label. Through experimental validation, the performance of our model on the multi-label text classification task shows the current optimal level, which fully proves the superiority of our model.

Legal judgment prediction (LJP), as an effective and critical application in legal assistant systems, aims to determine the judgment results according to the information based on the fact determination. In real-world scenarios, to deal with the criminal cases, judges not only take advantage of the fact description, but also consider the external information, such as the basic information of defendant and the court view. However, most existing works take the fact description as the sole input for LJP and ignore the external information. We propose a Transformer-Hierarchical-Attention-Multi-Extra (THME) Network to make full use of the information based on the fact determination. We conduct experiments on a real-world large-scale dataset of criminal cases in the civil law system. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art LJP methods on all judgment prediction tasks.

Although water is one of the most important nutrients and is essential for various physiological processes within the body, it does not receive adequate consideration when ensuring optimal nutrition and growth performance in piglets. This study was conducted to investigate the effects of drinking water temperature (DWT) and flow rate (DWF) on growth performance, nutrient digestibility and cecum microflora in weaned piglets during cold weather. Sixty-four piglets with an average body weight of 8.60 ± 0.5 kg were allotted into four groups with four replicates in each group and four pigs in each replicate. The DWT and DWF were set for each group as follows: (1) 13 °C + 300 mL/min, (2) 13 °C + 700 mL/min, (3) 30 °C + 300 mL/min and (4) 30 °C + 700 mL/min, respectively. All groups were fed the same diet during the 28 d trial. The body weight at day 0 and day 29, as well as daily feed intake, were recorded. Diarrhea severity was assessed every day. Fresh fecal samples were collected for four consecutive days at the end of the experiment for the digestibility test. Cecum content was collected after sacrifice for microbial composition analysis. The results indicated that: (1) DWT at 30 °C promoted the average daily gain (ADG) of weaned piglets considerably (p = 0.043) and decreased feed to weight ratio when compared with DWT at 13 °C (p = 0.045). DWF had no substantial effect on the growth performance of piglets (p > 0.05). (2) The 30 °C DWT groups had higher apparent digestibility of crude protein, crude fat and energy than the 13 °C DWT groups (p < 0.05), while DWF had no significant effect on the apparent digestibility of nutrients (p > 0.05). (3) DWT at 30 °C increased the Bacteroidetes abundance and decreased the Proteobacteria abundance in cecum digesta. The change in these two factors may be related to a decrease in diarrhea and the improvement of growth performance. Different DWF had no substantial effect on the cecum microbial structure. To sum up, providing a DWT of 30 °C to weaned piglets in cold weather reduced the abundance of harmful bacteria in the cecum and improved the apparent nutrient digestibility, which is beneficial for maintaining a healthy intestinal microenvironment and promoting growth performance. A lower DWF of 300 mL/min had no adverse effect on growth performance. Therefore, a combination of 30 °C + 300 mL/min is recommended for weaned piglets during cold weather for the consideration of animal welfare and production efficiency.

Abstract Smad5 (small mothers against decapentaplegic 5) protein is a receptor-regulated member of the Smad family proteins, mainly participating in the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling pathway in its phosphorylated form. This article will provide a detailed review of Smad5, focusing on its gene characteristics, protein structure, and subcellular localization properties. We will also explore the related signaling pathways and the mechanisms of Smad5 in respiratory diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchial asthma, pulmonary arterial hypertension(PAH), lung cancer, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Additionally, the review will cover aspects such as proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, anti-fibrosis, and mitochondrial function metabolism. In addition, the review will cover aspects of proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, anti-fibrosis and functional mitochondrial metabolism related to the above topics. Numerous studies suggest that Smad5 may play a unique and important role in the pathogenesis of respiratory system diseases. However, in previous research, Smad5 was mainly used to broadly determine the activation of the BMP signaling pathway, and its own function has not been given much attention. It is worth noting that Smad5 has distinct nuclear-cytoplasmic distribution characteristics different from Smad1 and Smad8. It can undergo significant nuclear-cytoplasmic shuttling when intracellular pH (pHi) changes, playing important roles in both the classical BMP signaling pathway and non-BMP signaling pathways. Given that Smad5 can move intracellularly in response to changes in physicochemical properties, its cellular localization may play a crucial role in the development of respiratory diseases. This article will explore the possibility that its distribution characteristics may be an important factor that is easily overlooked and not adequately considered in disease research.

Off-line high-power tests of the fundamental power couplers prior to their on-line operations are of importance for ensuring their operating reliability and stability. To test the couplers using a limited power supply effectively, a movable standing wave (SW) resonant test system with an extraordinary power gain has been developed at Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMP, CAS). The system consists of a movable resonator having two movable shorts for the enhancement and movement of the SW field, and a tunable secondary coupler for feeding power into the resonator without reflection. The proof-of-principle structure of the system has been built and tested both at the low-power and at the high-power levels. The low-power test demonstrates that the moving range of the SW resonant field is over half a wavelength which ensures that the fundamental couplers can be tested by SW field at all reflected phases, and the system can provide a power gain ranging from 50 to 94, corresponding to 200–376 (4×50–4×94) of power gain in the case of traveling wave resonant ring system. Two types of multipacting inside the couplers were observed during the high-power tests and the mechanism of their influences on the power gain was analyzed. This movable and high-power-gain solution can be beneficial for the promotion of SW resonant test systems for fundamental couplers.