7 research outputs found
Failures count too: effect of the application of commercial inoculum of arbuscular fungi in a vineyard during its plantation
No full textSymbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) has long been recognized for its positive impact on plant health. Today, various companies market AMF-based commercial inoculants as biofertilizers or biostimulants for sustainable agriculture. However, their consistent efficacy in real-world field settings remains uncertain. This study investigated the influence of a commercial AMF inoculant on a newly planted vineyard featuring a local grape cultivar grafted onto a common rootstock (‘Ritcher 110’). Over two years, the physiological well-being, growth, and productivity of 20 inoculated vines compared to 20 control counterparts were monitored. The impact of inoculation on soil bacterial diversity and the infectivity of soil was assessed. Notably, AMF-inoculated plants exhibited consistently lower values in photosynthesis, growth, and grape production, although statistical significance was not always reached. Additionally, the total production remained unaffected, but there was a significant decrease in °Brix and pH values, suggesting delayed grape ripening in mycorrhizal plants, potentially promoting secondary metabolites accumulation. Regarding soil effects, the inoculation's impact was slight, with no substantial changes in soil mycorrhizal infectivity and only slight shifts in the microbial community's metabolic profile. Numerous studies highlight the context-dependent nature of AMF inoculation's effects, making it challenging to predict outcomes in field conditions. Failures found in trials like the present one provides valuable scientific information, contributing to determine the prerequisites for effective biofertilizer use in commercial viticulture. Ultimately, the effectiveness of AMF-based biofertilizers remains contingent on specific conditions, exposing the need for additional research to ensure their consistent and reliable application
Le Clone 8, un anticorps monoclonal dirigé contre le CD154 humain, reconnait et inhibe le clivage du CD154 murin
No full textLe CD154 est une glycoprotéine transmembranaire de type 2, impliquée dans plusieurs maladies auto-immunes, telles que le lupus érythémateux systémique, la polyarthrite rhumatoïde, la sclérose en plaques. Il joue également un rôle central dans l’activation des cellules immunitaires, notamment dans le cancer. L’interaction du CD154 avec son récepteur principal le CD40, joue un rôle important dans plusieurs processus cellulaires, tels que la prolifération, la différenciation des cellules et le changement de classes d’immunoglobulines. Une altération de cette interaction peut entraîner un dysfonctionnement aboutissant à différentes maladies, tel que le syndrome d'hyper-IgM lié au chromosome X. Cette maladie représente des taux élevés des IgM contre des taux plus faibles d'IgA, d'IgE et d'IgG. Des études antérieures ont démontré qu’un CD154 membranaire, muté à son site de clivage et rendu non-clivable, induit une activation immunitaire accrue et une cytotoxicité élevée contre les cellules tumorales exprimant son récepteur, le CD40. Dans cette optique, notre laboratoire a développé un anticorps monoclonal, Clone 8, capable de reconnaître le CD154 humain et d’inhiber son clivage spontané et induit par le CD40. Dans le travail illustré ici, nous avons prouvé que le Clone 8 reconnaît et lie efficacement le CD154 murin, compte tenu que le site de clivage du CD154 humain et du CD154 murin sont 100% homologues. De même, nous avons montré la capacité du Clone 8 à bloquer le clivage spontané et induit du CD154 aussi bien dans un modèle in-vitro où la concentration du CD154 soluble a été dosée en présence et en absence du Clone 8, qu’ex-vivo en utilisant les cellules T provenant des souris transgéniques OT-II et qui comprennent majoritairement des cellules T CD4+. De plus, nos résultats, ont révélé les cellules spléniques OT-II comme un bon modèle ex-vivo pour l’évaluation ultérieure de l’effet biologique du Clone 8 sur la prolifération cellulaire. L’ensemble de ces résultats ouvrent la voie à de nouvelles stratégies thérapeutiques visant à exploiter un CD154 stabilisé à la membrane pour optimiser l’activation immunitaire, notamment en immunothérapie du cancer.CD154 is a type II transmembrane glycoprotein involved in several autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. It also plays a central role in immune cell activation, particularly in cancer. The interaction between CD154 and its main receptor, CD40, is crucial for various cellular processes, including cell proliferation, cell differenciation and immunoglobulin class switching. Disruptions in this interaction can lead to dysfunctions associated with different diseases, such as X-linked hyper-IgM syndrome, which is characterized by elevated IgM levels and lower levels of IgA, IgE, and IgG. Previous studies have demonstrated that a membrane-bound CD154, mutated at its cleavage site to prevent its cleavage, enhances immune activation and increases cytotoxicity against tumor cells expressing CD40. In this context, our laboratory has developed a monoclonal antibody, Clone 8, which specifically recognizes human CD154 and inhibits both spontaneous and CD40-induced cleavage. In the work illustrated here, we demonstrated that Clone 8 effectively recognizes and binds murine CD154, given that the cleavage site of human and murine CD154 represents 100% homology between both species. In addition, our data showed that Clone 8 is capable of blocking spontaneous and CD40-induced cleavage of CD154 both in an in-vitro model, where the concentration of soluble CD154 was assayed in the presence and absence of Clone 8, and in ex-vivo using T cells from transgenic mice, OT-II, which include predominantly CD4+ T cells. In addition, we have revealed splenocytes from OT-II mice as an efficient ex-vivo model for the ultimate evaluation of the effect of Clone 8 on specific biological responses such as cell proliferation. Taken together, these results pave the way for new therapeutic strategies aiming at exploiting a CD154 resistant to cleavage and maintained on cell surface for an optimal immune activation, notably in cancer immunotherapy
Failures count too: effect of the application of commercial inoculum of arbuscular fungi in a vineyard during its plantation
No full textSymbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) has long been recognized for its positive impact on plant health. Today, various companies market AMF-based commercial inoculants as biofertilizers or biostimulants for sustainable agriculture. However, their consistent efficacy in real-world field settings remains uncertain. This study investigated the influence of a commercial AMF inoculant on a newly planted vineyard featuring a local grape cultivar grafted onto a common rootstock (‘Ritcher 110’). Over two years, the physiological well-being, growth, and productivity of 20 inoculated vines compared to 20 control counterparts were monitored. The impact of inoculation on soil bacterial diversity and the infectivity of soil was assessed. Notably, AMF-inoculated plants exhibited consistently lower values in photosynthesis, growth, and grape production, although statistical significance was not always reached. Additionally, the total production remained unaffected, but there was a significant decrease in °Brix and pH values, suggesting delayed grape ripening in mycorrhizal plants, potentially promoting secondary metabolites accumulation. Regarding soil effects, the inoculation's impact was slight, with no substantial changes in soil mycorrhizal infectivity and only slight shifts in the microbial community's metabolic profile. Numerous studies highlight the context-dependent nature of AMF inoculation's effects, making it challenging to predict outcomes in field conditions. Failures found in trials like the present one provides valuable scientific information, contributing to determine the prerequisites for effective biofertilizer use in commercial viticulture. Ultimately, the effectiveness of AMF-based biofertilizers remains contingent on specific conditions, exposing the need for additional research to ensure their consistent and reliable application
Identifying the best data-driven feature selection method for boosting reproducibility in classification tasks
No full textConsidering the proliferation of extremely high-dimensional data in many domains including computer vision and healthcare applications such as computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), advanced techniques for reducing the data dimensionality and identifying the most relevant features for a given classification task such as distinguishing between healthy and disordered brain states are needed. Despite the existence of many works on boosting the classification accuracy using a particular feature selection (FS) method, choosing the best one from a large pool of existing FS techniques for boosting feature reproducibility within a dataset of interest remains a formidable challenge to tackle. Notably, a good performance of a particular FS method does not necessarily imply that the experiment is reproducible and that the features identified are optimal for the entirety of the samples. Essentially, this paper presents the first attempt to address the following challenge: "Given a set of different feature selection methods {FS1, ..., FSK }, and a dataset of interest, how to identify the most reproducible and 'trustworthy' connectomic features that would produce reliable biomarkers capable of accurately differentiate between two specific conditions?" To this aim, we propose FS-Select framework which explores the relationships among the different FS methods using a multi-graph architecture based on feature reproducibility power, average accuracy, and feature * Corresponding author. stability of each FS method. By extracting the 'central' graph node, we identify the most reliable and reproducible FS method for the target brain state classification task along with the most discriminative features fingerprinting these brain states. To evaluate the reproducibility power of FS-Select, we perturbed the training set by using different cross-validation strategies on a multi-view small-scale connectomic dataset (late mild cognitive impairment vs Alzheimer's disease) and large-scale dataset including autistic vs healthy subjects. Our experiments revealed reproducible connectional features fingerprinting disordered brain states
The use of arbuscular mycorrhizal inoculum in viticulture is not always positive: a systematic review
No full textFor more than 70 years, the scientific literature has demonstrated that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have positive effects on plant growth and stress tolerance. However, AMF have only been widely implemented in agricultural systems in the last decade. Recent reviews indicate AMF are key to the sustainability of viticulture. To explore the universality of the positive effects of AMF inoculation on grapevines, we created a database of the results from 30 publications that performed 169 experiments comparing the development of grapevine plants inoculated with AMF against control vines. We calculated inoculation dependence, as ID = ((mean of inoculated treatment – mean of control)/mean of inoculated treatment) * 100), to compare the effects of AM inoculation on the growth of grapevine plants between different experiments. In most studies, the experimental conditions differed significantly from commercial conditions, since 75% of the studies were conducted under greenhouse conditions and 71.8% of studies compared the growth of inoculated plants with plants growing in a sterilized substrate. High variability was observed in the ID of different response variables, be-tween the various rootstocks tested, and between different species compositions of AMF inoculum, demonstrating that the effects of mycorrhizal inoculation in vineyard growth are highly context dependent. This study demonstrates further research is required to characterize the effects of AMF under field conditions. Moreover, this work indicates that specific trials are needed to determine the effect of particular mycorrhizal strains on individual rootstocks under specific growing conditions before the use of AMF can be recommended to vine-growers
Translucency of monolithic ceramics and the effect of surface condition on their flexural strength and enamel wear
No full textPLEASE NOTE: This work is protected by copyright. Downloading is restricted to the BU community: please log in with a valid BU account to access and click Download. If you are the author of this work and would like to make it publicly available, please contact [email protected] (DScD) --Boston University, Goldman School of Dental Medicine, 2013 (Department of Restorative Sciences and Biomaterials).Includes bibliographic references: leaves 195-204.Objectives: New block materials have been developed to fabricate full-contour restorations. Typically, zirconia and lithium disilicate (IPS e.max CAD) are s milled to full contoured restorations and then subjected to various grinding and polishing procedures in the dentist hand to improve the fit. Various finishing procedures may affect physical and mechanical properties of the material. The purposes of this study are (1) to evaluate the wear resistance and the abrasiveness of zirconia and lithium disilicate with different surface finish against dental enamel, (2) to evaluate the flexural strength of zirconia and lithium disilicate restorative materials subjected to various finishing procedures and (2) to compare the translucency of three different brands of zirconia.
Materials and methods:
(1) 190 ceramic specimens (3 x5 x12 mm) - 10 from each group: IPS e.max CAD polished, glazed, ground and repolished, BruxZir polished, glazed, ground and repolished, Zirlux polished, glazed, ground and repolished, Zenostar polished, glazed, ground and repolished, Vita Mark II polished, Ceramco 3 polished and Unipack Prismatic porcelain polished were subjected to 600,000 strokes of enamel wear in a wear machine under a constant 400g load. Enamel specimens were prepared from sound, caries-free, extracted teeth. Measuring height and weight loss and then calculating volume loss determined the amount of enamel wear. The amount of ceramic wear was determined by measuring weight loss and calculating volume loss. Before and after 60,000, 120,000 and 600,000 strokes of wear testing; surface roughness was measured for each ceramic specimen using a portable surface roughness tester.
(2) 150 bars (2 x 4 x 20 mm) of IPS e.max CAD, BruxZir, old Zirlux, new Zirlux and Zenostar were randomly divided into 15 groups of 10 specimens each. Experimental groups are polished (Buehler Ecomet 250 polisher, 45, 15, 6, 1 micron diamond grit), ground (coarse grit diamond bur grinding) and repolished (medium and fine grit diamond bur finishing and Dialite diamond-impregnated polishers). A 3-point-bending test, span 1 5 mm, was used to measure the flexural strength of materials using an Instron machine at a crosshead speed of 0.5 mm/min with a 10 kN load cell. The surfaces of few random specimens were examined in the SEM.
(3) Spectrophotometer coIor i5 was used to measure the translucency of O.5 mm thick specimens: 30 BruxZir, 30 Zenostar and 30 Zirlux. All data was transferred to an excel sheet and translucency parameter was calculated.
Statistical analysis was conducted using t-test, one-way and two-way ANOVA and Bonferroni’s post hoc test at p = 0.05 1evel of significance.
Results:
(1) Statistical analysis revealed a significantly less enamel abrasion and greater wear resistance for the Zirconia materials than any other group. The most abrasive materials are Ceramco 3 and Unipack prismatic porcelain. Vita Mark II and IPS e.max CAD exhibit an intermediate position. Glazing and coarse grinding significantly increase the abrasiveness of Zirconia to enamel while only glazing increases the abrasiveness of IPS e.max CAD. On the ceramic level, only glazed zirconia exhibited volume loss by enamel wear.
(2) Two-Way ANOVA demonstrated significant difference in flexural strength between the test groups (p[less than] 0.05). IPS e.maX CAD demonstrated lower flexural strength than any Zirconia material tested. Surface finish did not alter the flexural strength of IPS e.max CAD. The new Zirlux flexural strength was also Iower than the old Zirlux, BruxZir and Zenostar which did not differ significantly. Bonferroni’s post hoc multiple comparison tests demonstrated that coarse grinding significantly lower the flexural strength of the zirconia materials while finishing and repolishing raise it back to its starting level except in Zenostar where repolishing cause further reduction in the flexural strength.
(3) Translucency testing demonstrated significant difference between the different brands of zirconia in the study: BruxZir is slightly less translucent than Zirlux and Zenostar.
Conclusions: Despite the limitations of this study, less wear of antagonist teeth was shown with Zirconia than with feldspathic porcelain. Polishing of zirconia full-contoured restoration is recommended for the best results in term of wear behavior and flexural strength
