Sensory fusion in the hoverfly righting reflex.

We study how falling hoverflies use sensory cues to trigger appropriate roll righting behavior. Before being released in a free fall, flies were placed upside-down with their legs contacting the substrate. The prior leg proprioceptive information about their initial orientation sufficed for the flies to right themselves properly.

Possible biased virulence attenuation in the Senegal strain of Ehrlichia ruminantium by ntrX gene conversion from an inverted segmental duplication.

Ehrlichia ruminantium is a tick-borne intracellular pathogen of ruminants that causes heartwater, a disease present in Sub-saharan Africa, islands in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, inducing significant economic losses. At present, three avirulent strains of E. ruminantium (Gardel, Welgevonden and Senegal isolates) have been produced by a process of serial passaging in mammalian cells in vitro, but unfortunately their use as vaccines do not offer a large range of protection against other strains, possibly due to the genetic diversity present within the species.

Predictors of family violence in North Carolina following initial COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.

Background: Although there is evidence that family violence increased in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, few studies have characterized longitudinal trends in family violence across the course of initial stay-at-home orders.

Objective: The purpose of the present study is to investigate patterns and predictors of family violence, such as child maltreatment and harsh punishment, during the first eight weeks of the pandemic after initial stay-at-home orders in North Carolina.

Participants And Setting: Participants included 120 families with children ages 4-11 (53% non-White, 49% female) and a primary caregiver (98% female) living in rural and suburban areas in North Carolina.

Children Persist Less When Adults Take Over.

Children need to learn to persist through challenges, yet adults sometimes step in to solve problems for them. Here, we looked at how adult taking over related to children's persistence. In an observational study (N = 34, ages 4-8), we found that parents who took over more often during a challenging puzzle task rated their children as dispositionally less persistent.

Simulation of Large Scale Neural Models With Event-Driven Connectivity Generation.

Accurate simulations of brain structures is a major problem in neuroscience. Many works are dedicated to design better models or to develop more efficient simulation schemes. In this paper, we propose a hybrid simulation scheme that combines time-stepping second-order integration of Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) type neurons with event-driven updating of the synaptic currents.

Automatic tracking of free-flying insects using a cable-driven robot.

Flying insects have evolved to develop efficient strategies to navigate in natural environments. Yet, studying them experimentally is difficult because of their small size and high speed of motion. Consequently, previous studies were limited to tethered flights, hovering flights, or restricted flights within confined laboratory chambers.

Light-Weight Portable Electroantennography Device as a Future Field-Based Tool for Applied Chemical Ecology.

Portable electroantennograms (pEAG) can further our understanding of odor plume dynamics and complement laboratory-based electroantennogram tools. pEAG's can help to address important questions such as the influence of plume structure on insect behavior, the active space of semiochemical-baited traps, and the impact of biotic and abiotic factors on this active space. Challenges associated with pEAGs include their miniaturization and sensitivity, confounding environmental odors, and processing of data.

Fast Measurements with MOX Sensors: A Least-Squares Approach to Blind Deconvolution.

Metal oxide (MOX) sensors are widely used for chemical sensing due to their low cost, miniaturization, low power consumption and durability. Yet, getting instantaneous measurements of fluctuating gas concentration in turbulent plumes is not possible due to their slow response time. In this paper, we show that the slow response of MOX sensors can be compensated by deconvolution, provided that an invertible, parametrized, sensor model is available.

An in vitro model to assess the immunosuppressive effect of tick saliva on the mobilization of inflammatory monocyte-derived cells.

Tick-borne pathogens cause potent infections. These pathogens benefit from molecules contained in tick saliva that have evolved to modulate host innate and adaptive immune responses. This is called "saliva-activated transmission" and enables tick-borne pathogens to evade host immune responses.

A user-friendly and scalable process to prepare a ready-to-use inactivated vaccine: the example of heartwater in ruminants under tropical conditions.

The use of cheap and thermoresistant vaccines in poor tropical countries for the control of animal diseases is a key issue. Our work aimed at designing and validating a process for the large-scale production of a ready-to-use inactivated vaccine for ruminants. Our model was heartwater caused by the obligate intracellular bacterium Ehrlichia ruminantium (ER).

Heterogeneity and convergence of olfactory first-order neurons account for the high speed and sensitivity of second-order neurons.

In the olfactory system of male moths, a specialized subset of neurons detects and processes the main component of the sex pheromone emitted by females. It is composed of several thousand first-order olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs), all expressing the same pheromone receptor, that contact synaptically a few tens of second-order projection neurons (PNs) within a single restricted brain area. The functional simplicity of this system makes it a favorable model for studying the factors that contribute to its exquisite sensitivity and speed.

Reactive searching and infotaxis in odor source localization.

Male moths aiming to locate pheromone-releasing females rely on stimulus-adapted search maneuvers complicated by a discontinuous distribution of pheromone patches. They alternate sequences of upwind surge when perceiving the pheromone and cross- or downwind casting when the odor is lost. We compare four search strategies: three reactive versus one cognitive.

Using insect electroantennogram sensors on autonomous robots for olfactory searches.

Robots designed to track chemical leaks in hazardous industrial facilities or explosive traces in landmine fields face the same problem as insects foraging for food or searching for mates: the olfactory search is constrained by the physics of turbulent transport. The concentration landscape of wind borne odors is discontinuous and consists of sporadically located patches. A pre-requisite to olfactory search is that intermittent odor patches are detected.

Machine learning for automatic prediction of the quality of electrophysiological recordings.

The quality of electrophysiological recordings varies a lot due to technical and biological variability and neuroscientists inevitably have to select "good" recordings for further analyses. This procedure is time-consuming and prone to selection biases. Here, we investigate replacing human decisions by a machine learning approach.

New avian paramyxoviruses type I strains identified in Africa provide new outcomes for phylogeny reconstruction and genotype classification.

Newcastle disease (ND) is one of the most lethal diseases of poultry worldwide. It is caused by an avian paramyxovirus 1 that has high genomic diversity. In the framework of an international surveillance program launched in 2007, several thousand samples from domestic and wild birds in Africa were collected and analyzed.

Multiphasic on/off pheromone signalling in moths as neural correlates of a search strategy.

Insects and robots searching for odour sources in turbulent plumes face the same problem: the random nature of mixing causes fluctuations and intermittency in perception. Pheromone-tracking male moths appear to deal with discontinuous flows of information by surging upwind, upon sensing a pheromone patch, and casting crosswind, upon losing the plume. Using a combination of neurophysiological recordings, computational modelling and experiments with a cyborg, we propose a neuronal mechanism that promotes a behavioural switch between surge and casting.

Plasminogen controls inflammation and pathogenesis of influenza virus infections via fibrinolysis.

Detrimental inflammation of the lungs is a hallmark of severe influenza virus infections. Endothelial cells are the source of cytokine amplification, although mechanisms underlying this process are unknown. Here, using combined pharmacological and gene-deletion approaches, we show that plasminogen controls lung inflammation and pathogenesis of infections with influenza A/PR/8/34, highly pathogenic H5N1 and 2009 pandemic H1N1 viruses.

Tick-borne diseases in cattle: applications of proteomics to develop new generation vaccines.

Tick-borne diseases (TBDs) affect 80% of the world's cattle population, hampering livestock production throughout the world. Livestock industry is important to rural populations not only as food supply, but also as a source of income. Tick control is usually achieved by using acaricides which are expensive, deleterious to the environment and can induce chemical resistance of vectors; the development of more effective and sustainable control methods is therefore required.

Glomerular latency coding in artificial olfaction.

Sensory perception results from the way sensory information is subsequently transformed in the brain. Olfaction is a typical example in which odor representations undergo considerable changes as they pass from olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) to second-order neurons. First, many ORNs expressing the same receptor protein yet presenting heterogeneous dose-response properties converge onto individually identifiable glomeruli.

Proteomic analyses of Ehrlichia ruminantium highlight differential expression of MAP1-family proteins.

The Rickettsiales Ehrlichia ruminantium (ER) is the causative agent of heartwater, a fatal tick-borne disease of livestock in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Caribbean, posing strong economical constraints to livestock production. In an attempt to identify the most prominent proteins expressed by this bacterium, especially those encoded by the major antigenic protein 1 (map1) multigene family, a proteome map of ER cultivated in endothelial cells was constructed by using two dimensional gel electrophoresis combined with mass spectrometry. Among the sixty-four spots detected, we could identify only four proteins from the MAP1-family; the other proteins detected were mainly related to energy, amino acid and general metabolism (26%), to protein turnover, chaperones and survival (21%) and to information processes (14%) or classified as hypothetical proteins (23%).

A new typing technique for the Rickettsiales Ehrlichia ruminantium: multiple-locus variable number tandem repeat analysis.

Ehrlichia ruminantium (ER) is a member of the order Rickettsiales transmitted by Amblyomma ticks. This obligatory intracellular bacterium is the causative agent of a fatal disease in ruminants, named heartwater. It represents a constraint on breeding development in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Caribbean.