Listening to bluetooth beacons for epidemic risk mitigation.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic let to efforts to develop and deploy digital contact tracing systems to expedite contact tracing and risk notification. Unfortunately, the success of these systems has been limited, partly owing to poor interoperability with manual contact tracing, low adoption rates, and a societally sensitive trade-off between utility and privacy. In this work, we introduce a new privacy-preserving and inclusive system for epidemic risk assessment and notification that aims to address these limitations.

Transcriptome analysis of root response to citrus blight based on the newly assembled Swingle citrumelo draft genome.

Background: Citrus blight is a citrus tree overall decline disease and causes serious losses in the citrus industry worldwide. Although it was described more than one hundred years ago, its causal agent remains unknown and its pathophysiology is not well determined, which hampers our understanding of the disease and design of suitable disease management.

Results: In this study, we sequenced and assembled the draft genome for Swingle citrumelo, one important citrus rootstock.

Transgenic Citrus Expressing an Arabidopsis NPR1 Gene Exhibit Enhanced Resistance against Huanglongbing (HLB; Citrus Greening).

Commercial sweet orange cultivars lack resistance to Huanglongbing (HLB), a serious phloem limited bacterial disease that is usually fatal. In order to develop sustained disease resistance to HLB, transgenic sweet orange cultivars 'Hamlin' and 'Valencia' expressing an Arabidopsis thaliana NPR1 gene under the control of a constitutive CaMV 35S promoter or a phloem specific Arabidopsis SUC2 (AtSUC2) promoter were produced. Overexpression of AtNPR1 resulted in trees with normal phenotypes that exhibited enhanced resistance to HLB.

A multiplex polymerase chain reaction method for reliable, sensitive and simultaneous detection of multiple viruses in citrus trees.

A multiplex polymerase chain reaction (mPCR) assay was developed to detect six RNA and one DNA citrus virus: Citrus leaf rugose virus (CLRV), Citrus psorosis virus (CPsV), Citrus tatter leaf virus (CTLV), Citrus tristeza virus (CTV), Citrus variegation virus (CVV), Citrus yellow mosaic virus (CYMV), and Indian citrus ringspot virus (ICRSV) from citrus plants. These seven viruses are classified in six different virus genera. Degenerate primers were designed based on the respective virus isolate sequence data available from the GenBank and were used for reliable detection of the different viruses by simplex- and mPCR.