Introduction: Malaria remains a significant burden, and a fully protective vaccine against is critical for reducing morbidity and mortality. Antibody responses against the blood-stage antigen Merozoite Surface Protein 2 (MSP2) are associated with protection from malaria, but its extensive polymorphism is a barrier to its development as a vaccine candidate. New tools, such as long-read sequencing and accurate protein structure modelling allow us to study the genetic diversity and immune responses towards antigens from clinical isolates with unprecedented detail.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNowadays, Artificial Intelligence systems have expanded their competence field from research to industry and daily life, so understanding how they make decisions is becoming fundamental to reducing the lack of trust between users and machines and increasing the transparency of the model. This paper aims to automate the generation of explanations for model-free Reinforcement Learning algorithms by answering "why" and "why not" questions. To this end, we use Bayesian Networks in combination with the NOTEARS algorithm for automatic structure learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVascular leakage associated with vascular endothelial cell (vEC) dysfunction is a hallmark of sepsis. Causative for the decreased integrity of the vascular endothelium (vE) is a complex concurrence of pathogen components, inflammation-associated host factors, and the interaction of vECs and activated circulating immune cells. One signaling pathway that regulates the integrity of the vE is the Notch cascade, which is activated through the binding of a Notch ligand to its respective Notch receptor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (SXT) is a valuable second-line antimicrobial agent to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections. Discrepancies between various antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) methods for SXT susceptibility in S. aureus have been described.
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