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  1. Abstract

    Spatial transcriptomics data play a crucial role in cancer research, providing a nuanced understanding of the spatial organization of gene expression within tumor tissues. Unraveling the spatial dynamics of gene expression can unveil key insights into tumor heterogeneity and aid in identifying potential therapeutic targets. However, in many large-scale cancer studies, spatial transcriptomics data are limited, with bulk RNA-seq and corresponding Whole Slide Image (WSI) data being more common (e.g. TCGA project). To address this gap, there is a critical need to develop methodologies that can estimate gene expression at near-cell (spot) level resolution from existing WSI and bulk RNA-seq data. This approach is essential for reanalyzing expansive cohort studies and uncovering novel biomarkers that have been overlooked in the initial assessments. In this study, we present STGAT (Spatial Transcriptomics Graph Attention Network), a novel approach leveraging Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to discern spatial dependencies among spots. Trained on spatial transcriptomics data, STGAT is designed to estimate gene expression profiles at spot-level resolution and predict whether each spot represents tumor or non-tumor tissue, especially in patient samples where only WSI and bulk RNA-seq data are available. Comprehensive tests on two breast cancer spatial transcriptomics datasets demonstrated that STGAT outperformed existing methods in accurately predicting gene expression. Further analyses using the TCGA breast cancer dataset revealed that gene expression estimated from tumor-only spots (predicted by STGAT) provides more accurate molecular signatures for breast cancer sub-type and tumor stage prediction, and also leading to improved patient survival and disease-free analysis. Availability: Code is available at https://github.com/compbiolabucf/STGAT.

     
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  2. Abstract

    In oligotrophic oceans, the smallest eukaryotic phytoplankton are both significant primary producers and predators of abundant bacteria such asProchlorococcus. However, the drivers and consequences of community dynamics among these diverse protists are not well understood. Here, we investigated how trophic strategies along the autotrophy‐mixotrophy spectrum vary in importance over time and across depths at Station ALOHA in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. We combined picoeukaryote community composition from a 28‐month time‐series with traits of diverse phytoplankton isolates from the same location, to examine trophic strategies across 13 operational taxonomic units and 8 taxonomic classes. We found that autotrophs and slower‐grazing mixotrophs tended to prevail deeper in the photic zone, while the most voracious mixotrophs were relatively abundant near the surface. Within the mixed layer, there was greater phagotrophy when conditions were most stratified and when Chlaconcentrations were lowest, although the greatest temporal variation in trophic strategy occurred at intermediate depths (45–100 m). Dynamics at this site are consistent with previously described spatial patterns of trophic strategies. The success of relatively phagotrophic phytoplankton at shallower depths in the most stratified waters suggests that phagotrophy is a competitive strategy for acquiring nutrients when energy from light is plentiful.

     
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  3. Event detection in power systems aims to identify triggers and event types, which helps relevant personnel respond to emergencies promptly and facilitates the optimization of power supply strategies. However, the limited length of short electrical record texts causes severe information sparsity, and numerous domain-specific terminologies of power systems makes it difficult to transfer knowledge from language models pre-trained on general-domain texts. Traditional event detection approaches primarily focus on the general domain and ignore these two problems in the power system domain. To address the above issues, we propose a Multi-Channel graph neural network utilizing Type information for Event Detection in power systems, named MC-TED , leveraging a semantic channel and a topological channel to enrich information interaction from short texts. Concretely, the semantic channel refines textual representations with semantic similarity, building the semantic information interaction among potential event-related words. The topological channel generates a relation-type-aware graph modeling word dependencies, and a word-type-aware graph integrating part-of-speech tags. To further reduce errors worsened by professional terminologies in type analysis, a type learning mechanism is designed for updating the representations of both the word type and relation type in the topological channel. In this way, the information sparsity and professional term occurrence problems can be alleviated by enabling interaction between topological and semantic information. Furthermore, to address the lack of labeled data in power systems, we built a Chinese event detection dataset based on electrical Power Event texts, named PoE . In experiments, our model achieves compelling results not only on the PoE dataset, but on general-domain event detection datasets including ACE 2005 and MAVEN. 
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  4. Background

    Cardiac surgery-associated acute kidney injury (CSA-AKI) is related to increased morbidity and mortality. However, limited studies have explored the influence of different feature selection (FS) methods on the predictive performance of CSA-AKI. Therefore, we aimed to compare the impact of different FS methods for CSA-AKI.

    Methods

    CSA-AKI is defined according to the kidney disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria. Both traditional logistic regression and machine learning methods were used to select the potential risk factors for CSA-AKI. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the performance of the models. In addition, the importance matrix plot by random forest was used to rank the features' importance.

    Results

    A total of 1977 patients undergoing cardiac surgery at Fuwai hospital from December 2018 to April 2021 were enrolled. The incidence of CSA-AKI during the first postoperative week was 27.8%. We concluded that different enrolled numbers of features impact the final selected feature number. The more you input, the more likely its output with all FS methods. In terms of performance, all selected features by various FS methods demonstrated excellent AUCs. Meanwhile, the embedded method demonstrated the highest accuracy compared with the LR method, while the filter method showed the lowest accuracy. Furthermore, NT-proBNP was found to be strongly associated with AKI. Our results confirmed some features that previous studies have reported and found some novel clinical parameters.

    Conclusions

    In our study, FS was as suitable as LR for predicting CSA-AKI. For FS, the embedded method demonstrated better efficacy than the other methods. Furthermore, NT-proBNP was confirmed to be strongly associated with AKI.

     
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  5. A large fraction of marine primary production is performed by diverse small protists, and many of these phytoplankton are phagotrophic mixotrophs that vary widely in their capacity to consume bacterial prey. Prior analyses suggest that mixotrophic protists as a group vary in importance across ocean environments, but the mechanisms leading to broad functional diversity among mixotrophs, and the biogeochemical consequences of this, are less clear. Here we use isolates from seven major taxa to demonstrate a tradeoff between phototrophic performance (growth in the absence of prey) and phagotrophic performance (clearance rate when consuming Prochlorococcus ). We then show that trophic strategy along the autotrophy-mixotrophy spectrum correlates strongly with global niche differences, across depths and across gradients of stratification and chlorophyll a . A model of competition shows that community shifts can be explained by greater fitness of faster-grazing mixotrophs when nutrients are scarce and light is plentiful. Our results illustrate how basic physiological constraints and principles of resource competition can organize complexity in the surface ocean ecosystem. 
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  6. This communication measures the inter-helical angle of the 10-23 DNAzyme-substrate complex by atomic force microscopy (AFM). specificity. Herein, we have devised a strategy to assemble the DNAzyme-substrate complex into a periodic DNA 2D array, which allows reliable study of the conformation of the 10-23 DNAzyme by AFM imaging and fast Fourier transform (FFT). Specifically, the angle between the two flanking helical domains of the catalytic core has been determined via the repeating distance of 2D array. We expect that the same strategy can generally be applicable for studying other nucleic acid structures. 
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