Produce is increasingly recognized as a reservoir of human pathogens and transferable antibiotic resistance genes. This study aimed to explore methods to characterize the transferable resistome of bacteria associated with produce. Mixed salad, arugula, and cilantro purchased from supermarkets in Germany were analyzed by means of cultivation- and DNA-based methods. Before and after a nonselective enrichment step, tetracycline (TET)-resistant Escherichia coli were isolated and plasmids conferring TET resistance were captured by exogenous plasmid isolation. TET-resistant E. coli isolates, transconjugants, and total community DNA (TC-DNA) from the microbial fraction detached from leaves or after enrichment were analyzed for the presence of resistance genes, class 1 integrons, and various plasmids by real-time PCR and PCR-Southern blot hybridization. Real-time PCR primers were developed for IncI and IncF plasmids. TET-resistant E. coli isolated from arugula and cilantro carried IncF, IncI1, IncN, IncHI1, IncU, and IncX1 plasmids. Three isolates from cilantro were positive for IncN plasmids and bla_CTX-M-1 From mixed salad and cilantro, IncF, IncI1, and IncP-1β plasmids were captured exogenously. Importantly, whereas direct detection of IncI and IncF plasmids in TC-DNA failed, these plasmids became detectable in DNA extracted from enrichment cultures. This confirms that cultivation-independent DNA-based methods are not always sufficiently sensitive to detect the transferable resistome in the rare microbiome. In summary, this study showed that an impressive diversity of self-transmissible multiple resistance plasmids was detected in bacteria associated with produce that is consumed raw, and exogenous capturing into E. coli suggests that they could transfer to gut bacteria as well.

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Colour image watermarking has become one of the most important algorithms for copyright protection. The following paper will present an innovative scheme for watermarking blind colour images using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fast Walsh Hadamard transform (FWHT) and the Hessenberg decomposition as its basis. First, two-level DWT followed by FWHT are used to decompose the host image’s red channel. Next, the FWHT coefficients are split into 4× 4 non-overlapping blocks. Then, each selected block is decomposed using Hessenberg decomposition, where the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix H is quantified to embed the watermark information. Peak signalto-noise ratio, normalized cross-correlation and structural similarity index measure are used to evaluate the feasibility and the robustness. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed watermarking scheme is highly invisible with PSNR> 40 dB, for several watermarked colour images, with a capacity of 4096 bits and execution time of 0.7415 s. The proposed watermarking scheme is also highly resistant to both common image processing and geometrical attacks such as filtering, JPEG2000, noise adding, cropping, scaling, blurring and sharpening, and others

Modelling diversity is especially valuable in soft skills learning, where contextual awareness and understanding of different perspectives are crucial. This paper presents an application of a diversity analytics pipeline to generate domain diversity profiles for learners as captured in their comments while watching videos for learning a soft skill. The datasets for analysis were collected from a series of studies on learning presentation skills with Active Video Watching system (AVW-Space). Two user studies (with 37 postgraduates and 140 undergraduates, respectively) were compared. The learners’ diversity and personal profiles are used to further understand and highlight any notable patterns about their domain coverage on presentation skills.

ABSTRACT To our knowledge all the previous researches and studies for extracting the likely cause of emotion spikes was for comments and reviews with non-Arabic languages. Although, According to a study performed by Semiocast , Arabic was the fastest growing language on Twitter in 2011, and was the 6th most used language on Twitter in 2012. While a wide range of Arabic opinionated posts are broadcasted, research in the area of Arabic sentiment analysis remain sparse and show a very slow progress compared to that being carried out in other languages, mainly in English . For that, our work will be to identifying the likely causes of strong and sudden change of emotions within the temporal dimension of influential users’ emotion flow in Arabic Twitter we chose twitter because Twitter as a microblogging platform, receives over 500 million tweets worldwide every day as per 2016.These emotion spikes are the reaction of users toward certain events. Hence, our system will try to extracts keyphrases, which associated with each identified emotion spike, and passes them to an analyze step. Then the system will detect the named-entities and events or topics identification since the extracted keyphrases indicate a change on user’s emotions, and represent the causes of a particular emotion spike. 

Plants are colonized by diverse microorganisms, which may positively or negatively influence the plant fitness. The positive impact includes nutrient acquisition, enhancement of resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, both important factors for plant growth and survival, while plant pathogenic bacteria can cause diseases. Plant pathogens are adapted to negate or evade plant defense mechanisms, e.g. by the injection of effector proteins into the host cells or by avoiding the recognition by the host. Plasmids play an important role in the rapid bacterial adaptation to stresses and changing environmental conditions. In the plant environment, plasmids can further provide a selective advantage for the host bacteria, e.g. by carrying genes encoding metabolic pathways, metal and antibiotic resistances, or pathogenicity-related genes. However, we are only beginning to understand the role of mobile genetic elements and horizontal gene transfer for plant-associated bacteria. In this review, we aim to provide a short update on what is known about plasmids and horizontal gene transfer of plant associated bacteria and their role in plant-bacteria interactions. Furthermore, we discuss tools available to study the plant-associated mobilome, its transferability, and its bacterial hosts.