University of California, Riverside

Brooks A.J., LeFebvre J.C., Forman J.A., Vattipalli S., Belianinov A., Titze M., Cybart S.A.

Middleton A., Choi S.K., Walker S., Austermann J., Burgoyne J.R., Butler V., Chapman S.C., Crites A.T., Duell C.J., Freundt R.G., Huber A.I., Huber Z.B., Hubmayr J., Keller B., Lin L.T., et. al.

Qu R.Y., Boehm A.M., LeFebvre J.C., Vattipalli S., Parachikunnumal A., Kim A., Titze M.T., Belianinov A.A., Bielejec E.S., Ohta T., Cybart S.A.

Miller A., LeFebvre J.C., Vattipalli S., Sarkar N., Lily M., Cybart S.A.

Saini S., Rezaeian S., Akbari A., Badie B., Sheng J.

Attia A., Toraih E., Ardis C., Omar M., Abdelmaksoud A., Tatum D., Killackey M., Levy S., Paramesh A.

BACKGROUND: Obesity is a significant barrier to kidney transplantation for patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). We aimed to evaluate the long-term impact of metabolic and bariatric surgery (MBS) on kidney transplantation access and outcomes in individuals with obesity and patients with ESRD. STUDY DESIGN: A retrospective cohort study using data from 64 US healthcare organizations included 132,989 individuals with obesity (BMI ≥ 30 kg/m²) and ESRD requiring dialysis, of whom 6,263 (4.6%) underwent MBS. Propensity score matching produced 1:1 matched groups of 6,238 patients each, analyzed for 10 years. Primary outcomes included rates of kidney transplant waitlist placement, transplantation, and overall mortality. Secondary outcomes focused on 22,979 transplant recipients, including 1,701 (7.4%) patients who underwent MBS, to evaluate posttransplant adverse events. RESULTS: During a median follow-up of 33.3 months (MBS) and 28.5 months (controls), patients who underwent MBS demonstrated higher rates of waitlist placement (19.12% vs 10.53%, hazard ratio [HR] 1.800, 95% CI 1.636 to 1.980, p < 0.001) and transplantation (27.06% vs 16.09%, HR 1.712, 95% CI 1.584 to 1.852, p < 0.001) at 10 years, with benefits evident within 1-month postoperation. Mortality was lower in the MBS group (30.55% vs 36.44%, HR 0.768, 95% CI 0.723 to 0.817, p < 0.001). In transplant recipients, patients who underwent MBS had lower cardiovascular complications (37.3% vs 40.6%, risk ratio 0.92, p = 0.007) and all-cause mortality (16.70% vs 20.88%, HR 0.82, p < 0.001), with no significant differences in graft rejection or failure. CONCLUSIONS: MBS significantly improves access to kidney transplantation and long-term survival for obese patients with ESRD. Patients who underwent MBS demonstrated notable improvements in cardiovascular health, potentially leading to a better quality of life and survival. These findings suggest that MBS should be considered as part of the comprehensive care for this high-risk population.

Lynch S.C., Na F., Reyes-Gonzalez E., Bossard E., Alarcon K.S., Eskalen A., Gilbert G.S.

The microbiomes of plants can modulate the impacts of pests, including through interactions with the microbiomes of pathogen vectors, such as ambrosia beetles. Although physical and chemical traits of plant hosts are known to affect beetle-carried microbes, how beetle and host microbiomes interact is seldom explored. We aimed to determine whether wood-inhabiting endophytes mediate host susceptibility to Fusarium dieback, an emergent tree disease complex that includes ambrosia beetle vectors. We studied three competent host tree species ( Persea americana, Salix spp., and Platanus racemosa) common in disease hot spots in agricultural and wildland habitats. Using culturing methods, we compared the wood microbiomes of 319 attacked and 133 nonattacked trees across a network of 47 beetle-infested and 41 noninfested plots in Southern California, United States. We conducted 1,148 in vitro assays to evaluate antagonism by wood-inhabiting endophytic fungi (60 species) and bacteria (40 species) to the Fusarium pathogens and found 15 fungal and 11 bacterial species with clear antagonism to the pathogen. Such wood endophytes may have potential to protect tree hosts as biological control agents. However, antagonistic microbes were more common in attacked trees than in nonattacked trees, suggesting that either the abundance of antagonistic fungi and bacteria in the wood microbiome is insufficient to determine the host susceptibility to attack or antagonistic strains could be enriched in attacked trees in response to the pathogen invasion. Wood-inhabiting microbial communities were consistently different between cultivated Persea americana and wildland tree species, as there were some differences based on host attack status. Differences between attacked and nonattacked trees were reflected in different microbial consortia rather than the abundance of individual, antagonistic microbial species. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .

Thomas A.P., Suneel V., Karthika P.S., Alex M.J., Papa F., Rao V.T., Srinivas G., Rao E.P., Sudheesh K.

Abstract Fourteen years of monthly repeated expendable conductivity–temperature–depth sections across the northeastern Bay of Bengal were used to examine the interannual variability of temperature inversions during Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) years. Data averaged over three regions at the latitude band of 15°–19°N along the Port Blair–Kolkata shipping transect reveal occurrences of temperature inversions during November–February. Notably, inversions with higher thickness (∼92 m) and intensity (3.24°C) occurred at relatively shallow depths (∼50 m) during the 2012 positive IOD compared to the 2016 negative IOD (∼25-m thickness, 1.91°C intensity, at 86-m depth). The intensity of the inversion layer gradually weakened from Kolkata to Port Blair during the 2012 and 2019 positive IOD years and vice versa during the co-occurrence of IOD with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in 2015. The observed stratification was higher during 2012 and 2019 positive IOD years. Salt budget analysis revealed that the advection of freshwater plumes was the primary reason for this observed high stratification. Interestingly, on average, the inversion layer occupied 73%–86% of the barrier layer during the positive IOD years (2012 and 2019) and 40%–55% during the 2016 negative IOD (nIOD) year, from Kolkata to Port Blair. Heat budget analysis revealed that the net surface heat flux and penetrative shortwave radiation were the governing factors responsible for the observed inversion characteristics in the study region during different IOD phases. Our analysis indicates that undulations from westward-propagating Rossby waves were the driving mechanism behind the shallow and deep occurrences of inversions in our study region during the positive (2012 and 2019) and negative (2016) phases of IOD. The changes in mixed layer temperature caused by these wave processes were notably more dominant than the effect of the heat trapped in the inversion layer. Significance Statement The increase of temperature with depth in the ocean, known as temperature inversion, forms over the northern Bay of Bengal regularly during winter. The heat trapped in the inversion layer is believed to impact the sea surface temperature and, hence, the region’s climate. Therefore, using 14 years of expendable conductivity–temperature–depth data collected along the Kolkata–Port Blair transect through passenger ships, the year-to-year variability of temperature inversion is studied. Due to excess freshwater plumes, weak downwelling Rossby wave propagation, and conducive heat fluxes, intense temperature inversions formed near the surface in the 2012 positive Indian Ocean dipole year compared to the 2016 negative Indian Ocean dipole year. The heat trapped in the inversion does not seem to impact sea surface temperature as it is eroded due to the propagation of the upwelling Rossby waves.

Sánchez Gómez J.Á., Mo W., Zhao J., Liu Y.

Talukder Z., Lu B., Ren S., Islam M.A.

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising technique for decentralized privacy-preserving Machine Learning (ML) with a diverse pool of participating devices with varying device capabilities. However, existing approaches to handle such heterogeneous environments do not consider “fairness” in model aggregation, resulting in significant performance variation among devices. Meanwhile, prior works on FL fairness remain hardware-oblivious and cannot be applied directly without severe performance penalties. To address this issue, we propose a novel hardware-sensitive FL method called \(\mathsf {FairHetero} \) that promotes fairness among heterogeneous federated clients. Our approach offers tunable fairness within a group of devices with the same ML architecture as well as across different groups with heterogeneous models. Our evaluation under MNIST , FEMNIST , CIFAR10 , and SHAKESPEARE datasets demonstrates that \(\mathsf {FairHetero} \) can reduce variance among participating clients’ test loss compared to the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, resulting in increased overall performance.

Magill N., Pires A.R., Weiler M.

AbstractThe ellipsoid embedding function of a symplectic manifold gives the smallest amount by which the symplectic form must be scaled in order for a standard ellipsoid of the given eccentricity to embed symplectically into the manifold. It was first computed for the standard four‐ball (or equivalently, the complex projective plane) by McDuff and Schlenk, and found to contain the unexpected structure of an “infinite staircase,” that is, an infinite sequence of nonsmooth points arranged in a piecewise linear stair‐step pattern. Later work of Usher and Cristofaro‐Gardiner–Holm–Mandini–Pires suggested that while four‐dimensional symplectic toric manifolds with infinite staircases are plentiful, they are highly nongeneric. This paper concludes the systematic study of one‐point blowups of the complex projective plane, building on previous work of Bertozzi‐Holm‐Maw‐McDuff‐Mwakyoma‐Pires‐Weiler, Magill‐McDuff, Magill‐McDuff‐Weiler, and Magill on these Hirzebruch surfaces. We prove a conjecture of Cristofaro‐Gardiner–Holm–Mandini–Pires for this family: that if the blowup is of rational weight and the embedding function has an infinite staircase then that weight must be . We show also that the function for this manifold does not have a descending staircase. Furthermore, we give a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of an infinite staircase in this family which boils down to solving a quadratic equation and computing the function at one specific value. Many of our intermediate results also apply to the case of the polydisk (or equivalently, the symplectic product of two spheres).

Guo X., Lu J., Miao L., Shen E.

Aging is a time-dependent process of functional decline influenced by genetic and environmental factors. Age-related mitochondrial changes remain incompletely understood. Here, we found that compared to the wild type, the mitochondria of long-lived daf-2 C. elegans maintain youthful morphology and function. Through quantitative proteomic analysis on isolated mitochondria, we identified 257 differentially expressed candidates. Analysis of these changed mitochondrial proteins reveals a significant upregulation of five key mitochondrial metabolic pathways in daf-2 mutants, including branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), reactive oxygen species (ROS), propionate, β-alanine, and fatty acids (FA), all of which are related to daf-2-mediated longevity. In addition, mitochondrial ribosome protein abundance slightly decreased in daf-2 mutants. A mild reduction in mitochondrial elongation factor G (gfm-1) by RNAi extends the lifespan of wild type while decreasing lipid metabolic process and cytoplasmic fatty acid metabolism, suggesting that proper inhibition of mitochondrial translation activity might be important for lifespan extension. Overall, our findings indicate that mitochondrial metabolic modulation contributes to the longevity of daf-2 mutants and further highlights the crucial role of mitochondria in aging.

Phillips J., Bodaghi S., Vidalakis G., Blaha G.M.

‘Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus’ (CLas), the agent associated with the Huanglongbing (HLB) citrus disease, is commonly detected using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) with hydrolysis probes. Internal standards are typically included in the qPCR assays to reduce the risk of false negatives caused by inhibitors. When the internal standard is detected but CLas is not, it is generally assumed that the pathogen is absent from the tested sample. However, our study shows that trace amounts of CLas may go undetected if the internal standard is either overly abundant or too dissimilar to CLas. To overcome these limitations, we developed a synthetic internal standard (IS) that uses the same primer as the CLas target sequence, along with three to four downstream nucleotides, but with a unique internal sequence derived from smooth hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zygaena; IS-SHK). This sequence matches the G/C content and melting temperature of the CLas target and was specifically selected to minimize potential interference from other nucleic acid materials in citrus samples. To minimize competition between the IS-SHK standard and the CLas target, an average of only 21 molecules of IS-SHK standard is added to each qPCR reaction. Therefore, when IS-SHK standard is detected at expected levels and CLas is not, the absence of CLas is confirmed rather than inhibition of the detection. Conversely, the absence of both IS-SHK standard and CLas suggests the presence of a qPCR inhibitor, warranting retesting of the sample.

Paul S.J., Morán S., Arratia M., Brooks W.K., Hakobyan H., Alaoui A.E., Achenbach P., Alvarado J.S., Armstrong W.R., Atac H., Avakian H., Baashen L., Baltzell N.A., Barion L., Bashkanov M., et. al.

Javed S., Ali S., Goldy C.J., Nawab B., Baniya A., Dillman A.R.

The growing reliance on chemical pesticides in agriculture has raised significant concerns about their environmental and health impacts. This study investigates the potential of Indigenous entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs), specifically Steinernema pakistanense and Heterorhabditis indica, as biological control agents for Leucinodes orbonalis, the brinjal fruit and shoot borer, a major pest in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. A comprehensive soil sampling was carried out across 30 locations. Molecular identification via PCR and sequencing confirmed the taxonomic classification of the isolated strains, showing high genetic similarity to known EPN species. The reproductive potential of the isolated strains varied, with Pak.S.SA.22 exhibiting the highest fecundity, averaging 91,944 offspring per larva, indicating strong biocontrol potential. Laboratory bioassays at different concentrations showed that Pak.S.SA.22 achieved 100% mortality of L. orbonalis at a concentration of 200 IJs/mL, confirming its effectiveness. Field trials further validated these findings, demonstrating up to 90% pest control efficacy over multiple application intervals, highlighting the practical applicability of this strain in field conditions. These results advocate for the inclusion of indigenous EPNs in integrated pest management (IPM) programs as a sustainable, environmentally friendly alternative to chemical pesticides, contributing to the promotion of sustainable agricultural practices.