Showing papers by "Hungarian Academy of Sciences published in 2022"

Detection and elimination of viruses infecting sweet potatoes in Hungary

Abstract: Sweet potato has been grown in Hungary for the last three decades, and its popularity is increasing among farmers and consumers. Its production is hampered by pests and diseases due to poor agricultural practices, such as the use of virus-infected propagation materials. We tested the presence of 15 viruses by PCR and quantitative PCR in 110 sweet potato plants collected from seven regions in Hungary. Seven viruses in single or multiple infections associated with a wide range of foliar symptoms were detected: sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus (SPCSV), sweet potato virus G (SPVG), sweet potato virus C (SPVC), sweet potato feathery mottle virus (SPFMV), sweet potato virus 2 (SPV2), sweet potato leaf curl virus (SPLCV), and sweet potato pakakuy virus (SPPV). This is the first report on the occurrence of the begomovirus SPLCV in sweet potatoes in Hungary. The infectivity and identity of these viruses were confirmed through bioassays (grafting to Ipomoea setosa) and sequencing of the PCR-amplified sections of their genomes, respectively. Due to the necessity for virus-free sweet potato propagation material in Hungary, virus elimination was carried out successfully in five out of six genotypes important for Hungarian farmers using heat treatment and meristem tip culture. All five viruses detected in the plants before heat treatment were removed except SPPV, which persists after heat treatment. Production and strict regulation of virus-free sweet potato propagation materials are recommended to avoid exacerbating the virus situation and protect Hungarian farmers from further losses.

Spin Dynamics of Moving Bodies in Rotating Black Hole Spacetimes

Abstract: The dynamics of spinning test bodies, moving in rotating black hole (Kerr, Bardeen-like and Hayward-like) spacetimes, are investigated. In Kerr spacetime, all the spherical, zoom-whirl and unbound orbits are considered numerically. Along spherical orbits and for high spin, an amplitude modulation is found in the harmonic evolution of the spin precessional angular velocity, caused by the spin-curvature coupling. Along the discussed zoom-whirl and unbound orbits, the test body approaches the center so much that it passes through the ergosphere. Near and inside the ergosphere, the variation of the spin direction can be very rapid. The effects of the spin-curvature coupling is also investigated. The initial values are chosen such a way, that the body and its spin move in the equatorial plane of the coordinate space and of the comoving frame, respectively. Hence, a clear effect of the spin-curvature coupling is observed as the orbit and the spin vector leave the equatorial plane. Additional effects in the spin precessional angular velocity and in the evolution of the Boyer–Lindquist coordinate components of the spin vector is also considered. Finally, in case of different regular black holes, the spin-curvature coupling influences differently the orbit and the spin evolutions.

Proteome-wide landscape of solubility limits in a bacterial cell

Abstract: Proteins are prone to aggregate when expressed above their solubility limits. Aggregation may occur rapidly, potentially as early as proteins emerge from the ribosome, or slowly, following synthesis. However, in vivo data on aggregation rates are scarce. Here, we classified the Escherichia coli proteome into rapidly and slowly aggregating proteins using an in vivo image-based screen coupled with machine learning. We find that the majority (70%) of cytosolic proteins that become insoluble upon overexpression have relatively low rates of aggregation and are unlikely to aggregate co-translationally. Remarkably, such proteins exhibit higher folding rates compared to rapidly aggregating proteins, potentially implying that they aggregate after reaching their folded states. Furthermore, we find that a substantial fraction (~ 35%) of the proteome remain soluble at concentrations much higher than those found naturally, indicating a large margin of safety to tolerate gene expression changes. We show that high disorder content and low surface stickiness are major determinants of high solubility and are favored in abundant bacterial proteins. Overall, our study provides a global view of aggregation rates and hence solubility limits of proteins in a bacterial cell.

Stepfamilies across Europe and overseas, 1550–1900

Abstract: This special issue investigates the families arising from death and the remarriage of a parent to consider the outcomes for the children, parents and stepparents from 1550 to 1900. It investigates historical demography to establish the numbers and types of stepfamilies. The introduction sketches several themes such as: the lingering effects of parental loss; how remarriage shapes stepfamily patterns in Western and East Central Europe; the effects of being a stepchild; stepparent caregiving and the household economy; when illegitimate children become stepchildren; household structure, property and inheritance regimes; and avenues for future research. This stepfamilies issue explores the cleavages as well as similarities in stepfamilies from Western Europe to Eastern Europe and looks beyond the continent into the overseas territories of the Dutch and Portuguese empires.

Language-Grounded Indoor 3D Semantic Segmentation in the Wild

Abstract: Recent advances in 3D semantic segmentation with deep neural networks have shown remarkable success, with rapid performance increase on available datasets. However, current 3D semantic segmentation benchmarks contain only a small number of categories – less than 30 for ScanNet and SemanticKITTI, for instance, which are not enough to reflect the diversity of real environments (e.g., semantic image understanding covers hundreds to thousands of classes). Thus, we propose to study a larger vocabulary for 3D semantic segmentation with a new extended benchmark on ScanNet data with 200 class categories, an order of magnitude more than previously studied. This large number of class categories also induces a large natural class imbalance, both of which are challenging for existing 3D semantic segmentation methods. To learn more robust 3D features in this context, we propose a language-driven pre-training method to encourage learned 3D features that might have limited training examples to lie close to their pre-trained text embeddings. Extensive experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art 3D pre-training for 3D semantic segmentation on our proposed benchmark (+9% relative mIoU), including limited-data scenarios with +25% relative mIoU using only 5% annotations.

Modality

Abstract: The notion of modality is almost inextricably intertwined with metaphysics, some kind of theory of what is real, what exists, and why (a theory of ‘first causes’). At the center of the commonsensical theory is the real world, but the idea is that there exist, or at least there can exist, other worlds.

Time and space

Abstract: We owe the recognition of a deep connection between time, space, and gravity to the 20th century, but people have used language to speak about spatial and temporal matters long before the development of Euclidean geometry, let alone general relativity. Throughout this book, we approach problems through language use, in search of a naive theory that can be reasonably assumed to underlie human linguistic competence.

Optimization of Bonus-Malus Systems

Abstract: Bonus-Malus System (BMS) is a risk managing method mostly used in liability insurances. The most general application of the BMS is in the Motor third-party liability insurance. In a BMS, there are finitely many classes, each having a different premium. At the start of the contract, each policyholder is assigned to the "initial class". Subsequently, suppose the policyholder has a claim in the following period. In that case, he/she moves to a worse class, so the policyholder's payment may increase in the subsequent period. If he/she does not have a claim in a particular period, then he/she moves to a better class; therefore, his/her payment may become less in the following period. The classification rule – how many classes the policyholder will move up or down in the system – is called the transition rule. Hence, a transition rule specifies where the policyholder will be reclassified in the subsequent period for each possible claim. Our contribution to the literature of the optimization of the BMS can be summarized as: • We investigate a model that was introduced by Heras et al. (2004) but with a modified objective function. We proved that an optimal premium-scale always exists with this objective function in which all premiums equal one of the risk groups expected claim. • We considered the same model with a profit constraint. In this case, we proved that an optimal premium-scale always exists in which there is only one type of premium that is unequal to any risk group's expected claim. • We introduced a MILP model for the optimization of transition rules with fixed premiums. We considered unified and non-unified transition rules optimization. In the case of unified transition rules, we gave the rule to exclude those transition rules that would lead to a non-irreducible Markov chain. • We introduced a MILP model for the joint optimization of transition rules and premiums. We can determine the exact solution with the investigated objective function when we do not consider the profit constraint. However, we can only approximate it otherwise. • We introduced an extended version of the model, where instead of the stationary probabilities, we use multi-period optimization. • We introduced modeling approaches to consider the BMS premium with other statistical estimations in the final premium. Finally, we compared the methods with numerical experiments on realistic data. • We introduced an optimization model for a BMS where the classification depends on the claim amount.

P1407: cdk6 in hematopoietic stem cells: more than a cell cycle kinase

Abstract: Background: Cell cycle kinase CDK6 acts as a transcriptional regulator and links cell cycle progression to differentiation and cellular homeostasis. CDK6 has been implicated in the initiation and progression of lymphoid and myeloid malignancies and regulates the balance of long-term hematopoietic stem cell (LT-HSC) dormancy and activation. CDK6 acts in a kinase-dependent and kinase-independent way to regulate haematopoiesis. Aims: As CDK4/6 inhibitors have entered the clinics, we aim at understanding and dissecting kinase-dependent and independent-functions of CDK6 in adult HSCs with application of different stress conditions. Methods: To investigate kinase-independent effects of CDK6 in HSCs, we made use of a mouse model harbouring a kinase inactivated mutant of CDK6 (Cdk6KM/KM). We performed in vivo serial transplantation and homing assays to study HSC re-population capacity. Low-input RNA-Seq of LT-HSCs after the 2nd serial transplantation round was used to understand transcriptional effects. Stressed haematopoiesis was further induced by chemical treatment with polyI:C. Results:Cdk6-/- HSCs are impaired in their ability to re-populate. This was not the case for Cdk6KM/KM hematopoietic cells evidenced by re-plating assays in vitro and serial transplantation settings in vivo. Cdk6KM/KM derived LT-HSCs maintain a stem-cell signature and express genes indicative for HSC dormancy at high levels compared to wild type LT-HSCs. Transcriptional analysis pointed to an altered and improved homing of Cdk6KM/KM LT-HSCs, which was confirmed in homing assays in vivo. This indicates a repressive role of CDK6 in stem cell homing. Upon polyI:C treatment, Cdk6KM/KM mice reacted with decreased stimulation as more Lin-Sca-1+c-kit+ (LSK) cells were residing in the bone marrow. Summary/Conclusion: Our data uncovers kinase-dependent and kinase-independent functions of CDK6 for HSC self-renewal and homing. Whereas serial transplantation settings and homing depend on kinase-inactive CDK6, poly-I:C treatment relies on kinase-activity.

Foundations of non-compositionality

Abstract: For the past half century, linguistic semantics was dominated by issues of compositionality to such an extent that the meaning of the atomic units (which were generally assumed to be words or their stems) received scant attention. Here we will put word meaning front and center, and base the entire plan of the book on beginning with the lowest meaningful units, morphemes, and building upward.

Valuations and learnability

Abstract: AbstractIn this chapter we describe a rational, but low resolution, model of probability. We do this for two reasons: first, to show how a naive theory, using only discrete categories, can still explain how people think about uncertainty, and second, as a model for fitting discrete theories of valuation (which arise in many other contexts from moral judgments to household finance) into the overall 4lang framework.

Negation

Abstract: AbstractOur goal in this chapter is to provide a formal theory of negation in ordinary language, as opposed to the formal theory of negation in logic and mathematics. In order to provide for a linguistically and cognitively sound theory of negation, we argue for the introduction of a dyadic negation predicate lack and a force dynamic account of affirmation and negation in general.

Before Fieldwork: Textual and Visual Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples and the Emergence of World Ethnography in Hungary in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract: This chapter explores the emergence of a discourse on world ethnography in the Kingdom of Hungary between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century. The author regards archives as a ″field″ for a historian of anthropology and elaborates on three main points: first, the principal agents of the so-called ″world ethnography″ in local, Jesuit, Lutheran, and Calvinist contexts; second, the respective historical sources that resulted from their work, i.e., missionary accounts, travelogues, (school)books of geography, and (school)books of natural history; and third, cultural stereotypes occuring in both texts and images, and relating to non-European indigenous peoples, for example, those of America, Asia, and Oceania. Examining the rise of global ethnography in Hungary as an entangled history, this chapter presents three detailed examples of the representation of indigenous peoples: demonization, hierarchization/barbarization, and exoticization. Demonstrating the Eurocentric background of Enlightenment ideas like that of savagery – barbarism – civilization, the chapter analyzes stereotypes relating to American Indians, Asian peoples (especially, the Chinese and the Samoyed), Polar peoples (the Greenland Inuit and the Sámi), and the Aborigins of Australia and Oceania.

PEA: Improving the Performance of ReLU Networks for Free by Using Progressive Ensemble Activations

Abstract: In recent years novel activation functions have been proposed to improve the performance of neural networks, and they show superior performance compared to the ReLU counterpart. However, there are environments, where the availability of complex activations is limited, and usually only the ReLU is supported. In this paper we propose methods that can be used to improve the performance of ReLU networks by using these efficient novel activations during model training. More specifically, we propose ensemble activations that are composed of the ReLU and one of these novel activations. Furthermore, the coefficients of the ensemble are neither fixed nor learned, but are progressively updated during the training process in a way that by the end of the training only the ReLU activations remain active in the network and the other activations can be removed. This means that in inference time the network contains ReLU activations only. We perform extensive evaluations on the ImageNet classification task using various compact network architectures and various novel activation functions. Results show 0.2-0.8% top-1 accuracy gain, which confirms the applicability of the proposed methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the proposed methods on semantic segmentation and we boost the performance of a compact segmentation network by 0.34% mIOU on the Cityscapes dataset.

Középkori magyar uralkodók archeogenetikai vizsgálata

Abstract: Középkori uralkodóink sírjai a történelem viharaiban elvesztek, maradványaik ismeretlen helyen, azonosítatlanul nyugszanak. Máig egyedül III. Béla maradványai kerültek elő, valamint szent királyaink ereklyéi maradtak meg az utókornak, melyek eredetiségét azonban sokan kétségbe vonják. Munkánk során a legtöbb királyunk temetkezési helyéül szolgált székesfehérvári királyi bazilika területén feltárt maradványok archeogenetikai vizsgálatát végezzük el, és azonosítjuk uralkodóink csontvázait. Emellett a Szent László-herma koponyaereklyéjét is megvizsgáltuk, hogy valódiságát igazoljuk. Míg a székesfehérvári vizsgálatokból csak részeredményeket közlünk, lévén a munka még nem fejeződött be, addig a herma vizsgálata lezajlott, bemutatjuk, hogy eredetisége igazolást nyert, valóban Szent László koponyáját rejti. Mi több, azt is ismertetjük, hogyan járult hozzá Szent László genomvizsgálata az Árpád-házi maradványok személyazonosításához, és kimutatjuk a honfoglalók genetikai örökségét a Szent Király örökítőanyagában.