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Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic, zoonotic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis that infects not only humans but also animals such as pigs, cows, buffaloes, sheep, and goats. Among them, pigs are one of the main food animals in the world. If pigs are infected with M. tuberculosis, meat products will be negatively affected, causing economic losses to the livestock industry. There is currently no systematic epidemiological assessment of swine TB in the world, so it is important to know the prevalence of swine, and these data are currently lacking, so we performed a statistical analysis. Results: We searched 6791 articles and finally included data from 35,303 pigs from 15 countries or territories, showing a combined prevalence of TB in pigs of 12.1% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 9.2 to 15.9). Among them, the prevalence rate of swine TB in Europe was 15.2% (95% CI: 11.1 to 20.7, 2491/25,050), which was higher compared with other continents, and the difference was significant; the positive rate of PCR method was higher in the detection method subgroup, which was 15.7% (95% CI: 8.0 to 31.0, 376/2261); Mycobacterium bovis was detected in pigs in the M. tuberculosis typing group (9.5%, 95% CI: 6.7 to 13.5, 1364/21,430). The positive rate is higher compared with Mycobacterium capris. Conclusion: This systematic review and meta-analysis is the first to determine the global prevalence of TB in swine herds. Although the seroprevalence of swine TB in this article is very low, the harm of TB cannot be ignored. It is important to take effective control and preventive measures to stop the spread of TB to reduce the impact of diseased pigs on animal husbandry and human health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Li-Xia. Qin, Jie-Qiong. Tan, Hai-Nan. Zhang, Jian-Guang. Tang, Bo. Jiang, Xiang-Min. Shen, Ji-Feng. Guo, Li-Ming. Tan, Beisha. Tang, Chun-Yu. Wang Context: A host of microRNAs have been reported to [...]

Objective: Bone metabolism can be influenced by a range of factors. We selected children with self‐limited epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (SeLECTS) and lifestyles similar to those of healthy children to control for the confounding factors that may influence bone metabolism. We aimed to identify the specific effects of epilepsy and/or anti‐seizure medications (ASMs) on bone metabolism. Methods: Patients with SeLECTS were divided into an untreated group and a monotherapy group, and the third group was a healthy control group. We determined the levels of various biochemical markers of bone metabolism, including procollagen type I nitrogenous propeptide (PINP), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), osteocalcin (OC), collagen type I cross‐linked C‐telopeptide (CTX), calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, parathyroid hormone (PTH), and vitamin D3 (VD3). Results: A total of 1487 patients (from 19 centers) were diagnosed with SeLECTS; 1032 were analyzed, including 117 patients who did not receive any ASMs (untreated group), 643 patients who received only one ASM (monotherapy group), and 272 children in the healthy control group. Except for VD3, other bone metabolism of the three groups were different (p <.001). Bone metabolism was significantly lower in the untreated group than the healthy control group (p <.05). There were significant differences between the monotherapy and healthy control group in the level of many markers. However, when comparing the monotherapy and untreated groups, the results were different; oxcarbazepine, levetiracetam, and topiramate had no significant effect on bone metabolism. Phosphorus and magnesium were significantly lower in the valproic acid group than the untreated group (adjusted p <.05, Cliff's delta.282–.768). CTX was significantly higher in the lamotrigine group than in the untreated group (adjusted p =.012, Cliff's delta =.316). Significance: Epilepsy can affect many aspects of bone metabolism. After controlling epilepsy and other confounders that affect bone metabolism, we found that the effects of ASMs on bone metabolism differed. Oxcarbazepine, levetiracetam, and topiramate did not affect bone metabolism, and lamotrigine corrected some of the abnormal markers of bone metabolism in patients with epilepsy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New particle formation including atmospheric aerosol nucleation and subsequent growth, contributes to about half of cloud condensation nuclei and can grow to form haze under certain conditions, so its role in climate change and air quality is indispensable. However, various kinds of nucleation precursors create vast combinations of molecular clustering, hindering the understanding the detailed picture of nucleation mechanism. The recently appeared general neural network potential, ANI‐2x, covering most of elements composing nucleation clusters, looks promising to be embedded into the nucleation theoretical workflows to improve the nucleation simulation accuracy. Here we benchmarked ANI‐2x's performance on both low and high energy isomers based workflows through comparing it with semi‐empirical (PM7) and DFT (ωB97XD/6‐31++G(d,p)) methods. Results show that ANI‐2x is superior to PM7 in single point energy and geometry optimization calculations when compared against DFT. However, generally ANI‐2x's accuracy on high energy isomers is still far less than that on low energy isomers. Besides, force comparison indicates that PM7's accuracy is better than that of ANI‐2x. After all, accuracy of the workflow that focuses on low energy isomers can be benefitted from ANI‐2x while for high energy isomers based workflow, PM7 is still the better choice than ANI‐2x due to the more important role of force labels than that of energy labels in preparing machine learning dataset. However, due to the linear relation between the ANI‐2x force and DFT force, a scale factor of approximately 0.50 is expected to greatly improve the ANI‐2x force performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COP1 (constitutive photomorphogenic 1, also known as RFWD2) is a p53-targeting E3 ubiquitin ligase containing RING-finger, coiled-coil, and WD40-repeat domains. Recent studies have identified that COP1 is overexpressed in several cancer types and that increased COP1 expression promotes cell proliferation, cell transformation, and tumor progression. In the present study, we investigated the expression and prognostic value of COP1 in primary gastric cancer. To investigate the role of the COP1 gene in primary gastric cancer pathogenesis, real-time quantitative PCR and western blotting were performed to examine COP1 expression in paired cancerous and matched adjacent noncancerous gastric tissues. The results revealed high COP1 mRNA (P=0.030) and protein (P=0.008) expression in most tumor-bearing tissues compared with the matched adjacent non-tumor tissues. The correlated protein expression analysis revealed a negative correlation between COP1 and p53 in gastric cancer samples (P=0.005, r=-0.572). Immunohistochemical staining of gastric cancer tissues from the same patient showed a high COP1 expression and a low p53 expression. To further investigate the clinicopathological and prognostic roles of COP1 expression, we performed immunohistochemical analysis of 401 paraffin-embedded gastric cancer tissue blocks. The data revealed that high COP1 expression was significantly correlated with T stage (P=0.030), M stage (P=0.048) and TNM stage (P=0.022). Consistent with these results, we found that high expression of COP1 was significantly correlated with poor survival in gastric cancer patients (PP

Organic pollutant control is a highly significant global concern regarding human health and environmental remediation. Designing highly efficient photocatalysts for use in the removal of organic pollutants in the environment has attracted great interest in recent years. Here, a class of metal–organic framework nanoplatforms based on Fe3O4@UiO-66 with versatile combination modes are designed and synthesized for the effective detoxification of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), one of the high-risk mycotoxins. The composite systems achieved efficient adsorption and photodegradation of AFB1, benefiting from UiO-66's porous structure and Fe3O4's catalytic enhancement. A high AFB1 degradation rate of up to 90% is obtained upon using these hybrid materials. The abundant hydroxyl-free radicals produced during the photocatalytic process drive the disruption of the AFB1 structure and thereby reduce its toxicity. In addition, SL- and LS-Fe3O4@UiO-66 catalysts can be facilely recycled, maintaining more than 80% of the catalytic capacity after three cycles. Moreover, these magnetic nanocatalysts have also demonstrated excellent generalizability, achieving over 90% removal of several organic contaminants including pesticides and dyes in solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass spectrometry measurements coupled with classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have been conducted in recent years to understand the final stage of ion formation in electrospray ionization (ESI). Here, to characterize the ion formation mechanism in the recently developed droplet-assisted ionization (DAI) source, MD simulations with various conditions (solute number, temperature, ions, composition) were performed to help explain DAI-based measurements. The specific binding ability of cortisone with preformed ions (ions of sodium, cesium and iodide) in evaporating nanodroplets makes the ion formation process characteristic of both the ion evaporation and charge residue models (IEM and CRM, respectively). Most preformed ions are ejected with dozens of solvent molecules to form gas-phase ions by IEM, while clusters of one or more cortisone molecules with one or more preformed ions remain in the evaporating droplet to form gas-phase ions by CRM. As the ratio of cortisone molecules to preformed ions increases, the number of preformed ions held in the droplet without ejection by the IEM increases. In other words, increasing the molecular solute to preformed ion ratio in the droplet increases the fraction of gas-phase ions formed by CRM relative to IEM. The increase in CRM relative to IEM is accompanied by an increase in the calculated activation energy barrier, which can explain the activation energy measurements by DAI, where droplets without preformed ions exhibit higher activation energies for gas-phase ion formation than droplets containing large numbers of preformed ions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]