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Drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) has become an increasingly serious public health problem and has complicated tuberculosis (TB) treatment. Levofloxacin (LOF) is an ideal anti-tuberculosis drug in clinical applications. However, the detailed molecular mechanisms of LOF-resistant M. tuberculosis in TB treatment have not been revealed. Our study performed transcriptome and methylome sequencing to investigate the potential biological characteristics of LOF resistance in M. tuberculosis H37Rv. In the transcriptome analysis, 953 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified; 514 and 439 DEGs were significantly downregulated and upregulated in the LOF-resistant group and control group, respectively. The KEGG pathway analysis revealed that 97 pathways were enriched in this study. In the methylome analysis, 239 differentially methylated genes (DMGs) were identified; 150 and 89 DMGs were hypomethylated and hypermethylated in the LOF-resistant group and control group, respectively. The KEGG pathway analysis revealed that 74 pathways were enriched in this study. The overlap study suggested that 25 genes were obtained. It was notable that nine genes expressed downregulated mRNA and upregulated methylated levels, including pgi, fadE4, php, cyp132, pckA, rpmB1, pfkB, acg, and ctpF, especially cyp132, pckA, and pfkB, which were vital in LOF-resistant M. tuberculosis H37Rv. The overlapping genes between transcriptome and methylome could be essential for studying the molecular mechanisms of LOF-resistant M. tuberculosis H37Rv. These results may provide informative evidence for TB treatment with LOF.

Additional file 2: Supplementary table 1. DEGs in different profiles.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to understand how tuberculosis (TB) control institutes raise awareness of TB among domestic migrants in China, specifically whether migrants have received TB information and how they received it. Methods: This multi-level analysis included both county-level data and individual-level data covering 31 provinces in mainland China. Multi-level logistic models were used to explore the factors associated with receiving TB information. Results: This analysis included 205 990 migrants from 31 provinces and municipalities. Only 77 460 (37.60%) migrants reportedly received any TB information in mainland China. The center for disease control and prevention (CDC), the center for tuberculosis control (CTC), and the center for prevention and treatment of chronic diseases (CPTCD) were the most likely to provide TB information for migrants in comparison to other types of TB control institutes, such as general hospitals, specialized hospitals, and community healthcare centers. The odds ratios were calculated as: 1.563 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.246–1.959) for CDCs, 1.385 (95% CI 1.063–1.804) for CTCs, and 1.723 (95% CI 1.424–2.085) for CPTCDs. Conclusions: China has not achieved universal coverage of TB awareness. TB awareness levels are higher in regions with CDC, CTC, and CPTCD institutes. Domestic migrants who have moved to western areas are more likely to have received TB information. Keywords: Tuberculosis, Transients and migrants, Health awareness

By using a change of scale and space, we study a class of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) whose solutions are drift--perturbed and exhibit behaviour analogous to standard Brownian motion including to the Law of the Iterated Logarithm (LIL). Sufficient conditions ensuring that these processes obey the LIL are given., Comment: 10 pages

This paper considers some the existence and uniqueness of strong solutions of stochastic neutral functional differential equations. The conditions on the neutral functional relax those commonly used to establish the existence and uniqueness of solutions of NSFDEs for many important classes of functional, and parallel the conditions used to ensure existence and uniqueness of solutions of related deterministic neutral equations. Exponential estimates on the almost sure and p--th mean rate of growth of solutions under the weaker existence conditions are also given., Comment: 35 pages

This paper studies the large fluctuations of solutions of finite--dimensional affine stochastic neutral functional differential equations with finite memory, as well as related nonlinear equations. We find conditions under which the exact almost sure growth rate of the running maximum of each component of the system can be determined, both for affine and nonlinear equations. The proofs exploit the fact that an exponentially decaying fundamental solution of the underlying deterministic equation is sufficient to ensure that the solution of the affine equation converges to a stationary Gaussian process., Comment: 28 pages

Because of the vehemence of market competence, the individuation and diversification of consumer’s demands and the complexity of products, the virtual prototyping technology for complex product becomes one of studying and applying hotspots in current simulation technology. The paper proposes a novel organization structure of multi-agent system for virtual prototype engineering, thus to support the life-cycle collaboration roundly and effectively. Then the paper discusses the four types of agents—information agents, service agents, platform agents and application agents in detail. And the paper illustrates the relations among types of agents. At last, it proposes two key techniques of MAS: the internal structure of agent and agent communication language. All these prove that MAS is effectively and extendable when applying to virtual prototype engineering.

Imperfect transmission of block-coded images often results in lost blocks. Best neighborhood matching (BNM) is a very good error concealment algorithm to achieve high quality restored image. However, the computation complexity of BNM is high due to the full search method. A fast error concealment method named intelligent two-step BNM (ITSBNM) is proposed, where an intelligent search method is developed for most time consuming stage. We alternatively use browse search and fine search in block matching process. The fine search used herein employs strategy of diamond search to find matching blocks. Simulation experiments have been performed on blocks lost images, and simulation results show that ITSBNM can achieve a good tradeoff between the computation and the visual quality of image restoration, meanwhile it is about only 8-10% of BNM in term of processing speed. Lots of simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a digital TV (total variation) restoration model based on graph theory, motivated by the classical continuous TV restoration model of Rudin,Osher and Fatemi. We investigate its advantages in de-noising and enhancing non-texture images, and also analyze its shortcomings in deal with the texture images. Following the ideas of Yves Meyer in a total variation minimization framework of L. Rudin, S.Os-her and E.Fatemi, we propose a new image filtering algorithm subsuming the digital TV filter and the residual error correction scheme. In our algorithm, we decompose a given image /sub u//sup 0/ into a sum of two parts u + v by two-step method, where in the first step digital TV filter is used to obtain u which is the sketchy approximation of /sup u//sub 0/ , while the texture information in v is extracted by the residual error correction scheme using wavelet and wavelet packet thresholding technique. Experiments show our hybrid algorithm has more abroad application perspective and has better performance than digital TV filtering algorithm on real image.

In this paper, a novel multiple watermarks coding and decoding system for image copyright protection is presented. Just noticeable difference (JND) threshold in the wavelet domain is used to exactly determine the locations for watermark embedding and dynamically control the watermark strength. A multiple-based number system is proposed to skillfully convert the watermarks information into values to be embedded in the choosing wavelet coefficients of the original image. We evaluated the capacity of the watermarking method in theory and analyse the possibility for inserting multiple watermarks. Experiments show our algorithm has excellent performance.

A generalized Mumford-Shah model for color image restoration and edge detection is established in this paper. First the color images are considered as the manifold based on the "surface based method", then a new physical quantity in the form of vector product, which describes the differences of the gradient between different channels, is introduced into the regularization term of the "object", then a generalized energy functional is proposed. Finally, we proposed a fast PDE's numerical iterative algorithm utilizing the steepest descent method and half-point scheme. Experimental results show the proposed model has good ability to overcoming the bad phenomena of color fluctuations along edges caused in the straightforward extension of the original Mumford-Shah model in vectorial cases.