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Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA) could be either non-syndromic or syndromic. There are significant challenges in clinically recognizing and differentiating Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome (HPS) from non-syndromic OCA.In a prospective consecutive case series, 63 patients (less than 18 years old) with a molecular genetic diagnosis of albinism (exceptA total of 63 patients were evaluated. Forty-five patients had non-syndromic OCA (11 OCA1B, 24 OCA2, 9 OCA4, and 1 OCA6), 5 patients had OA and 13 patients had HPS. All 3 BLOC-related HPS categories were seen (1 with BLOC1, 7 with BLOC-2 and 5 with BLOC-3 related HPS). All patients with OA were hyperopic, had darker fundus pigmentation, but had poor foveal development. All HPS patients had lighter fundus pigmentation. The degree of fundus pigmentation correlated positively with the iris pigmentation and also with the foveal development only in OCA2.Careful observation of the phenotype by comparison of the skin, hair, iris colour, with the degree of fundus pigmentation and foveal development may help clinically differentiate HPS from OCA patients of Chinese ethnicity even in the absence of any bleeding tendency.

Elagolix sodium is a gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) receptor antagonist that inhibits endogenous GnRH signaling by competitively binding to GnRH receptors in the pituitary gland to treat moderate to severe pain associated with endometriosis. To keep the safety and quality of the drug, a fast quantitative method by reversed-phase ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry has been developed and validated for the identification, assay and estimation of potential genotoxic impurities trimethyl phosphate and triisopropyl phosphate in commercial batches of this active pharmaceutical ingredient in accordance with International Conference on Harmonization guidelines Q2 and M7. The method was validated by assessing specificity, sensitivity, linearity, the limit of quantification and detection, accuracy, precision and robustness for above analytes at a very low concentration, whose quantification and detection limits reached to 24 and 4.8 pg/ml, respectively, and the total run time for a single injection was 6 min.

The study aimed to investigate the factors affecting the stability of imipenem and cilastatin sodium for injection (IMI/CIL) to improve the quality and stability in IMI/CIL preparation. In this study, the effects of headspace oxygen (HO), water content, particle shape, and particle size on the stability of IMI/CIL were investigated. IMI/CIL was purged with air, premixed oxygen/nitrogen gas (5%/95%), or high-purity nitrogen (99.999%) at 20, 5, or 2% oxygen levels to prepare IMI/CIL with different HO levels. IMI/CIL was stored at 30, 45, and 75% relative humidity for 30 days to prepare IMI/CIL with different water contents. High-performance liquid chromatography method was used for analysis. The results showed that oxygen, water, particle shape, and particle size had significant effects on the stability of IMI/CIL, and free water content is a better predictor of the safety and stability of imipenem and cilastatin sodium than the total water content. The optimization scheme of the above parameters is proposed, which significantly improves the stability of IMI/CIL. This study led to a better understanding of the degradation mechanism of imipenem and cilastatin sodium, and could provide a reference for the selection and control of IMI/CIL process conditions. This study would contribute to the development of IMI/CIL with improved stability.

Background Urinary tract infections (UTIs) caused by uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) are one of the most common outpatient bacterial infections. Although bacterial and host factors are reported to be associated with UTI pathogenesis, little is known about the host age-related differences in bacterial virulence factors and antimicrobial susceptibility. Methods PCRs were carried out to detect K1 capsule antigen, 15 virulence factors, and phylogenetic groups in E. coli isolates. Antimicrobial susceptibility of selected agents was determined by the disk diffusion method. Isolates were divided into 6 groups based on their host age. Results The results showed that virulence factors PapGII, PapGIII, Cnf1, Aer, Usp, Iha, OmpT, HlyA, and Sat, had highest frequencies in the host age group 0–3. Phylogenetic group B2 dominated in our isolates (59.6%) followed by group D (20.7%). In addition, 77.4% of strains isolated from 0 to 3 age group belonged to phylogenetic group B2. Antimicrobial susceptibility tests showed that E. coli strains isolated were significantly more resistant to antimicrobial agents as host age increased. Phylogenetic group B2 isolates were more susceptible to antimicrobial agents, compared to A, B1, and D isolates. Conclusion We found E. coli isolated from elders were more resistant to antimicrobial agents and had less virulence factors.

Background Escherichia coli is the leading pathogen responsible for urinary tract infection (UTI) and recurrent UTI (RUTI). Few studies have dealt with the characterization of host and bacteria in RUTI caused by E. coli with genetically identical or different strains. This study aimed to investigate the host and bacterial characteristics of E. coli RUTI based on molecular typing. Results Patients aged 20 years or above who presented with symptoms of UTI in emergency department or outpatient clinics between August 2009 and December 2010 were enrolled. RUTI was defined as patients had 2 or more infections in 6 months or 3 or more in 12 months during the study period. Host factors (including age, gender, anatomical/functional defect, and immune dysfunction) and bacterial factors (including phylogenicity, virulence genes, and antimicrobial resistance) were included for analysis. There were 41 patients (41%) with 91 episodes of E. coli RUTI with highly related PFGE (HRPFGE) pattern (pattern similarity > 85%) and 58 (59%) patients with 137 episodes of E. coli RUTI with different molecular typing (DMT) pattern, respectively. There was a higher prevalence of phylogenetic group B2 and neuA and usp genes in HRPFGE group if the first episode of RUTI caused by HRPFGE E. coli strains and all episodes of RUTI caused by DMT E. coli strains were included for comparison. The uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) strains in RUTI were more virulent in female gender, age E. coli RUTI. The use of fluoroquinolones was more likely associated with subsequent antimicrobial resistance in most types of antibiotics. Conclusions This study demonstrated that the uropathogens in RUTI were more virulent in genetically highly-related E. coli strains. Higher bacterial virulence in young age group (E. coli RUTI.

The high harmonic generation (HHG) by few-cycle laser pulses is essential for research in strong-field solid-state physics. Through comparison of high harmonic spectra of solids generated by laser pulses with varying durations, we discovered that lasers with good dispersion compensation are capable of producing a broad spectrum of high harmonics. As the pulse duration is further compressed, several interference peaks appear in the broad spectrum. Moreover, we conducted simulations using the semiconductor Bloch equation, considering the effect of Berry curvature, to better understand this process. Our work provides a valuable approach for studying HHG by few-cycle laser pulses in solid materials, expanding the application of HHG in attosecond physics.

There will be an increasing number of retired batteries in the foreseeable future. Retired batteries can reduce pollution and be used to construct a battery cycle ecosystem. To use retired batteries more efficiently, it is critical to be able to determine their State of Health (SOH) precisely and speedily. SOH can be estimated accurately through a comprehensive and inefficient charge-and-discharge procedure. However, the comprehensive charge and discharge is a time-consuming process and will make the SOH assessment for many retired batteries unrealistic. This paper proposes an accurate and efficient SOH Estimation (SOH-E) method using the actual data of retired batteries. A battery data acquisition system is designed to acquire retired batteries’ comprehensive discharge and charge data. The acquired discharge data are separated into various time interval-segregated sub-data. Then, the specially designed features for SOH-E are extracted from the sub-data. Neural Networks (NNs) are trained using these sub-data. The retired batteries’ SOH levels are then estimated after the NNs’ training. The experiments described herein use retired lead–acid batteries. The batteries’ rated voltage and capacity are 12 V and 90 Ah, respectively. Different feature value extractions and time intervals that might affect the SOH-E accuracy and are tested. The Backpropagation NN (BPNN) and Long-Short-Term-Memory NN (LSTMNN) are designed to estimate SOH in this paper. The experimental results indicate that SOH can be calculated in 30 min. The Root-Mean-Square Errors (RMSEs) are less than 3%. The proposed SOH-E can help decrease pollution, extend the life cycle of a retired battery, and establish a battery cycle ecosystem.

We have developed multi-channel dry-electrode electroencephalography (EEG) system to implement a brain computer interface (BCI) and discriminate four-class motor imagery signals. The EEG channels recorded from Fz, F3, F4, C3, Cz, C4, P3, and P4 positions, according to the international 10‒20 EEG system, were acquired and wirelessly transmitted to a personal computer. Five subjects were recruited to perform right hand, left hand, right foot, and left foot imagery movements with 60 trials in each movement type. EEG data were segmented into epochs from 0 to 8 s and anchored to time points of imagery movement cues. The segmented EEG epochs were pre-processed using the Morlet wavelet. A long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network with 64 LSTM cells was constructed to discriminate EEG signals recorded from different imagery movements. Among total EEG epochs, 80% were randomly chosen as training data and the rest 20% were used as validation data. The detection accuracy reached 89%.

Background: FimH adhesin is proposed to enhance Escherichia coli kidney infection by acting with PapGII adhesin, but genetic epidemiology study and animal study have not been widely conducted to confirm this hypothesis. Methods: We compared the prevalence of adhesin gene and their coexistent pattern between upper and lower urinary tract infection (UTI) strains. fimH mutant (EC114FM), papGII mutant (EC114PM) and fimH/papGII double mutant (EC114DM) were constructed from a pylonephritogenic strain (EC114). We compared among these strains for the infection ability in bladders and kidneys of female BALB/c mice challenged transurethrally with these bacteria and assessed 1, 3, and 7 days after inoculation. Results: Strains carrying fimH-only genotype were significantly more prevalent in lower UTI (P

CoAl LDH and its derivatives with a flower-like morphology were successfully synthesized via some phase transition routes.

Cognitive load (CL) theory suggests that instructional materials need to be designed for reducing unnecessary CL and has been regarded as one of the most influential theories in science education. How to measure individual CL is still under investigation. In this study, we developed an eight-channel dry-electrode electroencephalogram (EEG) system and proposed an algorithm to real-time measure the depth of working memory of the N-back task in a classroom environment. The ocular artifact was removed by using the recursive least-square (RLS) method. Time-frequency analysis was applied to extract event-related theta- band activities in the artifact-suppressed EEG signals. Eight participants had the active duration for theta-band activities as 1.44±0.36 mv, 1.70±0.22 mv, and 1.97±0.04 mv for 0-back, 1-back, and 2-back tasks, respectively. In contrast to the previous research that has used spectral power of particular frequency bands as signal features, we found the detection of active duration provides better discrimination power in classifying different CL levels, compared to that of the classification using features of spectral power. The result in this study demonstrates the feasibility of theta-band EEG as an indicator to measure students’ cognitive load in a classroom environment.

The mechanism of annealing-induced amorphization of metallic glass is investigated in this study via molecular dynamics simulation. Spherical nucleuses of Cu–Ni–Al alloy with a face-centered cubic structure are embedded to simulate nanograins in Cu–Ni–Al amorphous alloy; subsequently, the material is annealed at different temperatures. The results show that the critical radius for nucleation at temperatures above the glass transition temperature (Tg) affected the behavior, grain growth, and annihilation of nanograins in the Cu–Ni–Al amorphous alloy during annealing. When the temperature increased, the critical radius for nucleation increased as well. This causes the small nanograins to annihilate quickly and the large nanograins to develop rapidly. When the annealing temperature is higher than Tg, part of the crystal nuclei, which is smaller than the critical radius, can be eliminated. The crystallinity of the metallic glass decreased, and the minimum crystallinity is attained after a period of annealing simulation. Subsequently, as the residual effective nanograins began developing, the crystallinity of the amorphous metal increased again. Therefore, the annealing duration time is critical to the crystallinity of the amorphous alloy after annealing.

A high-energy narrow-linewidth Ti:sapphire laser with widely tunable wavelength was investigated. The Littman cavity was seeded by an extended prism cavity, and they were coupled together by sharing a partial reflection mirror. The widely wavelength tunability of the prism cavity and the linewidth compression of Littman cavity were incorporated together, which resulted in a significantly increased tunable wavelength range from 720 nm to 884 nm with linewidth of less than 100 MHz. The coupling effect and the synchronization between the two cavities in temporal and spectral domain were discussed. The narrow-linewidth laser centered at 786 nm was further amplified to 36 mJ and frequency-doubled to 393 nm with pulse energy of 18.8 mJ while maintaining the narrow linewidth at a repetition rate of 10 Hz. This widely tunable narrow-linewidth laser is a promising light source for high-resolution fluorescence spectroscopy.

Hybrid structures from metal and fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) hybrid laminates offer an attractive solution to enhance strength and structural stiffness as well as to achieve lightweight effect. The behavior of steel-FRP hybrid laminates subject to axial compression is not well understood due to lack of experimental and analytical investigations. The axial compression performance of steel-FRP hybrid laminates was studied by using axial compression test in this study. Hybrid laminates from DP980-CFRP (carbon fiber-reinforced polymer) and DP980-AFRP (aramid fiber-reinforced polymer) were fabricated and studied. An analytical model was deduced to analyze the maximum axial compressive load of steel-FRP hybrid laminates. The results demonstrate that steel-FRP hybrid laminates exhibit significantly higher maximum compressive loads and initial stiffnesses in axial compression in comparison with the single steel sheet.