Search

Aldehydes are the strongest and most abundant aromatic compounds in Kung Pao Chicken. However, the perceptual interactions between these aldehydes are not fully understood. Therefore, the flavor contribution of nine key aldehydes was estimated by determining thresholds. Except for benzaldehyde, the thresholds of all aldehydes measured in tasteless chicken matrices (TM) were significantly larger than their comparable values in water. Based on these results, the perceptual interactions of nine aldehydes were evaluated using S-curves and σ-τ plots. The interactions indicated that 31 of their 36 binary mixtures exhibited additive effects, three had masking effects, while two had synergistic effects. Recombination experiments showed that the addition of aldehydes lowered the odor threshold of aldehyde reconstitution (AR), thereby enhancing the aroma intensity of AR. These findings contribute to a better understanding of Kung Pao Chicken's aroma and can be used to improve its aroma quality.

To assess the frequency of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the general population, we searched over 64 million heavy chain antibody sequences from healthy unvaccinated, healthy BNT162b2 vaccinated and COVID-19 patient repertoires for sequences similar to 11 previously reported enhancing antibodies. Although the distribution of sequence identities was similar in all three groups of repertoires, the COVID-19 and healthy vaccinated hits were significantly more clonally expanded than healthy unvaccinated hits. Furthermore, among the tested hits, 17 out of 94 from COVID-19 and 9 out of 59 from healthy vaccinated, compared with only 2 out of 96 from healthy unvaccinated, bound to the enhancing epitope. A total of 9 of the 28 epitope-binding antibodies enhanced ACE2 receptor binding to the spike protein. Together, this study revealed that infection enhancing-like antibodies are far more frequent in COVID-19 patients or healthy vaccinated donors than in healthy unvaccinated donors, but a reservoir of potential enhancing antibodies exists in healthy donors that could potentially mature to actual enhancing antibodies upon infection.

B cell receptors (BCRs) and T cell receptors (TCRs) make up an essential network of defense molecules that, collectively, can distinguish self from non-self and facilitate destruction of antigen-bearing cells such as pathogens or tumors. The analysis of BCR and TCR repertoires plays an important role in both basic immunology as well as in biotechnology. Because the repertoires are highly diverse, specialized software methods are needed to extract meaningful information from BCR and TCR sequence data. Here, we review recent developments in bioinformatics tools for analysis of BCR and TCR repertoires, with an emphasis on those that incorporate structural features. After describing the recent sequencing technologies for immune receptor repertoires, we survey structural modeling methods for BCR and TCRs, along with methods for clustering such models. We review downstream analyses, including BCR and TCR epitope prediction, antibody-antigen docking and TCR-peptide-MHC Modeling. We also briefly discuss molecular dynamics in this context.

Summary: The onset of atherosclerosis (AS) is insidious, and early stage patients have atypical clinical symptoms. After being diagnosed in late stage, it is often prone to sudden and fatal cardiovascular events. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop precise and efficient diagnosis and therapy strategies of AS. Benefiting from high signal-to-noise ratio, low detection limit, high specificity and sensitivity, a series of activatable fluorescent probes based on atherosclerotic microenvironment have emerged for identification and treatment of AS. In this review, we focus on the atherosclerotic microenvironment and briefly summarize the correlation between the structural transformation and fluorescence signal changes of mono-/double-activatable fluorescent probes upon biomarkers stimulation. Moreover, their cutting-edge progress for AS theranostics is described. Finally, the outlook for activatable theranostic probes based on atherosclerotic microenvironment is discussed to aim at promoting innovative research in imaging-guided precise AS therapy.