Search

A novel glow-type chemiluminescence (CL)-based nanosensing system was developed for sensitive and rapid point-of-care testing (POCT) of H2O2 in food. CuSe nanoparticles (CuSeNPs) have excellent peroxidase-like activity. After being modified with thiols of 4-mercaptophenylboronic acid (MBA) (CuSeNPs@MBA), luminol can be catalyzed to produce long-lasting CL in the presence of H2O2. The possible reason for the long-lasting glow-type CL behavior was explored. Under the optimized condition, H2O2 can be sensitively detected with improved repeatability. The limit of detection is as low as 0.30 μM. To meet the requirement of in situ and outside of laboratory detection, a 3D-printed portable device was designed which can eliminate the environmental interference to improve detection accuracy. The developed multifunctional platform also has the advantages of simple operation and low cost, suggesting its great potential for applications in food and agricultural fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robotic surgery has been increasingly adopted in various surgical fields, but the cost-effectiveness of this technology remains controversial due to its high cost and limited improvements in clinical outcomes. This study aims to explore the health economic implications of robotic pancreatic surgery, to investigate its impact on hospitalization costs and consumption of various medical resources. Data of patients who underwent pancreatic surgery at our institution were collected and divided into robotic and traditional groups. Statistical analyses of hospitalization costs, length of stay, costs across different service categories, and subgroup cost analyses based on age, BMI class, and procedure received were performed using t tests and linear regression. Although the total hospitalization cost for the robotic group was significantly higher than that for the traditional group, there was a notable reduction in the cost of medical consumables. The reduction was more prominent among elderly patients, obese patients, and those undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomy, which could be attributed to the technological advantages of the robotic surgery platform that largely facilitate blood control, tissue protection, and suturing. The study concluded that despite higher overall costs, robotic pancreatic surgery offers significant savings in medical consumables, particularly benefiting certain patient subgroups. The findings provide valuable insights into the economic viability of robotic surgery, supporting its adoption from a health economics perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MiRNAs play an important role in regulating plant growth and immune response. Mosaic diseases are recognized as the most important plant diseases in the world, and mosaic symptoms are recovery tissues formed by plants against virus infection. However, the mechanism of the formation of mosaic symptoms remains elusive. In this study, two typical mosaic systems consisting of Nicotiana tabacum-cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) and N. tabacum-tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) were used to investigate the relevance of miRNAs to the appearance of mosaic symptoms. The results of miRNA-seq showed that there were significant differences in miRNA abundance between dark green tissues and chlorotic tissues in mosaic leaves caused by the infection of CMV or TMV. Compared with healthy tissues, miRNA expression was significantly increased in chlorotic tissues, but slightly increased in dark green tissues. Three miRNAs, namely miR1919, miR390a, and miR6157, were identified to be strongly up-regulated in chlorotic tissues of both mosaic systems. Results of overexpressing or silencing of the three miRNAs proved that they were related to chlorophyll synthesis, auxin response, and small GTPase-mediated immunity pathway, which were corresponding to the phenotype, physiological parameters and susceptibility of the chlorotic tissues in mosaic leaves. Besides, the newly identified novel-miRNA48, novel-miRNA96 and novel-miRNA103 may also be involved in this formation of mosaic symptoms. Taken together, our results demonstrated that miR1919, miR390a and miR6157 are involved in the formation of mosaic symptoms and plant antiviral responses, providing new insight into the role of miRNAs in the formation of recovery tissue and plant immunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To evaluate the incidence of malignancies in acromegaly and to identify risk factors for newly-diagnostic cancers, especially the excessive growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). Methods: A retrospective cohort including 1738 consecutive hospitalized patients with acromegaly in a single referral center between 2012 and 2020 (mean follow-up 4.3 years). A gender- and age-matched case-control study (280 patients from the cohort) was performed for risk factor analysis. Results: One hundred thirteen malignancies (67 diagnosed after acromegaly) were observed. The overall newly-diagnostic cancer risk of acromegaly was higher than the general population (standardized incidence ratio (SIR) 2.81; 95% CI 2.18–3.57). The risk of thyroid cancer (n = 33, SIR 21.42; 95% CI 13.74–30.08) and colorectal cancer (n = 8, SIR 3.17; 95% CI 1.37–6.25) was elevated. In the overall cohort, IGF-1 (ULN: 1.27 vs. 0.94, p = 0.057), GH (1.30 vs. 1.00 ng/ml, p = 0.12), and disease-controlled rate (34.9% vs. 45.9%, p = 0.203) at the last visit did not reach significance between patients with and without post-diagnostic cancer. In the case-control study, GH (1.80 vs. 0.90 ng/ml, p = 0.018) and IGF-1 (ULN: 1.27 vs. 0.91, p = 0.003) at the last visit were higher in patients with post-diagnostic cancers, with a lower disease-controlled rate. Elder age was a risk factor for cancer. Other metabolic comorbidities and the size of pituitary tumors were similar. Conclusion: The risk of malignancies, especially thyroid cancer, was increased in patients with acromegaly in our center. More cancer screening should be considered when managing acromegaly, especially in patients with higher posttreatment GH and IGF-1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple SARS-CoV-2 Omicron sub-variants, such as BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5, emerge one after another. BA.5 has become the dominant strain worldwide. Additionally, BA.2.75 is significantly increasing in some countries. Exploring their receptor binding and interspecies transmission risk is urgently needed. Herein, we examine the binding capacities of human and other 28 animal ACE2 orthologs covering nine orders towards S proteins of these sub-variants. The binding affinities between hACE2 and these sub-variants remain in the range as that of previous variants of concerns (VOCs) or interests (VOIs). Notably, R493Q reverse mutation enhances the bindings towards ACE2s from humans and many animals closely related to human life, suggesting an increased risk of cross-species transmission. Structures of S/hACE2 or RBD/hACE2 complexes for these sub-variants and BA.2 S binding to ACE2 of mouse, rat or golden hamster are determined to reveal the molecular basis for receptor binding and broader interspecies recognition. SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant evolves into multiple sub-variants. Here, authors evaluate the binding capacity of these sub-variants to human and animal ACE2s and reveal molecular bases for their receptor binding and broader interspecies recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Omicron SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly spreading worldwide. To delineate the impact of emerging mutations on spike's properties, we performed systematic structural analyses on apo Omicron spike and its complexes with human ACE2 or S309 neutralizing antibody (NAb) by cryo-EM. The Omicron spike preferentially adopts the one-RBD-up conformation both before and after ACE2 binding, which is in sharp contrast to the orchestrated conformational changes to create more up-RBDs upon ACE2 binding as observed in the prototype and other four variants of concern (VOCs). Furthermore, we found that S371L, S373P and S375F substitutions enhance the stability of the one-RBD-up conformation to prevent exposing more up-RBDs triggered by ACE2 binding. The increased stability of the one-RBD-up conformation restricts the accessibility of S304 NAb, which targets a cryptic epitope in the closed conformation, thus facilitating the immune evasion by Omicron. These results expand our understanding of Omicron spike's conformation, receptor binding and antibody evasion mechanism. The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant spreads rapidly. Here the authors show that Omicron S preferentially adopts the one-RBD-up conformation, which leads to a non-RBM-binding monoclonal antibody escape. Mutagenesis reveals that S371L, S373P and S375F substitutions enhance the conformational stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 carries multiple unusual mutations, particularly in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike (S) protein. Moreover, host-adapting mutations, such as residues 493, 498, and 501, were also observed in the Omicron RBD, which indicates that it is necessary to evaluate the interspecies transmission risk of the Omicron variant. Herein, we evaluated the interspecies recognition of the Omicron BA.1 and Delta RBDs by 27 ACE2 orthologs, including humans. We found that Omicron BA.1 expanded its receptor binding spectra to palm-civet, rodents, more bats (least horseshoe bat and greater horseshoe bat) and lesser hedgehog tenrec. Additionally, we determined the cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structure of the Omicron BA.1 S protein complexed with mouse ACE2 (mACE2) and the crystal structure of Omicron RBD complexed with palm-civet ACE2 (cvACE2). Several key residues for the host range have been identified. These results suggest that surveillance should be enhanced on the Omicron variant for its broader-species receptor binding to prevent spillover and expansion of reservoir hosts for a prolonged pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for data volume, large data center networks (DCNs) have been proposed. In 2019, Zhang et al. proposed a new highly scalable DCN architecture named HSDC (Highly Scalable Data Center Network), which can achieve greater incremental scalability. In this paper, we give the definition of the logical graph of HSDC, named H n , which can be treated as a compound graph of hypercube and complete graph of the same dimension. First, we prove that the connectivity and tightly super connectivity of H n are both n. Then, we give an O(n) shortest unicast algorithm to find a shortest path between any two distinct nodes in H n , and prove the correctness of this algorithm. In fact, we also prove that the length of the shortest path constructed by this algorithm is no more than 2 d + 1 if d < n and at most 2d if d = n , where d is the Hamming distance between the start and end nodes, and the diameter of H n is 2n. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word-of-mouth plays an important role in the spread of influence by means of a cascading manner, e.g., the promotion of new products, information dissemination, etc. Today's Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide viral marketing for many companies to conduct business promotion, and the idea behind viral marketing comes from the word-of-mouth effects. Given a predefined budget (e.g., the set size k), influence maximization selects a set of initial users to help companies to promote their products. The budget-making often is of challenging owning to the hardness of trade-off between profit and cost. Most of recent research on influence maximization primarily study the problem of independent product promotion, but few take into account the impacts of other existing products that users have already owned. Moreover, the current solutions encounter scalability problem whenever facing a large scale social network. In this paper, we explore the viral marketing by defining a general influence maximization problem where a practical scenario of coexistence of multiple products is considered. To capture the impacts of other existing products, we put forward a new method to measure the influence between users. Different from previous work, the goal of our general problem is to maximize the profit/cost ratio which can avoid the difficulty of budget-making and reflects maximization effects better. Then, we propose a ( 1 2 + ε )-approximate algorithm with linear complexity to solve the problem, and further design a distributed implementation to achieve good scalability. Extensive experiments on real world datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the wide application of cloud computing, the scale of cloud data center network is growing. The virtual machine (VM) live migration technology is becoming more crucial in cloud data centers for the purpose of load balance, and efficient utilization of resources. The lightweight virtualization technique has made virtual machines more portable, efficient and easier to management. Different from virtual machines, containers bring more lightweight, more flexible and more intensive service capabilities to the cloud. Researches on container migration is still in its infancy, especially live migration is still very immature. In this paper, we present the locality live migration model where we take into account the distance, available bandwidth and costs between containers. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a cluster. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed method improves the utilization of resources of servers, and also improves the balance of all kinds of resources on the physical machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel glow-type chemiluminescence (CL)-based nanosensing system was developed for sensitive and rapid point-of-care testing (POCT) of H2O2 in food. CuSe nanoparticles (CuSeNPs) have excellent peroxidase-like activity. After being modified with thiols of 4-mercaptophenylboronic acid (MBA) (CuSeNPs@MBA), luminol can be catalyzed to produce long-lasting CL in the presence of H2O2. The possible reason for the long-lasting glow-type CL behavior was explored. Under the optimized condition, H2O2 can be sensitively detected with improved repeatability. The limit of detection is as low as 0.30 μM. To meet the requirement of in situ and outside of laboratory detection, a 3D-printed portable device was designed which can eliminate the environmental interference to improve detection accuracy. The developed multifunctional platform also has the advantages of simple operation and low cost, suggesting its great potential for applications in food and agricultural fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]