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T-helper (Th) 17 and Th22 cells are critical for the pathogenic process of Kawasaki Disease (KD). A total of 43 children with freshly diagnosed KD and 20 healthy controls (HC) were quantified for the numbers of Th17, Th22 and Th1 cells by flow cytometry. The concentrations of serum IL-17, IL-22, IL-6, IFN-γ and TNF-α were examined by ELISA. Compared to those in the HC, significantly increased numbers of Th17 and Th22 cells, but not Th1 cells, and higher levels of serum IL-17 and IL-22, but not IFN-γ, were found in KD patients. Stratification analysis indicated the numbers of both Th17 and Th22 cells and the concentrations of serum IL-17 and IL-22 in KD patients with coronary artery lesions (CAL) were significantly greater than that in those with noncoronary artery lesions (NCAL). Treatment with the intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy significantly decreased numbers of Th22 and Th17 cells as well as the serum concentrations of IL-22 and IL-17 in KD patients. The concentrations of serum IL-22 and IL-17 were correlated positively with C-reactive protein (CRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) values as well as N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) in those patients respectively. Conclusion: Our study provided direct evidence that Th22 and Th17 cells might contribute to the pathogenesis of KD.

IntroductionKawasaki disease (KD) , also known as Kawasaki syndrome, is an acute, self-limited febrile vasculitis that predominantly affects infants and children under 5 years of age [1]. KD is characterized by high spiking fever persisting for more than 5 days, erythematous rash, bilateral conjunctivitis, congestive oral mucosa, swelling lymph node, and edematous extremity [2]. Furthermore, KD is the most common cause of acquired cardiac disease, especially coronary artery aneurysms in children [3]. Although KD has been studied for almost half a century, the pathogenic mechanism of KD remains unclear. Furthermore, while most patients respond well to intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), roughly one-quarter of the children meeting clinical criteria will go on to have coronary artery inflammation, including aneurysms [4]. Hence, further illustration of the mechanism of KD is a crying need to find a therapeutic for KD treatment clinically.Both innate and adaptive immune systems are involved in the pathogenesis of KD [5]. The early event of visualized immunological abnormality is the activation of innate immune system represented as the elevated numbers of activated monocytes and increased expression of circulating cytokines, such as interleukin (IL)-6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) -α [6]. Subsequently, it is generally believed that autoreactive T cell and their inflammatory cytokines play a major role in the development of KD [7]. T helper (Th) 17 cells, a recently identified lineage of CD4+ Th cells, predominantly produce IL-17A. Th17 cell and IL-17A have been shown to participate in host defense responses and inflammatory diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Graves’ disease (GD), and Crohn’s disease (CD) [8-11]. A recent study has shown that a high frequency of Th17 cells and high levels of IL-17 were demonstrated in the acute stage of KD, and that elevated Th17 cells might be associated with tissue damage and coronary artery aneurysm formation [7, 12]. However, there is little information about whether higher frequency of Th17 and higher concentrations of IL-17A also exist in Chinese patients with KD and how Th17 responses are associated with the development of coronary artery aneurysm in KD patients.More notably, a newly identified T-cell subset, termed Th22 cells, has been described as expressing their key cytokines interleukin (IL)-22, which can activate signal transduction and transcription 3 (STAT3) [13]. IL-22, originally termed as an IL-10-related T-cell-derived-inducible factor, enhance innate immunity and promote epithelial cell proliferation and tissue. In contrast, IL-22 also act as regulator in the pathogenesis of RA and SLE [14-15]. Furthermore, recent studies have reported that IL-22 may function as a biphasic cytokine: protective and regenerative in steady state while amplifying proinflammatory signals given by TNF-α [16], which is necessary for exacerbation of vascular injury in KD. However, little is known about the role of Th22 cells in the pathogenesis of KD. We believe that Th22 cells may partially contribute to the formation of coronary aneurysms.Here, in the current study, we sought to further clarify the mechanism underlying hyperactivation of Th22 and Th17 during acute KD. We characterized the numbers of circulating Th22 and Th17 cells by flow cytometry, and measured the concentration of serum inflammatory cytokines by enzymelinked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 43 Chinese patients with new onset KD. Furthermore, we analyzed the potential association of the numbers of Th22 and Th17 cells with the clinical measures in these KD patients. Our findings indicated that increased numbers of Th22 and Th17 cells might be contributed to the pathogenesis of KD in Chinese patients.

Speaker adaptation methods aim to create fair quality synthesis speech voice font for target speakers while only limited resources available. Recently, as deep neural networks based statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) methods become dominant in SPSS TTS back-end modeling, speaker adaptation under the neural network based SPSS framework has also became an important task. In this paper, linear networks (LN) is inserted in multiple neural network layers and fine-tuned together with output layer for best speaker adaptation performance. When adaptation data is extremely small, the low-rank plus diagonal(LRPD) decomposition for LN is employed to make the adapted voice more stable. Speaker adaptation experiments are conducted under a range of adaptation utterances numbers. Moreover, speaker adaptation from 1) female to female, 2) male to female and 3) female to male are investigated. Objective measurement and subjective tests show that LN with LRPD decomposition performs most stable when adaptation data is extremely limited, and our best speaker adaptation (SA) model with only 200 adaptation utterances achieves comparable quality with speaker dependent (SD) model trained with 1000 utterances, in both naturalness and similarity to target speaker., 5 pages, 6 figures, accepted by ICASSP 2018

Synergistic effects of additive amount, reaction time and temperature of transglutaminase on properties of WPI-NaCas composite protein films were discussed by orthogonal experiments. Results indicated that transglutaminase (TGase) modification decreased D50 and D90 of film-forming solution particles, resulting in decrease in water solubility and increase in both mechanical and water barrier properties of films under most conditions. Compared with control sample, scanning electron microscope analysis indicated that cross-section of enzyme modification sample was denser and more impermeable. However, there was no significant difference in both thermogravimetric analysis and solution apparent viscosity changes for all samples. Orthogonal experiment results also showed that TGase reaction time was the most effective factor on tensile strength (TS) and water vapor permeability (WVP) properties of film, and the secondary, tertiary factors were reaction temperature, TGase additive amount respectively. Films modified by 0.1 mg/ml TGase at 50°C for 30 min exhibited the optimum mechanical and water barrier performance. Key words: Transglutaminase (TGase), mechanical properties, water vapor permeability (WVP), scanning electron microscopy analysis.

The WPI-NaCas-GLY antimicrobial film takes full advantage of the controlled release of active or antimicrobial agents as well as demonstrates a great potential for functioning as an alternative biodegradable polymer in practical applications. The moisture sorption kinetics of the film as an important carrier of active agents was investigated at various relative humidities (RH). The results indicated that the moisture sorption characterization and procedure of this film can be described well by the empirical Peleg model with higher confidence and concordance. The model could predict the film's moisture content at any time (Mt), the time to reach any given level of R (tR), the equilibrium moisture at any RH condition (Me), and isotherm trend based upon experimental data and modeled constants k(1), k(2), a, b, c, and d without giving consideration to their physical meaning. The water vapor transmission rate of the WPI-NaCas-GLY antimicrobial film increased exponentially with increasing RH due to its hydrophilicity, which was primarily caused by the presence of glycerol in a higher content. The results also suggested that aw predominately affects the film's Me values compared with the temperature factor by fixed nonlinear multiple regression analyses.