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Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Derby (S. Derby) is one of the numerous non-typhoidal Salmonella serovars and has been recognized as a food-borne pathogen. In 2019, outbreaks of salmonellosis were reported in 13 yak farms in the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China. A total of 32 salmonella strains were isolated from 162 fecal samples of yaks with diarrhea as well as from drinking water samples. The isolates were subjected to serovar identification, animal experiments, and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) analyses. The serovar of all the isolates was S. Derby, and the sequence types (STs) were ST40. The analysis of the differences of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) showed that the salmonella strains isolated from 13 farms were clonally related. Animal experiments showed that the lethal dose (LD50) was 4.57 × 107 CFU (colony-forming units); the shedding time of S. Derby in mice was 24 days; the bacterial loads in spleen were higher than those in other organs (ileum, liver, and cecum). Pathological analyses by hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining revealed obvious damage in the spleen, liver, and intestine. These results indicate that the S. Derby from yaks can cause infection in mice.

Abstract Background The increasing penetration of a massive number of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and distributed generators (DGs) into current power distribution networks imposes obvious challenges on power distribution network operation. Methods This paper presents an optimal temporal-spatial scheduling strategy of PEV charging demand in the presence of DGs. The solution is designed to ensure the reliable and secure operation of the active power distribution networks, the randomness introduced by PEVs and DGs can be managed through the appropriate scheduling of the PEV charging demand, as the PEVs can be considered as mobile energy storage units. Results As a result, the charging demands of PEVs are optimally scheduled temporally and spatially, which can improve the DG utilization efficiency as well as reduce the charging cost under real-time pricing (RTP). Conclusions The proposed scheduling strategy is evaluated through a series of simulations and the numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and the benefits of the proposed solution.

The Western meat-rich diet is both high in protein and fat. Although the hazardous effect of a high fat diet (HFD) upon liver structure and function is well recognized, whether the co-presence of high protein intake contributes to, or protects against, HF-induced hepatic injury remains unclear. Increased intake of branched chain amino acids (BCAA, essential amino acids compromising 20% of total protein intake) reduces body weight. However, elevated circulating BCAA is associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and injury. The mechanisms responsible for this quandary remain unknown; the role of BCAA in HF-induced liver injury is unclear. Utilizing HFD or HFD + BCAA models, we demonstrated BCAA supplementation attenuated HFD-induced weight gain, decreased fat mass, activated mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), inhibited hepatic lipogenic enzymes, and reduced hepatic triglyceride content. However, BCAA caused significant hepatic damage in HFD mice, evidenced by exacerbated hepatic oxidative stress, increased hepatic apoptosis, and elevated circulation hepatic enzymes. Compared to solely HFD-fed animals, plasma levels of free fatty acids (FFA) in the HFD + BCAA group are significantly further increased, due largely to AMPKα2-mediated adipocyte lipolysis. Lipolysis inhibition normalized plasma FFA levels, and improved insulin sensitivity. Surprisingly, blocking lipolysis failed to abolish BCAA-induced liver injury. Mechanistically, hepatic mTOR activation by BCAA inhibited lipid-induced hepatic autophagy, increased hepatic apoptosis, blocked hepatic FFA/triglyceride conversion, and increased hepatocyte susceptibility to FFA-mediated lipotoxicity. These data demonstrated that BCAA reduces HFD-induced body weight, at the expense of abnormal lipolysis and hyperlipidemia, causing hepatic lipotoxicity. Furthermore, BCAA directly exacerbate hepatic lipotoxicity by reducing lipogenesis and inhibiting autophagy in the hepatocyte.

This study was designed to compare the recovery of target-controlled infusion of sufentanil and remifentanil in patients of colorectal cancer. In total, 104 patients were randomly divided into sufentanil and remifentanil groups. One group was given target-controlled infusion of sufentanil, while the other group received remifentanil. Inflammatory factors and oxidative stress indicators were measured at 10 min before induction of anesthesia (T1), 1 h (T2), 24 h (T3), and 72 h (T4) after surgery. Adverse reactions were also compared. The extubation and recovery time of sufentanil group were longer than remifentanil group. The levels of CRP, IL-8, and IL-4 in sufentanil group and remifentanil group increased continuously. CRP contents at T3, T4, and IL-8 and IL-4 contents at T2, T3, and T4 of remifentanil group were lower ( P

Working memory is a critical brain function for maintaining and manipulating information over delay periods of seconds. It is debated whether delay-period neural activity in sensory regions is important for the active maintenance of information during the delay period. Here, we tackle this question by examining the anterior piriform cortex (APC), an olfactory sensory cortex, in head-fixed mice performing several olfactory working memory tasks. Active information maintenance is necessary in these tasks, especially in a dual-task paradigm in which mice are required to perform another distracting task while actively maintaining information during the delay period. Optogenetic suppression of neuronal activity in APC during the delay period impaired performance in all the tasks. Furthermore, electrophysiological recordings revealed that APC neuronal populations encoded odor information in the delay period even with an intervening distracting task. Thus, delay activity in APC is important for active information maintenance in olfactory working memory.

Avian coronavirus infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) causes severe economic losses in the poultry industry, but its control is hampered by the continuous emergence of new genotypes and the lack of cross-protection among different IBV genotypes. We designed a new immunogen based on a spike with the consensus nucleotide sequence (S_con) that may overcome the extraordinary genetic diversity of IBV. S_con was cloned into a pVAX1 vector to form a new IBV DNA vaccine, pV-S_con. pV-S_con could be correctly expressed in HD11 cells with corresponding post-translational modification, and induced a neutralizing antibody response to the Vero-cell-adapted IBV strain Beaudette (p65) in mice. To further evaluate its immunogenicity, specific-pathogen-free (SPF) chickens were immunized with the pV-S_con plasmid and compared with the control pVAX1 vector and the H120 vaccine. Detection of IBV-specific antibodies and cell cytokines (IL-4 and IFN-γ) indicated that vaccination with pV-S_con efficiently induced both humoral and cellular immune responses. After challenge with the heterologous strain M41, virus shedding and virus loading in tissues was significantly reduced both by pV-S_con and its homologous vaccine H120. Thus, pV-S_con is a promising vaccine candidate for IBV, and the consensus approach is an appealing method for vaccine design in viruses with high variability.

Reliable detection of the media-adventitia border (MAB) and the lumen-intima border (LIB) in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images remains a challenging task that is of high clinical interest. In this paper, we propose a superpixel-wise fuzzy clustering technique modified by edges, followed by level set evolution (SFCME-LSE), for automatic border extraction in 40 MHz IVUS images. The contributions are three-fold. First, the usage of superpixels suppresses the influence of speckle noise in ultrasound images on the clustering results. Second, we propose a region of interest (ROI) assignment scheme to prevent the segmentation from being distracted by pathological structures and artifacts. Finally, the contour is converged towards the target boundary through LSE with an appropriately improved edge indicator. Quantitative evaluations on two IVUS datasets by the Jaccard measure (JM), the percentage of area difference (PAD), and the Hausdorff distance (HD) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SFCME-LSE method. SFCME-LSE achieves the minimal HD of 1.20 ± 0.66 mm and 1.18 ± 0.70 mm for the MAB and LIB, respectively, among several state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available dataset.

To reveal the role of SO3 poisoning in Cu/SSZ-13 NH3-SCR catalysts, fresh and sulfated Cu/SSZ-13 catalysts were prepared in the presence or absence of SO3 flux. The deactivation mechanism is probed by the changes of structural, copper species, and selective catalytic reduction (SCR) activity. The variations concentrate on the changes of copper species as the Chabazite (CHA) framework of Cu/SSZ-13 catalysts could keep intact at high ratios of SO3/SOx. The thermal gravimetric analyzer (TGA) results reveal that the copper sulfate formed during sulfation and the amounts of sulfate species increased with an increase in the SO3/SOx ratio. In contrast to the changing trend of copper sulfate, temperature program reduction (H2-TPR), and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) results manifest that, since the number of active copper ions declines with an increase of the SO3/SOx ratio, the active sites transform to these inactive species during sulfation. Due to the combination of NH3-SCR activity and the kinetic tests, it is shown that the decreased number of active sites is responsible for the declined SCR activity at low temperature. As Cu/SSZ-13 catalysts show excellent acid-resistance ability, our study reveals that the Cu/SSZ-13 catalyst is a good candidate for NOx elimination, especially when SO3 exists.

ZrO2 nanoparticles, ZrO2 (P) and ZrO2 (H), with different tetragonal phase contents, were prepared. ZrO2 (P) possessed higher tetragonal phase content than ZrO2 (H). Ni/ZrO2 catalysts (10% (w/w)), using ZrO2 (P) and ZrO2 (H) as supports, were prepared using an impregnation method, and were characterized using XRD, Raman, H2-TPR, XPS, and H2-TPD techniques. Their catalytic performance in maleic anhydride hydrogenation was tested. The Ni/ZrO2 (P) catalyst exhibited stronger metal-support interactions than the Ni/ZrO2 (H) catalyst because of its higher number of oxygen vacancies and the low-coordinated oxygen ions on its surface. Consequently, smaller Ni crystallites and a higher C=C hydrogenation activity for maleic anhydride to succinic anhydride were obtained over a Ni/ZrO2 (P) catalyst. However, the C=O hydrogenation activity of Ni/ZrO2 (P) catalyst was much lower than that of the Ni/ZrO2 (H) catalyst. A 43.5% yield of γ-butyrolacetone was obtained over the Ni/ZrO2 (H) catalyst at 210 °C and 5 MPa of H2 pressure, while the yield of γ-butyrolactone was only 2.8% over the Ni/ZrO2 (P) catalyst under the same reaction conditions. In situ FT-IR characterization demonstrated that the high C=O hydrogenation activity for the Ni/ZrO2 (H) catalyst could be attributed to the surface synergy between active metallic nickel species and relatively electron-deficient oxygen vacancies.

Recently, the increasing integration of electric vehicles (EVs) has drawn great interest due to its flexible utilization; moreover, environmental concerns have caused an increase in the application of combined heat and power (CHP) units in multi-energy systems (MES). This paper develops an approach to coordinated scheduling of MES considering CHPs, uncertain EVs and battery degradation based on model predictive control (MPC), aimed at achieving the most economic energy scheduling. After exploiting the pattern of the drivers’ commuting behavior, the stochastic characteristics of available charging/discharging electric power of aggregated EVs in office or residential buildings are analyzed and represented by the scenarios with the help of scenario generation and reduction techniques. At each step of MPC optimization, the solution of a finite-horizon optimal control is achieved in which a suitable number of available EVs scenarios is considered, while the economic objective and operational constraints are included. The simulation results obtained are encouraging and indicate both the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

To reveal the role of impregnated sodium (Na) ions in Cu/SSZ-13 catalysts, Cu/SSZ-13 catalysts with four Na-loading contents were prepared using an incipient wetness impregnation method and hydrothermally treated at 600 °C for 16 h. The physicochemical property and selective catalytic reduction (SCR) activity of these catalysts were studied to probe the deactivation mechanism. The impregnated Na exists as Na+ on catalysts and results in the loss of both Brönsted acid sites and Cu2+ ions. Moreover, the high loading of Na ions destroy the framework structure of Cu/SSZ-13 and forms new phases (SiO2/NaSiO3 and amorphous species) when Na loading was higher than 1.0 mmol/g. The decreased Cu2+ ions finally transformed into CuxO, CuO, and CuAlOx species. The inferior SCR activity of Na impregnated catalysts was mainly due to the reduced contents of Cu2+ ions at kinetic temperature region. The reduction in the amount of acid sites and Cu2+ ions, as well as copper oxide species (CuxO and CuO) formation, led to low SCR performance at high temperature. Our study also revealed that the existing problem of the Na ions’ effect should be well-considered, especially at high hydrothermal aging when diesel particulate filter (DPF) is applied in upstream of the SCR applications.

Interleukin-10 and Interleukin-12 are produced primarily by pathogen-activated antigen-presenting cells, particularly macrophages and dendritic cells. IL-10 and IL-12 play very important immunoregulatory roles in host defense and immune homeostasis. Being anti- and pro-inflammatory in nature, respectively, their functions are antagonistically opposing. A comprehensive and in-depth understanding of their immunological properties and signaling mechanisms will help develop better clinical intervention strategies in therapy for a wide range of human disorders. Here, we provide an update on some emerging concepts, controversies, unanswered questions, and opinions regarding the immune signaling of IL-10 and IL-12.

In this paper, an adaptively constrained stochastic model predictive control (MPC) is proposed to achieve less-conservative coordination between energy storage units and uncertain renewable energy sources (RESs) in a microgrid (MG). Besides the economic objective of MG operation, the limits of state-of-charge (SOC) and discharging/charging power of the energy storage unit are formulated as chance constraints when accommodating uncertainties of RESs, considering mild violations of these constraints are allowed during long-term operation, and a closed-loop online update strategy is performed to adaptively tighten or relax constraints according to the actual deviation probability of violation level from the desired one as well as the current change rate of deviation probability. Numerical studies show that the proposed adaptively constrained stochastic MPC for MG optimal operation is much less conservative compared with the scenario optimization based robust MPC, and also presents a better convergence performance to the desired constraint violation level than other online update strategies.

Various studies have demonstrated that factor V Leiden (FVL) and G20210A prothrombin mutation contribute to the risk of Budd-Chiari syndrome (BCS), while other studies provided conflicting findings. In order to derive more precise estimations of the relationships, a meta-analysis was performed.Eligible articles were identified through search of databases including Pubmed, Chinese Biomedical Database (CBM, Chinese), and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, Chinese). Odd ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using random- or fixed- model.Finally, twelve studies were included for FVL and nine studies were included for G20210A prothrombin mutation. With respect to FVL, significantly increased BCS risk was found in the overall population (OR = 6.29, 95%CI = 4.23-9.36). Subgroup analyses suggested that FVL was associated with an increased risk of BCS in the population with high background mutation prevalence (>1% in the normal population). No significant association was found between BCS and G20210A prothrombin mutation (OR = 1.78, 95%CI = 0.77-4.11).The presence of FVL should be evaluated in patients with BCS. Conversely, G20210A prothrombin mutation is not significantly associated with risk of BCS. Large-scale well designed studies are necessary to be conducted to further confirm or refute the observed association.

Human guanylate-binding protein 1 (hGBP1) is an interferon-inducible protein involved in the host immune response against viral infection. In response to infection by influenza A virus (IAV), hGBP1 transcript and protein were significantly upregulated. Overexpression of hGBP1 inhibited IAV replication in a dose-dependent manner in vitro. The lysine residue at position 51 (K51) of hGBP1 was essential for inhibition of IAV replication. Mutation of K51 resulted in an hGBP1 that was unable to inhibit IAV replication. The viral nonstructural protein 1 (NS1) was found to interact directly with hGBP1. K51 of hGBP1 and a region between residues 123 and 144 in NS1 were demonstrated to be essential for the interaction between NS1 and hGBP1. Binding of NS1 to hGBP1 resulted in a significant reduction in both GTPase activity and the anti-IAV activity of hGBP1. These findings indicated that hGBP1 contributed to the host immune response against IAV replication and that hGBP1-mediated antiviral activity was antagonized by NS1 via binding to hGBP1.