Search

Vaccination is a key method to control the pandemic.[1] As of October 1, 2022, more than 120 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered globally and more than 3 billion in China.[2] Despite the high level of vaccine coverage, limited data are available on the safety of COVID-19 vaccination for women planning pregnancy, especially those receiving in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. Consistent with three small previous studies,[[4], [6]] our findings provide further evidence indicating that vaccination with inactivated COVID-19 vaccines did not result in any measurable detrimental effects on IVF or early pregnancy outcomes. The commonly used COVID-19 vaccines include inactivated virus vaccines and mRNA vaccines.[3] Regarding mRNA vaccines, three small studies have examined their potential impacts on IVF outcomes and concluded that mRNA vaccines did not influence patients' performance during IVF treatment.[[4], [6]] However, limited data are available on inactivated virus vaccines. [Extracted from the article]

Study Question: Is the protein l-arginine methyltransferase 3 (PRMT3)/asymmetrical dimethylarginine (ADMA)/nitric oxide (NO) pathway involved in the development of recurrent miscarriage (RM), and what is the potential mechanism?Summary Answer: Elevated levels of PRMT3 and ADMA inhibit NO formation in the decidua, thereby impairing the functions of trophoblast cells at the maternal-foetal interface.What Is Known Already: Decreased NO bioavailability is associated with RM. ADMA, an endogenous inhibitor of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), is derived from the methylation of protein arginine residues by PRMTs and serves as a predictor of mortality in critical illness.Study Design, Size, Duration: A total of 145 women with RM and 149 healthy women undergoing elective termination of an early normal pregnancy were enrolled. Ninety-six female CBA/J, 24 male DBA/2 and 24 male BALB/c mice were included. CBA/J × DBA/2 matings represent the abortion group, while CBA/J × BALB/c matings represent the normal control group. The CBA/J pregnant mice were then categorised into four groups: (i) normal + vehicle group (n = 28), (ii) abortion + vehicle group (n = 28), (iii) normal + SGC707 (a PRMT3 inhibitor) group (n = 20) and (iv) abortion + SGC707 group (n = 20). All injections were made intraperitoneally on Days 0.5, 3.5 and 6.5 of pregnancy. Decidual tissues were collected on Days 8.5, 9.5 and 10.5 of gestation. The embryo resorption rates were calculated on Day 9.5 and Day 10.5 of gestation.Participants/materials, Setting, Methods: NO concentration, ADMA content, NOS activity, expression levels of NOS and PRMTs in decidual tissues were determined using conventional assay kits or western blotting. PRMT3 expression was further analysed in decidual stromal cells, macrophages and natural killer cells. A co-culture system between decidual macrophages (DMs) and HTR-8/SVneo trophoblasts was constructed to study the roles of the PRMT3/ADMA/NO signalling pathway. Trophoblast apoptosis was analysed via Annexin V-fluorescein isothiocyanate/propidium iodide staining. CBA/J × DBA/2 mouse models were used to investigate the effects of SGC707 on embryo resorption rates.Main Results and the Role Of Chance: Our results show that NO concentration and NOS activity were decreased, but ADMA content and PRMT3 expression were increased in the decidua of RM patients. Moreover, compared with the normal control subjects, PRMT3 expression was significantly up-regulated in the macrophages but not in the natural killer cells or stromal cells of the decidua from RM patients. The inhibition of PRMT3 results in a significant decrease in ADMA accumulation and an increase in NO concentration in macrophages. When co-cultured with DMs, which were treated with SGC707 and ADMA, trophoblast apoptosis was suppressed and induced, respectively. In vivo experiments revealed that the administration of SGC707 reduced the embryo resorption rate of CBA/J × DBA/2 mice.Limitations, Reasons For Caution: All sets of experiments were not performed with the same samples. The main reason is that each tissue needs to be reserved for clinical diagnosis and only a small piece of each tissue can be cut and collected for this study.Wider Implications Of the Findings: Our results indicate that the PRMT3/ADMA/NO pathway is a potential marker and target for the clinical diagnosis and therapy of RM.Study Funding/competing Interest(s): This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC1001401), National Natural Science Foundation of China (81730039, 82071653, 81671460, 81971384 and 82171657) and Shanghai Municipal Medical and Health Discipline Construction Projects (2017ZZ02015). The authors have declared no conflict of interest.Trial Registration Number: N/A. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Doppler frequency of one target can be estimated with low computation cost and high precision via closed-form robust Chinese remainder theorem (CFRCRT) when pulsed Doppler (PD) radar works with a low pulse repetition frequency. However, it brings difficulty for the method based on Chinese remainder theorem to estimate Doppler frequencies of multiple targets, because the correspondence between the detected targets and the wrapped frequencies is unknown in advance. The proposed algorithm, which is based on amplitude aid using clustering methodology, solves the problem of Doppler frequencies estimation of multiple targets. Additionally, because traditional discrete Fourier transform suffers from low matching precision due to spectrum leakage and picket fence effect, all phase discrete Fourier transform (apDFT) is proposed to match the frequency remainder with high performance. The theoretical analysis and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for Doppler frequencies of multiple targets in PD radar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conjugated polymers show great potential in the application of photocatalysis, particularly for the photoreduction reaction of water to generate hydrogen. Molecular structure design is a key part for building a high‐performance organic photocatalyst. Herein, two bisulfone‐containing conjugated polymer photocatalysts were constructed with 1D or 3D polymer structures, and the effect of polymer geometry on photocatalytic activity was studied. It was found that the linear polymer PySEO‐1 exhibited increased photocatalytic performance compared with the 3D polymer network PySEO‐2 because the enhanced coplanarity of the polymeric chain in PySEO‐1 promoted the photogenerated charge‐carrier transmission along the 1D main chain. As a result, an attractive hydrogen generation rate of 9477 μmol h−1 g−1 was obtained with PySEO‐1 under broadband light irradiation. PySEO‐1 also exhibited a high external quantum efficiency of 4.1 % at an incident light wavelength of 400 nm, demonstrating that the bisulfone‐containing polymers are attractive as organic photocatalysts for hydrogen production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, hypocholesterolaemic peptides were separated from whey protein trypsin hydrolysates (WPTHs) and the inhibition of cholesterol micellar solubility (ICMS) and the stability of hypocholesterolaemic peptides after exposure to simulated gastrointestinal conditions were evaluated. Whey protein trypsin hydrolysates were concentrated by ultrafiltration and then desalted through macroporous adsorption resin DA201‐C. Sephadex G‐50 gel filtration chromatography was used to separate the hypocholesterolaemic peptides from the fraction eluted with 75% ethanol. The results suggested that the fraction obtained by gel filtration with a molecular weight (MW) ranging from 1900 Da to 3100 Da exhibited the highest hypocholesterolaemic activity. This fraction was further separated by reversed‐phase high‐performance liquid chromatography into 14 fractions; the peptides with the highest activities were obtained from the fifth peak with a MW of 2454 Da and 58.77% ICMS. The hypocholesterolaemic peptides were relatively stable when exposed to simulated gastrointestinal digestion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel unitary parallel factor (U-PARAFAC) algorithm of estimating direction-of-departure (DOD) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) in bistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is proposed. A real-valued tensor signal model is constructed by applying the traditional forward-backward averaging technique. Subsequently, the fact that the real-valued tensor follows a PARAFAC model is proved, thus the subspace-based high-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) method can be avoided in the subsequent solving process. Furthermore, directly operating the real-valued loading factors instead of the signal subspace, traditional unitary ESPRIT (U-ESPRIT) method is firstly extended to the real-valued PARAFAC model. The new algorithm, which exploits the multidimensional structure and does not require the estimation of signal subspace, having good performance especially at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). More attractively, compared with classical tensor methods such as the PARAFAC algorithm and the unitary tensor-ESPRIT algorithm, the U-PARAFAC algorithm still performs well without sacrificing array aperture when targets are highly correlated or closely spaced. Additional angle pair-matching is not required. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel dual-functional radar-communication waveform design problem with low peak-to-average power ratio and range sidelobe is proposed. • The multi-user interference is optimized and constrained into constructive interference region to improve the performance of dual-functional radarcommunication system and ensure the quality-of-service of communication. • For the imperfect channel state information, a robust DFRC waveform design method is proposed. Dual-functional radar-communication system integrates the radar and communication functions into one system with a shared dual-functional waveform. In this paper, we focus on the problem of dual-functional waveform design under the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) constraint and low range sidelobe requirement. When the conventional schemes aim to minimize the multi-user interference (MUI) energy and maximize the similarity to the reference radar waveform, in our proposed method, a weighted summation objective function incorporated with the PAPR constraint and optimized MUI is constructed for the waveform design. Specifically, MUI is classified into destructive interference and constructive interference, while the latter is exploited as a free power for communication and is constrained to guarantee the communication quality-of-service (QoS). To tackle the resulting high order nonconvex problem, we develop an iteration algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) procedure, which involves two quadratic programming subproblems in each iteration and is easy to solve with the current solver. Moreover, by taking the imperfect channel state information (CSI) into consideration, we further investigate the robust dual-functional waveform design problem with the bounded uncertainty of the CSI. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]