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Abstract Background To investigate dynamic fluctuations of serum viral load and peripheral T-lymphocyte subpopulations of chronic hepatitis B patients and their correlation during entecavir therapy. Methods Fifty-five patients received entecavir 0.5 mg/d therapy. Serum HBV DNA load was measured by Real-Time-PCR, and the levels of peripheral T-lymphocyte subpopulations by flow cytometry biweekly, every four weeks and every eight weeks during weeks 1–12, 13–24 and 24–48, respectively. Multilevel modelling was used to analyse the relationship between these variables. Results Of the 55 patients, all HBeAg positive and with detectable HBV DNA, the majority (81.8%) had serum levels of HBV DNA over 107 copies per milliliter. HBV viral load dropped sharply during the first two weeks. In 28 and 43 patients, the level became undetectable from week 24 and 48, respectively. Using pre-therapy level as the reference, a significant decrease in CD8+ T cells and increase in CD4+ T cells were found from week 12. Both parameters and CD4+/CD8+ ratio steadily improved throughout the 48 weeks. Multilevel analyses showed that the level of decrement of HBV DNA was associated with the increment of T-lymphocyte activities only in the later period (4–48 week). After 4 weeks of therapy, for each log10 scale decrement of HBV DNA, the percentage of CD4+ lymphocyte was increased by 0.49 and that of CD8+ decreased by 0.51. Conclusion T-lymphocyte subpopulations could be restored partially by entecavir treatment in patients with chronic hepatitis B concurrently with reduction of viremia.

This study aims to evaluate four pacemaker pocket cleaning methods for preventing implantation‐related infections. This single‐center trial prospectively randomized 910 patients undergoing first‐time pacemaker implantation or replacement into four pocket cleaning methods: hemocoagulase (group A, n = 228), gentamicin (group B, n = 228), hemocoagulase plus gentamicin (group C, n = 227), and normal saline (group D, n = 227). Before implanting the pacemaker battery, the pockets were cleaned with gauze presoaked in the respective cleaning solutions. Then, these patients were followed up to monitor the occurrence of infections for 1 month after implantation. Twelve implantation‐related infections occurred in 910 patients (1.32%): four patients from group A (1.75%), three patients from group B (1.32%), two patients from group C (0.88%), and three patients from group D (1.32%) (P >.05). Furthermore, two patients developed bloodstream infections (0.22%), and both of these patients were associated with pocket infection (one patient was from group A, while the other patient was from group C, respectively). No cases of infective endocarditis occurred. The differences in the number of infections in these study groups were not statistically significant. The application of hemocoagulase, gentamicin, hemocoagulase plus gentamicin, or normal saline on the presoaked gauze before implantation was equally effective in preventing pocket‐associated infections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On December 19th, 2017, China's Emissions Trading System (CETS) was officially launched, firstly only covering the power industry. Cap setting and allowance allocation are urgent issues for the government. Because of the different characteristics of sectors, this paper tries to propose a reasonable and effective allocation scheme from the industry perspective for the government. Firstly, it adopts traditional methods, namely grandfathering and benchmarking. Secondly, it proposes theoretical allocation schemes. Finally, the most effective scheme is selected for sectors. Results show that quotas of grandfathering scheme are larger than that of benchmarking scheme. Among four theoretical scenarios, quotas in the preferring capacity scenario are the lowest and those in the preferring potential scenario are the highest. Quotas of the manufacturing and electricity, gas, and water production and supply industries are higher. In the industrial sectors, quotas of the light and high-tech industries are lower. Results of regional quotas calculations in the preferring capacity scheme are consistent with the regional carbon intensity reduction target in the 13th Five-Year Plan Work Program for Controlling GHG Emissions. After comparing all schemes, this paper determines that theoretical scheme is the most effective for its balance on emissions reduction and development of sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Anthracnose caused by Colletotrichum fructicola is one of the most important diseases in pear fruit, resulting in huge economic losses. Public awareness of protecting the environment and food safety, together with pathogen resistance to many key fungicides have led to an urgent need to develop alternative strategies for controlling fruit diseases. Here, the antifungal activity of a natural product, dihydromaltophilin [heat‐stable antifungal factor (HSAF)], against C. fructicola in vitro and in vivo was investigated to determine its efficacy for anthracnose management. RESULTS: HSAF exhibited pronounced antifungal activity against in vitro mycelial growth of C. fructicola, with a half‐inhibition concentration of 0.43 mg L−1. Hyphae treated with HSAF showed defects such as hyperbranching, swelling and depolarized growth. Conidia germination in the pathogen was inhibited by HSAF in a dose‐dependent manner. In the presence of 4 mg L−1 HSAF, conidia germination was significantly delayed, and germ tube growth was inhibited. HSAF at 8 mg L−1 completely blocked conidia germination in C. fructicola. In addition, HSAF disrupted coordination of cytokinesis with growth and nuclear division, induced reactive oxygen species production in conidia, and damaged the integrity of the conidia cell wall. Moreover, an in vivo test confirmed that 50 mg L−1 HSAF significantly reduced the development of anthracnose decay in pear fruit caused by C. fructicola. CONCLUSION: HSAF was highly effective in reducing pear anthracnose caused by C. fructicola and has great potential to become a new type of fruit preservative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uniform-in-time bounds of nonnegative classical solutions to reaction-diffusion systems in all space dimension are proved. The systems are assumed to dissipate the total mass and to have locally Lipschitz nonlinearities of at most (slightly super-) quadratic growth. This pushes forward the recent advances concerning global existence of reaction-diffusion systems dissipating mass in which a uniform-in-time bound has been known only in space dimension one or two. As an application, skew-symmetric Lotka-Volterra systems are shown to have unique classical solutions which are uniformly bounded in time in all dimensions with relatively compact trajectories in C(Ω)m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

App-based ride-hailing is a newly emergent mode of travel that is expected to influence passengers' travel behavior significantly. In this study, we define app-based ride-hailing services to include hailing of taxis through smartphone apps and sharing of private vehicles (car sharing is not included). This paper is one of the first quantitative studies to examine how app-based ride hailing would impact passengers' choice of travel mode and change car-purchasing behaviors. China is taken as the empirical context, and the data are from a large-scale app-based survey conducted via the largest app-based ride-hailing platform in the world. Drawing on these rich survey data, the investigation covers both the short-term travel mode choices and long-term car-purchasing behaviors of app-based ride-hailing users. The research findings are helpful in understanding changes in urban residents' travel behaviors under in context of app-based ride hailing, and provide valuable in-depth insights for both governments and app-based ride-hailing service providers (i.e., enterprises) for the management and regulation of ride hailing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stabilization by noise for parabolic equations in perforated domains, i.e. domains with small holes, is investigated. We show that when the holes are small enough, one can stabilize the unstable equations using suitable multiplicative Itô noise. The results are quantitative, in the sense that we can explicitly estimate the size of the holes and diffusion coefficients for which stabilization by noise takes place. This is done by using the asymptotic behaviour of the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian as the hole shrinks to a point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fusarium graminearum is a dominant phytopathogenic fungus causing Fusarium head blight (FHB) in cereal crops. Heat-stable antifungal factor (HSAF) is a polycyclic tetramate macrolactam (PoTeM) isolated from Lysobacter enzymogenes that exhibits strong antifungal activity against F. graminearum. HSAF significantly reduces the DON production and virulence of F. graminearum. Importantly, HSAF exhibited no cross-resistance to carbendazim, phenamacril, tebuconazole and pydiflumetofen. However, the target protein of HSAF in F. graminearum is unclear. In this study, the oxysterol-binding protein FgORP1 was identified as the potential target of HSAF using surface plasmon resonance (SPR) combined with RNA-sequence (RNA-seq). The RNA-seq results showed cell membrane and ergosterol biosynthesis were significantly impacted by HSAF in F. graminearum. Molecular docking showed that HSAF binds with arginine 1205 and glutamic acid 1212, which are located in the oxysterol-binding domain of FgORP1. The two amino acids in FgORP1 are responsible for HSAF resistance in F. graminearum though site-directed mutagenesis. Furthermore, deletion of FgORP1 led to significantly decreased sensitivity to HSAF. Additionally, FgORP1 regulates the mycelial growth, conidiation, DON production, ergosterol biosynthesis and virulence in F. graminearum. Overall, our findings revealed the mode of action of HSAF against F. graminearum , indicating that HSAF is a promising fungicide for controlling FHB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]