Notably, 159 confirmed cases have been reported in 23 other countries beyond China, including Japan, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, the USA, Malaysia, and Germany. Because of the ...seriousness of this outbreak, WHO declared it a public health emergency of international concern on Jan 30, 2020, followed by the USA announcing a public health emergency on Jan 31, 2020. ...it is important to understand the lung microenvironment and the map of immune responses against 2019-nCoV infection, which might help to define clinical stages and uncover the pathogenesis of the disease. First-line medical staff and scientists in China have had a leading role in fighting the outbreak of 2019-nCoV-associated pneumonia.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Carbon dioxide (CO
2
) has emerged as a sustainable, feasible, abundant one-carbon synthon and displays great potential in the synthesis of heterocycles such as lactones, lactams, and ...2-oxazolidinones, which are privileged motifs in pharmaceutical chemistry demonstrating bioactivities. Although the fixation of CO
2
is restricted due to its thermodynamic stability and kinetic inertness, multiple breakthroughs have been realized in annulation chemistry. This review concentrates on the advances made in the last five years in CO
2
-incorporated cyclization triggered by
N
-,
O
-, and
C
-nucleophiles. Three transformation modes of CO
2
including carboxylative cyclization, carbonylative cyclization, and reductive cyclization have been summarized. Moreover, typical mechanisms and significant applications of these reactions are also described.
CO
2
, as a sustainable, feasible, abundant one-carbon synthon, has been utilized in carboxylative cyclization, carbonylative cyclization, and reductive cyclization.
Since early January 2020, after the outbreak of coronavirus infection in Wuhan, China, ≈365 confirmed cases have been reported in Shenzhen, China. The mode of community and intrafamily transmission ...is threatening residents in Shenzhen. Strategies to strengthen prevention and interruption of these transmissions should be urgently addressed.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A high efficiency and great tunability of bandwidth and absorption‐range electromagnetic wave absorber is proposed without precedent. A series of 2D carbon‐based nanocomposites with the loading of ...cerium oxide (CN‐Ce) and other types of rare earth oxides (CN‐REOs) can be successfully synthesized by a simple solvothermal‐sintering method. As‐synthesized 2D nanocomposites with local graphite‐like C3N4 structure and trace N‐doped are identified by transmission electron microscopy, X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X‐ray powder diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy. The CN‐REOs and polyvinylidene fluoride composite absorbers with reflection loss values above −40 dB are obtained in C‐band, X‐band, and Ku‐band, respectively. The empirical rules on effective bandwidth and frequency range are discovered and summarized, which can be successfully realized by simply tuning the doping amount or type of REO. The mechanism is explained by enhanced attenuation and tunable impedance matching. In addition co‐filled samples by two types of CN‐REOs nanocomposites are prepared to support these findings and inspire the preparation of absorber with desirable frequency band in the range of 2–18 GHz.
In the system of composites of PVDF and trace n‐doped carbon nanocomposites loaded with rare earth oxide, a high‐performance electromagnetic wave‐absorbing composite with adjustable electromagnetic wave absorption frequency range and adjustable effective absorption width is obtained. Regular performance is found based on extensive experimental data and analysis of intrinsic performance. In addition, the empirical conclusions are well‐validated by co‐filled (CN‐Ce+CN‐Eu)/PVDF samples.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
There have been significant advances in our understanding of human autoimmunity that have led to improvements in classification and diagnosis and, most importantly, research advances in new ...therapies. The importance of autoimmunity and the mechanisms that lead to clinical disease were first recognized about 50 years ago following the pioneering studies of Macfarlane Burnett and his Nobel Prize‐winning hypothesis of the ‘forbidden clone’. Such pioneering efforts led to a better understanding not only of autoimmunity, but also of lymphoid cell development, thymic education, apoptosis and deletion of autoreactive cells. Contemporary theories suggest that the development of an autoimmune disease requires a genetic predisposition and environmental factors that trigger the immune pathways that lead, ultimately, to tissue destruction. Despite extensive research, there are no genetic tools that can be used clinically to predict the risk of autoimmune disease. Indeed, the concordance of autoimmune disease in identical twins is 12–67%, highlighting not only a role for environmental factors, but also the potential importance of stochastic or epigenetic phenomena. On the other hand, the identification of cytokines and chemokines, and their cognate receptors, has led to novel therapies that block pathological inflammatory responses within the target organ and have greatly improved the therapeutic effect in patients with autoimmune disease, particularly rheumatoid arthritis. Further advances involving the use of multiplex platforms for diagnosis and identification of new therapeutic agents should lead to major breakthroughs within the next decade.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) in combination with computational chemistry has been used systematically over the past decade to elucidate the structures and chemical bonding of size-selected boron ...clusters. Small boron clusters have been found to be planar or quasi-planar, consisting of a monocyclic circumference with one or more interior atoms. The propensity for planarity has been found to be a result of both σ and π electron delocalisation over the molecular plane, giving rise to concepts of σ and π multiple aromaticity. In particular, the B
36
cluster has been found to possess a highly stable planar structure with a central hexagonal vacancy. This finding provides the first indirect experimental evidence that single-atom layer boron-sheets with hexagonal vacancies, dubbed 'borophene', are potentially viable. Another exciting discovery has been the observation and characterisation of the first all-boron fullerenes. PES revealed that the
cluster consisted of two isomers with very different electron binding energies. Global minimum searches led to two nearly degenerate isomers competing for the global minimum: a quasi-planar isomer with a double hexagonal vacancy and an unprecedented cage isomer. In the neutral, the B
40
cage is overwhelmingly the global minimum, which is the first all-boron fullerene to be observed and is named 'borospherene'. Rapid progresses in our understanding of the structures and bonding of size-selected boron clusters have been made during the past decade, which will be the focus of this review. The recent findings about borophenes and borospherenes have stimulated growing interests in boron clusters and will accelerate the pace of discovery in boron chemistry and nanostructures.
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BFBNIB, GIS, IJS, KISLJ, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithm designed to tackle combinatorial optimization problems. Despite its promise for near-term ...quantum applications, not much is currently understood about the QAOA’s performance beyond its lowest-depth variant. An essential but missing ingredient for understanding and deploying the QAOA is a constructive approach to carry out the outer-loop classical optimization. We provide an in-depth study of the performance of the QAOA on MaxCut problems by developing an efficient parameter-optimization procedure and revealing its ability to exploit nonadiabatic operations. Building on observed patterns in optimal parameters, we propose heuristic strategies for initializing optimizations to find quasioptimalp-level QAOA parameters inOpoly(p)time, whereas the standard strategy of random initialization requires2O(p)optimization runs to achieve similar performance. We then benchmark the QAOA and compare it with quantum annealing, especially on difficult instances where adiabatic quantum annealing fails due to small spectral gaps. The comparison reveals that the QAOA can learn via optimization to utilize nonadiabatic mechanisms to circumvent the challenges associated with vanishing spectral gaps. Finally, we provide a realistic resource analysis on the experimental implementation of the QAOA. When quantum fluctuations in measurements are accounted for, we illustrate that optimization is important only for problem sizes beyond numerical simulations but accessible on near-term devices. We propose a feasible implementation of large MaxCut problems with a few hundred vertices in a system of 2D neutral atoms, reaching the regime to challenge the best classical algorithms.
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CMK, CTK, FMFMET, IJS, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
Since its discovery in December 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected more than 2 180 000 people worldwide and has caused more than 150 000 deaths as of ...April 16, 2020. SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus causing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), uses the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as a cell receptor to invade human cells. Thus, ACE2 is the key to understanding the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This study is to investigate the ACE2 expression in various human tissues in order to provide insights into the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
We compared ACE2 expression levels across 31 normal human tissues between males and females and between younger (ages ≤ 49 years) and older (ages > 49 years) persons using two-sided Student's t test. We also investigated the correlations between ACE2 expression and immune signatures in various tissues using Pearson's correlation test.
ACE2 expression levels were the highest in the small intestine, testis, kidneys, heart, thyroid, and adipose tissue, and were the lowest in the blood, spleen, bone marrow, brain, blood vessels, and muscle. ACE2 showed medium expression levels in the lungs, colon, liver, bladder, and adrenal gland. ACE2 was not differentially expressed between males and females or between younger and older persons in any tissue. In the skin, digestive system, brain, and blood vessels, ACE2 expression levels were positively associated with immune signatures in both males and females. In the thyroid and lungs, ACE2 expression levels were positively and negatively associated with immune signatures in males and females, respectively, and in the lungs they had a positive and a negative correlation in the older and younger groups, respectively.
Our data indicate that SARS-CoV-2 may infect other tissues aside from the lungs and infect persons with different sexes, ages, and races equally. The different host immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection may partially explain why males and females, young and old persons infected with this virus have markedly distinct disease severity. This study provides new insights into the role of ACE2 in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Exhaustion of cytotoxic effector natural killer (NK) and CD8
T cells have important functions in the establishment of persistent viral infections, but how exhaustion is induced during chronic ...hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection remains poorly defined. Here we show, using the humanized C/O
mice permissive for persistent HCV infection, that NK and CD8
T cells become sequentially exhausted shortly after their transient hepatic infiltration and activation in acute HCV infection. HCV infection upregulates Qa-1 expression in hepatocytes, which ligates NKG2A to induce NK cell exhaustion. Antibodies targeting NKG2A or Qa-1 prevents NK exhaustion and promotes NK-dependent HCV clearance. Moreover, reactivated NK cells provide sufficient IFN-γ that helps rejuvenate polyclonal HCV CD8
T cell response and clearance of HCV. Our data thus show that NKG2A serves as a critical checkpoint for HCV-induced NK exhaustion, and that NKG2A blockade sequentially boosts interdependent NK and CD8
T cell functions to prevent persistent HCV infection.
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