The unprecedented coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has created a worldwide public health emergency, and there is an urgent need to develop an effective vaccine to control this severe ...infectious disease. Here, we find that a single vaccination with a replication-defective human type 5 adenovirus encoding the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (Ad5-nCoV) protect mice completely against mouse-adapted SARS-CoV-2 infection in the upper and lower respiratory tracts. Additionally, a single vaccination with Ad5-nCoV protects ferrets from wild-type SARS-CoV-2 infection in the upper respiratory tract. This study suggests that the mucosal vaccination may provide a desirable protective efficacy and this delivery mode is worth further investigation in human clinical trials.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes the infectious disease COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), which was first reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Despite ...extensive efforts to control the disease, COVID-19 has now spread to more than 100 countries and caused a global pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have originated in bats; however, the intermediate animal sources of the virus are unknown. In this study, we investigated the susceptibility of ferrets and animals in close contact with humans to SARS-CoV-2. We found that SARS-CoV-2 replicates poorly in dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks, but ferrets and cats are permissive to infection. Additionally, cats are susceptible to airborne transmission. Our study provides insights into the animal models for SARS-CoV-2 and animal management for COVID-19 control.
Rabies virus (RABV) invades the central nervous system and nearly always causes fatal disease in humans. How RABV interacts with host neuron membrane receptors to become internalized and cause rabid ...symptoms is not yet fully understood. Here, we identified a novel receptor of RABV, which RABV uses to infect neurons. We found that metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 2 (mGluR2), a member of the G protein-coupled receptor family that is abundant in the central nervous system, directly interacts with RABV glycoprotein to mediate virus entry. RABV infection was drastically decreased after mGluR2 siRNA knock-down in cells. Antibodies to mGluR2 blocked RABV infection in cells in vitro. Moreover, mGluR2 ectodomain soluble protein neutralized the infectivity of RABV cell-adapted strains and a street strain in cells (in vitro) and in mice (in vivo). We further found that RABV and mGluR2 are internalized into cells and transported to early and late endosomes together. These results suggest that mGluR2 is a functional cellular entry receptor for RABV. Our findings may open a door to explore and understand the neuropathogenesis of rabies.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Background Lung cancer (LC) is one of the most common malignant tumors in the world and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths, which seriously threatens human life and health as well as brings a ...heavy burden to the society. In recent years, the tumor microenvironment (TME) has become an emerging research field and hotspot affecting tumor pathogenesis and therapeutic approaches. However, to date, there has been no bibliometric analysis of lung cancer and the tumor microenvironment from 2014 to 2023.This study aims to comprehensively summarize the current situation and development trends in the field from a bibliometric perspective. Methods The publications about lung cancer and the tumor microenvironment from 2014 to 2023 were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). The Microsoft Excel, Origin, R-bibliometrix, CiteSpace, and VOSviewer software are comprehensively used to scientifically analyze the data. Results Totally, 763 publications were identified in this study. A rapid increase in the number of publications was observed after 2018. More than 400 organizations published these publications in 36 countries or regions. China and the United States have significant influence in this field. Zhou, CC and Frontiers in Immunology are the most productive authors and journals respectively. Besides, the most frequently cited references were those on lung cancer pathogenesis, clinical trials, and treatment modalities. It suggests that novel lung cancer treatment models mainly based on the TME components, such as cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) may lead to future research trends. Conclusions The field of lung cancer and the tumor microenvironment research is still in the beginning stages. Gene expression, molecular pathways, therapeutic modalities, and novel detection technologies in this field have been widely studied by researchers. This is the first bibliometric study to comprehensively summarize the research trend and development regarding lung cancer and tumor microenvironment over the last decade. The result of our research provides the updated perspective for scholars to understand the key information and cutting-edge hotspots in this field, as well as to identify future research directions.
The continuous emergence of severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants and the increasing number of breakthrough infection cases among vaccinated people support the urgent need for ...research and development of antiviral drugs. Viral entry is an intriguing target for antiviral drug development. We found that diltiazem, a blocker of the L-type calcium channel Cav1.2 pore-forming subunit (Cav1.2 α1c) and an FDA-approved drug, inhibits the binding and internalization of SARS-CoV-2, and decreases SARS-CoV-2 infection in cells and mouse lung. Cav1.2 α1c interacts with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and ACE2, and affects the attachment and internalization of SARS-CoV-2. Our finding suggests that diltiazem has potential as a drug against SARS-CoV-2 infection and that Cav1.2 α1c is a promising target for antiviral drug development for COVID-19.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Online forumpost evaluationis an effective way for instructors to assess students’ knowledge understanding and writing mechanics. Manually evaluating massive posts costs a lot of time. Automatically ...grading online posts could significantly alleviate instructors’ burden. Similar text assessment tasks like Automated Text Scoring evaluate the writing quality of independent texts or relevance between text and prompt. And Automatic Short Answer Grading measures the semantic matching of short answers according to given problems and correct answers. Different from existing tasks, we propose a novel task, Automated Post Scoring (APS), which grades all online discussion posts in each thread of each student with given topics and quoted posts. APS evaluates not only the writing quality of posts automatically but also the relevance to topics. To measure the relevance, we model the semantic consistency between posts and topics. Supporting arguments are also extracted from quoted posts to enhance posts evaluation. Specifically, we propose a mixture model including a hierarchical text model to measure the writing quality, a semantic matching model to model topic relevance, and a semantic representation model to integrate quoted posts. We also construct a new dataset called Online Discussion Dataset containing 2,542 online posts from 694 students of a social science course. The proposed models are evaluated on the dataset with correlation and residual based evaluation metrics. Compared with measuring posts alone, experimental results demonstrate that incorporating topics and quoted posts could improve the performance of APS by a large margin, more than 9 percent on QWK.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Chemical flooding plays an important role in enhancing oil recovery due to many reasons, including the viscosity-increment effect of polymer, wettability alteration effect of surfactant, and the ...formation of emulsions, which have been known to effectively increase the swept area and oil displacement efficiency, hence increasing heavy oil recovery. Laboratory tests and pilot trials of alkali–surfactant–polymer (ASP) injection show that the oil recovery of the emulsified system is 5% more than the cases where no emulsions existed. Therefore, it is of great significance to study heavy oil emulsions and its field application for enhanced heavy oil recovery. This paper discusses a thorough overview of the most fundamental ASP flooding mechanisms, along with some examples of laboratory experiments and field trials. In addition, the formation conditions and the interfacial characteristics of heavy oil emulsions are also discussed, mainly ASP flooding, and then the seepage mechanisms of these emulsions are investigated. The relationship between the formation of heavy oil emulsions and the enhanced heavy oil recovery effect by chemical flooding is discussed through core flooding experiments at the reservoir temperature and some field pilots to reach the optimum heavy oil recovery.
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