Pangolins are endangered animals in urgent need of protection. Identifying and cataloguing the viruses carried by pangolins is a logical approach to evaluate the range of potential pathogens and help ...with conservation. This study provides insight into viral communities of Malayan Pangolins (
) as well as the molecular epidemiology of dominant pathogenic viruses between Malayan Pangolin and other hosts. A total of 62,508
assembled contigs were constructed, and a BLAST search revealed 3600 ones (≥300 nt) were related to viral sequences, of which 68 contigs had a high level of sequence similarity to known viruses, while dominant viruses were the Sendai virus and Coronavirus. This is the first report on the viral diversity of pangolins, expanding our understanding of the virome in endangered species, and providing insight into the overall diversity of viruses that may be capable of directly or indirectly crossing over into other mammals.
An outbreak of 2019‐nCoV infection has spread across the world. No specific antiviral drugs have been approved for the treatment of COVID‐2019. In addition to the recommended antiviral drugs, such as ...interferon‐ɑ, lopinavir/ritonavir, ribavirin, and chloroquine phosphate, some clinical trials focusing on virus RNA‐dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) inhibitors have been registered and initiated. Favipiravir, a purine nucleic acid analog and potent RdRp inhibitor approved for use in influenza, is also considered in several clinical trials. Herein, we summarized the pharmacokinetic characteristics of favipiravir and possible drug–drug interactions from the view of drug metabolism. We hope this will be helpful for the design of clinical trials for favipiravir in COVID‐2019, as data regarding in vitro virus inhibition and efficacy in preclinical animal studies are still not available.
Human object-selective cortex shows a large-scale organization characterized by the high-level properties of both animacy and object size. To what extent are these neural responses explained by ...primitive perceptual features that distinguish animals from objects and big objects from small objects? To address this question, we used a texture synthesis algorithm to create a class of stimuli—texforms—which preserve some mid-level texture and form information from objects while rendering them unrecognizable. We found that unrecognizable texforms were sufficient to elicit the large-scale organizations of object-selective cortex along the entire ventral pathway. Further, the structure in the neural patterns elicited by texforms was well predicted by curvature features and by intermediate layers of a deep convolutional neural network, supporting the mid-level nature of the representations. These results provide clear evidence that a substantial portion of ventral stream organization can be accounted for by coarse texture and form information without requiring explicit recognition of intact objects.
•Reliability estimation through simulation for multistate flow networks.•MP-based simulation without prior knowledge of boundary for demand.•Investigating reliability degradation through the analysis ...of time series.•Large-scale case study of Taiwan Academic Network.
A multistate flow network is useful for the effective and efficient model construction and reliability evaluation of large and complex systems. To evaluate the reliability of a multistate flow network, boundary points for specified demands are generated in the existing path- and cut-based methodologies. Using the boundary points, the system reliability can be calculated using analytical or simulation methodologies. However, evaluating reliability using boundary points is an NP-hard problem. To improve the time efficiency of reliability estimation, a path-based simulation approach without boundary points is proposed in this study, where the minimal path without any cycles is used. The contributions of this study are threefold: First, the proposed path-based simulation complements the cut-based simulation to improve the applicability of reliability estimation for various network topologies. Second, the proposed simulation algorithm presents linear time complexity, whereas conventional boundary-based analytical methodologies or simulations consume exponential/factorial time. Third, the time attribute is included in the proposed simulation approach to analyze the behavior of reliability degradation over time. The experimental results, including those of a case study, indicate that the proposed path-based simulation is more effective and efficient than existing boundary-based approaches, particularly for large and complex systems.
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is notable for its high mortality and high metastatic characteristics. The shear force generated by bloodstream provides mechanical signals regulating multiple responses of ...cells, including metastatic cancer cells, dispersing in blood vessels. We, therefore, studied the effect of shear flow on circulating CRC cells in the present study. The CRC cell line SW620 was subjected to shear flow of 12.5 dynes/cm2 for 1 and 2 h separately. Resulting elevated caspase‐9 and ‐3 indicated that shear flow initiated the apoptosis of SW620. Enlarged cell size associated with a higher level of cyclin D1 was coincident with the flow cytometric results indicating that the cell cycle was arrested at the G1 phase. An elevated phosphor‐eNOSS1177 increased the production of nitric oxide and led to reactive oxygen species‐mediated oxidative stress. Shear flow also regulated epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) by increasing E‐cadherin and ZO‐1 while decreasing Snail and Twist1. The migration and invasion of sheared SW620 were also substantially decreased. Further investigations showed that mitochondrial membrane potential was significantly decreased, whereas mitochondrial mass and ATP production were not changed. In addition to the shear flow of 12.5 dynes/cm2, the expressions of EMT were compared at lower (6.25 dynes/cm2) and at higher (25 dynes/cm2) shear flow. The results showed that lower shear flow increased mesenchymal characteristics and higher shear flow increased epithelial characteristics. Shear flow reduces the malignancy of CRC in their metastatic dispersal that opens up new ways to improve cancer therapies by applying a mechanical shear flow device.
With the change and complexity of the tourism market environment, the financial risks faced by tourism enterprises are increasingly diversified. Effectively evaluating and controlling these financial ...risks has become the key to the development of tourism enterprises. Therefore, this study builds an accurate and real-time enterprise financial risk assessment and control model with the help of genetic algorithm. The results show that compared with other models, the maximum error value of the research model is only 0.12, and the maximum mean square error is only 0.09. The high reliability of the model is verified by simulating the data of selected tourism enterprises. After increasing the number of samples, the accuracy of the model continues to improve, and the predicted financial indicators are more in line with the actual situation. The model achieves the best results in average fitness, and the required error value is reached within 10 iterations. In the goodness of fit comparison, the goodness of fit of the training set, the test set and the verification set of the model are all over 0.7. In the empirical analysis, the ACC of the research model reached 97.4%, the accuracy rate reached 97.1%, the F1 index of the research reached 98.6%, and the other three research models were all lower than 98%. The above shows that the research model has significant advantages and can effectively evaluate and control the financial risk of tourism enterprises.
(1) Background: Dietary fiber intake may provide beneficial effects on the components of metabolic syndrome (MetS); however, observational studies reported inconsistent results for the relationship ...between dietary fiber intake and MetS risk. We conducted a meta-analysis to quantify previous observational studies and a narrative review to summarize mechanisms involved in the potential relationship. (2) Methods: The literature was searched on PubMed and Web of Science until 28 November 2017. A random-effects model was used to calculate the summary risk estimates. Eleven cross-sectional studies and three cohort studies were included in the meta-analysis. Results from the original studies were reported as odds ratios (ORs) or relative ratios (RRs) of the MetS associated with different levels of dietary fiber intake, and the ORs/RRs comparing the highest with lowest categories of the intake were pooled. (3) Results: For the cross-sectional studies, the pooled OR was 0.70 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.61-0.82) with evidence of high heterogeneity (
² = 74.4%,
< 0.001) and publication bias (
for Egger's test < 0.001). After removing four studies, results remained significant (OR = 0.67, 95% CI: 0.58-0.78) and the heterogeneity was largely reduced (
² = 32.4%,
= 0.181). For the cohort studies, the pooled RR was 0.86 (95% CI: 0.70-1.06). (4) Conclusion: Although the meta-analysis suggests an inverse association between dietary fiber intake and risk of MetS, and the association was supported by a wide range of mechanism studies, the findings are limited by insufficient cohort data. More prospective studies are needed to further verify the association between dietary fiber intake and the risk of MetS.
It is still a great challenge to achieve high selectivity of CH4 in CO2 electroreduction reactions (CO2RR) because of the similar reduction potentials of possible products and the sluggish kinetics ...for CO2 activation. Stabilizing key reaction intermediates by single type of active sites supported on porous conductive material is crucial to achieve high selectivity for single product such as CH4. Here, Cu2O(111) quantum dots with an average size of 3.5 nm are in situ synthesized on a porous conductive copper‐based metal–organic framework (CuHHTP), exhibiting high selectivity of 73 % towards CH4 with partial current density of 10.8 mA cm−2 at −1.4 V vs. RHE (reversible hydrogen electrode) in CO2RR. Operando infrared spectroscopy and DFT calculations reveal that the key intermediates (such as *CH2O and *OCH3) involved in the pathway of CH4 formation are stabilized by the single active Cu2O(111) and hydrogen bonding, thus generating CH4 instead of CO.
Cu2O(111) single‐type sites on a conductive metal–organic framework are successfully prepared by an in situ electrochemical method. The cooperative effect between the single active Cu2O(111) and hydrogen bonding contributes to the high selectivity of 73 % towards CH4 with large current density in CO2 electroreduction reduction for the obtained Cu2O(111)@CuHHTP.
Substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology provides an attractive solution to the integration of planar and nonplanar circuits by using a planar circuit fabrication process. However, it is ...usually difficult to implement the negative coupling structure required for the design of compact canonical folded elliptic or quasi-elliptic cross-coupled bandpass filter on the basis of a single-layer SIW. In this paper, a special planar negative coupling scheme including a magnetic coupling post-wall iris and a balanced microstrip line with a pair of metallic via-holes is studied in detail. Two -band fourth-degree cross-coupled bandpass filters without and with source-load coupling using the negative coupling structures are then proposed and designed. The two novel SIW filters having the same center frequency of 20.5 GHz and respective passband width of 700 and 800 MHz are implemented on a single-layer Rogers RT/Duroid 5880 substrate with thickness of 0.508 mm. Measured results of those filters, which exhibit a high selectivity, and a minimum in-band insertion loss of approximately 0.9 and 1.0 dB, respectively, agree well with simulated results.
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