The rapid outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been a matter of international concern as the disease is spreading fast 1, 2. Considering that the contagious disease has led to an ...enormous impact globally, there is an urgent need to identify the risk populations with poor prognosis. Ageing is associated with certain changes in pulmonary physiology, pathology and function, during the period of lung infection. Therefore, age-related differences in responsiveness and tolerance become obvious and lead to worse clinical outcomes in elderly individuals 3. Previous studies have mentioned that older COVID-19 patients are at an increased risk of death 4–7. However, the age-related clinical characteristics, disease courses and outcomes other than death in COVID-19 patients remain unclear.
Age significantly determined the clinical features and prognosis of COVID-19. The prognosis was worse in patients older than 60 years, calling for clinicians to pay more attention to patients of this age.
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In the past few decades, due to the rapid development of industry and the rapid growth of population, emissions of pollutants to the environment have increased dramatically, and the demand for ...drinking water is also increasing. Water treatment is a matter of concern because it is directly related to the health of humans and wildlife. Graphene and its derivatives have potential applications in seawater desalination and wastewater treatment due to their unique pore structure and ionic molecular sieving separation capabilities. Graphene, graphene oxide (GO), and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) can be formulated into nanoporous materials and composites with tunable properties that can be optimized for water filtration. Methods for perforating graphene include ion etching/ion bombardment and electron beam nanometer engraving, which are briefly introduced in this paper. Graphene-based composites further expand the capabilities of graphene in seawater desalination and wastewater treatment, by introducing new features and properties. In this review, the performance improvement of graphene-based separation membranes in decontamination and desalination in recent years is reviewed in detail. This review focuses on improving the performance of graphene-based membranes for separation, decontamination, and seawater desalination applications, by discussing how various modifications and preparation methods impact important performance properties, including water permeance, selectivity, rejection of solutes, membrane mechanical strength, and antifouling characteristics. We also discuss the outlook for future development of graphene-based membranes.
Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is being used widely to resolve cellular heterogeneity. With the rapid accumulation of public scRNA-seq data, an effective and efficient cell-querying method is ...critical for the utilization of the existing annotations to curate newly sequenced cells. Such a querying method should be based on an accurate cell-to-cell similarity measure, and capable of handling batch effects properly. Herein, we present Cell BLAST, an accurate and robust cell-querying method built on a neural network-based generative model and a customized cell-to-cell similarity metric. Through extensive benchmarks and case studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Cell BLAST in annotating discrete cell types and continuous cell differentiation potential, as well as identifying novel cell types. Powered by a well-curated reference database and a user-friendly Web server, Cell BLAST provides the one-stop solution for real-world scRNA-seq cell querying and annotation.
Abstract
Background
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel β-coronavirus, causes severe pneumonia and has spread throughout the globe rapidly. The disease associated ...with SARS-CoV-2 infection is named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). To date, real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the only test able to confirm this infection. However, the accuracy of RT-PCR depends on several factors; variations in these factors might significantly lower the sensitivity of detection.
Methods
In this study, we developed a peptide-based luminescent immunoassay that detected immunoglobulin (Ig)G and IgM. The assay cutoff value was determined by evaluating the sera from healthy and infected patients for pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2.
Results
To evaluate assay performance, we detected IgG and IgM in the sera from confirmed patients. The positive rate of IgG and IgM was 71.4% and 57.2%, respectively.
Conclusions
Therefore, combining our immunoassay with real-time RT-PCR might enhance the diagnostic accuracy of COVID-19.
A peptide-based magnetic chemiluminescence enzyme immunoassay for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies was developed; 71.4% (197 of 276) and 57.2% (158 of 276) of the COVID-19 inpatients were positive for IgG and IgM against SARS-CoV-2.
We report acute antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in 285 patients with COVID-19. Within 19 days after symptom onset, 100% of patients tested positive for antiviral immunoglobulin-G (IgG). ...Seroconversion for IgG and IgM occurred simultaneously or sequentially. Both IgG and IgM titers plateaued within 6 days after seroconversion. Serological testing may be helpful for the diagnosis of suspected patients with negative RT-PCR results and for the identification of asymptomatic infections.
Water shortages have become a major problem facing the world today. Membrane separation technology is commonly used in water treatment applications. The development of new materials for water ...treatment can reduce the energy required for water treatment, reduce cost, and improve efficiency. The unique structure and properties of graphene and silica make them attractive materials for preparation of nanofiltration membranes for water treatment. We have successfully prepared a graphene oxide/silica (GO/SiO
2
) hybrid composite materials by in situ hydrolysis, using tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) as a silicon source in an alkaline environment. The chemistry and structure of these materials are characterized by TEM, FTIR, Raman, and XPS of GO and the GO/SiO
2
composite. BET porosimetry reveals that the total pore volume of the composite is 2.84 cm
3
g
−1
, the specific surface area is 2897 m
2
g
−1
, and the average pore diameter is 3.97 nm. We prepared GO membranes and GO/SiO
2
composite membranes by vacuum suction filtration. The morphology of the membrane was observed by FESEM and AFM. The composite membrane has a larger surface roughness (
R
ms
= 9.39). We also tested the thermal stability by TGA, and hydrophilicity by water contact angle measurements. The water permeance of the composite membrane is up to 229.15 L m
−2
h
−1
bar
−1
, and the rejection of the rhodamine B dye molecules is as high as 99%. The GO/SiO
2
hybrid composite membrane has good hydrophilicity and thermal stability, high water permeance and rejection, and can be developed as a high-performance material for water treatment.
We evaluated global and regional burdens of, risk factors for, and epidemiologic trends in pancreatic cancer among groups of different sexes and ages.
We used data from the GLOBOCAN database to ...estimate pancreatic cancer incidence and mortality in 184 countries. We examined the association between lifestyle and metabolic risk factors, extracted from the World Health Organization Global Health Observatory database, and pancreatic cancer incidence and mortality by univariable and multivariable linear regression. We retrieved country-specific age-standardized rates (ASRs) of incidence and mortalities from cancer registries from 48 countries through 2017 for trend analysis by joinpoint regression analysis.
The highest incidence and mortality of pancreatic cancer were in regions with very high (ASRs, 7.7 and 4.9) and high human development indexes (ASRs, 6.9 and 4.6) in 2018. Countries with higher incidence and mortality were more likely to have higher prevalence of smoking, alcohol drinking, physical inactivity, obesity, hypertension, and high cholesterol. From 2008 to 2017, 2007 to 2016, or 2003 to 2012, depending on the availability of the data, there were increases in incidence among men and women in 14 (average annual percent changes AAPCs, 8.85 to 0.41) and 17 (AAPCs, 6.04 to 0.87) countries, respectively. For mortality, the increase was observed in 8 (AAPCs, 4.20 to 0.55) countries among men and 14 (AAPCs, 5.83 to 0.78) countries among women. Although the incidence increased in 18 countries (AAPCs, 7.83 to 0.91) among individuals 50 years or older, an increasing trend in pancreatic cancer was also identified among individuals younger than 50 years and 40 years in 8 (AAPCs, 8.75 to 2.82) and 4 (AAPCs, 11.07 to 8.31) countries, respectively.
In an analysis of data from 48 countries, we found increasing incidence and mortality trends in pancreatic cancer, especially among women and populations 50 years or older, but also among younger individuals. More preventive efforts are recommended for these populations.
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Abstract
Molecular representations play critical roles in researching drug design and properties, and effective methods are beneficial to assisting in the calculation of molecules and solving related ...problem in drug discovery. In previous years, most of the traditional molecular representations are based on hand-crafted features and rely heavily on biological experimentations, which are often costly and time consuming. However, recent researches achieve promising results using machine learning on various domains. In this article, we present a novel method named Smi2Vec-BiGRU that is designed for learning atoms and solving the single- and multitask binary classification problems in the field of drug discovery, which are the basic and also key problems in this field. Specifically, our approach transforms the molecule data in the SMILES format into a set of sample vectors and then feeds them into the bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural networks for training, which learns low-dimensional vector representations for molecular drug. We conduct extensive experiments on several widely used benchmarks including Tox21, SIDER and ClinTox. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarking datasets, demonstrating the feasibility and competitiveness of our proposed approach.
Noncoding RNAs, including long non‐coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs, are involved in the development of neuropathic pain. Currently, we investigated that lncRNA X inactive–specific transcript ...(XIST) and toll‐like receptor 5 (TLR5) were greatly upregulated in chronic constriction injury rat models, whereas miR‐154‐5p (microRNA‐154‐5p) was significantly downregulated. Bioinformatics analysis was used to predict miR‐154‐5p as a target gene of XIST, and dual‐luciferase reporter tests proved the correlation between them. We observed that miR‐154‐5p was negatively modulated by XIST in vitro. XIST overexpression markedly induced neuropathic pain development in rats with chronic constriction injury, whereas the upregulation of miR‐154‐5p could reverse this phenomenon. Furthermore, TLR5 was demonstrated to be a target gene of miR‐154‐5p by using bioinformatics predictions. miR‐154‐5p negatively regulated TLR5 expression in vitro, and TLR5 was able to promote neuropathic pain development. In addition, overexpressing miR‐154‐5p can reverse the role of TLR5 neuropathic pain in vivo. Taken these together, we indicated that XIST could increase TLR5 expression by acting as a sponge of miR‐154‐5p in neuropathic pain development. This study revealed that XIST can contribute to neuropathic pain progression in rats through decreasing miR‐154‐5p and increasing TLR5. The XIST/miR‐154‐5p/ TLR5 axis can be provided as a novel therapeutic target in treating neuropathic pain.
We showed that the inhibition of X inactive–specific transcript (XIST) inhibited neuropathic pain development of chronic constriction injury rats via increasing miR‐154 and decreasing toll‐like receptor 5 (TLR5). Both in vitro and in vivo experiments were performed to elucidate the mechanisms of the XIST/miR‐154/TLR5 axis in modulating neuropathic pain development. Our findings implied that XIST can be identified as a novel therapeutic target for neuropathic pain.
Abstract
Background
The high cost and insufficient supply of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines have slowed the pace of controlling cervical cancer. A phase III clinical trial was conducted to ...evaluate the efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity of a novel Escherichia coli-produced bivalent HPV-16/18 vaccine.
Methods
A multicenter, randomized, double-blind trial started on November 22, 2012 in China. In total, 7372 eligible women aged 18–45 years were age-stratified and randomly assigned to receive three doses of the test or control (hepatitis E) vaccine at months 0, 1, and 6. Co-primary endpoints included high-grade genital lesions and persistent infection (over 6 months) associated with HPV-16/18. The primary analysis was performed on a per-protocol susceptible population of individuals who were negative for relevant HPV type-specific neutralizing antibodies (at day 0) and DNA (at day 0 through month 7) and who received three doses of the vaccine. This report presents data from a prespecified interim analysis used for regulatory submission.
Results
In the per-protocol cohort, the efficacies against high-grade genital lesions and persistent infection were 100.0% (95% confidence interval = 55.6% to 100.0%, 0 of 3306 in the vaccine group vs 10 of 3296 in the control group) and 97.8% (95% confidence interval = 87.1% to 99.9%, 1 of 3240 vs 45 of 3246), respectively. The side effects were mild. No vaccine-related serious adverse events were noted. Robust antibody responses for both types were induced and persisted for at least 42 months.
Conclusions
The E coli-produced HPV-16/18 vaccine is well tolerated and highly efficacious against HPV-16/18–associated high-grade genital lesions and persistent infection in women.
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