Emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) from the winter of 2002 to the spring of 2003 has caused a serious threat to public health.
To evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of the ...inactivated SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) vaccine, 36 subjects received two doses of 16 SARS-CoV units (SU) or 32 SU inactivated SARS-CoV vaccine, or placebo control.
On day 42, the seroconversion reached 100% for both vaccine groups. On day 56, 100% of participants in the group receiving 16 SU and 91.1% in the group receiving 32 SU had seroconverted. The geometric mean titre of neutralizing antibody peaked 2 weeks after the second vaccination, but decreased 4 weeks later.
The inactivated vaccine was safe and well tolerated and can elicit SARS-CoV-specific neutralizing antibodies.
Pandemic influenza represents a major threat to global health. Vaccination is the most economic and effective strategy to control influenza pandemic. Conventional vaccine approach, despite being ...effective, has a number of major deficiencies including limited range of protection, total dependence on embryonated eggs for production, and time consuming for vaccine production. There is an urgent need to develop novel vaccine strategies to overcome these deficiencies.
The major objective of this work was to develop a novel vaccine strategy combining recombinant haemagglutinin (HA) protein and a master cell (MC) activator C48/80 for intranasal immunization. We demonstrated in BALB/c mice that MC activator C48/80 had strong adjuvant activity when co-administered with recombinant HA protein intranasally. Vaccination with C48/80 significantly increased the serum IgG and mucosal surface IgA antibody responses against HA protein. Such increases correlated with stronger and durable neutralizing antibody activities, offering protection to vaccinated animals from disease progression after challenge with lethal dose of A/California/04/2009 live virus. Furthermore, protected animals demonstrated significant reduction in lung virus titers, minimal structural alteration in lung tissues as well as higher and balanced production of Th1 and Th2 cytokines in the stimulated splenocytes when compared to those without C48/80.
The present study demonstrates that the novel vaccine approach of combining recombinant HA and mucosal adjuvant C48/80 is safe and effective in eliciting protective immunity in mice. Future studies on the mechanism of action of C48/80 and potential combination with other vaccine strategies such as prime and boost approach may help to induce even more potent and broad immune responses against viruses from various clades.
Olfactory proteins in insects are extremely diverse. The sensory neuron membrane protein (SNMP) olfactory receptor, which shares a high identity among different insects, has been shown to be ...essential for olfaction perception in insects. To research the function of SNMP, the gene encoding SNMP from
Plutella xylostella
Linnaeus (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae) was cloned and named
PxyloSNMP1
(GenBank accession no. HM536984). The sequencing results showed that the open reading frame of
PxyloSNMP1
had the characteristics of SNMP, with two putative transmembrane domains flanking a large extracellular loop and a 34-residue hydrophobic signal peptide sequence. The amino acid sequence of
PxyloSNMP1
had a high degree of similarity with those from other insect species and shared 78.8% identity with the SNMP sequence from
Amyelois transitella
Walker (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae). RT-PCR analysis revealed that the gene was expressed during all life-history stages and in all adult tissues. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) analysis also showed that the
PxyloSNMP1
transcript could be observed in different developmental stages at different levels of expression. The tissue expression pattern further indicated that
PxyloSNMP1
was expressed most in the antenna of
P. xylostella
, followed by the abdomen, head (without antenna), wing, leg and thorax. This study provides a basis for further studies of the function of SNMP from
P. xylostella
.
Polyethylene (PE) is the largest-volume synthetic polymer, and its chemical inertness makes its degradation by low-energy processes a challenging problem. We report a tandem catalytic cross alkane ...metathesis method for highly efficient degradation of polyethylenes under mild conditions. With the use of widely available, low-value, short alkanes (for example, petroleum ethers) as cross metathesis partners, different types of polyethylenes with various molecular weights undergo complete conversion into useful liquid fuels and waxes. This method shows excellent selectivity for linear alkane formation, and the degradation product distribution (liquid fuels versus waxes) can be controlled by the catalyst structure and reaction time. In addition, the catalysts are compatible with various polyolefin additives; therefore, common plastic wastes, such as postconsumer polyethylene bottles, bags, and films could be converted into valuable chemical feedstocks without any pretreatment.
Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is an essential branch of image reversible data hiding. Over the past decade, many significant achievements have been made. However, for most RDHEI ...researches, the cloud service user (CSU) demands either an encryption method specified by the cloud service provider (CSP) or prior knowledge about the original image to indicate the preprocessing operation. This characteristic may lead to some security issues like information leakage that may limit the use of this type of technology. To solve this problem, we propose a simple but effective RDHEI method that separates the CSU and CSP. The owner CSU exclusively sends the standard stream cipher image to the CSP, while the CSP can embed message data into the encrypted image through a simple MSB replacement without knowing the encrypted method or prior knowledge about the original image. The embedded message data can be extracted; meanwhile, the image can be approximately recovered by another authentic CSU. Since the proposed fundamental method is not error-free in most circumstances, we provide an alternative option to achieve reversibility by transmitting a perfect recovery key from the owner CSU to any authentic CSU. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.
•This paper proposes an RDHEI method without any additional information transmission between the image owner and the data hider.•The security level has a significant improvement compared to the methods with preprocessing.•The proposed method improves the performance in terms of embedding and reversibility compared to the baseline methods.•The embedding performance is not influenced by the image contents, and the algorithmic complexity is decreased.
Object detection on remote sensing images (RSIs) is a critical component of RSI processing techniques. Nonetheless, as the complexity of the model structure increases, more training data is required ...to prevent a severe decline in object detection performance. This requirement highlights the potential of few-shot object detection techniques. At present, few researches have been investigated for few-shot object detection on RSIs. To address this situation, we propose the saliency-guided multihead distribution calibration network (SMDC-Net) by building upon the existing fine-tuning-based two-stage few-shot object detection approach. We employ an RSI salient object detection (SOD) branch that leverages the feature of RSIs to predict the saliency maps. These predicted saliency maps are used as an attention map to augment the feature of RSIs. Meanwhile, to guarantee the ability of the network to identify objects in both the base and novel categories accurately, we design a multihead detector that can recognize objects in base and novel categories separately while introducing a consistency loss to supervise the consistency of the multihead predicted labels. We evaluate the performance of two widely recognized RSI datasets (i.e., DIOR and NWPU VHR-10) in various experimental settings for comparison and ablation analysis. The results illustrate that SMDC-Net enhances the detection performance of novel categories by approximately 3% compared to the state-of-the-art MM-RCNN while preserving the performance of base categories.
As emerging drivers, the enabling role of digital economy (DIE) and open innovation (OPI) in green low-carbon development (GLD) may be underestimated. In the context of digital development and ...knowledge sharing, the study examines the direct enabling impact and spatial interdependence of DIE and OPI on GLD in China from multidimensional perspectives of adjacency, geography and economy. The results show that DIE and OPI can not only positively promote local GLD by means of technological innovation and green information sharing, but also possess a vital impact on the GLD of geographically close or economically similar areas through spillover effect. Besides, the diffusion effect of DIE, which positively affects green low-carbon development in similar regions, is proven to transcend the negative siphon effect. Compared with open innovation, digital economy plays a stronger direct and indirect spillover role, becoming a priority enabler for GLD. Moreover, the spillover effects of digital economy and open innovation on green low-carbon development exhibit geographical boundaries. Based on these findings, governments can promote green low-carbon development by integrating digital technologies, fostering collaborative innovation and facilitating regional cooperation.
•Digital economy and open innovation are proven to foster low-carbon development.•Positive spillover effects of digital economy and open innovation are confirmed.•The diffusion effect of digital economy outweighs the negative siphon effect.•Digital economy is a preferred enabler of green low-carbon development.•Spillover effects of digitization and open innovation have geographical boundaries.
Cardiac hypertrophy is associated with many forms of heart disease, and identifying important modifier genes involved in the pathogenesis of cardiac hypertrophy could lead to the development of new ...therapeutic strategies. Tomoregulin-1 is a growth factor that is primarily involved in embryonic development and adult central nervous system (CNS) function, and it is expressed abnormally in a variety of CNS pathologies. Tomoregulin-1 is also expressed in the myocardium. However, the effects of tomoregulin-1 on the heart, particularly on cardiac hypertrophy, remains unknown. The aim of the study is to examine whether and by what mechanism tomoregulin-1 regulates the development of cardiac hypertrophy induced by pressure overload. In this study, we found that tomoregulin-1 was significantly upregulated in two cardiac hypertrophy models: cTnT(R92Q) transgenic mice and thoracic aorta constriction (TAC)-induced cardiac hypertrophy mice. The transgenic overexpression of tomoregulin-1 increased the survival rate, improved the cardiac geometry and functional parameters of echocardiography, and decreased the degree of cardiac hypertrophy of the TAC mice, whereas knockdown of tomoregulin-1 expression resulted in an opposite phenotype and exacerbated phenotypes of cardiac hypertrophy induced by TAC. A possible mechanism by which tomoregulin-1 regulates the development of cardiac hypertrophy in TAC-induced cardiac hypertrophy is through inhibiting TGFβ non-canonical (TAK1-JNK) pathways in the myocardium. Tomoregulin-1 plays a protective role in the modulation of adverse cardiac remodeling from pressure overload in mice. Tomoregulin-1 could be a therapeutic target to control the development of cardiac hypertrophy.
•A novel perceptual image hashing scheme using block truncation coding is proposed.•The pre-processing for regularization is first conducted to produce secondary image.•Reconstruction levels and ...CSLBP-based matrix are extracted as perceptual features.•Quantization and PCA operation are used to generate the final compact hash securely.
In this paper, we propose a novel perceptual image hashing scheme based on block truncation coding (BTC). In the proposed scheme, the pre-processing is first applied on original image through bilinear interpolation, Gaussian low-pass filtering, and singular value decomposition (SVD) to construct a secondary image for regularization. Then, BTC is conducted on the secondary image to extract perceptual image features, and the low and high reconstruction levels and the feature matrix of corresponding binary map after the computation of center-symmetrical local binary pattern (CSLBP) are compressed with quantization and data dimensionality reduction of PCA to produce the final compact binary hash. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has the satisfactory performances of robustness, anti-collision, and security.
The highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus is one of candidates for future pandemic. Since H5N1 viruses had previously been isolated only from avian species, the outbreak raised questions about ...the ability of these viruses to cause severe disease and death in humans. Pregnant women are at increased risk for influenza-associated illness and death. However, little is known about whether influenza viruses could transmit to the fetus through the placenta, and the effects of abortion and preterm delivery to maternal influenza infection are not well understood. We found that the H5N1 viruses could vertical transmit to the fetus through the placenta in the BALB/c mouse model, and the viruses could partly be evacuated by the pregnant mice during abortion or preterm delivery. This study may further our understanding about the transmission of this highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, supply optimized clinical treatment method for pregnant women, and shed some light on better preventing and controlling for future potential outbreak of H5N1 influenza pandemic.
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