•The COVID-19 has a high R0, a long incubation period, and a short serial interval.•The COVID-19 has a general low CFR, but much higher in patients with comorbidities.•The spike protein binding to ...ACE2 may explain the high R0 of COVID-19.•Autopsy showed more exudative lesions, and less fibrosis and consolidation.•Remdesivir, chloroquine, tocilizumab, and convalescent plasma may be effective.
The rapid spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by a zoonotic beta-coronavirus entitled 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), has become a global threat. Awareness of the biological features of 2019-nCoV should be updated in time and needs to be comprehensively summarized to help optimize control measures and make therapeutic decisions.
Based on recently published literature, official documents and selected up-to-date preprint studies, we reviewed the virology and origin, epidemiology, clinical manifestations, pathology and treatment of 2019-nCoV infection, in comparison with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection.
The genome of 2019-nCoV partially resembled SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, and indicated a bat origin. The COVID-19 generally had a high reproductive number, a long incubation period, a short serial interval and a low case fatality rate (much higher in patients with comorbidities) than SARS and MERS. Clinical presentation and pathology of COVID-19 greatly resembled SARS and MERS, with less upper respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms, and more exudative lesions in post-mortems. Potential treatments included remdesivir, chloroquine, tocilizumab, convalescent plasma and vaccine immunization (when possible).
The initial experience from the current pandemic and lessons from the previous two pandemics can help improve future preparedness plans and combat disease progression.
In the recent two decades, three global viral infectious diseases, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), middle east respiratory syndrome (MERS), and coronavirus disease (COVID-19), have occurred ...worldwide. SARS occurred in November 2002, causing 8096 infected cases, as well as 774 deaths. MERS occurred in June, 2012, causing 2519 confirmed cases, along with 866 associated deaths. COVID-19 occurred in December 2019, as of 30 April 2020, a total of 3,024,059 clinical cases have been reported, including 208,112 deaths. Healthcare workers (HCWs) need to be in close contact with these virus-infected patients and their contaminated environments at work, thus leading to be infected in some of them, even a few of them are died in line of duty. In this review, we summarized the infection status of HCWs during the outbreak of SARS, MERS and COVID-19, with in-depth discussion, hoping to provoke sufficient attention to the HCWs infection status by more people.
B-box (BBX) proteins play important roles in plant growth regulation and development including photomorphogenesis, photoperiodic regulation of flowering, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses.
...In the present study we retrieved total 131 BBX members from five Poaceae species including 36 from maize, 30 from rice, 24 from sorghum, 22 from stiff brome, and 19 from Millet. All the BBX genes were grouped into five subfamilies on the basis of their phylogenetic relationships and structural features. The expression profiles of 12 OsBBX genes in different tissues were evaluated through qRT-PCR, and we found that most rice BBX members showed high expression level in the heading stage compared to seedling and booting stages. The expression of OsBBX1, OsBBX2, OsBBX8, OsBBX19, and OsBBX24 was strongly induced by abiotic stresses such as drought, cold and salt stresses. Furthermore, the expression of OsBBX2, OsBBX7, OsBBX17, OsBBX19, and OsBBX24 genes was up-regulated under GA, SA and MeJA hormones at different time points. Similarly, the transcripts level of OsBBX1, OsBBX7, OsBBX8, OsBBX17, and OsBBX19 genes were significantly affected by heavy metals such as Fe, Ni, Cr and Cd.
Change in the expression pattern of BBX members in response to abiotic, hormone and heavy metal stresses signifies their potential roles in plant growth and development and in response to multivariate stresses. The findings suggest that BBX genes could be used as potential genetic markers for the plants, particularly in functional analysis and determining their roles under multivariate stresses.
•We combine Zelinsky's hypothesis of the mobility transition model and land use transition theory to explore land use change.•We examine changes in rural out-migration and land use in China from a ...transition perspective.•Land use transition in China has unique characters, such as hollowed villages, because of institutional environment.•Deal with the food–environment-development trilemma, policies should consider the impact of rural out-migration on land use transition.
Although rural out-migration has significantly transformed land use at the local to regional scale, the links between rural out-migration and land use change are not well understood. This paper connects Zelinsky's mobility transition model to land use transition theory and identifies the impacts of rural out-migration on land use transition. It then explores the significant influences of rural out-migration on land use transition in China. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1978, China has undergone rapid and significant changes. Extensive rural out-migration has transformed China from a land-attached agricultural society to an urban and industrial society. This has produced several contrasting land use trends: increased land demand in urban areas at the expense of high-quality cultivated land, increased number of total settlement areas and emerging “hollowed villages” in the countryside. China's policies addressing these problems could benefit to other developing countries, such as restricting frontier clearing through land zoning and other ecological protection policies; encouraging nonmigrants to adjust their agricultural land holdings; protecting nonmigrants’ interest through subsidizing agricultural land, and improving rural infrastructure and farmers’ living conditions. Rural out-migration is thus a critical element in addressing the fundamental question of land use—how to balance the land demand for economic development, food security and conservation. This article explores the impacts of rural out-migration on land use change, analyzes the process of migration and land use transition and then examines how rural out-migration affects land use transition in China. This paper also explores future land use change in China, by considering the trend of rural–urban migration and the dynamics of population transition. In so doing, we try to link current rural out-migration dynamics and land use change to facilitate future research and policy considerations. We propose that in order to facilitate policymaking, further research should take a multiscale perspective: cross-country research should be based on an understanding of the dynamics and issues of rural out-migration and land use change in developing countries with different characteristics; country-level research should focus on land use change and problems caused by rural out-migration and its spatial characteristics; and community and household-level research should examine the effects of out-migration of household or household members on agricultural and other land use change.
Smoking is relevant to infectious diseases resulting in increased prevalence and mortality. In this article, we aim to provide an overview of the effects of smoking in various infections and to ...explain the potential mechanisms. We searched PubMed and other relevant databases for scientific studies that explored the relationship between smoking and infection. The mechanisms of susceptibility to infection in smokers may include alteration of the structural, functional and immunologic host defences. Smoking is one of the main risk factors for infections in the respiratory tract, digestive tract, reproductive tract, and other systems in humans, increasing the prevalence of HIV, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV, and the current SARS-CoV-2. Smoking cessation can reduce the risk of infection. Smoking increases the incidence of infections and aggravates the progress and prognosis of infectious diseases in a dose-dependent manner. Smoking cessation promotion and education are the most practical and economical preventive measures to reduce aggravation of disease infection owing to tobacco use.
•Heat transfer characteristics of interior walls in south china has been studied.•Heat transfer between adjacent rooms is studied under different heating terminals.•Heat transfer between adjacent ...rooms increase heat load greatly.•Heat transfer through inner walls affect energy consumption greatly.
In this paper, in order to study the effect of heat transfer between households on good indoor thermal environment and building energy efficiency, the indoor thermal environment and heat consumption of the room with different laying forms of radiation end are compared in the case of no heating in the adjacent room through the field experimental test. It was found that whether the adjacent room is heated directly affects the surface temperature and total heat consumption of the inner wall. Compared with the heating adjacent room, when the adjacent room is not heated the indoor air temperature in the working area decreased by 3.4-4.7%, the internal wall surface temperature decreased by 3.0–7.4%, and the heat flux density of internal wall surface increased by 29.8–52.2%. The heating surface temperature was reduced by 2.3–3.7%, the heat flux density of the heating surface was increased by 15.3–16.3% for floor and ceiling heating, and the heat flux density was reduced by about 22% because of the large heat transfer to adjacent rooms through interior walls. The heating of the large heat transfer to the adjacent rooms through interior walls. The total heat supply to the room increased by 5.2–7.2%. Additional heat load calculation is supposed to be taken into consideration due to the large heat transfer between interior walls while neighboring rooms are not heated.
Timely and accurate delineation of the cropland extent over large area is crucial for operational agriculture monitoring and is also beneficial to address food security issues. Existing global ...datasets associated with cropland are limited by insufficient spatial resolution to properly represent areas with small parcel size distributions, and their less-than-ideal accuracies hamper application at regional and local scales. Diverse very high spatial resolution (VHSR) satellite systems are now available, offering sub-meter to five-meter resolution (e.g. Gaofen-1, Gaofen-2, and ZiYuan-3), and hence enabling explicit extraction of cropland areas from heterogeneous and fragmented landscapes. This study presented a generalized methodology for operational cropland mapping at very high resolution using a deep convolutional neural network to automatically learn the robust and discriminative features. Specifically, we slightly modified the pyramid scene parsing network (PSPNet) and combined deep long-range features with shadow local features to provide predictions with high level of detail. We demonstrated the modified PSPNet (MPSPNet) over four province-wide study areas (Heilongjiang, Hebei, Zhejiang and Guangdong) with diverse agrosystems across China from north to south using multi-source very high spatial resolution satellite images (mainly Gaofen-1 supplemented with Gaofen-2 and ZiYuan-3), with the overall accuracies ranging from 89.99% to 92.31%. Moreover, we compared MPSPNet with other CNN models and investigated the its behavior by visualizing the learned features on different layers, indicating that combining low and high level features for final classification was an efficient and accurate strategy for cropland mapping because the former capture edge information related to object boundaries and the latter could learn long-range spatial dependencies that helped recognize croplands. The temporal transfer and spatial transfer assessments from the respects of qualitative and quantitative corroborated the robust generalizability of the proposed method. And the contrast to the traditional object-based classification method also demonstrated the advantages and strong generalization capabilities of MPSPNet in extracting cropland using VHSR remote sensed images. We compared our results with the current cropland maps generated from FROM-GLC10, which further verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach for large-scale cropland mapping at very high resolution.
•A novel approach based on CNNs was proposed for large area cropland mapping.•Low-level and high-level information learned from deep CNNs were used jointly.•High classification accuracies were achieved over diverse agrosystems.•The cropland maps were produced with high spatial resolution multi-source images.•The proposed method can be used for agriculture monitoring application.
Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are reported to act as important regulators in cancers. CircRNA RAPGEF5 (cRAPGEF5) is derived from exons 2–6 of the RAPGEF5 gene and may promote papillary thyroid cancer ...progression. However, the role of cRAPGEF5 in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) remains unclear. In this study, we found cRAPGEF5 to be significantly downregulated in RCC tissues. Among 245 RCC cases, cRAPGEF5 downregulation correlated positively with aggressive clinical characteristics and independently predicted poor overall survival and recurrence-free survival. Functional assays demonstrated that cRAPGEF5 suppresses RCC proliferation and migration in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, RNA Immunoprecipitation and circRNA in vivo precipitation assays showed that cRAPGEF5 functions as a sponge of oncogenic miR-27a-3p, which targets the suppressor gene TXNIP. Interactions between miR-27a-3p and cRAPGEF5 or TXNIP were confirmed by dual-luciferase reporter assays. In conclusion, cRAPGEF5 plays a role in suppressing RCC via the miR-27a-3p/TXNIP pathway and may serve as a promising prognostic biomarker and novel therapeutic target for RCC patients.
•cRAPGEF5 downregulation is associated with RCC progression and predicts poor prognosis in RCC.•cRAPGEF5 inhibits RCC growth and metastasis by sponging miR-27a-3p.•miR-27a-3p facilitates RCC proliferation and migration by regulating TXNIP.•cRAPGEF5 suppresses RCC by the miR-27a-3p/TXNIP pathway.
Under investigation in this paper is the Ivancevic option pricing model. Based on trial function method, rogue wave and dark wave solutions are constructed. By means of symbolic computation, these ...analytical solutions are obtained with the Maple. Perturbation solutions are obtained through direct perturbation method. These results will enrich the existing literature of the Ivancevic option pricing model. Dynamical characteristics for rogue waves and dark waves are exhibited by using three-dimensional plots, curve plots, density plots and contour plots.
PDF
