This research focuses on the evaluation of a heritage office building in the town of Kenadsa in the Southwest of Algeria (a famous oasis in the arid regions of the country). Emphasizing user’s ...perception as a metric key for performance assessment, this study aims to investigate the users’ perception and behaviors of a heritage office building on an oasis settlement. The research was conducted in 2023, and employing a multidimensional approach, both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, along with agent-based modeling, were integrated. One qualitative methodology is based on a series of field surveys and the other quantitative methodology relies on in situ measurements of the physical dimensions of the environment. The quantitative aspect involves an agent-based modeling framework, simulating user interactions by incorporating physical dimensions, spatial layout, historical context, and user behavior. The main findings of this study, examining perceptions and behaviors under varying luminous and thermal environments, show that this integrated approach provides insights into user satisfaction, spatial utilization, and the identification of user behaviors and productivity in each office.
The Cimicidae are obligatory blood-feeding ectoparasites of medical and veterinary importance. We aim in the current study to assess the ability of MALDI-TOF MS to identify Cimex hirundinis swallow ...bugs collected in house martin nests.
Swallow bugs were picked out from abandoned nests of house martin swallows and identified morphologically to the species level. The bugs were randomly selected, dissected and then subjected to MALDI-TOF MS and molecular analyses.
A total of 65 adults and 50 nymphs were used in the attempt to determine whether this tool could identify the bug species and discriminate their developmental stages. Five adults and four nymphs of C. hirundinis specimens were molecularly identified to update our MS homemade arthropod database. BLAST analysis of COI gene sequences from these C. hirundinis revealed 98.66-99.12% identity with the corresponding sequences of C. hirundinis of the GenBank. The blind test against the database supplemented with MS reference spectra showed 100% (57/57) C. hirundinis adults and 100% (46/46) C. hirundinis nymphs were reliably identified and in agreement with morphological identification with logarithmic score values between 1.922 and 2.665. Ninety-nine percent of C. hirundinis specimens tested were positive for Wolbachia spp. The sequencing results revealed that they were identical to Wolbachia massiliensis, belonging to the new T-supergroup strain and previously isolated from C. hemipterus.
We report for the first time to our knowledge a case of human infestation by swallow bugs (C. hirundinis) in France. We also show the usefulness of MALDI-TOF MS in the rapid identification of C. hirundinis specimens and nymphs with minimal sample requirements. We phylogenetically characterized the novel Wolbachia strain (W. massiliensis) infecting C. hirundinis and compared it to other recognized Wolbachia clades.
Cimicids of Medical and Veterinary Importance Hamlili, Fatima Zohra; Bérenger, Jean Michel; Parola, Philippe
Insects (Basel, Switzerland),
04/2023, Letnik:
14, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Members of the Cimicidae family are significant pests for mammals and birds, and they have attracted medical and veterinary interest. A number of recent studies have investigated bed bugs, due to ...their dramatic resurgence all over the world. Indeed, bed bugs are of significant public health and socioeconomic importance since they lead to financial burdens and dermatological complications and may have mental and psychological consequences. It is important to note that certain cimicids with a preference for specific hosts (birds and bats) use humans as an alternative host, and some cimicids have been reported to willingly feed on human blood. In addition, members of the Cimicidae family can lead to economic burdens and certain species are the vectors for pathogens responsible for diseases. Therefore, in this review, we aim to provide an update on the species within the Cimicidae family that have varying medical and veterinary impacts, including their distribution and their associated microorganisms. Various microbes have been documented in bed bugs and certain important pathogens have been experimentally documented to be passively transmitted by bed bugs, although no conclusive evidence has yet associated them with epidemiological outbreaks. Additionally, among the studied cimicids (bat bugs, chicken bugs, and swallow bugs), only the American swallow bug has been considered to be a vector of several arboviruses, although there is no proven evidence of transmission to humans or animals. Further studies are needed to elucidate the reason that certain species in the Cimicidae family cannot be biologically involved in transmission to humans or animals. Additional investigations are also required to better understand the roles of Cimicidae family members in the transmission of human pathogens in the field.
Freshwater snails of the genera Biomphalaria, Bulinus, and Oncomelania are intermediate hosts of schistosomes that cause human schistosomiasis, one of the most significant infectious neglected ...diseases in the world. Identification of freshwater snails is usually based on morphology and potentially DNA-based methods, but these have many drawbacks that hamper their use. MALDI-TOF MS has revolutionised clinical microbiology and has emerged in the medical entomology field. This study aims to evaluate MALDI-TOF MS profiling for the identification of both frozen and ethanol-stored snail species using protein extracts from different body parts. A total of 530 field specimens belonging to nine species (Biomphalaria pfeifferi, Bulinus forskalii, Bulinus senegalensis, Bulinus truncatus, Bulinus globosus, Bellamya unicolor, Cleopatra bulimoides, Lymnaea natalensis, Melanoides tuberculata) and 89 laboratory-reared specimens, including three species (Bi. pfeifferi, Bu. forskalii, Bu. truncatus) were used for this study. For frozen snails, the feet of 127 field and 74 laboratory-reared specimens were used to validate the optimised MALDI-TOF MS protocol. The spectral analysis yielded intra-species reproducibility and inter-species specificity which resulted in the correct identification of all the specimens in blind queries, with log-score values greater than 1.7. In a second step, we demonstrated that MALDI-TOF MS could also be used to identify ethanol-stored snails using proteins extracted from the foot using a specific database including a large number of ethanol preserved specimens. This study shows for the first time that MALDI-TOF MS is a reliable tool for the rapid identification of frozen and ethanol-stored freshwater snails without any malacological expertise.
This study used MALDI-TOF MS and molecular tools to identify tick species infesting camels from Tamanrasset in southern Algeria and to investigate their associated microorganisms. Ninety-one adult ...ticks were collected from nine camels and were morphologically identified as Hyalomma spp., Hyalomma dromedarii, Hyalomma excavatum, Hyalomma impeltatum and Hyalomma anatolicum. Next, the legs of all ticks were subjected to MALDI-TOF MS, and 88/91 specimens provided good-quality MS spectra. Our homemade MALDI-TOF MS arthropod spectra database was then updated with the new MS spectra of 14 specimens of molecularly confirmed species in this study. The spectra of the remaining tick specimens not included in the MS database were queried against the upgraded database. All 74 specimens were correctly identified by MALDI-TOF MS, with logarithmic score values ranging from 1.701 to 2.507, with median and mean values of 2.199 and 2.172 ± 0.169, respectively. One H. impeltatum and one H. dromedarii (2/91; 2.20%) tested positive by qPCR for Coxiella burnetii, the agent of Q fever. We also report the first detection of an Anaplasma sp. close to A. platys in H. dromedarii in Algeria and a potentially new Ehrlichia sp. in H. impeltatum.
The Cimicidae are obligatory blood-feeding ectoparasites of medical and veterinary importance. We aim in the current study to assess the ability of MALDI-TOF MS to identify Cimex hirundinis swallow ...bugs collected in house martin nests. Swallow bugs were picked out from abandoned nests of house martin swallows and identified morphologically to the species level. The bugs were randomly selected, dissected and then subjected to MALDI-TOF MS and molecular analyses. A total of 65 adults and 50 nymphs were used in the attempt to determine whether this tool could identify the bug species and discriminate their developmental stages. Five adults and four nymphs of C. hirundinis specimens were molecularly identified to update our MS homemade arthropod database. BLAST analysis of COI gene sequences from these C. hirundinis revealed 98.66-99.12% identity with the corresponding sequences of C. hirundinis of the GenBank. The blind test against the database supplemented with MS reference spectra showed 100% (57/57) C. hirundinis adults and 100% (46/46) C. hirundinis nymphs were reliably identified and in agreement with morphological identification with logarithmic score values between 1.922 and 2.665. Ninety-nine percent of C. hirundinis specimens tested were positive for Wolbachia spp. The sequencing results revealed that they were identical to Wolbachia massiliensis, belonging to the new T-supergroup strain and previously isolated from C. hemipterus. We report for the first time to our knowledge a case of human infestation by swallow bugs (C. hirundinis) in France. We also show the usefulness of MALDI-TOF MS in the rapid identification of C. hirundinis specimens and nymphs with minimal sample requirements. We phylogenetically characterized the novel Wolbachia strain (W. massiliensis) infecting C. hirundinis and compared it to other recognized Wolbachia clades.
The novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, initially appeared in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and has since spread around the world. The purpose of this paper is to use deep convolutional ...neural networks (DCCN) to improve the detection of COVID-19 from X-ray images. In this study, we create a DCNN based on a residual network (Resnet-50) that can identify COVID-19 from two other classes (pneumonia and normal) in chest X-ray images. DCNN was evaluated using two classification methods: binary (BC-1: COVID-19 vs. normal, BC-2: COVID-19 vs. pneumonia) and multi-class (pneumonia vs. normal vs. COVID-19). In all experiments, four fold cross-validation was used to train and test the model. This architecture's average accuracy is 99.9% for BC-1, 99.8% for BC-2, and 97.3% for multi-class cases. The experimental findings demonstrated that the suggested system detects COVID-19 with an average precision and sensitivity of 95% and 95.1% for multi-class classification, respectively. According to our findings, the proposed DCNN may help health professionals in confirming their first evaluation of COVID-19 patients.
This study investigates the complex relationship between user perceptions and subsequent behaviors in the multisensory environment within Kenadsa’s heritage office building, located in the oasis of ...Bechar, Algeria. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative subjective data collection methods, the research aims to assess the perceptual dimensions of the office building's interior space, thermal conditions and lighting environment, as well as to evaluate its performance based on users' perceptions and behaviors. The methodology includes in situ questionnaire surveys conducted after each user's work experience, complemented by thermal and visual assessments observation of the lighting during the winter and summer seasons. The results highlight the dynamic interplay between user perception and behavior, and provide valuable information for improving the design and functionality of heritage buildings in similar contexts.
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