Travelers With Cutaneous Leishmaniasis Cured Without Systemic Therapy

Guidelines recommend wound care and/or local therapy as first-line treatment for cutaneous leishmaniasis. An analysis of a referral treatment program in 135 travelers showed that this approach was feasible in 62% of patients, with positive outcome in 83% of evaluable patient

New Code-Based Privacy-Preserving Cryptographic Constructions

Code-based cryptography has a long history but did suffer from periods of slow development. The field has recently attracted a lot of attention as one of the major branches of post-quantum cryptography. However, its subfield of privacy-preserving cryptographic constructions is still rather underdeveloped, e.g., important building blocks such as zero-knowledge range proofs and set membership proofs, and even proofs of knowledge of a hash preimage, have not been known under code-based assumptions. Moreover, almost no substantial technical development has been introduced in the last several years. This work introduces several new code-based privacy-preserving cryptographic constructions that considerably advance the state-of-the-art in code-based cryptography. Specifically, we present $3$ major contributions, each of which potentially yields various other applications. Our first contribution is a code-based statistically hiding and computationally binding commitment scheme with companion zero-knowledge (ZK) argument of knowledge of a valid opening that can be easily extended to prove that the committed bits satisfy other relations. Our second contribution is the first code-based zero-knowledge range argument for committed values, with communication cost logarithmic in the size of the range. A special feature of our range argument is that, while previous works on range proofs/arguments (in all branches of cryptography) only address ranges of non-negative integers, our protocol can handle signed fractional numbers, and hence, can potentially find a larger scope of applications. Our third contribution is the first code-based Merkle-tree accumulator supported by ZK argument of membership, which has been known to enable various interesting applications. In particular, it allows us to obtain the first code-based ring signatures and group signatures with logarithmic signature sizes

Preliminary evaluation of the competitiveness of PPV-Rec and PPV-D under field conditions

International audiencePPV-D, PPV-M and PPV-Rec are the three main strains of Plum pox virus (PPV), the most detrimental viral pathogen of stone fruits (Prunus sp.). While different experimental results reported that PPV-M is more aggressive than PPV-D, limited information are available about the competitiveness of PPV-Rec relatively to PPV-D or PPV-M. To provide this information, we monitored the PPV-Rec and PPV-D spreading in an experimental plum orchard (577 trees) located in Bistrita, Romania. The dynamic of spread of the two strains was monitored during four vegetative periods (2008-2011). The sanitary status of the trees was assessed visually and by ELISA testing each year. In 2008, the strain status of each PPV isolate was determined by IC- RT-PCR using strain specific primers located in the (Cter) CP, (Cter) NIb – (Nter) CP and the 6K1-CIP coding regions. From 2009 to 2011, strain typing was performed for every new disease case and for all single strain infections detected in the previous years, in order to check for possible over infection with the other strain. Disease incidence increased from 57 % (328/577) in 2008 to 72 % (414/577) in 2011. From a total of 328 infected trees in 2008, 58% of the trees were infected by PPV-Rec, 13 % by PPV-D and 29% were co-infected by PPV-D and PPV-Rec. The results on the rate of progression of PPV-D and PPV-Rec as well as the frequency of co-infections will be presented and a preliminary conclusion upon the competitiveness of PPV-Rec and PPV-D in our conditions will be discussed

Emergence of a recombinant Tomato yellow leaf curl virus and displacement of parental-type viruses in Morocco

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Plum Pox Virus Strains in Bulgaria

International audienceSharka or plum pox has a long presence in Bulgaria. In this study, 790 plum, peach and apricot samples were analyzed by TAS-ELISA. 465 samples (58.9%) reacted positive for PPV. The highest level of PPV infection was detected in the plum orchards (86.06%), followed by the peach (46.5%) orchards/single grown trees and in the apricot (32.05%) orchards/single grown trees. Molecular typing performed by strain-specific IC-RT-PCR analyses showed that the most prevalent strain was PPV-M (46.7%), followed by PPV-Rec (43.9%) and PPV-D (7.9%). The rate of mixed infection was 1.5%. Distinct epidemiological situations depending on the stone-fruit species were evidenced. On plum, PPV-Rec was the most prevalent strain (69.1%), followed by PPV-M (20.1%) and PPV-D (8.3%). The rate of mixed infections was 2.5%. On the contrary to the plums, peaches and apricots were essentially infected by PPV-M (89.2 and 80.6 %, respectively). On apricot, PPV-Rec was detected more frequently than PPV-D (11.9 and 7.5% respectively), whereas on peach the opposite pattern was found (7.5 and 3.3% for PPV-D and PPV-Rec, respectively). To assess the genetic diversity, 27 isolates were partially characterised by direct sequencing of the PCR products spanning the (Cter) NIb-(Nter) CP and the (Cter) P3-6K1-(Nter) CI coding regions. Phylogenetic analysis of these isolates confirmed their RT-PCR-based strain typing. Bulgarian PPV-Rec isolates clustered with PPV-Rec isolates retrieved from the NCBI database in both analysed regions. Phylogenetic analyses of PPV-M isolates based on the NIb-CP genomic region showed that they fell into the Ma and Mb clusters, while on the base of the P3-6K1-CI genomic region, part of the isolates formed a third sub-cluster more related to Mb, than to Ma isolates. Regardless of the analysed region, the analyzed PPV-D isolates grouped together with D strain isolates from Europe, Canada and USA

A recombinant tomato yellow leaf curl virus has replaced its parental viruses in southern Morocco

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