Kinetics of non-structural protein 1, IgM and IgG antibodies in dengue type 1 primary infection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Early and accurate diagnosis of dengue infection is essential for control of disease outbreaks. Recently, the dengue virus non-structural antigen 1 (NS1), a conserved and secreted glycoprotein, has been used as a marker for early diagnosis of dengue with convenience and cost-effectiveness. Serological tests of dengue IgM and IgG antibodies are still the most widely used for diagnosis of dengue. In order to assess combined diagnostic value of these tests, we study the kinetic profiles of circulating NS1, dengue IgM and IgG antibodies over the course of the disease by using an in-house dengue type 1 (DENV1) specific NS1 capture ELISA and the commercial Panbio Dengue IgM and IgG capture ELISAs.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A panel of 313 acute-and early convalescent-phase serum specimens from 140 DENV1 primary infected patients during an outbreak of dengue in Guangzhou, China, in 2006 were studied. Dengue NS1 presented high levels in acute-phase serum samples. It was detectable as early as day 1 of illness, and up to 14 day after onset. The sensitivity of NS1 detection was ranged from 81.8% to 91.1% with samples taken during the first 7 days. Anti-dengue IgM antibody was detectable on the third day of onset with the positive rate of 42.9%, and rapidly increasing to 100% by day 8 of illness. Anti-dengue IgG antibody was detectable on the fifth day of onset with low level at the first week of onset, and slowly increasing to 100% by day 15 of illness. Combining the results of NS1 and IgM antibody detection allowed positive diagnosis in 96.9% -100% for samples taken after day 3 of onset.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Dengue NS1 detection might shorten the window period by first few days of illness. A combination of dengue NS1 antigen and IgM antibody testing facilitates enhanced diagnosis rates. The procedures should be suitable for developing countries where dengue is endemic.</p

pirScan: a webserver to predict piRNA targeting sites and to avoid transgene silencing in C. elegans

pirScan is a web-based tool for identifying C. elegans piRNA-targeting sites within a given mRNA or spliced DNA sequence. The purpose of our tool is to allow C. elegans researchers to predict piRNA targeting sites and to avoid the persistent germline silencing of transgenes that has rendered many constructs unusable. pirScan fulfills this purpose by first enumerating the predicted piRNA-targeting sites present in an input sequence. This prediction can be exported in a tabular or graphical format. Subsequently, pirScan suggests silent mutations that can be introduced to the input sequence that would allow the modified transgene to avoid piRNA targeting. The user can customize the piRNA targeting stringency and the silent mutations that he/she wants to introduce into the sequence. The modified sequences can be re-submitted to be certain that any previously present piRNA-targeting sites are now absent and no new piRNA-targeting sites are accidentally generated. This revised sequence can finally be downloaded as a text file and/or visualized in a graphical format. pirScan is freely available for academic use at http://cosbi4.ee.ncku.edu.tw/pirScan/

Clinical experience exchange of 3 cases with Fournier’s gangrene

Fournier’s gangrene (FG), also known as necrotizing fasciitis, is a condition that affects the genitalia and perineum, resulting in the rapid development of necrosis and gangrene in infected tissues and potentially spreading to adjacent tissues, including the abdominal wall. It mainly affects males and requires prompt treatment to prevent potentially life-threatening complications. In Case 1, a 64-year-old man with type 2 diabetes was diagnosed with FG due to a scrotal skin injury after scratching his scrotal skin. The patient underwent radical debridement, treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics, negative pressure wound treatment, and skin transplantation. In Case 2, a 79-year-old man suffered from a sebaceous cyst of the scrotum that had been scratched for seven days, resulting in black and necrotic skin of the scrotum. He was diagnosed with FG and underwent radical debridement and drainage of pus, followed by anti-infection treatment, negative pressure wound treatment, and skin transplantation. In Case 3, a 48-year-old male injured at the scrotum’s base developed swelling, pain, foul odor and pus discharge and was diagnosed with FG. The patient underwent emergency treatment, including incision and drainage of the scrotum and right lower abdominal wall abscess, as well as wound debridement. Ultimately, all three patients’ scrotal wounds returned to normal, but Case 2 was complicated by blood vessel thrombosis in both lower limbs. Early surgical debridement is a necessary intervention for FG, along with active postoperative anti-infection treatment and measures to prevent the occurrence of complications

A comparative study of stigma and mental health status between patients with erectile dysfunction and patients with erectile dysfunction and diabetes

Recently, although stigma and mental health among patients with diabetes have garnered significant research attention, there are still limited investigations into the stigma and mental health of patients with erectile dysfunction (ED) and diabetes. In this study, we aimed to examine the stigma and mental health of patients with ED and diabetes to provide insights for improving the treatment and nursing of patients with ED and diabetes. We selected 82 patients with ED and diabetes and 82 patients with ED. Patients were evaluated using the Basic Information Scale, Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90) and Social Impact Scale (SIS). Patients with ED and diabetes had higher scores than the national norm in all dimensions of shame (p < 0.05), while patients with ED scored higher than the national norm in the dimensions of social exclusion, economic discrimination and internal shame (p < 0.05). Further, patients with ED and diabetes had higher scores of disease shame regarding social exclusion, internal shame and social isolation dimensions than patients with ED (p < 0.05). The score of interpersonal relationship factors of patients with ED was lower than that of the national norm (p < 0.05), while for patients with ED, the score of interpersonal relationship factors in patients’ SCL-90 was lower (p < 0.05) and the score of psychotic factors was higher than that of the national norm (p < 0.05). A positive correlation was observed between the paranoid factor score in the SCL-90 of patients with ED and diabetes, the social exclusion dimension score, and the total score in the sense of shame (p < 0.05). Both patients with ED and diabetes and patients with ED exhibited abnormally higher rates of SCL-90 scores, indicating the presence of psychological distress and urging the need to strengthen psychological care

Fatal Community-acquired Pneumonia in Children Caused by Re-emergent Human Adenovirus 7d Associated with Higher Severity of Illness and Fatality Rate

Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) are highly contagious pathogens causing acute respiratory disease (ARD), such as community-acquired pneumonia. HAdV-7d, a re-emergent genomic variant, has been recently reported in Asia and the United States after a several-decade absence. However, whether HAdV-7d is associated with higher severity than other types is currently unclear. In this study, the clinical and epidemiological investigation showed that fever, cough, and sore throat were the three most common respiratory symptoms of HAdV infections. HAdV-7 caused longer duration of fever, higher morbidity of tachypnea/dyspnea, pleural effusion, diarrhea, hepatosplenomegaly, consciousness alteration, as well as higher rates of pneumonia, mechanical ventilation and higher fatality rate (28.6%) than other types, particularly HAdV-3 and HAdV-2. The genomes of seven HAdV-7d isolates from mild, severe, and fatal cases were sequenced and highly similar with each other. Surprisingly, two isolates (2011, 2012) had 100% identical genomes with an earlier strain from a fatal ARD outbreak in China (2009), which elucidates the virus origin and confirms the unexpected HAdV genomic conservation and stability. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that L1 52/55-kDa DNA packaging protein may be associated with the higher severity of illness and fatality rate of HAdV-7. Clinicians need to be aware of HAdVs in children with ARD

Unraveling the Molecular Basis of Temperature-Dependent Genetic Regulation in Penicillium marneffei

Penicillium marneffei is an opportunistic fungal pathogen endemic in Southeast Asia, causing lethal systemic infections in immunocompromised patients. P. marneffei grows in a mycelial form at the ambient temperature of 25°C and transitions to a yeast form at 37°C. The ability to alternate between the mycelial and yeast forms at different temperatures, namely, thermal dimorphism, has long been considered critical for the pathogenicity of P. marneffei, yet the underlying genetic mechanisms remain elusive. Here we employed high-throughput sequencing to unravel global transcriptional profiles of P. marneffei PM1 grown at 25 and 37°C. Among ∼11,000 protein-coding genes, 1,447 were overexpressed and 1,414 were underexpressed at 37°C. Counterintuitively, heat-responsive genes, predicted in P. marneffei through sequence comparison, did not tend to be overexpressed at 37°C. These results suggest that P. marneffei may take a distinct strategy of genetic regulation at the elevated temperature; the current knowledge concerning fungal heat response, based on studies of model fungal organisms, may not be applicable to P. marneffei. Our results further showed that the tandem repeat sequences (TRSs) are overrepresented in coding regions of P. marneffei genes, and TRS-containing genes tend to be overexpressed at 37°C. Furthermore, genomic sequences and expression data were integrated to characterize gene clusters, multigene families, and species-specific genes of P. marneffei. In sum, we present an integrated analysis and a comprehensive resource toward a better understanding of temperature-dependent genetic regulation in P. marneffei

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe