Upregulation of a novel eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A (eIF5A) in dengue 2 virus-infected mosquito cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Dengue virus, a mosquito-borne flavivirus, is the etiological agent of dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and dengue shock syndrome. It generally induces apoptosis in mammalian cells, but frequently results in persistent infection in mosquito cells. That mechanism remains to be explored. In turn, a genomic survey through subtractive hybridization (PCR-select cDNA subtraction) was conducted in order to find gene(s) that may play a role in interactions between the virus and its host cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Through this technique, we identified a novel eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A (eIF5A) which is upregulated in <it>Aedes albopictus</it>-derived C6/36 cells infected by the type 2 dengue (Den-2) virus. The full-length of the identified eIF5A gene consisted of 1498 bp of nucleotides with a 41.39% G+C content, and it possessed a higher similarity and shorter evolutionary distance with insects than with other organisms. Upregulation of eIF5A in response to Den-2 virus infection was validated at both the RNA and protein levels. This phenomenon was also observed by confocal microscopy. In addition, cell death obviously occurred when eIF5A activity was inhibited in C6/36 cells even when they were infected by the virus. However, viral multiplication was not obviously affected in infected C6/36 cells when eIF5A activity was reduced.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Taken together, we postulated that eIF5A plays a role in preventing mosquito cells from death in response to Den-2 viral infection, thus facilitating continued viral growth and potential persistent infection in mosquito cells. It would be worthwhile to further investigate how its downstream factors or cofactors contribute to this phenomenon of dengue infection.</p

Exploring the Impact of Different Sources Credibility on App Downloading Behavior: An ELM Perspective

With the increasing of using smart phone, people began to use “App” in their daily life. While they need to download a specific type of App, the developer of the App will provide them an introductory page which describes the functionality of the App and contains statistical data. Besides, function of “your friend who has downloaded this App” is introduced to smart phone users. Therefore, many peripheral cues are listed in the page nowadays to persuade people to download. The purpose of this study is to understand whether peripheral cues in the introductory page can persuade people to download this App. In our study, we used ELM-based theory to explain the behavior of persuading. The expected contribution of this study is to understand three peripheral cues would influence App credibility which influence attitude toward downloading. This study will provide advices to App developers to promote their strategies of business

Detach and Adapt: Learning Cross-Domain Disentangled Deep Representation

While representation learning aims to derive interpretable features for describing visual data, representation disentanglement further results in such features so that particular image attributes can be identified and manipulated. However, one cannot easily address this task without observing ground truth annotation for the training data. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning model of Cross-Domain Representation Disentangler (CDRD). By observing fully annotated source-domain data and unlabeled target-domain data of interest, our model bridges the information across data domains and transfers the attribute information accordingly. Thus, cross-domain joint feature disentanglement and adaptation can be jointly performed. In the experiments, we provide qualitative results to verify our disentanglement capability. Moreover, we further confirm that our model can be applied for solving classification tasks of unsupervised domain adaptation, and performs favorably against state-of-the-art image disentanglement and translation methods.Comment: CVPR 2018 Spotligh

Understanding the Impact of Service Failure and Recovery Justice on Consumers’ Satisfaction and Repurchase Intention

This research attempts to explore the impacts of different types of justice and their interactions on the satisfaction toward service failure recovery. We attempt to classify justices into hygiene, motivator, or asymmetric variable, based on the concept of asymmetric effect and two factors theory proposed by Herzberg. Specifically, we predict that procedural and distributive justices are hygiene or performance factor and interpersonal justice is motivator. In addition, based on expectancy-disconfirmation theory (EDT), we also attempt to understand the interaction between paired justices by arguing that motivator can generate more effect when hygiene factor or performance factors meet initial expectation. An experiment, with 3x2x2 between-subjects factorial design consisting of three factors to represent different levels of justice provided by online retailer, will be conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. A two-step approach will be used to (1) confirmation the types (hygiene, performance, or motivator) that each justice dimension belongs to, (2) understand the impact of each justice on satisfaction, and (3) test whether motivator will generate more effect when hygiene and performance factor are satisfied

Evolution of carbapenem resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii: An 18-year longitudinal study from a medical center in northern Taiwan

BackgroundCarbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as an important cause of nosocomial infections with high morbidity and mortality. The carbapenemases, especially class D carbapenem-hydrolyzing oxacillinases (CHDLs), play an important role, but the relationship between their prevalence trend and carbapenem resistance remains unclear.Materials and methodsBetween 1995 and 2012, we collected 667 isolates of A. baumannii from a single medical center in northern Taiwan. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) was used to determine clonality. Antimicrobial susceptibility was determined. Carbapenemase genes and associated genetic structures were detected by polymerase chain reaction.ResultsIsolates were heterogeneous on PFGE. Susceptibility to carbapenem decreased steadily over the study period from 88.1% (2001–2003) to <25% (2010–2012), whereas the isolates remained susceptible to colistin (nearly 100%) and partially susceptible to tigecycline (80%). Starting in 2001, isolates carrying the ISAba1-blaOXA-51-like allele were consistently identified. Isolates containing the transposons Tn2006 or Tn2008 first appeared in 2007 with increasing carriage rates from 17.5% (2007–2009) to 50.0% (2010–2012). The IS1008-ΔISAba3-blaOXA-58-like, blaOXA-72 and metallo-β-lactamase genes were detected only sporadically. Isolates carrying CHDL genes were resistant to multiple drugs, including carbapenem, but remained susceptible to colistin (100.0%).ConclusionIncreased carbapenem resistance in A. baumannii may be caused by the increased prevalence of isolates containing the ISAba1-blaOXA-51-like allele and the transposons Tn2006 and Tn2008

Non-invasive and transdermal measurement of blood uric acid level in human by electroporation and reverse iontophoresis

The aim of this study was to find out the optimum combination of electroporation (EP) and reverse iontophoresis (RI) on noninvasive and transdermal determination of blood uric acid level in humans. EP is the use of high-voltage electric pulse to create nano-channels on the stratum corneum, temporarily and reversibly. RI is the use of small current to facilitate both charged and uncharged molecule transportation across the skin. It is believed that the combination of these two techniques has additional benefits on the molecules’ extraction across the human skin. In vitro studies using porcine skin and diffusion cell have indicated that the optimum mode for transdermal uric acid extraction is the combination of RI with symmetrical biphasic direct current (current density = 0.3 mA/cm2; phase duration = 180 s) and EP with 10 pulses per second (voltage = 100 V/cm2; pulse width = 1 ms). This optimum mode was applied to six human subjects. Uric acid was successfully extracted through the subjects’ skin into the collection solution. A good correlation (r2 = 0.88) between the subject’s blood uric acid level and uric acid concentrations in collection solutions was observed. The results suggest that it may be possible to noninvasively and transdermally determine blood uric acid levels

Comparison of Calcium Balancing Strategies During Hypothermic Acclimation of Tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) and Goldfish (Carassius auratus)

The body temperatures of teleost species fluctuate following changes in the aquatic environment. As such, decreased water temperature lowers the rates of biochemical reactions and affects many physiological processes, including active transport-dependent ion absorption. Previous studies have focused on the impacts of low temperature on the plasma ion concentrations or membrane transporters in fishes. However, very few in vivo or organism-level studies have been performed to more thoroughly elucidate the process of acclimation to low temperatures. In the present study, we compared the strategies for cold acclimation between stenothermic tilapia and eurythermic goldfish. Whole-body calcium content was more prominently diminished in tilapia than in goldfish after long-term cold exposure. This difference can be attributed to alterations in the transportation parameters for Ca2+ influx, i.e., maximum velocity (Vmax) and binding affinity (1/Km). There was also a significant difference in the regulation of Ca2+ efflux between the two fishes. Transcript levels for Ca2+ related transporters, including the Na+/Ca2+ exchanger and epithelial Ca2+ channel, were similarly regulated in both fishes. However, upregulation of plasma membrane Ca2+ATPase expression was more pronounced in goldfish than in tilapia. In addition, enhanced Na+/K+-ATPase abundance, which provides the major driving force for ion absorption, was only detected in tilapia, while upregulated Na+/K+-ATPase activity was only detected in goldfish. Based on the results of the present study, we have found that goldfish and tilapia differentially regulate gill epithelial plasma membrane Ca2+-ATPase (PMCA) expression and Na+/K+-ATPase activity in response to cold environments. These regulatory differences are potentially linked to more effective regulation of Ca2+ influx kinetics and better maintenance of whole body calcium content in goldfish than in tilapia

Benchmarking of eight recurrent neural network variants for breath phase and adventitious sound detection on a self-developed open-access lung sound database-HF_Lung_V1

A reliable, remote, and continuous real-time respiratory sound monitor with automated respiratory sound analysis ability is urgently required in many clinical scenarios-such as in monitoring disease progression of coronavirus disease 2019-to replace conventional auscultation with a handheld stethoscope. However, a robust computerized respiratory sound analysis algorithm has not yet been validated in practical applications. In this study, we developed a lung sound database (HF_Lung_V1) comprising 9,765 audio files of lung sounds (duration of 15 s each), 34,095 inhalation labels, 18,349 exhalation labels, 13,883 continuous adventitious sound (CAS) labels (comprising 8,457 wheeze labels, 686 stridor labels, and 4,740 rhonchi labels), and 15,606 discontinuous adventitious sound labels (all crackles). We conducted benchmark tests for long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), convolutional neural network (CNN)-LSTM, CNN-GRU, CNN-BiLSTM, and CNN-BiGRU models for breath phase detection and adventitious sound detection. We also conducted a performance comparison between the LSTM-based and GRU-based models, between unidirectional and bidirectional models, and between models with and without a CNN. The results revealed that these models exhibited adequate performance in lung sound analysis. The GRU-based models outperformed, in terms of F1 scores and areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves, the LSTM-based models in most of the defined tasks. Furthermore, all bidirectional models outperformed their unidirectional counterparts. Finally, the addition of a CNN improved the accuracy of lung sound analysis, especially in the CAS detection tasks.Comment: 48 pages, 8 figures. To be submitte