Structure activity related, mechanistic, and modeling studies of gallotannins containing a glucitol-core and α-glucosidase

Gallotannins containing a glucitol core, which are only produced by members of the maple (Acer) genus, are more potent α-glucosidase inhibitors than the clinical drug, acarbose. While this activity is influenced by the number of substituents on the glucitol core (e.g. more galloyl groups leads to increased activity), the mechanisms of inhibitory action are not known. Herein, we investigated ligand–enzyme interactions and binding mechanisms of a series of ‘glucitol-core containing gallotannins (GCGs)’ against the α-glucosidase enzyme. The GCGs included ginnalins A, B and C (containing two, one, and one galloyl/s, respectively), maplexin F (containing 3 galloyls) and maplexin J (containing 4 galloyls). All of the GCGs were noncompetitive inhibitors of α-glucosidase and their interactions with the enzyme were further explored using biophysical and spectroscopic measurements. Thermodynamic parameters (by isothermal titration calorimetry) revealed a 1 : 1 binding ratio between GCGs and α-glucosidase. The binding regions between the GCGs and α-glucosidase, probed by a fluorescent tag, 1,1′-bis(4-anilino-5-naphthalenesulfonic acid), revealed that the GCGs decreased the hydrophobic surface of the enzyme. In addition, circular dichroism analyses showed that the GCGs bind to α-glucosidase and lead to loss of the secondary α-helix structure of the protein. Also, molecular modeling was used to predict the binding site between the GCGs and the α-glucosidase enzyme. This is the first study to evaluate the mechanisms of inhibitory activities of gallotannins containing a glucitol core on α-glucosidase

Seamless monolithic three-dimensional integration of single-crystalline films by growth

The demand for the three-dimensional (3D) integration of electronic components is on a steady rise. The through-silicon-via (TSV) technique emerges as the only viable method for integrating single-crystalline device components in a 3D format, despite encountering significant processing challenges. While monolithic 3D (M3D) integration schemes show promise, the seamless connection of single-crystalline semiconductors without intervening wafers has yet to be demonstrated. This challenge arises from the inherent difficulty of growing single crystals on amorphous or polycrystalline surfaces post the back-end-of-the-line process at low temperatures to preserve the underlying circuitry. Consequently, a practical growth-based solution for M3D of single crystals remains elusive. Here, we present a method for growing single-crystalline channel materials, specifically composed of transition metal dichalcogenides, on amorphous and polycrystalline surfaces at temperatures lower than 400 {\deg}C. Building on this developed technique, we demonstrate the seamless monolithic integration of vertical single-crystalline logic transistor arrays. This accomplishment leads to the development of unprecedented vertical CMOS arrays, thereby constructing vertical inverters. Ultimately, this achievement sets the stage to pave the way for M3D integration of various electronic and optoelectronic hardware in the form of single crystals

Surveillance for West Nile Virus in Dead Wild Birds, South Korea, 2005–2008

To investigate the possibility of West Nile virus (WNV) introduction into South Korea, the National Veterinary Research and Quarantine Service has conducted nationwide surveillance of WNV activity in dead wild birds since 2005. Surveillance conducted during 2005–2008 found no evidence of WNV activity

Comparison of carnivore, omnivore, and herbivore mammalian genomes with a new leopard assembly.

BACKGROUND: There are three main dietary groups in mammals: carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores. Currently, there is limited comparative genomics insight into the evolution of dietary specializations in mammals. Due to recent advances in sequencing technologies, we were able to perform in-depth whole genome analyses of representatives of these three dietary groups. RESULTS: We investigated the evolution of carnivory by comparing 18 representative genomes from across Mammalia with carnivorous, omnivorous, and herbivorous dietary specializations, focusing on Felidae (domestic cat, tiger, lion, cheetah, and leopard), Hominidae, and Bovidae genomes. We generated a new high-quality leopard genome assembly, as well as two wild Amur leopard whole genomes. In addition to a clear contraction in gene families for starch and sucrose metabolism, the carnivore genomes showed evidence of shared evolutionary adaptations in genes associated with diet, muscle strength, agility, and other traits responsible for successful hunting and meat consumption. Additionally, an analysis of highly conserved regions at the family level revealed molecular signatures of dietary adaptation in each of Felidae, Hominidae, and Bovidae. However, unlike carnivores, omnivores and herbivores showed fewer shared adaptive signatures, indicating that carnivores are under strong selective pressure related to diet. Finally, felids showed recent reductions in genetic diversity associated with decreased population sizes, which may be due to the inflexible nature of their strict diet, highlighting their vulnerability and critical conservation status. CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides a large-scale family level comparative genomic analysis to address genomic changes associated with dietary specialization. Our genomic analyses also provide useful resources for diet-related genetic and health research

Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background: The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017) includes a comprehensive assessment of incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 354 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Previous GBD studies have shown how the decline of mortality rates from 1990 to 2016 has led to an increase in life expectancy, an ageing global population, and an expansion of the non-fatal burden of disease and injury. These studies have also shown how a substantial portion of the world's population experiences non-fatal health loss with considerable heterogeneity among different causes, locations, ages, and sexes. Ongoing objectives of the GBD study include increasing the level of estimation detail, improving analytical strategies, and increasing the amount of high-quality data. Methods: We estimated incidence and prevalence for 354 diseases and injuries and 3484 sequelae. We used an updated and extensive body of literature studies, survey data, surveillance data, inpatient admission records, outpatient visit records, and health insurance claims, and additionally used results from cause of death models to inform estimates using a total of 68 781 data sources. Newly available clinical data from India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Nepal, China, Brazil, Norway, and Italy were incorporated, as well as updated claims data from the USA and new claims data from Taiwan (province of China) and Singapore. We used DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression tool, as the main method of estimation, ensuring consistency between rates of incidence, prevalence, remission, and cause of death for each condition. YLDs were estimated as the product of a prevalence estimate and a disability weight for health states of each mutually exclusive sequela, adjusted for comorbidity. We updated the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary development indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and total fertility rate. Additionally, we calculated differences between male and female YLDs to identify divergent trends across sexes. GBD 2017 complies with the Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting. Findings: Globally, for females, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and haemoglobinopathies and haemolytic anaemias in both 1990 and 2017. For males, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and tuberculosis including latent tuberculosis infection in both 1990 and 2017. In terms of YLDs, low back pain, headache disorders, and dietary iron deficiency were the leading Level 3 causes of YLD counts in 1990, whereas low back pain, headache disorders, and depressive disorders were the leading causes in 2017 for both sexes combined. All-cause age-standardised YLD rates decreased by 3·9% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·1-4·6) from 1990 to 2017; however, the all-age YLD rate increased by 7·2% (6·0-8·4) while the total sum of global YLDs increased from 562 million (421-723) to 853 million (642-1100). The increases for males and females were similar, with increases in all-age YLD rates of 7·9% (6·6-9·2) for males and 6·5% (5·4-7·7) for females. We found significant differences between males and females in terms of age-standardised prevalence estimates for multiple causes. The causes with the greatest relative differences between sexes in 2017 included substance use disorders (3018 cases [95% UI 2782-3252] per 100 000 in males vs 1400 [1279-1524] per 100 000 in females), transport injuries (3322 [3082-3583] vs 2336 [2154-2535]), and self-harm and interpersonal violence (3265 [2943-3630] vs 5643 [5057-6302]). Interpretation: Global all-cause age-standardised YLD rates have improved only slightly over a period spanning nearly three decades. However, the magnitude of the non-fatal disease burden has expanded globally, with increasing numbers of people who have a wide spectrum of conditions. A subset of conditions has remained globally pervasive since 1990, whereas other conditions have displayed more dynamic trends, with different ages, sexes, and geographies across the globe experiencing varying burdens and trends of health loss. This study emphasises how global improvements in premature mortality for select conditions have led to older populations with complex and potentially expensive diseases, yet also highlights global achievements in certain domains of disease and injury

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

Minimal information for studies of extracellular vesicles (MISEV2023): From basic to advanced approaches

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), through their complex cargo, can reflect the state of their cell of origin and change the functions and phenotypes of other cells. These features indicate strong biomarker and therapeutic potential and have generated broad interest, as evidenced by the steady year-on-year increase in the numbers of scientific publications about EVs. Important advances have been made in EV metrology and in understanding and applying EV biology. However, hurdles remain to realising the potential of EVs in domains ranging from basic biology to clinical applications due to challenges in EV nomenclature, separation from non-vesicular extracellular particles, characterisation and functional studies. To address the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field, the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) updates its 'Minimal Information for Studies of Extracellular Vesicles', which was first published in 2014 and then in 2018 as MISEV2014 and MISEV2018, respectively. The goal of the current document, MISEV2023, is to provide researchers with an updated snapshot of available approaches and their advantages and limitations for production, separation and characterisation of EVs from multiple sources, including cell culture, body fluids and solid tissues. In addition to presenting the latest state of the art in basic principles of EV research, this document also covers advanced techniques and approaches that are currently expanding the boundaries of the field. MISEV2023 also includes new sections on EV release and uptake and a brief discussion of in vivo approaches to study EVs. Compiling feedback from ISEV expert task forces and more than 1000 researchers, this document conveys the current state of EV research to facilitate robust scientific discoveries and move the field forward even more rapidly

Global, regional, and national age-sex-specific mortality and life expectancy, 1950-2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background: Assessments of age-specific mortality and life expectancy have been done by the UN Population Division, Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UNPOP), the United States Census Bureau, WHO, and as part of previous iterations of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD). Previous iterations of the GBD used population estimates from UNPOP, which were not derived in a way that was internally consistent with the estimates of the numbers of deaths in the GBD. The present iteration of the GBD, GBD 2017, improves on previous assessments and provides timely estimates of the mortality experience of populations globally. Methods: The GBD uses all available data to produce estimates of mortality rates between 1950 and 2017 for 23 age groups, both sexes, and 918 locations, including 195 countries and territories and subnational locations for 16 countries. Data used include vital registration systems, sample registration systems, household surveys (complete birth histories, summary birth histories, sibling histories), censuses (summary birth histories, household deaths), and Demographic Surveillance Sites. In total, this analysis used 8259 data sources. Estimates of the probability of death between birth and the age of 5 years and between ages 15 and 60 years are generated and then input into a model life table system to produce complete life tables for all locations and years. Fatal discontinuities and mortality due to HIV/AIDS are analysed separately and then incorporated into the estimation. We analyse the relationship between age-specific mortality and development status using the Socio-demographic Index, a composite measure based on fertility under the age of 25 years, education, and income. There are four main methodological improvements in GBD 2017 compared with GBD 2016: 622 additional data sources have been incorporated; new estimates of population, generated by the GBD study, are used; statistical methods used in different components of the analysis have been further standardised and improved; and the analysis has been extended backwards in time by two decades to start in 1950. Findings: Globally, 18·7% (95% uncertainty interval 18·4–19·0) of deaths were registered in 1950 and that proportion has been steadily increasing since, with 58·8% (58·2–59·3) of all deaths being registered in 2015. At the global level, between 1950 and 2017, life expectancy increased from 48·1 years (46·5–49·6) to 70·5 years (70·1–70·8) for men and from 52·9 years (51·7–54·0) to 75·6 years (75·3–75·9) for women. Despite this overall progress, there remains substantial variation in life expectancy at birth in 2017, which ranges from 49·1 years (46·5–51·7) for men in the Central African Republic to 87·6 years (86·9–88·1) among women in Singapore. The greatest progress across age groups was for children younger than 5 years; under-5 mortality dropped from 216·0 deaths (196·3–238·1) per 1000 livebirths in 1950 to 38·9 deaths (35·6–42·83) per 1000 livebirths in 2017, with huge reductions across countries. Nevertheless, there were still 5·4 million (5·2–5·6) deaths among children younger than 5 years in the world in 2017. Progress has been less pronounced and more variable for adults, especially for adult males, who had stagnant or increasing mortality rates in several countries. The gap between male and female life expectancy between 1950 and 2017, while relatively stable at the global level, shows distinctive patterns across super-regions and has consistently been the largest in central Europe, eastern Europe, and central Asia, and smallest in south Asia. Performance was also variable across countries and time in observed mortality rates compared with those expected on the basis of development. Interpretation: This analysis of age-sex-specific mortality shows that there are remarkably complex patterns in population mortality across countries. The findings of this study highlight global successes, such as the large decline in under-5 mortality, which reflects significant local, national, and global commitment and investment over several decades. However, they also bring attention to mortality patterns that are a cause for concern, particularly among adult men and, to a lesser extent, women, whose mortality rates have stagnated in many countries over the time period of this study, and in some cases are increasing

Technical development of transcutaneous electrical nerve inhibition using medium-frequency alternating current

Abstract Background Innovative technical approaches to controlling undesired sensory and motor activity, such as hyperalgesia or spasticity, may contribute to rehabilitation techniques for improving neural plasticity in patients with neurologic disorders. To date, transcutaneous electrical stimulation has used low frequency pulsed currents for sensory inhibition and muscle activation. Yet, few studies have attempted to achieve motor nerve inhibition using transcutaneous electrical stimulation. This study aimed to develop a technique for transcutaneous electrical nerve inhibition (TENI) using medium-frequency alternating current (MFAC) to suppress both sensory and motor nerve activity in humans. Methods Surface electrodes were affixed to the skin of eight young adults to stimulate the median nerve. Stimulation intensity was increased up to 50% and 100% of the pain threshold. To identify changes in sensory perception by transcutaneous MFAC (tMFAC) stimulation, we examined tactile and pressure pain thresholds in the index and middle fingers before and after stimulation at 10 kHz. To demonstrate the effect of tMFAC stimulation on motor inhibition, stimulation was applied while participants produced flexion forces with the index and middle fingers at target forces (50% and 90% of MVC, maximum voluntary contraction). Results tMFAC stimulation intensity significantly increased tactile and pressure pain thresholds, indicating decreased sensory perception. During the force production task, tMFAC stimulation with the maximum intensity immediately reduced finger forces by ~ 40%. Finger forces recovered immediately after stimulation cessation. The effect on motor inhibition was greater with the higher target force (90% MVC) than with the lower target (50% MVC). Also, higher tMFAC stimulation intensity provided a greater inhibition effect on both sensory and motor nerve activity. Conclusion We found that tMFAC stimulation immediately inhibits sensory and motor activity. This pre-clinical study demonstrates a novel technique for TENI using MFAC stimulation and showed that it can effectively inhibit both sensory perception and motor activity. The proposed technique can be combined with existing rehabilitation devices (e.g., a robotic exoskeleton) to inhibit undesired sensorimotor activities and to accelerate recovery after neurologic injury