Bacterial interactome disturbance in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease clinical stability and exacerbations

Rationale: Our understanding of airway dysbiosis in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remains incomplete, which may be improved by unraveling the complexity in microbial interactome. Objectives: To characterize reproducible features of airway bacterial interactome in COPD at clinical stability and during exacerbation, and evaluate their associations with disease phenotypes. Methods: We performed weighted ensemble-based co-occurrence network analysis of 1742 sputum microbiomes from published and new microbiome datasets, comprising two case-control studies of stable COPD versus healthy control, two studies of COPD stability versus exacerbation, and one study with exacerbation-recovery time series data. Results: Patients with COPD had reproducibly lower degree of negative bacterial interactions, i.e. total number of negative interactions as a proportion of total interactions, in their airway microbiome compared with healthy controls. Evaluation of the Haemophilus interactome showed that the antagonistic interaction networks of this established pathogen rather than its abundance consistently changed in COPD. Interactome dynamic analysis revealed reproducibly reduced antagonistic interactions but not diversity loss during COPD exacerbation, which recovered after treatment. In phenotypic analysis, unsupervised network clustering showed that loss of antagonistic interactions was associated with worse clinical symptoms (dyspnea), poorer lung function, exaggerated neutrophilic inflammation, and higher exacerbation risk. Furthermore, the frequent exacerbators (≥ 2 exacerbations per year) had significantly reduced antagonistic bacterial interactions while exhibiting subtle compositional changes in their airway microbiota. Conclusions: Bacterial interactome disturbance characterized by reduced antagonistic interactions, rather than change in pathogen abundance or diversity, is a reproducible feature of airway dysbiosis in COPD clinical stability and exacerbations, which suggests that we may target interactome rather than pathogen alone for disease treatment.</p

Contamination and mobile colistin resistance gene analysis for Salmonella isolated from retail chickens in Ji'nan

ObjectiveTo investigate the contamination of Salmonella in retail chickens in Ji’nan city from 2020 to 2021， and to explore the prevalence of the mobile colistin resistance gene （mcr） among these Salmonella isolates.MethodsFrom December 2020 to November 2021， 260 retail chicken samples were collected in Ji’nan City， and Salmonella was isolated and confirmed according to GB 4789.4—2016 “National food standard - Food microbiological examination： Salmonella”. Serotype identification and mcr gene screening were performed for all Salmonella isolates by polymerase chain reaction （PCR）. The drug resistance of mcr gene-positive strains was tested by micro-broth dilution method.ResultsA total of 61 in 260 retail chicken samples were positive for Salmonella detection with the contamination rate of 23.46% （61/260）. The highest contamination rate was 53.33% （32/60） for samples collected in autumn. One hundred and three Salmonella strains were isolated， 56 of which were Salmonella Enteritidis， accounting for 54.37% （56/103）. Two Salmonella Indiana， isolated from two separate chicken wing samples collected from different regions， were positive for mcr-1 gene， with a positive rate of 1.94% （2/103）. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing revealed that both of the two mcr-1-harboring Salmonella Indiana were multi-drug resistant， and one of them was concurrently resistant to all 12 categories of tested drugs， including carbapenems and polymyxins.ConclusionThere was a certain degree of Salmonella contamination in retail chickens in Jinan from 2020 to 2021， and the contamination rate of the samples collected in autumn was higher than in any other seasons. Salmonella Enteritidis was the predominant serotype. It should be of concern that a Salmonella isolate carried mcr-1 gene with severe multidrug resistance to both colistin and carbapenems， indicating that the surveillance for Salmonella in the whole chain of chicken production should be strengthened continuously， to provide important basic data for the prevention and control of foodborne diseases

Evaluating the ageing degrees of bitumen by rheological and chemical indices

The ageing of bitumen is an inevitable phenomenon which is still challenging to be characterised. This paper aims at evaluating the ageing degrees of bitumen comprehensively. There were six types of bitumen being aged to five levels for comparing purposes and multiple rheological tests by a DSR as well as chemical test for the SARA (saturates, aromatics, resins and asphaltenes) properties of bitumen were carried out. The critical temperatures, G-R parameter and nonrecoverable-compliance-based ageing indices were proposed to evaluate the ageing degrees of bitumen in terms of low-, intermediate- and high-temperature performance of bitumen, respectively. Also, a novel ageing evaluation index based on the integration of modulus of master curves was employed and modified, which can evaluate the ageing degrees of bitumen accurately in terms of the whole range of temperature. Finally, the chemical ageing index were analysed and was confirmed to have strong linear relationship with rheological indices of bitumen

Characterization of Bitumen Modified with Pyrolytic Carbon Black from Scrap Tires

Pyrolytic carbon black (CBp) from scrap tire pyrolysis is a potential modifier for the bitumen industry. Binders containing different contents of CBp were prepared and experimentally investigated to examine the effects of CBp on the electrical and thermal conductivity, conventional physical properties, rheological properties, high-temperature antirutting performance, aging resistance, and storage stability. Laboratory test results indicated that the incorporation of CBp effectively improves the electrothermal properties, rheological properties, high-temperature rutting resistance, and aging resistance. It also increases the viscosity and decreases the storage stability of bitumen. The study confirms that CBp-modified bitumen with proper selection of content can be a multifunctional paving material.</jats:p

Single-Image Superresolution for RGB Remote Sensing Imagery via Multiscale CNN-Transformer Feature Fusion

Single-image superresolution (SISR) of remote sensing images aims to improve image resolution through algorithmic means while restoring rich high-frequency detailed information. Previously, convolutional neural network (CNN) achieves impressive progress in SISR due to its strong local feature extraction capability. However, the CNN is difficult to model long-range dependencies, which limits the performance of SISR. Transformer has a greater advantage over the CNN in long-range dependence modeling. Moreover, remote sensing elements typically exhibit multiscale characteristics and maintain strong coupling relationships with the surrounding environment. Paying attention to multiscale local and global information can help further improve the performance of SISR. Existing methods encounter challenges in leveraging diverse feature sets within single architecture networks. In this article, we propose a multiscale CNN-Transformer feature fusion (MSCT) network for remote sensing SISR. MSCT is a hybrid structural network, which consists of the adaptive residual dense block (ARDB), the multiscale Transformer block (MSTB), and the local&#x2013;global information enhancement block (LGEB). Among them, ARDB can extract abundant multiscale local features via dense connected convolutional layers and adaptive residual learning. MSTB generates multiscale tokens with multiple convolutional layers to obtain multiscale global information. LGEB further enhance the extraction of local&#x2013;global information in spatial and frequency domain. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that MSCT achieves competitive results on RGB remote sensing imagery compared with other representative SISR methods. In addition, SR experiments on Sentinel-2 images show that MSCT has a certain generalization ability on multispectral images. Extended experiments also demonstrate that MSCT can effectively improve the performance of object detection

Experimental study on the peeling characteristics of wax on the surface of plastic alloy pipe and glass steel pipe

Abstract Plastic alloy pipes and glass steel pipes are two widely used non-metallic pipes. In this paper, sliced paraffin was used to perform waxing and peeling experiments on the lining surfaces of two types of pipes, investigating the effects of temperature and wax thickness on the surface peeling force of two types of pipe line. This experimental study has certain guiding effect on the selection of non-metallic pipes and the design of the wax removal device.</jats:p

High Expression of Ten Eleven Translocation 1 Is Associated with Poor Prognosis in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Background. DNA methylation patterns have been found to be distinct between tumor and normal patients. However, the effect of DNA demethylation enzymes, ten eleven translocation (TET) proteins, has not been comprehensively characterized in liver cancer. In this research, we sought to unravel the linkage of TET proteins with prognosis, immune characteristics and biological pathways in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Materials and Methods. Four independent datasets with gene expression data and clinical data of HCC samples were downloaded from public databases. CIBERSORT, single sample Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (ssGSEA), MCP-counter, and TIMER were implemented to evaluate immune cell infiltration. limma was employed to screen differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between two groups. The demethylation-related risk model was established by using univariate Cox regression analysis, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), and stepwise Akaike information criterion (stepAIC). Results. TET1 was significantly higher expressed in tumor samples than that in normal samples. HCC patients with advanced stages (III+IV) and grades (G3+G4) had higher TET1 expression compared to early stages (I+II) and grades (G1+G2). HCC samples with high TET1 expression had worse prognosis than that with low expression. High and low TET1 expression groups had distinct immune cell infiltration and response to immunotherapy and chemotherapy. We identified 90 DEGs related to DNA demethylation in high vs. low TET1 expression groups. Furthermore, we established a risk model based on 90 DEGs containing seven key prognostic genes (SERPINH1, CDC20, HACD2, SPHK1, UGT2B15, SLC1A5, and CYP2C9) with effectiveness and robustness in predicting HCC prognosis. Conclusions. Our study suggested TET1 as a potential indicator in HCC progression. TET1 was closely involved in immune infiltration and activation of oncogenic pathways. The DNA demethylation-related risk model was potential to be applied for predicting HCC prognosis in clinics