BEHAVIOR STUDY ON RATS WITH UNILATERAL SPLINT: IS SUDDEN CHANGE IN OCCLUSION RESPONSIBLE FOR TMD PAIN?

Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) Disorders (TMDs) affect 5-10% of the US population. One potential cause of TMD is a change in occlusion from trauma or surgery. In order to investigate whether a sudden change in occlusion is associated with the emergence of hypersensitivity in the TMJ area in adult rats, we performed perioral hypersensitivity assessment before and after splint placement on 12 male and 16 female Sprague Dawley rats with the orofacial pain assay. Rats were trained to access sucrose solution via a window in the side of the cage. Cumulative contact time (CT) with the sucrose sipper tube was determined for each 10 min training and subsequent testing session. For testing, 18-pin wire arrays were placed in the window to provide bi-lateral mechanical stimulation of the face when the sucrose solution was accessed. Baseline CTs were collected 3 times before the splint, and post-splint CTs were collected on different days depending on different batches. Splints consisted of dental resin poured to about 1 mm in thickness, which were applied unilaterally to the left maxillary molars. The experiment was conducted through 4 batches with 4 rats in the first batch and 8 rats in the other 3 batches. For the result, some of the rats in the splint group showed a decreasing trend for CT after splint placement while the others showed a transient decrease. For the Sham group, most rats in Batch 1 and 3 had very low CTs, while Batch 2 had high CTs before the splint but they decreased a lot after the splint placement. Batch 4 had high and stable CTs. No conclusion can be drawn from the current study because low CTs were seen in many rats before splint placement. For the future studies, more training could increase the baseline CT in order to detect the impact of splinting

Glycoprotein is enough for sindbis virus-derived DNA vector to express heterogenous genes

To investigate the necessity and potential application of structural genes for expressing heterogenous genes from Sindbis virus-derived vector, the DNA-based expression vector pVaXJ was constructed by placing the recombinant genome of sindbis-like virus XJ-160 under the control of the human cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter of the plasmid pVAX1, in which viral structural genes were replaced by a polylinker cassette to allow for insertion of heterologous genes. The defect helper plasmids pVaE or pVaC were developed by cloning the gene of glycoprotein E3E26KE1 or capsid protein of XJ-160 virus into pVAX1, respectively. The report gene cassette pVaXJ-EGFP or pV-Gluc expressing enhanced green fluorescence protein (EGFP) or Gaussia luciferase (G.luc) were constructed by cloning EGFP or G.luc gene into pVaXJ. EGFP or G.luc was expressed in the BHK-21 cells co-transfected with report gene cassettes and pVaE at levels that were comparable to those produced by report gene cassettes, pVaC and pVaE and were much higher than the levels produced by report gene cassette and pVaC, suggesting that glycoprotein is enough for Sindbis virus-derived DNA vector to express heterogenous genes in host cells. The method of gene expression from Sindbis virus-based DNA vector only co-transfected with envelop E gene increase the conveniency and the utility of alphavirus-based vector systems in general

COVID-19 datasets : a brief overview

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic affects lives and social-economic development around the world. The affecting of the pandemic has motivated researchers from different domains to find effective solutions to diagnose, prevent, and estimate the pandemic and relieve its adverse effects. Numerous COVID-19 datasets are built from these studies and are available to the public. These datasets can be used for disease diagnosis and case prediction, speeding up solving problems caused by the pandemic. To meet the needs of researchers to understand various COVID-19 datasets, we examine and provide an overview of them. We organise the majority of these datasets into three categories based on the category of ap-plications, i.e., time-series, knowledge base, and media-based datasets. Organising COVID-19 datasets into appropriate categories can help researchers hold their focus on methodology rather than the datasets. In addition, applications and COVID-19 datasets suffer from a series of problems, such as privacy and quality. We discuss these issues as well as potentials of COVID-19 datasets. © 2022, ComSIS Consortium. All rights reserved

A Deterministic Construction for Jointly Designed Quasicyclic LDPC Coded-Relay Cooperation

This correspondence presents a jointly designed quasicyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded-relay cooperation with joint-iterative decoding in the destination node. Firstly, a design-theoretic construction of QC-LDPC codes based on a combinatoric design approach known as optical orthogonal codes (OOC) is presented. Proposed OOC-based construction gives three classes of binary QC-LDPC codes with no length-4 cycles by utilizing some known ingredients including binary matrix dispersion of elements of finite field, incidence matrices, and circulant decomposition. Secondly, the proposed OOC-based construction gives an effective method to jointly design length-4 cycles free QC-LDPC codes for coded-relay cooperation, where sum-product algorithm- (SPA-) based joint-iterative decoding is used to decode the corrupted sequences coming from the source or relay nodes in different time frames over constituent Rayleigh fading channels. Based on the theoretical analysis and simulation results, proposed QC-LDPC coded-relay cooperations outperform their competitors under same conditions over the Rayleigh fading channel with additive white Gaussian noise