Synthetic rabbit-human antibody conjugate as a control in immunoassays for immunoglobulin M specific to hepatitis E virus

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In assays for anti-hepatitis E virus (HEV) immunoglobulin M (IgM), large volumes of the patient's sera cannot be easily obtained for use as a positive control. In this study, we investigated an alternative chemical method in which rabbit anti-HEV IgG was conjugated with human IgM and was used as a positive control in the anti-HEV IgM assay. Rabbit anti-HEV IgG was isolated from immune sera by chromatography on protein A-Sepharose and was conjugated with human IgM by using 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide (EDC) as a crosslinker.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The specific anti-HEV IgG antibody titer was 100,000 times that of the negative control, i.e., prebleed rabbit serum. The results of anti-HEV IgM enzyme-linked immunosobent assay showed that the antibody conjugate was similar to anti-HEV IgM antibodies produced in humans. The results of a stability experiment showed that the antibody conjugate was stable for use in external quality assessment or internal quality control trials.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We concluded that the chemically conjugated rabbit-human antibody could be used instead of the traditional serum control as a positive control in the anti-HEV IgM assay.</p

SkyMath: Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to solve varieties of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including mathematical reasoning. In this work, we present SkyMath, a large language model for mathematics with 13 billion parameters. By applying self-compare fine-tuning, we have enhanced mathematical reasoning abilities of Skywork-13B-Base remarkably. On GSM8K, SkyMath outperforms all known open-source models of similar size and has established a new SOTA performance

Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Model

In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves \emph{state of the art} performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs

Explanation of core ion cyclotron emission from beam-ion heated plasmas in ASDEX Upgrade by the magnetoacoustic cyclotron instability

Bursts of ion cyclotron emission (ICE), with spectral peaks corresponding to the hydrogen cyclotron harmonic frequencies in the plasma core are detected from helium plasmas heated by sub-Alfvénic beam-injected hydrogen ions in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. Based on the fast ion distribution function obtained from TRANSP/NUBEAM code, together with a linear analytical theory of the magnetoacoustic cyclotron instability (MCI), the growth rates of MCI could be calculated. In our theoretical and experimental studies, we found that the excitation mechanism of core ICE driven by sub-Alfvénic beam ions in ASDEX Upgrade is MCI as the time evolution of MCI growth rates is broadly consistent with measured ICE amplitudes. The MCI growth rate is very sensitive to the energy and velocity distribution of beam-injected ions and is suppressed by the slowing down of the dominant beam-injected ion velocity and the spreading of the fast ion distribution profile. This may help to account for the experimental observation that ICE signals disappear within ~3 ms after the NBI turn-off time, much faster than the slowing down times of the beam ions

Efficacy and safety of tigecycline monotherapy vs. imipenem/cilastatin in Chinese patients with complicated intra-abdominal infections: a randomized controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Tigecycline, a first-in-class broad-spectrum glycylcycline antibiotic, has broad-spectrum in vitro activity against bacteria commonly encountered in complicated intra-abdominal infections (cIAIs), including aerobic and facultative Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and anaerobic bacteria. In the current trial, tigecycline was evaluated for safety and efficacy vs. imipenem/cilastatin in hospitalized Chinese patients with cIAIs.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this phase 3, multicenter, open-label study, patients were randomly assigned to receive IV tigecycline or imipenem/cilastatin for ≤2 weeks. The primary efficacy endpoints were clinical response at the test-of-cure visit (12-37 days after therapy) for the microbiologic modified intent-to-treat and microbiologically evaluable populations. Because the study was not powered to demonstrate non-inferiority between tigecycline and imipenem/cilastatin, no formal statistical analysis was performed. Two-sided 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated for the response rates in each treatment group and for differences between treatment groups for descriptive purposes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>One hundred ninety-nine patients received ≥1 dose of study drug and comprised the modified intent-to-treat population. In the microbiologically evaluable population, 86.5% (45 of 52) of tigecycline- and 97.9% (47 of 48) of imipenem/cilastatin-treated patients were cured at the test-of-cure assessment (12-37 days after therapy); in the microbiologic modified intent-to-treat population, cure rates were 81.7% (49 of 60) and 90.9% (50 of 55), respectively. The overall incidence of treatment-emergent adverse events was 80.4% for tigecycline vs. 53.9% after imipenem/cilastatin therapy (<it>P </it>< 0.001), primarily due to gastrointestinal-related events, especially nausea (21.6% vs. 3.9%; <it>P </it>< 0.001) and vomiting (12.4% vs. 2.0%; <it>P </it>= 0.005).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Clinical cure rates for tigecycline were consistent with those found in global cIAI studies. The overall safety profile was also consistent with that observed in global studies of tigecycline for treatment of cIAI, as well as that observed in analyses of Chinese patients in those studies; no novel trends were observed.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00136201</p

Enabling real-time multi-messenger astrophysics discoveries with deep learning

Multi-messenger astrophysics is a fast-growing, interdisciplinary field that combines data, which vary in volume and speed of data processing, from many different instruments that probe the Universe using different cosmic messengers: electromagnetic waves, cosmic rays, gravitational waves and neutrinos. In this Expert Recommendation, we review the key challenges of real-time observations of gravitational wave sources and their electromagnetic and astroparticle counterparts, and make a number of recommendations to maximize their potential for scientific discovery. These recommendations refer to the design of scalable and computationally efficient machine learning algorithms; the cyber-infrastructure to numerically simulate astrophysical sources, and to process and interpret multi-messenger astrophysics data; the management of gravitational wave detections to trigger real-time alerts for electromagnetic and astroparticle follow-ups; a vision to harness future developments of machine learning and cyber-infrastructure resources to cope with the big-data requirements; and the need to build a community of experts to realize the goals of multi-messenger astrophysics

Does environmental protection tax law accelerate energy transition? Evidence from electrification of 262 cities in China

While global climate risk is increasing substantially with greenhouse gas emission, energy transition is a key approach to alleviate this concern. This paper constructs the difference in difference model (DID) and the difference-in-differences based propensity score matching model (PSM-DID) to estimate the effects of China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law on energy transition and its transmission path. The empirical results show that (1) China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law can promote energy transition through electrification, and this conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. (2) China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law can facilitate energy transition by improving both the quantity and the quality of industrial structure upgrading. The findings of this paper not only enrich the literature on the energy transition and environmental tax designs in developing countries but also provide an empirical reference for the government to promote energy transition orderly by implementing environmental tax

Effects of Scion Variety on the Phosphorus Efficiency of Grafted Camellia oleifera Seedlings

Grafting provides a way to improve tolerance to low phosphorus (P) stress for plants, and has been extensively applied in commercial cultivars grafted onto appropriate rootstocks. However, little literature is available concerning the scion-mediated effect on P efficiency in grafted plants. In this study, three different Camellia oleifera Abel. scion cultivars (G8, G83-1, and W2) were grafted onto the same rootstock (W2) under controls (0.5 mM) and low-P (0 mM) availability for eight months. The results showed that the scions significantly affected root-to-shoot weight ratios, the root morphology with a diameter larger than 1 mm, P accumulation, and the P utilization efficiency (PUE) of the root. A higher increase in the root-to-shoot weight ratio under the low-P supply was observed in the G83-1/W2 (26.15%) than in the G8/W2 (0%) and the W2/W2 (5.32%). Root PUE of the scion G8, G83-1, and W2 was improved by up to 113.73%, 45.46%, and 20.97% under the low-P supply. Moreover, G8/W2 exhibited higher shoot P accumulation and the highest root PUE under the low-P supply, indicating a high capability to tolerate P deficiency by maximizing the cost-effectiveness of P remobilization to photosynthetic organs. This suggested the vigorous variety of G8 could be a promising scion to improve grafted C. oleifera tolerance to low-P stress. Our results would have important implications for exploration and identification of a superior scion variety to enhance the ability of resistance concerning P deficiency stress in C. oleifera