Antiviral treatment alters the frequency of activating and inhibitory receptor-expressing natural killer cells in chronic Hepatitis B virus infected patients

Natural killer (NK) cells play a critical role in innate antiviral immunity, but little is known about the impact of antiviral therapy on the frequency of NK cell subsets. To this aim, we performed this longitudinal study to examine the dynamic changes of the frequency of different subsets of NK cells in CHB patients after initiation of tenofovir or adefovir therapy. We found that NK cell numbers and subset distribution differ between CHB patients and normal subjects; furthermore, the association was found between ALT level and CD158b+ NK cell in HBV patients. In tenofovir group, the frequency of NK cells increased during the treatment accompanied by downregulated expression of NKG2A and KIR2DL3. In adefovir group, NK cell numbers did not differ during the treatment, but also accompanied by downregulated expression of NKG2A and KIR2DL3. Our results demonstrate that treatment with tenofovir leads to viral load reduction, and correlated with NK cell frequencies in peripheral blood of chronic hepatitis B virus infection. In addition, treatments with both tenofovir and adefovir in chronic HBV infected patients induce a decrease of the frequency of inhibitory receptor+ NK cells, which may account for the partial restoration of the function of NK cells in peripheral blood following treatment

Differential Evolution-based 3D Directional Wireless Sensor Network Deployment Optimization

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are applied more and more widely in real life. In actual scenarios, 3D directional wireless sensors (DWSs) are constantly employed, thus, research on the real-time deployment optimization problem of 3D directional wireless sensor networks (DWSNs) based on terrain big data has more practical significance. Based on this, we study the deployment optimization problem of DWSNs in the 3D terrain through comprehensive consideration of coverage, lifetime, connectivity of sensor nodes, connectivity of cluster headers and reliability of DWSNs. We propose a modified differential evolution (DE) algorithm by adopting CR-sort and polynomial-based mutation on the basis of the cooperative coevolutionary (CC) framework, and apply it to address deployment problem of 3D DWSNs. In addition, to reduce computation time, we realize implementation of message passing interface (MPI) parallelism. As is revealed by the experimentation results, the modified algorithm proposed in this paper achieves satisfying performance with respect to either optimization results or operation time

A new 111 type iron pnictide superconductor LiFeP

A new iron pnictide LiFeP superconductor was found. The compound crystallizes into a Cu2Sb structure containing an FeP layer showing superconductivity with maximum Tc of 6K. This is the first 111 type iron pnictide superconductor containing no arsenic. The new superconductor is featured with itinerant behavior at normal state that could helpful to understand the novel superconducting mechanism of iron pnictide compounds.Comment: 3 figures + 1 tabl

Diversity of eukaryotic plankton of aquaculture ponds with Carassius auratus gibelio, using denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis

PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) were used to explore the relationship between eukaryotic plankton community succession and environmental factors in two aquaculture pond models with gibel carp Carassius auratus gibelio. The main culture species of pond 1 were gibel carp and grass carp, and the combined density was 46224 fingerling/ha (gibel carp/grass carp/silver carp/bighead carp, 17:4:6:1). The main culture species of pond 2 was gibel carp, and the combined density was 37551 fingerling/ha (gibel carp/silver carp/bighead carp, 52:1:1). Water samples were collected monthly. The results showed that the annual average concentrations of TP and PO_4-P in pond 1 were significantly higher than pond 2 (p>0.05). The concentration of chlorophyll a (chl a) has no significantly difference between pond 1 and pond 2. DGGE profiles of 18S rRNA gene fragments from the two ponds revealed that the diversity of eukaryotic plankton assemblages was highly variable. 91 bands and 71 bands were detected in pond 1 and pond 2, respectively. The average Shannon–Wiener index of pond 1 was significantly higher than pond 2. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) revealed that temperature played a key role in the structure of the eukaryotic plankton community in both ponds, but the nutrient concentration did not affect it. Our results suggest that DGGE method is a cost-effective way to gain insight into seasonal dynamics of eukaryotic plankton communities in culture ponds, and the increase in the number of filter-feeding silver carp and bighead carp could increase the diversity of the eukaryotic plankton community