Evolution of humoral immune response to SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine in liver transplant recipients - a longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND AND AIM Liver transplant recipients show suboptimal vaccine-elicited immune responses to severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccination. This study aimed to assess real-world data on SARS-CoV-2 antibodies after the second and third SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in liver transplant recipients in Switzerland. METHODS We enrolled liver transplant recipients who attended regular follow-up visits between 01/07/2021 and 30/04/2022 at the outpatient clinic of the Department of Visceral Surgery and Medicine at Bern University Hospital, Switzerland. Following the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health recommendations, we measured SARS-CoV-2 anti-spike IgG antibodies in 117 liver transplant recipients ≥4 weeks after the second SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination from 07/2021-04/2022. In case of antibody levels of 100 AU/ml were defined as "responders", those with 12-100 AU/ml as "partial responders" and those with <12 AU/ml as "non-responders". RESULTS After two vaccinations, 36/117 (31%) were responders, 42/117 (36%) were partial responders and 39/117 (33%) were non-responders. The humoral immune response improved significantly after the third vaccination, resulting in 31/55 (56%) responders among the previous partial or non-responders. A total of 26 patients developed COVID-19, of whom two had a moderate or severe course (both non-responders after three doses). DISCUSSION One third of liver transplant recipients showed an optimal response following two vaccinations; a third dose achieved a complete antibody response in more than half of partial and non-responders. We observed only one severe course of COVID-19 and no deaths from COVID-19 in the vaccinated liver transplant recipients

Efficiently reconstructing compound objects by quantum imaging with higher-order correlation functions

Quantum imaging has a potential of enhancing the precision of objects reconstruction by exploiting quantum correlations of the imaging field, in particular for imaging with low-intensity fields up to the level of a few photons. However, it generally leads to nonlinear estimation problems. The complexity of these problems rapidly increases with the number of parameters describing the object and the correlation order. Here we propose a way to drastically reduce the complexity for a wide class of problems. The key point of our approach is to connect the features of the Fisher information with the parametric locality of the problem, and to reconstruct the whole set of parameters stepwise by an efficient iterative inference scheme that is linear on the total number of parameters. This general inference procedure is experimentally applied to quantum near-field imaging with higher-order correlated light sources, resulting in super-resolving reconstruction of grey compound transmission objects

Генезис и эволюция этнической идентичности белорусов

For the restoration of biodiversity in agricultural grasslands, it is essential to understand how management acts as an ecological filter on the resident species. Mowing constitutes such a filter: only species that possess functional traits enabling them to withstand its consequences can persist in the community. We investigated how the timing of mowing modulates this filtering effect for insects. We predicted that two traits drive species responses. Species with larval development within the meadow vegetation will suffer more from mowing than species whose larvae develop in or on the ground, or outside the meadows, while species with a later phenology should benefit from later mowing. We conducted a five-year experiment, replicated at 12 sites across the Swiss lowlands, applying three different mowing regimes to low-intensity hay meadows: (1) first cut of the year not earlier than 15 June (control regime); (2) the first cut delayed until 15 July; and (3) leaving an uncut grass refuge on 10–20% of the meadow area (after earliest first cut on 15 June). Before the first cut in years 4 or 5, we sampled larvae of Lepidoptera and sawflies, and adults of moths, parasitoid wasps, wild bees, hoverflies, ground beetles, and rove beetles. Overall, before the first cut of the year, abundances of species with vegetation-dwelling larvae were higher in meadows with delayed mowing or an uncut grass refuge, with some taxon-specific variation. In contrast, species whose larval development is independent of the meadow vegetation showed no differences in abundance between mowing regimes. Species richness did not differ among regimes. For species with vegetation-dwelling larvae, a fourth-corner analysis showed an association between early phenology and the control regime. No associations were found for the other functional groups. Our results show that slight modifications of mowing regimes, easily implementable in agri-environmental policy schemes, can boost invertebrate abundance, potentially benefitting insectivorous vertebrates

BDNF : an indicator of insomnia?

publishe