Preceding human metapneumovirus infection increases adherence of Streptococcus pneumoniae and severity of murine pneumococcal pneumonia

BackgroundCoinfection with respiratory virus and Streptococcus pneumoniae has been frequently reported in several epidemiologic studies. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of preceding human metapneumovirus (hMPV) inoculation on subsequent pneumococcal infection.MethodsHep-2 and A549 cells were infected with hMPV then inoculated with S. pneumoniae. Bacterial adhesion was measured using colony forming unit and cytometric-fluorescence assays. In vivo bacterial adhesion was examined in hMPV-infected mice after inoculation of fluorescence-conjugated S. pneumoniae. Pulmonary inflammation (bacterial titers, cytokine levels, and histopathology) of hMPV-infected mice was investigated after inoculation with S. pneumoniae.ResultsIn vitro results of bacterial infection with S. pneumoniae on A549 and Hep-2 monolayer cells showed that even though cellular adherence was variable among different serotypes, there was significantly enhanced bacterial adherence in A549 cells with preceding hMPV infection. In addition, in vivo study of hMPV-infected mice showed increased adhesion of S. pneumoniae on the bronchial epithelium with delayed bacterial clearance and exacerbated histopathology. Furthermore, mice with preceding hMPV infection showed repressed recruitment of airway neutrophils with decreased expression of neutrophil chemoattractants during pneumococcal infection.ConclusionThese results suggest that hMPV-infected airway cells, especially the lower airway epithelium, express increased adherence with S. pneumoniae. Furthermore, hMPV-infected mice showed impaired recruitment of airway neutrophils, possibly leading to delayed bacterial clearance and exacerbated pulmonary inflammation, after secondary infection with pneumococcal isolates

Learning Representations for Clustering via Partial Information Discrimination and Cross-Level Interaction

In this paper, we present a novel deep image clustering approach termed PICI, which enforces the partial information discrimination and the cross-level interaction in a joint learning framework. In particular, we leverage a Transformer encoder as the backbone, through which the masked image modeling with two paralleled augmented views is formulated. After deriving the class tokens from the masked images by the Transformer encoder, three partial information learning modules are further incorporated, including the PISD module for training the auto-encoder via masked image reconstruction, the PICD module for employing two levels of contrastive learning, and the CLI module for mutual interaction between the instance-level and cluster-level subspaces. Extensive experiments have been conducted on six real-world image datasets, which demononstrate the superior clustering performance of the proposed PICI approach over the state-of-the-art deep clustering approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/Regan-Zhang/PICI

Robust Stereoscopic Crosstalk Prediction

We propose a new metric to predict perceived crosstalk using the original images rather than both the original and ghosted images. The proposed metrics are based on color information. First, we extract a disparity map, a color difference map, and a color contrast map from original image pairs. Then, we use those maps to construct two new metrics (Vdispc and Vdlogc). Metric Vdispc considers the effect of the disparity map and the color difference map, while Vdlogc addresses the influence of the color contrast map. The prediction performance is evaluated using various types of stereoscopic crosstalk images. By incorporating Vdispc and Vdlogc, the new metric Vpdlc is proposed to achieve a higher correlation with the perceived subject crosstalk scores. Experimental results show that the new metrics achieve better performance than previous methods, which indicate that color information is one key factor for crosstalk visible prediction. Furthermore, we construct a new data set to evaluate our new metrics

Liraglutide-induced reduction of myocardial ischemiareperfusion injury in rats via ERK1/2 signaling pathway

Purpose: To investigate the protective effect of liraglutide on myocardial ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury and its molecular mechanism.Methods: Ischemia reperfusion model male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were randomly divided into negative control group, I/R group (saline), liraglutide group (liraglutide) and PD group (liraglutide + PD98059). The weight of myocardium in ischemic and infarction areas of the heart, myocardial injury biomarker, oxidative stress, as well as expressions of mRNA molecules of apoptosis were determined.Results: The myocardial mass of ischemic and infarcted areas of the heart (relative to left ventricular mass) of I/R group were significantly higher (p ˂ 0.05) than those of negative control group, but significantly lower in liraglutide group than in I/R group (p > 0.05). However, the parameters were significantly higher in PD group than in liraglutide group (p ˂ 0.05). CK, CK-MB and LDH activities, as well as levels of cTnI and cTnT in I/R group were significantly higher (p ˂ 0.05) than those of negative control group. However, the parameters were significantly lower (p ˂ 0.05) in liraglutide group than in I/R group, but higher in PD group (p ˂ 0.05) than in liraglutide group. Serum SOD, GSH-Px, CAT activities and tBcl-2 mRNA expression were significantly lower in I/R group than those of negative control group (p ˂ 0.001), while those PD group were significantly lower than those of liraglutide group (p ˂ 0.001).Conclusion: Liraglutide alleviates myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury and inhibits oxidative stress and apoptosis via ERK1/2 signaling pathway in rats, but further studies are required to ascertain the clinical efficacy and safety of the compound.Keywords: Ischemia-reperfusion injury, Liraglutide, ERK1/2 signal pathway, Oxidative stress, Apoptosi

Complete genome sequencing and analysis of six enterovirus 71 strains with different clinical phenotypes

BACKGROUND: Hand, foot and mouth diseases (HFMD) caused by enterovirus 71(EV71) presents a broad spectrum of clinical manifestations ranging from mild febrile disease to fatal neurolocal disease. However, the mechanism of virulence is unknown. METHODS: We isolated 6 strains of EV71 from HFMD patients with or without neurological symptoms, and sequenced the whole genomes of the viruses to reveal the virulence factors of EV71. RESULTS: Phylogenetic tree based on VP1 region showed that all six strains clustered into C4a of C4 sub-genotype. In the complete polypeptide, 298 positions were found to be variable in all strains, and three of these positions (Val(P814)/Ile(P814) in VP1, Val(P1148)/Ile(P1148) in 3A and Ala (P1728)/Cys (P1728)/Val (P1728) in 3C) were conserved among the strains with neurovirulence, but variable in strains without neurovirulence. In the 5(′)-UTR region, it showed that the first 10 nucleotides were mostly conserved, however from the 11th nucleotide, nucleotide insertions and deletions were quite common. The secondary structure prediction of 5(′)-UTR sequences showed that two of three strains without neurovirulence (SDLY11 and SDLY48) were almost the same, and all strains with neurovirulence (SDLY96, SDLY107 and SDLY153) were different from each other. SDLY107 (a fatal strain) was found different from other strains on four positions (C(P241)/T(P241), A(P571)/T(P571), C(P579)/T(P579) in 5(′)-UTR and T(P7335)/C(P7335) in 3(′)-UTR). CONCLUSIONS: The three positions (Val(P814)/Ile(P814) in VP1, Val(P1148)/Ile(P1148) in 3A and Ala (P1728)/Cys (P1728)/Val (P1728) in 3C), were different between two phenotypes. These suggested that the three positions might be potential virulent positions. And the three varied positions were also found to be conserved in strains with neurovirulence, and variable in strains without neurovirulence. These might reveal that the conservation of two of the three positions or the three together were specific for the strains with neurovirulence. Varation of secondary structure of 5(′)-UTR, might be correlated to the changes of viral virulence. SDLY107 (a fatal strain) was found different from other strains on four positions, these positions might be related with death

Acupuncture therapies for cancer-related fatigue: A Bayesian network meta-analysis and systematic review

BackgroundCancer-related fatigue (CRF) is one of the most commonly reported symptoms impacting cancer survivors. This study evaluated and compared the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture treatments for CRF.MethodsWe searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, China Biology Medicine China National Knowledge Infrastructure, China Science and Technology Journal Database, and WanFang Database from inception to November 2022 to identify eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing acupuncture treatments with sham interventions, waitlist (WL), or usual care (UC) for CRF treatment. The outcomes included the Cancer Fatigue Scale (CFS) and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), and pair-wise and Bayesian network meta-analyses were performed using STATA v17.0.ResultsIn total, 34 randomized controlled trials featuring 2632 participants were included. In the network meta-analysis, the primary analysis using CFS illustrated that point application (PA) + UC (standardized mean difference [SMD] = −1.33, 95% CI = −2.02, −0.63) had the highest probability of improving CFS, followed by manual acupuncture (MA) + PA (SMD = −1.21, 95% CI = −2.05, −0.38) and MA + UC (SMD = −0.80, 95% CI = −1.50, −0.09). Moreover, the adverse events of these interventions were acceptable.ConclusionThis study demonstrated that acupuncture was effective and safe on CRF treatment. However, further studies are still warranted by incorporating more large-scale and high-quality RCTs.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO, identifier CRD42022339769