Model-Based Design of Growth-Attenuated Viruses

Live-virus vaccines activate both humoral and cell-mediated immunity, require only a single boosting, and generally provide longer immune protection than killed or subunit vaccines. However, growth of live-virus vaccines must be attenuated to minimize their potential pathogenic effects, and mechanisms of attenuation by conventional serial-transfer viral adaptation are not well-understood. New methods of attenuation based on rational engineering of viral genomes may offer a potentially greater control if one can link defined genetic modifications to changes in virus growth. To begin to establish such links between genotype and growth phenotype, we developed a computer model for the intracellular growth of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a well-studied, nonsegmented, negative-stranded RNA virus. Our model incorporated established regulatory mechanisms of VSV while integrating key wild-type infection steps: hijacking of host resources, transcription, translation, and replication, followed by assembly and release of progeny VSV particles. Generalization of the wild-type model to allow for genome rearrangements matched the experimentally observed attenuation ranking for recombinant VSV strains that altered the genome position of their nucleocapsid gene. Finally, our simulations captured previously reported experimental results showing how altering the positions of other VSV genes has the potential to attenuate the VSV growth while overexpressing the immunogenic VSV surface glycoprotein. Such models will facilitate the engineering of new live-virus vaccines by linking genomic manipulations to controlled changes in virus gene-expression and growth

Production and processing of canna vermicelli in Hung Yen province toward sustainable development

Located in the Red River Delta region, Hung Yen province has 923000 ha of total land area, of which agricultural land area occupied 60.67%. The agricultural land area per labor is 0.1 ha. However, it has been annually decreasing due to the development of industrial zone, construction of urban zone, expansion of road… For these reasons, the stainable development for production and processing of agricultural products plays a very important role in job creation for farmers who loosed their own agricultural land, avoidance of quantity and quality loosing of raw agricultural products and increase in economic efficiency of agricultural production and processing. The production and processing of canna are traditional jobs of rural households in Hung Yen. They not only have been creating jobs for rural households but also increasing in their income. Beside the social and economic benefit created by these activities, the processing activity has caused many negative consequences. It led to environmental pollution due to its waste, overuse of chemical substances. Desiccated of vermicelli in bad condition resulted in the unsafe food. Therefore, this study is conducted to deeply investigate both positive effects and negative consequences created by production and processing of canna vermicelli in term of economic, social and environmental aspects. This study concentrates on the farm households; discuss advantages and disadvantages of production inputs, processing techniques and output market of their products from arrowroot to vermicelli; and find out solutions for the sustainable development for production and processing of vermicelli

Impact of professional development activities on teachers’ formative assessment practices

This study aims to explore the impact of professional development (PD) activities on the practice of formative assessment, mediated by outcome expectancy and self-efficacy. The study used a survey method to unveil compelling insights among 5,546 primary teachers within the context of Vietnam. The findings from partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) demonstrated a significant impact of PD on teachers’ outcome expectancy regarding formative assessment and their self-efficacy in practicing it. The study emphasizes that PD significantly enhances the effectiveness of practice when interconnected with outcome expectancy and self-efficacy. When teachers anticipate positive outcomes and possess strong self-belief, PD notably improves their classroom formative assessment practices. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring PD initiatives to bolster teachers’ outcome expectancy and self-efficacy. By emphasizing these aspects, PD can significantly elevate its positive influence on classroom practices, especially in formative assessment. This study provides crucial insights for educational policymakers and institutions aiming to maximize the impact of PD programs for primary educators in Vietnam

Enriching Biomedical Knowledge for Vietnamese Low-resource Language Through Large-Scale Translation

Biomedical data and benchmarks are highly valuable yet very limited in low-resource languages other than English such as Vietnamese. In this paper, we make use of a state-of-the-art translation model in English-Vietnamese to translate and produce both pretrained as well as supervised data in the biomedical domains. Thanks to such large-scale translation, we introduce ViPubmedT5, a pretrained Encoder-Decoder Transformer model trained on 20 million translated abstracts from the high-quality public PubMed corpus. ViPubMedT5 demonstrates state-of-the-art results on two different biomedical benchmarks in summarization and acronym disambiguation. Further, we release ViMedNLI - a new NLP task in Vietnamese translated from MedNLI using the recently public En-vi translation model and carefully refined by human experts, with evaluations of existing methods against ViPubmedT5

ẢNH HƯỞNG CỦA ASTAXANTHIN BỔ SUNG TRONG THỨC ĂN LÊN TĂNG TRƯỞNG, TỶ LỆ SỐNG VÀ MÀU SẮC DA CÁ KHOANG CỔ NEMO, Amphiprion ocellaris THƯƠNG MẠI

This study examined the influence of astaxanthin added to food on growth, survival rate and pigmentation of commercial false clownfish, Amphiprion ocellaris. Five experiments were performed with synthetic astaxanthin contents: 0; 50; 100; 150 and 200 mg/kg diets. Mean weight and mean length of fish were 1.16 ± 0.22 gand and 33.05 ± 3.29 mm respectively. Fish were fed by 5% of their live weight during the examination of 8 weeks. After 56 days of experiments, the skin pigmentation levels were analysed using Clownfish Exercise pigmentation chart which has a scale from 1 to 10. Color scales of 5 experiments: 0; 50; 100; 150 and 200 mg Astaxanthin/kg diets were 2.12 ± 0.08, 3.79 ± 0.1, 5.31 ± 0.14, 7.78 ± 0.09, 8.04 ± 0.12 respectively. The result showed that the dietary astaxanthin could increase coloration of skin compared with the control group which had the lightest color (P 0.05) but there were no significant effects on growth and survival rate of clownfish (P 0.05).Nghiên cứu này đánh giá ảnh hưởng của Astaxanthin bổ sung trong thức ăn lên tăng trưởng, tỷ lệ sống và màu sắc da của cá khoang cổ Nemo Amphiprion ocellaris thương mại. Năm lô thí nghiệm được thực hiện với hàm lượng astaxanthin tổng hợp (Carophyll Pink 10% CWS) bổ sung vào trong thức ăn là: 0, 50, 100, 150 và 200 mg/kg. Cá thí nghiệm có khối lượng và chiều dài trung bình ban đầu tương ứng là 1,16 ± 0,22 g và 33,05 ± 3,29 mm. Cá được cho ăn với khẩu phần 5% khối lượng thân trong 8 tuần. Sau 56 ngày nuôi màu sắc da của cá được đánh giá bằng phương pháp cho điểm sử dụng thước so màu Clownfish Exercise có thang điểm từ 1 tới 10. Thang điểm màu sắc của 5 lô bổ sung 0, 50, 100, 150 và 200 mg Astaxanthin/kg thức ăn lần lượt là: 2,12 ± 0,08; 3,79 ± 0,1; 5,31 ± 0,14; 7,78 ± 0,09; 8,04 ± 0,12. Kết quả cho thấy những lô thí nghệm có bổ sung Astaxanthin làm tăng màu sắc da của cá so với lô đối chứng (P0,05) nhưng không có sự khác biệt có ý nghĩa về tăng trưởng và tỷ lệ sống giữa các lô thí nghiệm với nhau (P 0,05)

Differential expression of microRNAs in plasma of patients with colorectal cancer: A potential marker for colorectal cancer screening

Objective: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to offer great potential in the diagnosis of cancer. We investigated whether plasma miRNAs could discriminate between patients with and without colorectal cancer (CRC). Methods: This study was divided into three phases: (1) marker discovery using real-time PCR-based miRNA profiling on plasma, corresponding cancerous and adjacent non-cancerous colonic tissues of five patients with CRC, along with plasma from five healthy individuals as controls; (2) marker selection and validation by real-time quantitative RT-PCR on a small set of plasma; and (3) independent validation on a large set of plasma from 90 patients with CRC, 20 patients with gastric cancer, 20 patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and 50 healthy controls. Results: Of the panel of 95 miRNAs analysed, five were upregulated both in plasma and tissue samples. All the five miRNAs were validated on the plasma of 25 patients with CRC and 20 healthy controls. Both miR-17-3p and miR-92 were significantly elevated in the patients with CRC (p<0.0005). The plasma levels of these markers were significantly reduced after surgery in 10 patients with CRC (p<0.05). Further validation with an independent set of plasma samples (n=180) indicated that miR-92 differentiates CRC from gastric cancer, IBD and normal subjects. This marker yielded a receiver operating characteristic curve area of 88.5%. At a cut-off of 240 (relative expression in comparison to RNU6B snRNA), the sensitivity was 89% and the specificity was 70% in discriminating CRC from control subjects. Conclusion: MiR-92 is significantly elevated in plasma of patients with CRC and can be a potential non-invasive molecular marker for CRC screening.published_or_final_versio

Adiponectin is protective against oxidative stress-induced cytotoxicity in amyloid-beta neurotoxicity

Oral PresentationBeta-amyloid (Aβ) neurotoxicity is important in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathogenesis. Aβ neurotoxicity causes oxidative stress, inflammation, and mitochondrial damage resulting in neuronal degeneration and death. Oxidative stress, inflammation, and mitochondrial failure are also pathophysiological mechanisms of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) which is characterised by insulin resistance. Interestingly, T2DM increases risk to develop AD which is associated with reduced neuronal insulin sensitivity (central insulin resistance). We studied the potential protective effect of adipon…published_or_final_versio

Cognitive impairment in adiponectin-knockout mice

Oral Presentationpublished_or_final_versio

VIETNAMESE STUDENT RESEARCHERS’ EXPECTATIONS OF THEIR SUPERVISOR AND SUPERVISION PROCESS

In Vietnam, scientific research is no longer just the work of scientists, graduate students, scholars, or lecturers; tertiary students are also encouraged to conduct scientific research. Therefore, the scientific research work of students receives more attention from educators. The research on carrying out scientific research of students is also therefore increasing. However, researchers do not seem to have paid enough attention to the role of supervisors during the supervision process. The evidence is that there are few studies on supervisors in Vietnam. Therefore, this study was conducted to learn about the role of supervisors from the student's perspective and expectations. Specifically, this study was conducted quantitatively with the use of a questionnaire consisting of 49 questions with a 5-point Likert scale. A total of 100 English-major students at a university in Southwest Vietnam participated in this study by answering the questionnaire. The results from the questionnaire show that students had high expectations from their supervisors. Specifically, students expect their supervisor to be someone who respects their opinions, has good scientific research knowledge, can give constructive comments, and is always willing to help them when needed. Based on research findings, supervisors are encouraged to participate in professional development training related to scientific research to improve their research knowledge and skills. Along with that, supervisors need to be aware of their role during the process of guiding students to do scientific research.  Article visualizations