Measurement of Bell-type inequalities and quantum entanglement from Λ\Lambda-hyperon spin correlations at high energy colliders

Spin correlations of $\Lambda$-hyperons embedded in the QCD strings formed in high-energy collider experiments provide unique insight into their locality and entanglement features. We show from general considerations that while the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality is less stringent for such states, they provide a benchmark for quantum-to-classical transitions induced by varying i) the associated hadron multiplicity, ii) the spin of nucleons, iii) the separation in rapidity between pairs, and iv) the kinematic regimes accessed. These studies also enable the extraction of quantitative measures of quantum entanglement. We first explore such questions within a simple model of a QCD string comprised of singlets of two partial distinguishable fermion flavors and compare analytical results to those obtained on quantum hardware. We further discuss a class of spin Hamiltonians that model the dynamics of $\Lambda$ spin correlations. Prospects for extracting quantum features of QCD strings from hyperon measurements at current and future colliders are outlined.Comment: Revised manuscrip

Serum Metabolomic Profiling of Piglets Infected with Virulent Classical Swine Fever Virus

Citation: Gong, W. J., Jia, J. J., Zhang, B. K., Mi, S. J., Zhang, L., Xie, X. M., . . . Tu, C. C. (2017). Serum Metabolomic Profiling of Piglets Infected with Virulent Classical Swine Fever Virus. Frontiers in Microbiology, 8, 14. doi:10.3389/fmicb.2017.00731Classical swine fever (CSF) is a highly contagious swine infectious disease and causes significant economic losses for the pig industry worldwide. The objective of this study was to determine whether small molecule metabolites contribute to the pathogenesis of CSF. Birefly, serum metabolomics of CSFV Shimen strain-infected piglets were analyzed by ultraperformance liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UPLC/ESI-Q-TOF/MS) in combination with multivariate statistical analysis. In CSFV-infected piglets at days 3 and 7 post-infection changes were found in metabolites associated with several key metabolic pathways, including tryptophan catabolism and the kynurenine pathway, phenylalanine metabolism, fatty acid and lipid metabolism, the tricarboxylic acid and urea cycles, branched-chain amino acid metabolism, and nucleotide metabolism. Several pathways involved in energy metabolism including fatty acid biosynthesis and beta-oxidation, branched-chain amino acid metabolism, and the tricarboxylic acid cycle were significantly inhibited. Changes were also observed in several metabolites exclusively associated with gut microbiota. The metabolomic profiles indicate that CSFV-host gut microbiome interactions play a role in the development of CSF

Controllable Motion Synthesis and Reconstruction with Autoregressive Diffusion Models

Data-driven and controllable human motion synthesis and prediction are active research areas with various applications in interactive media and social robotics. Challenges remain in these fields for generating diverse motions given past observations and dealing with imperfect poses. This paper introduces MoDiff, an autoregressive probabilistic diffusion model over motion sequences conditioned on control contexts of other modalities. Our model integrates a cross-modal Transformer encoder and a Transformer-based decoder, which are found effective in capturing temporal correlations in motion and control modalities. We also introduce a new data dropout method based on the diffusion forward process to provide richer data representations and robust generation. We demonstrate the superior performance of MoDiff in controllable motion synthesis for locomotion with respect to two baselines and show the benefits of diffusion data dropout for robust synthesis and reconstruction of high-fidelity motion close to recorded data

A neutralizing monoclonal antibody-based competitive ELISA for classical swine fever C-strain post–vaccination monitoring

Background: Virus neutralization test (VNT) is widely used for serological survey of classical swine fever (CSF) and efficacy evaluation of CSF vaccines. However, VNT is a time consuming procedure that requires cell culture and live virus manipulation. C-strain CSF vaccine is the most frequently used vaccine for CSF control and prevention. In this study, we presented a neutralizing monoclonal antibody (mAb) based competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (cELISA) with the emphasis on the replacement of VNT for C-strain post–vaccination monitoring. Results: One monoclonal antibody (6B211) which has potent neutralizing activity against C-strain was generated. A novel cELISA was established and optimized based on the strategy that 6B211 can compete with C-strain induced neutralizing antibodies in pig serum to bind capture antigen C-strain E2. By testing C-strain VNT negative pig sera (n = 445) and C-strain VNT positive pig sera (n = 70), the 6B211 based cELISA showed 100% sensitivity (95% confidence interval: 94.87 to 100%) and 100% specificity (95% confidence interval: 100 to 100%). The C-strain antibody can be tested in pigs as early as 7 days post vaccination with the cELISA. By testing pig sera (n = 139) in parallel, the cELISA showed excellent agreement (Kappa = 0.957) with VNT. The inhibition rate of serum samples in the cELISA is highly correlated with their titers in VNT (r2 = 0.903, p < 0.001). In addition, intra- and inter-assays of the cELISA exhibited acceptable repeatability with low coefficient of variations (CVs). Conclusions: This novel cELISA demonstrated excellent agreement and high level correlation with VNT. It is a reliable tool for sero-monitoring of C-strain vaccination campaign because it is a rapid, simple, safe and cost effective assay that can be used to monitor vaccination-induced immune response at the population level.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Impact of calcification on Murray law-based quantitative flow ratio for physiological assessment of intermediate coronary stenoses

Background: To investigate the influence of coronary calcification on the diagnostic performance of Murray law-based quantitative flow ratio (μQFR) in identifying hemodynamically significant coronary lesions referenced to fractional flow reserve (FFR). Methods: A total of 571 intermediate lesions from 534 consecutive patients (66.1 ± 10.0 years, 67.2% males) who underwent coronary angiography and simultaneous FFR measurement were included. Calcific deposits were graded by angiography as none or mild (spots), moderate (involving ≤ 50% of the reference vessel diameter), and severe (&gt; 50%). Performance of μQFR to detect functional ischemia (FFR ≤ 0.80) was evaluated, including diagnostic parameters and areas under the receiver-operating curves (AUCs). Results: The discrimination of ischemia by μQFR was comparable between none/mild and moderate/severe calcification (AUC: 0.91 [95% confidence interval: 0.88–0.93] vs. 0.87 [95% confidence interval: 0.78–0.94]; p = 0.442). No statistically significant difference was observed for μQFR between the two categories in sensitivity (0.70 vs. 0.69, p = 0.861) and specificity (0.94 vs. 0.90, p = 0.192). Moreover, μQFR showed significantly higher AUCs than quantitative coronary angiographic diameter stenosis in both vessels with none/mild (0.91 vs. 0.78, p &lt; 0.001) and moderate/severe calcification (0.87 vs. 0.69, p &lt; 0.001). By multivariable analysis, there was no association between calcification and μQFR-FFR discordance (adjusted odds ratio: 1.529, 95% confidence interval: 0.788–2.968, p = 0.210) after adjustment for other confounding factors. Conclusions: μQFR demonstrated robust and superior diagnostic performance for lesion-specific ischemia compared with angiography alone regardless of coronary calcification

The diagnostic significance of the ZNF gene family in pancreatic cancer: a bioinformatics and experimental study

Background: Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PAAD) is among the most devastating of all cancers with a poor survival rate. Therefore, we established a zinc finger (ZNF) protein-based prognostic prediction model for PAAD patients.Methods: The RNA–seq data for PAAD were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases. Differentially expressed ZNF protein genes (DE-ZNFs) in PAAD and normal control tissues were screened using the “lemma” package in R. An optimal risk model and an independent prognostic value were established by univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses. Survival analyses were performed to assess the prognostic ability of the model.Results: We constructed a ZNF family genes-related risk score model that is based on the 10 DE-ZNFs (ZNF185, PRKCI, RTP4, SERTAD2, DEF8, ZMAT1, SP110, U2AF1L4, CXXC1, and RMND5B). The risk score was found to be a significant independent prognostic factor for PAAD patients. Seven significantly differentially expressed immune cells were identified between the high- and low-risk patients. Then, based on the prognostic genes, we constructed a ceRNA regulatory network that includes 5 prognostic genes, 7 miRNAs and 35 lncRNAs. Expression analysis showed ZNF185, PRKCI and RTP4 were significantly upregulated, while ZMAT1 and CXXC1 were significantly downregulated in the PAAD samples in all TCGA - PAAD, GSE28735 and GSE15471 datasets. Moreover, the upregulation of RTP4, SERTAD2, and SP110 were verified by the cell experiments.Conclusion: We established and validated a novel, Zinc finger protein family - related prognostic risk model for patients with PAAD, that has the potential to inform patient management

Pigs immunized with a novel E2 subunit vaccine are protected from subgenotype heterologous classical swine fever virus challenge

Citation: Madera, R., Gong, W. J., Wang, L. H., Burakova, Y., Lleellish, K., Galliher-Beckley, A., . . . Shi, J. S. (2016). Pigs immunized with a novel E2 subunit vaccine are protected from subgenotype heterologous classical swine fever virus challenge. Bmc Veterinary Research, 12, 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-016-0823-4Background: Classical swine fever (CSF) or hog cholera is a highly contagious swine viral disease. CSF endemic countries have to use routine vaccination with modified live virus (MLV) vaccines to prevent and control CSF. However, it is impossible to serologically differentiate MLV vaccinated pigs from those infected with CSF virus (CSFV). The aim of this study is to develop a one-dose E2-subunit vaccine that can provide protection against CSFV challenge. We hypothesize that a vaccine consisting of a suitable adjuvant and recombinant E2 with natural conformation may induce a similar level of protection as the MLV vaccine. Results: Our experimental vaccine KNB-E2 was formulated with the recombinant E2 protein (Genotype 1.1) expressed by insect cells and an oil-in-water emulsion based adjuvant. 10 pigs (3 weeks old, 5 pigs/group) were immunized intramuscularly with one dose or two doses (3 weeks apart) KNB-E2, and 10 more control pigs were administered normal saline solution only. Two weeks after the second vaccination, all KNB-E2 vaccinated pigs and 5 control pigs were challenged with 5 x 10(5) TCID50 CSFV Honduras/1997 (Genotype 1.3, 1 ml intramuscular, 1 ml intranasal). It was found that while control pigs infected with CSFV stopped growing and developed high fever (>40 degrees C), high level CSFV load in blood and nasal fluid, and severe leukopenia 3-14 days post challenge, all KNB-E2 vaccinated pigs continued to grow as control pigs without CSFV exposure, did not show any fever, had low or undetectable level of CSFV in blood and nasal fluid. At the time of CSFV challenge, only pigs immunized with KNB-E2 developed high levels of E2-specific antibodies and anti-CSFV neutralizing antibodies. Conclusions: Our studies provide direct evidence that pigs immunized with one dose KNB-E2 can be protected clinically from CSFV challenge. This protection is likely mediated by high levels of E2-specific and anti-CSFV neutralizing antibodies

Characterization of monoclonal antibodies that specifically differentiate field isolates from vaccine strains of classical swine fever virus

Classical swine fever virus (CSFV) is a major animal pathogen threatening the global pork industry. To date, numerous anti-CSFV monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and their recognizing epitopes have been reported. However, few mAbs were systematically characterized for the capacity to differentiate field CSFV isolates from CSF vaccine strains, and the molecular basis associated with antigenic differences between vaccines and field isolates is still largely unknown. In the present study, recombinant CSFV structural glycoproteins E2 of both virulent and vaccine strains and Erns of vaccine strain were expressed using eukaryotic cells and murine mAbs generated against E2 and Erns. After serial screening and cloning of the hybridomas, the viral spectra of mAbs were respectively determined by indirect fluorescent antibody assay (IFA) using 108 CSFVs, followed by Western blot analysis using expressed glycoproteins of all CSFV sub-genotypes including vaccine strains. The antigenic structures recognized by these mAbs were characterized by epitope mapping using truncated, chimeric, and site-directed mutated E2 and Erns proteins. We have identified two vaccine-specific, one field isolate-specific, and two universal CSFV-specific mAbs and five novel conformational epitopes with critical amino acid (aa) motifs that are associated with these five mAbs: 213EPD215, 271RXGP274, and 37LXLNDG42 on E2 and 38CKGVP42, W81, and D100/V107 on Erns. Particularly, E213 of E2 is field isolate-specific, while N40 of E2 and D100/V107 of Erns are vaccine strain-specific. Results from our study further indicate that N40D of E2 mutation in field strains was likely produced under positive selection associated with long-term mass vaccination, leading to CSFV evasion of host immune response. Taking together, this study provides new insights into the antigenic structure of CSFV E2 and Erns and the differentiating mAbs will contribute to the development of a diagnostic strategy to differentiate C-strain vaccination from natural infection (DIVA) of CSFV in terms of elimination of CSF in China

Shielding Protection by Mesoporous Catalysts for Improving Plasma-Catalytic Ambient Ammonia Synthesis

[Image: see text] Plasma catalysis is a promising technology for decentralized small-scale ammonia (NH(3)) synthesis under mild conditions using renewable energy, and it shows great potential as an alternative to the conventional Haber–Bosch process. To date, this emerging process still suffers from a low NH(3) yield due to a lack of knowledge in the design of highly efficient catalysts and the in situ plasma-induced reverse reaction (i.e., NH(3) decomposition). Here, we demonstrate that a bespoke design of supported Ni catalysts using mesoporous MCM-41 could enable efficient plasma-catalytic NH(3) production at 35 °C and 1 bar with >5% NH(3) yield at 60 kJ/L. Specifically, the Ni active sites were deliberately deposited on the external surface of MCM-41 to enhance plasma–catalyst interactions and thus NH(3) production. The desorbed NH(3) could then diffuse into the ordered mesopores of MCM-41 to be shielded from decomposition due to the absence of plasma discharge in the mesopores of MCM-41, that is, “shielding protection”, thus driving the reaction forward effectively. This promising strategy sheds light on the importance of a rational design of catalysts specifically for improving plasma-catalytic processes