Immune Efficacy of a Genetically Engineered Vaccine against Lymphocystis Disease Virus: Analysis of Different Immunization Strategies

Here, we report the construction of a vaccine against lymphocystis disease virus (LCDV) using nucleic acid vaccination technology. A fragment of the major capsid protein encoding gene from an LCDV isolated from China (LCDV-cn) was cloned into an eukaryotic expression vector pEGFP-N2, yielding a recombinant plasmid pEGFP-N2-LCDV-cn0.6 kb. This plasmid was immediately expressed after liposomal transfer into the Japanese flounder embryo cell line. The recombinant plasmid was inoculated into Japanese flounder via two routes (intramuscular injection and hypodermic injection) at three doses (0.1, 5, and 15 μg), and then T-lymphopoiesis in different tissues and antibodies raised against LCDV were evaluated. The results indicated that this recombinant plasmid induced unique humoral or cell-mediated immune responses depending on the inoculation route and conferred immune protection. Furthermore, the humoral immune responses and protective effects were significantly increased at higher vaccine doses via the two injection routes. Plasmid pEGFP-N2-LCDV0.6 kb is therefore a promising vaccine candidate against LCDV in Japanese flounder

Characteristics, causes, and prevention measures of coal mine water hazard accidents in China

As one of the top “five major hazards” in coal mines, water hazards have become the second leading cause of danger for coal mine safety and worker lives, next only to gas accidents. Between 2000 and 2022, a total of 1206 water hazard accidents occurred in coal mines in China, resulting in 5018 deaths, among which 103 larger-scale events resulted in 2039 deaths. In order to identify accident patterns, summarize lessons learned, and promote prevention of water hazard accidents, various aspects were analyzed statistically, including geographical regions, years, seasons, hydrogeological types, water sources, and ownership of coal mines. Analyses revealed that the complexity of hydrogeological conditions highly correlated with the frequency of water-related accidents. Southern China recorded the highest number of incidents and casualties, and the peak incidence periods throughout the year mainly concentrated in March to May and July to August. Goaf water was identified as the primary source of water filling, which presented strong concealment and harm, mainly occurring in township-owned coal mines with weaker technical exploration and management capabilities. As for the causes of accidents, complex mining environments and insufficient attention subjectively, i.e., improper management and illegal mining, were the main reasons for accidents. Hidden water-bearing structures such as point-like collapse columns and linear fault structures, as well as goaf water that were not explored and placed in accordance with regulations, were identified as the main technical causes of accidents. By analyzing bibliometrics, it was found that current research themes focusing on coal mine water disasters align well with the principles of “predicting and forecasting, exploring if in doubt, exploring before mining, treating before mining”. To address the problems of “unclear risk assessment, inaccurate risk identification, and incapability to cope with accidents” in coal mine water disasters, corresponding countermeasures were proposed in three aspects: surveying filling factors and hidden geological factors causing disasters, analyzing three-dimensional hydrogeological conditions of filling water, and implementing an accurate classification source prevention. In response to the trend of informationization and intelligent development of water disaster prevention and control, technical measures such as transparent mines, water disaster monitoring and early warning, and emergency rescue were proposed

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Inflammatory cytokines in highly myopic eyes.

Currently, myopic retinopathy is the most common irreversible blinding disease but its pathophysiology is not completely clear. A cross-sectional, observational study was conducted in a single center to analyze aqueous samples from highly myopic eyes (axial length >25 mm, n = 92) and ametropic or mild myopic eyes (n = 88) for inflammatory cytokines. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), Interleukin 6 (IL-6), and matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. IL-6 and MMP-2 were significantly higher in the highly myopic eyes than in the non-high myopic eyes (IL-6: 11.90 vs. 4.38 pg/mL, p < 0.0001; MMP-2: 13.10 vs. 8.82 ng/mL, p = 0.0003) while adjusting for age, gender, and intraocular pressure. There was a significant positive association between levels of IL-6 and MMP-2 in aqueous humor and the axial lengths of the eye globes (IL-6, β = 0.065, p < 0.0001, n = 134; MMP-2, β = 0.097, p < 0.0001, n = 131). Conversely, VEGF in aqueous humor was significantly lower in the highly myopic eyes than in the non-high myopic eyes (45.56 vs. 96.90 pg/mL, p < 0.0001, n = 153) while age, gender, and intraocular pressure were adjusted. The results suggest that low-grade intraocular inflammation may play an important role in the development and progression of high myopia and myopic retinopathy

Semi-Supervised Community Detection via Constraint Matrix Construction and Active Node Selection

Identification of community structures is essential for characterizing and analyzing complex networks. Having focusing primarily on network topological structures, most existing methods for community detection ignore two types of non-topological relationships among nodes, i.e., pairwise “must-link” constraints among pairs of nodes and labels of nodes, such as functions they may have. Here, we present a novel semi-supervised and active learning method for community detection to integrate these two types of information of a network so as to increase the accuracy of community identification. Our new method will honor the “must-link” relationship without introducing new parameters and is efficient with a guaranteed convergence. An essential component of the method is a linear representation that is particularly suited to an active learning to help select the most critical nodes that impact community discovery. We present results from extensive experiments on synthetic and real networks to show the superior performance of the new methods over the existing approaches

Inflammatory cytokines in highly myopic eyes.

Currently, myopic retinopathy is the most common irreversible blinding disease but its pathophysiology is not completely clear. A cross-sectional, observational study was conducted in a single center to analyze aqueous samples from highly myopic eyes (axial length >25 mm, n = 92) and ametropic or mild myopic eyes (n = 88) for inflammatory cytokines. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), Interleukin 6 (IL-6), and matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. IL-6 and MMP-2 were significantly higher in the highly myopic eyes than in the non-high myopic eyes (IL-6: 11.90 vs. 4.38 pg/mL, p < 0.0001; MMP-2: 13.10 vs. 8.82 ng/mL, p = 0.0003) while adjusting for age, gender, and intraocular pressure. There was a significant positive association between levels of IL-6 and MMP-2 in aqueous humor and the axial lengths of the eye globes (IL-6, β = 0.065, p < 0.0001, n = 134; MMP-2, β = 0.097, p < 0.0001, n = 131). Conversely, VEGF in aqueous humor was significantly lower in the highly myopic eyes than in the non-high myopic eyes (45.56 vs. 96.90 pg/mL, p < 0.0001, n = 153) while age, gender, and intraocular pressure were adjusted. The results suggest that low-grade intraocular inflammation may play an important role in the development and progression of high myopia and myopic retinopathy

Influence of Rectifier Nozzles on the Flow Distribution Characteristics of Parallel Pipes

The inhomogeneous distribution of parallel pipe flow leads to difficulty in the efficient and reliable operation of fluid power equipment. In view of this, a new type of rectifier nozzle has been proposed in parallel pipelines. Numerical simulation and experimental studies were used to reveal the influence of the rectification nozzle on the flow distribution characteristics. The hydraulic characteristics of the parallel pipelines with and without rectifier nozzles were compared and analyzed. The effects of the temperature and inlet flow on the flow uniformity were studied. The results showed that the initial temperature had little effect on the flow distribution of parallel pipelines, and the flow rates of the branches were not much different. The inlet flow had great influence on the distribution characteristics of the parallel pipelines, but the rectifier nozzles changed the local resistance structure and pressure distribution at the shunt, thereby improving the non-uniformity of the flow distribution of the parallel pipelines, and the maximum difference between the two pipes was optimized from 28.89 t/h (20.3%) to 2.2 t/h (1.5%). The rectifying nozzle could distort the flow field of each branch during the split, making the distribution of flow rate and flow state more uniform and stable. At high inlet fluid temperatures, cavitation could occur under the pressure drop of the nozzle, and partial cavitation had little effect on the flow distribution

Efficient oxidation of bisphenol A with oxysulfur radicals generated by iron-catalyzed autoxidation of sulfite at circumneutral pH under UV irradiation.

International audienceThere is actually a need for efficient methods to clean waters and wastewaters from pollutants such as the bisphenol A endocrine disrupter. Advanced oxidation processes currently use persulfate or peroxymonosulfate to generate sulfate radicals. There are, however, few reports on the use of sulfite to generate sulfate radicals, instead of persulfate or peroxymonosulfate, except for dyes. Here we studied the degradation of the bisphenol A using iron(III) as catalyst and sulfite as precursor of oxysulfur radicals, at initial pH of 6, under UV irradiation at 395 nm. The occurrence of radicals was checked by quenching with tert-butyl alcohol and ethanol. Bisphenol A degradation products were analyzed by liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC–MS). Results reveal that iron(III) or iron(II) have a similar oxidation efficiency. Quenching experiments show that the oxidation rate of bisphenol A is 47.7 % for SO4·−, 37.3 % for SO5·− and 15 % for HO·. Bisphenol A degradation products include catechol and quinone derivatives. Overall, our findings show that the photo-iron(III)–sulfite system is efficient for the oxidation of bisphenol A at circumneutral pH