catena-Poly[[[triaqua­(4,5-diaza­fluorene-9-one)cadmium]-μ-benzene-1,3-dicarboxyl­ato] dihydrate]

In the title compound, {[Cd(C8H4O4)(C11H6N2O)(H2O)3]·2H2O}n, the CdII atom is seven-coordinated by two N atoms from the phenanthroline-derived 4,5-diaza­fluorene-9-one ligand, two O atoms from one bidentate benzene-1,3-dicarboxyl­ate ligand and three O atoms from the three water mol­ecules in a distorted penta­gonal-bipyramidal arrangement. Moreover, there are two dissociative water mol­ecules in each unit. Neighbouring units inter­act through π–π inter­actions [centroid–centroid distances = 3.325 (3) and 3.358 (4) Å] and O—H⋯O hydrogen-bonding, resulting in a two-dimensional network extending parallel to (001)

IGB: Addressing The Gaps In Labeling, Features, Heterogeneity, and Size of Public Graph Datasets for Deep Learning Research

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high potential for a variety of real-world, challenging applications, but one of the major obstacles in GNN research is the lack of large-scale flexible datasets. Most existing public datasets for GNNs are relatively small, which limits the ability of GNNs to generalize to unseen data. The few existing large-scale graph datasets provide very limited labeled data. This makes it difficult to determine if the GNN model's low accuracy for unseen data is inherently due to insufficient training data or if the model failed to generalize. Additionally, datasets used to train GNNs need to offer flexibility to enable a thorough study of the impact of various factors while training GNN models. In this work, we introduce the Illinois Graph Benchmark (IGB), a research dataset tool that the developers can use to train, scrutinize and systematically evaluate GNN models with high fidelity. IGB includes both homogeneous and heterogeneous academic graphs of enormous sizes, with more than 40% of their nodes labeled. Compared to the largest graph datasets publicly available, the IGB provides over 162X more labeled data for deep learning practitioners and developers to create and evaluate models with higher accuracy. The IGB dataset is a collection of academic graphs designed to be flexible, enabling the study of various GNN architectures, embedding generation techniques, and analyzing system performance issues for node classification tasks. IGB is open-sourced, supports DGL and PyG frameworks, and comes with releases of the raw text that we believe foster emerging language models and GNN research projects. An early public version of IGB is available at https://github.com/IllinoisGraphBenchmark/IGB-Datasets.Comment: Accepted in KDD'23 conference. This is final preprint versio

The Warming Acupuncture for Treatment of Sciatica in 30 Cases

ObjectiveTo observe the relation between the pain threshold and the therapeutic effects of acupuncture for sciatica.Methods90 sciatica patients were equally divided at random into the following 3 groups: a warming acupuncture group treated with the needles warmed by burning moxa, a western medicine group administered Nimesulide tablets and a point-injection group with Anisodamine injected. The pain threshold was tested before treatment and after the first, second and third treatment courses.ResultsThe warming acupuncture therapy showed better therapeutic effects than the other two groups with significant differences in the change of pain threshold and the improvement of clinical symptoms and signs (P < 0.01).ConclusionAcupuncture can relieve the symptoms of sciatica with the increase of pain threshold

Invasive reperfusion after 12 hours of the symptom onset remains beneficial in patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction: Evidence from a meta-analysis of published data

Background: Early myocardial reperfusion therapy (&lt; 12 h) in patients with acute myocardial infarc­tion (AMI) can significantly improve their prognosis. However, the effect of late reperfusion (&gt; 12 h) remains controversial. In this study, the effects of late reperfusion versus standard drug therapy on the outcomes of patients with AMI were evaluated by systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods: PubMed, Embase, Medline, Cochrane, Wanfang, and CNKI databases were searched for eligible studies for the present study. Meta-analysis was performed using RevMan 5.3.3 software. Rela­tive risk (RR) and the 95% confidence interval (CI) were used to compare the outcomes between the two groups. The main outcome measures were major adverse cardiac events (MACEs), all-cause mortality, recurrent myocardial infarction (MI), and heart failure. Results: Eighteen studies were identified including 14,677 patients, of whom 5157 received late reperfusion with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and 9520 received medication therapy (MT). Compared to MT, late PCI was associated with decreased all-cause mortality (RR 0.60, 95% CI 0.44–0.83; p = 0.002), MACEs (RR 0.67; 95% CI 0.50–0.89; p &lt; 0.001), and heart failure (RR 0.76; 95% CI 0.60–0.97; p = 0.03), while there was also a trend toward decreased recurrent MI (RR 0.70; 95% CI 0.47–1.05; p = 0.08). However, subgroup analysis according to time to PCI showed that the clinical benefit was only from PCI after 12 h but not from 2 to 60 days of the onset of symptoms. Conclusions: The present meta-analysis suggested that PCI performed &gt; 12 h but not 2–60 days after AMI is associated with significant improvement in clinical outcomes. However, these results need further rigorously designed large sample size clinical trials to be validated

The Y271 and I274 Amino Acids in Reverse Transcriptase of Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 Are Critical to Protein Stability

Reverse transcriptase (RT) of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-1 plays a key role in initiating viral replication and is an important target for developing anti-HIV drugs. Our previous study showed that two mutations (Y271A and I274A) in the turn RT (Gln269-Arg277) abrogated viral replication, but the replication capacity and RT activity was discordant. In this study, we further investigated why alanine substitutions at these two sites would affect viral replication. We found that both RT activity and RT protein were almost undetectable in viral particles of these two mutants, although the Pr160gag-pol mutants were properly expressed, transported and incorporated. Using protease inhibition assay, we demonstrated a correlation between the degradation of the RT mutants and the activity of viral protease. Our native gel analysis indicated that the mutations at 271 and 274 amino acids might cause conformational changes, leading to the formation of higher order oligomers instead of dimers, resulting in increased protein instability and susceptibility to viral protease. Thus, residues 271 and 274 are critical to RT stability and resistance to viral protease. The conservation of the two amino acid residues among different strains of HIV-1 lent further support to this conclusion. The knowledge gained here may prove useful in drug design

4-Phenylbutyric Acid Attenuates Pancreatic Beta-Cell Injury in Rats with Experimental Severe Acute Pancreatitis

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is a particular process with an imbalance of homeostasis, which plays an important role in pancreatitis, but little is known about how ER stress is implicated in severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) induced pancreatic beta-cell injury. To investigate the effect of 4-phenylbutyric acid (4-PBA) on the beta-cell injury following SAP and the underlying mechanism, twenty-four Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into sham-operation (SO) group, SAP model group, and 4-PBA treatment group. SAP model was induced by infusion of 5% sodium taurocholate into the biliopancreatic duct. 4-PBA or normal saline was injected intraperitoneally for 3 days in respective group before successful modeling. Results showed that 4-PBA attenuated the following: (1) pancreas and islet pathological injuries, (2) serum TNF-α and IL-1β, (3) serum insulin and glucose, (4) beta-cell ultrastructural changes, (5) ER stress markers (BiP, ORP150, and CHOP), Caspase-3, and insulin expression in islet. These results suggested that 4-PBA mitigates pancreatic beta-cell injury and endocrine disorder in SAP, presumably because of its role in inhibiting excessive endoplasmic reticulum stress. This may serve as a new therapeutic target for reducing pancreatic beta-cell injury and endocrine disorder in SAP upon 4-PBA treatment

A novel strategy for rapid identification of the fruits of Illicium verum and Illicium anisatum using electronic nose and tongue technology

Purpose: To develop an effective and rapid strategy for the identification of fruits of I. verum and I. anisatum based on their odor and taste.Methods: Electronic nose (E-nose) and electronic tongue (E-tongue) technology was used to identify the fruits of I. verum (FIV) and I. anisatum (FIA). Samples of FIA, FIV, and FIA : FIV mixtures in different proportions (1 : 3, 1 : 1, and 3 : 1) were prepared to evaluate the identification abilities of E-nose and Etongue methods. Samples were powdered and sifted through a standard sieve (aperture size 355 ± 13 μm) for E-nose analysis. Each sample was refluxed with water for 1 h before E-tongue analysis. The acquired data were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) and discriminant factor analysis (DFA).Results: Based on the signals acquired by E-nose and E-tongue analyses, a total of 90 data points each were used for PCA. The three principal component values for E-nose analysis were PC1 = 93.89 %, PC2 = 6.08 %, and PC3 = 0.03 %, and those for E-tongue analysis were PC1 = 98.72 %, PC2 = 0.68 %, and PC3 = 0.57 %. The sample data were significantly divided into two groups representing FIV and FIA. Furthermore, E-nose and E-tongue assessments combined with PCA and DFA analyses effectively identified FIV, FIA and their mixtures.Conclusion: The use of E-nose and E-tongue technology is an effective and rapid strategy to identify the fruits of I. verum and I. anisatum and their mixtures. This strategy may also offer an effective method for detection of adulterants.Keywords: Illicium verum, Illicium anisatum, Discrimination, Electronic nose, Electronic tongue, Safety, Principal component analysis, Discriminant factor analysi

Construction of an infectious cloning system of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus and identification of glycoprotein 5 as a potential determinant of virulence and pathogenicity

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) infection of pigs causes a variety of clinical manifestations, depending on the pathogenicity and virulence of the specific strain. Identification and characterization of potential determinant(s) for the pathogenicity and virulence of these strains would be an essential step to precisely design and develop effective anti-PRRSV intervention. In this study, we report the construction of an infectious clone system based on PRRSV vaccine strain SP by homologous recombination technique, and the rescue of a chimeric rSP-HUB2 strain by replacing the GP5 and M protein-coding region from SP strain with the corresponding region from a highly pathogenic strain PRRSV-HUB2. The two recombinant viruses were shown to be genetically stable and share similar growth kinetics, with rSP-HUB2 exhibiting apparent growth and fitness advantages. Compared to in cells infected with PRRSV-rSP, infection of cells with rSP-HUB2 showed significantly more inhibition of the induction of type I interferon (IFN-β) and interferon stimulator gene 56 (ISG56), and significantly more promotion of the induction of proinflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-8, ISG15 and ISG20. Further overexpression, deletion and mutagenesis studies demonstrated that amino acid residue F16 in the N-terminal region of the GP5 protein from HUB2 was a determinant for the phenotypic difference between the two recombinant viruses. This study provides evidence that GP5 may function as a potential determinant for the pathogenicity and virulence of highly pathogenic PRRSV