Human Papillomavirus Infection in Relation to Vaginal Microflora and Immune Factors

Objective: Clarify the vaginal microflora and immune factors in women with human papilloma virus (HPV) infection, and explore its association with HPV infection. Methods: This study collected vaginal secretions and blood from 160 women initially diagnosed as HPV positive in our hospital from June 2020 to December 2020 and 80 healthy women with HPV negative physical examination in the same period. The vaginal microflora of the patients were detected by 16S rDNA sequencing and the expression of immune factors was measured by a high-performance liquid phase chip. Results: The different types of HPV were HPV mix (64,40%), HPV52 (39,24.375%), HPV16 (30,18.750%), HPV58 (18,11.250%), HPV18 (6,3.750%), HPV53 (1,0.625%), HPV55 (1,0.625%), and HPV68 (1,0.625%).α diversity analysis showed that there was no significant difference in vaginal microflora between different HPV types (P=0.733). The genus level abundance of vaginal microflora in each group was mainly Lactobacillus, followed by Gardnerella and Prevotella. LEfSe Analysis showed that the mix group was Gardnerella and the type HPV16 group was Streptococcus. The immune comparison showed that MIP-1β was significantly upregulated in the HPV-positive group, but EGF in the HPV-negative group. Conclusion: This study revealed that HPV infection can change the proportion of vaginal microbial bacteria and the expression of immune factors, which provides a basis for local vaginal treatment and prevention of HPV infection after HPV infection

A patulous progress: International entrepreneurship effects on Chinese born-global firm performance

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MDPI. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145508Using data from SMEs in Hubei province, the role of entrepreneurship in the sustainable performance of born global firms in China was discussed. The structural equation modeling analysis of 345 questionnaires indicates that both international knowledge and international entrepreneurial capability are significantly related to born global firms’ performance. Dynamic capabilities, which includes three sub-dimensions: adaptation capability, absorption capability and innovation capability, was found to be less important to firm performance. Therefore, it may be argued that born global firms in inland China are still limited by resources, including those generated from the international knowledge needed to adapt to internal and external pressures.This article is supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law with the fund number: 2722020JCT028

学会抄録

BackgroundMany developing countries are experiencing rapid ecological changes such as deforestation and shifting agricultural practices. These environmental changes may have an important consequence on malaria due to their impact on vector survival and reproduction. Despite intensive deforestation and malaria transmission in the China-Myanmar border area, the impact of deforestation on malaria vectors in the border area is unknown.MethodsWe conducted life table studies on Anopheles minimus larvae to determine the pupation rate and development time in microcosms under deforested, banana plantation, and forested environments.ResultsThe pupation rate of An. minimus was 3.8 % in the forested environment. It was significantly increased to 12.5 % in banana plantations and to 52.5 % in the deforested area. Deforestation reduced larval-to-pupal development time by 1.9-3.3 days. Food supplementation to aquatic habitats in forested environments and banana plantations significantly increased larval survival rate to a similar level as in the deforested environment.ConclusionDeforestation enhanced the survival and development of An. minimus larvae, a major malaria vector in the China-Myanmar border area. Experimental determination of the life table parameters on mosquito larvae under a variety of environmental conditions is valuable to model malaria transmission dynamics and impact by climate and environmental changes

An Asymmetric Proximal Decomposition Method for Convex Programming with Linearly Coupling Constraints

The problems studied are the separable variational inequalities with linearly coupling constraints. Some existing decomposition methods are very problem specific, and the computation load is quite costly. Combining the ideas of proximal point algorithm (PPA) and augmented Lagrangian method (ALM), we propose an asymmetric proximal decomposition method (AsPDM) to solve a wide variety separable problems. By adding an auxiliary quadratic term to the general Lagrangian function, our method can take advantage of the separable feature. We also present an inexact version of AsPDM to reduce the computation load of each iteration. In the computation process, the inexact version only uses the function values. Moreover, the inexact criterion and the step size can be implemented in parallel. The convergence of the proposed method is proved, and numerical experiments are employed to show the advantage of AsPDM

Broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity and improved stability of a D-Amino acid enantiomer of DMPC-10A, the designed derivative of dermaseptin truncates

DMPC-10A (ALWKKLLKK-Cha-NH2) is a 10-mer peptide derivative from the N-terminal domain of Dermaseptin-PC which has shown broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity as well as a considerable hemolytic effect. In order to reduce hemolytic activity and improve stability to endogenous enzymes, a D-amino acid enantiomer (DMPC-10B) was designed by substituting all L-Lys and L-Leu with their respective D-form amino acid residues, while the Ala1 and Trp3 remained unchanged. The D-amino acid enantiomer exhibited similar antimicrobial potency to the parent peptide but exerted lower cytotoxicity and hemolytic activity. Meanwhile, DMPC-10B exhibited remarkable resistance to hydrolysis by trypsin and chymotrypsin. In addition to these advantages, DMPC-10B exhibited an outstanding antibacterial effect against Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Klebsiella pneumoniae using the Galleria mellonella larva model and displayed synergistic activities with gentamicin against carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae strains. This indicates that DMPC-10B would be a promising alternative for treating antibiotic-resistant pathogens

Title2Event: Benchmarking Open Event Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese Title Dataset

Event extraction (EE) is crucial to downstream tasks such as new aggregation and event knowledge graph construction. Most existing EE datasets manually define fixed event types and design specific schema for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. Moreover, news titles, an important source of event mentions, have not gained enough attention in current EE research. In this paper, We present Title2Event, a large-scale sentence-level dataset benchmarking Open Event Extraction without restricting event types. Title2Event contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics collected from Chinese web pages. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest manually-annotated Chinese dataset for open event extraction. We further conduct experiments on Title2Event with different models and show that the characteristics of titles make it challenging for event extraction, addressing the significance of advanced study on this problem. The dataset and baseline codes are available at https://open-event-hub.github.io/title2event.Comment: EMNLP 202

Invasiveness of the Yersinia pestis ail protein contributes to host dissemination in pneumonic and oral plague

Yersinia pestis, a Gram-negative bacterium, is the etiologic agent of plague. A hallmark of Y. pestis infection is the organism's ability to rapidly disseminate through an animal host. Y. pestis expresses the outer membrane protein, Ail (Attachment invasion locus), which is associated with host invasion and serum resistance. However, whether Ail plays a role in host dissemination remains unclear. In this study, C57BL/6J mice were challenged with a defined Y. pestis strain, KimD27, or an isogenic ail-deleted mutant derived from KimD27 via metacarpal paw pad inoculation, nasal drops, orogastric infection, or tail vein injection to mimic bubonic, pneumonic, oral, or septicemic plague, respectively. Our results showed that ail-deleted Y. pestis KimD27 lost the ability to invade host cells, leading to failed host dissemination in the pneumonic and oral plague models but not in the bubonic or septicemic plague models, which do not require invasiveness. Therefore, this study demonstrated that whether Ail plays a role in Y. pestis pathogenesis depends on the infection route.Peer reviewe