Modeling the Geographic Spread of Rabies in China

Abstract In order to investigate how the movement of dogs affects the geographically inter-provincial spread of rabies in Mainland China, we propose a multi-patch model to describe the transmission dynamics of rabies between dogs and humans, in which each province is regarded as a patch. In each patch the submodel consists of susceptible, exposed, infectious, and vaccinated subpopulations of both dogs and humans and describes the spread of rabies among dogs and from infectious dogs to humans. The existence of the disease-free equilibrium is discussed, the basic reproduction number is calculated, and the effect of moving rates of dogs between patches on the basic reproduction number is studied. To investigate the rabies virus clades lineages, the two-patch submodel is used to simulate the human rabies data from Guizhou and Guangxi, Hebei and Fujian, and Sichuan and Shaanxi, respectively. It is found that the basic reproduction number of the two-patch model could be larger than one even if the isolated basic reproduction number of each patch is less than one. This indicates that the immigration of dogs may make the disease endemic even if the disease dies out in each isolated patch when there is no immigration. In order to reduce and prevent geographical spread of rabies in China, our results suggest that the management of dog markets and trades needs to be regulated, and transportation of dogs has to be better monitored and under constant surveillance. Author Summary In 1999, human rabies cases were reported in about 120 counties in Mainland China, mainly in the southern provinces. Now outbreaks of human rabies have been reported in about 1000 counties and the disease has spread geographically from the south to the north. Phylogeographic analyses of rabies virus strains indicate that prevalent strains in northern provinces are indeed related to the remote southern provinces. It is believed that the geographical spread of rabies virus is caused by the transportation of dogs. In this paper, a multi-patch model is proposed to describe the spatial transmission dynamics of rabies in China and to investigate how the immigration of dogs affects the geographical spread of rabies. The expression and sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number indicates that the movement of dogs plays an essential role in the spatial transmission dynamics of rabies. Numerical simulations on the effect of the immigration rate in three pairs of provinces, Guizhou and Guangxi, Hebei and Fujian, Sichuan and Shaanxi, are also performed. It is shown that the immigration of dogs is the main factor for the long-distance inter-provincial spread of rabies and it is necessary to manage such inter-provincial transportation of dogs

SciRE-Solver: Efficient Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models by Score-integrand Solver with Recursive Derivative Estimation

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a powerful class of generative models known for their ability to generate high-fidelity image samples. A major challenge in the implementation of DPMs is the slow sampling process. In this work, we bring a high-efficiency sampler for DPMs. Specifically, we propose a score-based exact solution paradigm for the diffusion ODEs corresponding to the sampling process of DPMs, which introduces a new perspective on developing numerical algorithms for solving diffusion ODEs. To achieve an efficient sampler, we propose a recursive derivative estimation (RDE) method to reduce the estimation error. With our proposed solution paradigm and RDE method, we propose the score-integrand solver with the convergence order guarantee as efficient solver (SciRE-Solver) for solving diffusion ODEs. The SciRE-Solver attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) sampling performance with a limited number of score function evaluations (NFE) on both discrete-time and continuous-time DPMs in comparison to existing training-free sampling algorithms. Such as, we achieve $3.48$ FID with $12$ NFE and $2.42$ FID with $20$ NFE for continuous-time DPMs on CIFAR10, respectively. Different from other samplers, SciRE-Solver has the promising potential to surpass the FIDs achieved in the original papers of some pre-trained models with a small NFEs. For example, we reach SOTA value of $2.40$ FID with $100$ NFE for continuous-time DPM and of $3.15$ FID with $84$ NFE for discrete-time DPM on CIFAR-10, as well as of $2.17$ ($2.02$) FID with $18$ ($50$) NFE for discrete-time DPM on CelebA 64$\times$64

Ammonia and salinity tolerance of Penaeus monodon across eight breeding families

© 2016 Chen et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Ammonia nitrogen and salinity tolerance of Penaeus monodon from eight selected breeding families were evaluated at the concentration of 67.65 mg L−1 ammonia-N and reducing salinity from 15 to 0 ‰. The final survival of family A (88.67 ± 9.81 %) was highest, and the final survival of family B was lowest (24.33 ± 14.01 %) after the ammonia tolerance test. Upon completing the sudden drop salinity test from 15 to 0 ‰, the highest survival was observed in family B (98.00 ± 1.73 %), and the lowest survival was found in family H (18.00 ± 1.73 %). Family A showed the strongest ability to tolerate ammonia stress, and family B showed the strongest tolerance to low salinity. This study suggests that the tolerance of salinity and ammonia nitrogen varied between breeding families. Results from the present study provide useful information towards selective breeding in shrimp in aquaculture for environmental tolerance

Association analysis of alpha-amylase (AMY) and cathepsin L (CTSL) SNPs with growth traits in giant tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon

Alpha-amylase (AMY) and cathepsin-L (CTSL) were selected as candidate genes for SNP discovery for growth traits of P. monodon. Six SNPs were found in AMY and three in CTSL in P. monodon. Association analyses for the candidate SNPs with important economic traits were performed in populations. That allele A at CTLS-213 SNP, AA, and GA, tended to be associated with increased body weight. Shrimps with genotype GG had significantly smaller CL, CW, and CH values than those with GT and TT genotypes (P < 0.05). While CTLS-820 SNP was found to be significantly associated with CH and FSL (P <0.05). These SNPs will be valid for marker-assisted selection breeding programs in P. monodon

Supplementary data for article: Chen, S.; Ruan, Y.; Brown, J. D.; Gallucci, J.; Maslak, V.; Hadad, C. M.; Bađić, J. D. Assembly of Amphiphilic Baskets into Stimuli-Responsive Vesicles. Developing a Strategy for the Detection of Organophosphorus Chemical Nerve Agents. Journal of the American Chemical Society 2013, 135 (40), 14964–14967. https://doi.org/10.1021/ja408585j

Supporting information for: [https://doi.org/10.1021/ja408585j]Related to published version: [http://cherry.chem.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/1427

Dynamic variations in the peripheral blood lymphocyte subgroups of patients with 2009 pandemic H1N1 swine-origin influenza A virus infection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Novel Influenza A (H1N1) is an acute respiratory infectious disease. Animal experiments indicated that when H1N1 virus infected early hosts, it showed strong CD4⁺, CD8⁺, and CD4⁺CD25⁺T cell reactions. The aim of this study was to investigate the dynamic fluctuations of the peripheral blood lymphocyte subgroups in patients infected with H1N1 swine-origin influenza A virus (S-OIV).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The frequency of T cells, B cells, natural killer (NK) cells, and regulatory T cells (Treg) in 36 severe H1N1 and 40 moderate H1N1 patients were detected at different periods by flow cytometry. In parallel, serum cytokines were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and C-reactive protein (CRP) was analyzed through an image-type automatic biochemical analyzer. In addition, 20 healthy volunteers, who were not infected with 2009 H1N1 virus, were selected as controls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The frequency of NK cells were decreased in all cases and CD19⁺B cells were increased in severe cases than those of the controls. At 1-2d from onset, the frequency of CD4⁺and CD4⁺CD25⁺T cells in moderate cases was higher than in the severe cases. Serum cytokines, specifically IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, and IFN-γ exhibited no significant change both in the moderate and the severe cases during the whole monitoring process. In the early stage of the disease, serum CRP levels in the severe and moderate groups were significantly higher than that in the control group.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Patients showed different lymphocyte subgroup distributions between mild and severe cases, which might affect the incidence and development of 2009 H1N1.</p

Supplementary material for the article: Mitrović, A.; Stevanović, J.; Milčić, M.; Žekić, A.; Stanković, D.; Chen, S.; Badjić, J. D.; Milić, D.; Maslak, V. Fulleropyrrolidine Molecular Dumbbells Act as Multi-Electron-Acceptor Triads. Spectroscopic, Electrochemical, Computational and Morphological Characterizations. RSC Advances 2015, 5 (107), 88241–88248. https://doi.org/10.1039/c5ra16309a

Supplementary material for:[https://doi.org/10.1039/c5ra16309a]Related to published version: [http://cherry.chem.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/1984

Paramagnetic behaviour of silver nanoparticles generated by decomposition of silver oxalate

Silver oxalate Ag2C2O4, was already proposed for soldering applications, due to the formation when it is decomposed by a heat treatment, of highly sinterable silver nanoparticles. When slowly decomposed at low temperature (125 °C), the oxalate leads however to silver nanoparticles isolated from each other. As soon as these nanoparticles are formed, the magnetic susceptibility at room temperature increases from -3.14 10-7 emu.Oe-1.g-1 (silver oxalate) up to -1.92 10-7 emu.Oe-1.g-1 (metallic silver). At the end of the oxalate decomposition, the conventional diamagnetic behaviour of bulk silver, is observed from room temperature to 80 K. A diamagnetic-paramagnetic transition is however revealed below 80 K leading at 2 K, to silver nanoparticles with a positive magnetic susceptibility. This original behaviour, compared to the one of bulk silver, can be ascribed to the nanometric size of the metallic particles

Supplementary data for article: Chen, S.; Ruan, Y.; Brown, J. D.; Gallucci, J.; Maslak, V.; Hadad, C. M.; Bađić, J. D. Assembly of Amphiphilic Baskets into Stimuli-Responsive Vesicles. Developing a Strategy for the Detection of Organophosphorus Chemical Nerve Agents. Journal of the American Chemical Society 2013, 135 (40), 14964–14967. https://doi.org/10.1021/ja408585j

Supporting information for: [https://doi.org/10.1021/ja408585j]Related to published version: [http://cherry.chem.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/1427