Anthrax vaccine design: strategies to achieve comprehensive protection against spore, bacillus, and toxin

The successful use of Bacillus anthracis as a lethal biological weapon has prompted renewed research interest in the development of more effective vaccines against anthrax. The disease consists of three critical components: spore, bacillus, and toxin, elimination of any of which confers at least partial protection against anthrax. Current remedies rely on postexposure antibiotics to eliminate bacilli and pre- and postexposure vaccination to target primarily toxins. Vaccines effective against toxin have been licensed for human use, but need improvement. Vaccines against bacilli have recently been developed by us and others. Whether effective vaccines will be developed against spores is still an open question. An ideal vaccine would confer simultaneous protection against spores, bacilli, and toxins. One step towards this goal is our dually active vaccine, designed to destroy both bacilli and toxin. Existing and potential strategies towards potent and effective anthrax vaccines are discussed in this review

Quantum states and intertwining phases in kagome materials

In solid materials, nontrivial topological states, electron correlations, and magnetism are central ingredients for realizing quantum properties, including unconventional superconductivity, charge and spin density waves, and quantum spin liquids. The Kagome lattice, made up of connected triangles and hexagons, can host these three ingredients simultaneously and has proven to be a fertile platform for studying diverse quantum phenomena including those stemming from the interplay of these ingredients. In this review, we introduce the fundamental properties of the Kagome lattice as well as discuss the complex observed phenomena seen in several emergent material systems such as the intertwining of charge order and superconductivity in some Kagome metals, modulation of magnetism and topology in some Kagome magnets, and symmetry breaking with Mott physics in the breathing Kagome insulators. We also highlight many open questions in the field as well as future research directions of Kagome systems

Communicating Environmental CSR towards Consumers

While engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gradually become mainstream in the business context, the investigation of CSR communication and its effectiveness remains limited. This study examines how environmental CSR communication affects consumer perception and behavior through an experiment design. We distinguish three CSR communication factors—message content (climate responsibility vs. sustainable use of natural resources), message style (greenhushing vs. uniform vs. greenwashing) and praise tactics (consumer praise vs. company praise)—and assess their impacts on consumer trust, purchase intention and consumer advocacy, respectively. We also investigate the moderating role of attributed intrinsic and extrinsic corporate motives on engaging in environmental CSR. An online experiment (N = 304) revealed that a uniform message style outperforms the other two styles, whereas greenwashing is found to be least effective. In addition, attributed intrinsic corporate motives moderate the impacts of environmental CSR communication on consumer trust, purchase intention and consumer advocacy, respectively. No moderation effect was found for attributed extrinsic corporate motives. The findings provide important implications for effective environmental CSR communication with respect to specific message styles and attributed corporate motives

Classification of Super-Modular Categories by Rank

We pursue a classification of low-rank super-modular categories parallel to that of modular categories. We classify all super-modular categories up to rank = 6, and spin modular categories up to rank = 11. In particular, we show that, up to fusion rules, there is exactly one non-split super-modular category of rank 2, 4 and 6, namely PSU(2)4k+ 2 for k = 0,1 and 2. This classification is facilitated by adapting and extending well-known constraints from modular categories to super-modular categories, such as Verlinde and Frobenius-Schur indicator formulae

Immunochemical characterization of polysaccharide antigens from six clinical strains of Enterococci

BACKGROUND: Enterococci have become major nosocomial pathogens due to their intrinsic and acquired resistance to a broad spectrum of antibiotics. Their increasing drug resistance prompts us to search for prominent antigens to develop vaccines against enterococci. Given the success of polysaccharide-based vaccines against various bacterial pathogens, we isolated and characterized the immunochemical properties of polysaccharide antigens from five strains of Enterococcus faecalis and one strain of vancomycin-resistant E. faecium. RESULTS: We cultured large batches of each strain, isolated sufficient quantities of polysaccharides, analyzed their chemical structures, and compared their antigenic specificity. Three classes of polysaccharides were isolated from each strain, including a polyglucan, a teichoic acid, and a heteroglycan composed of rhamnose, glucose, galactose, mannosamine, and glucosamine. The polyglucans from all six strains are identical and appear to be dextran. Yields of the teichoic acids were generally low. The most abundant polysaccharides are the heteroglycans. The six heteroglycans are structurally different as evidenced by NMR spectroscopy. They also differ in their antigenic specificities as revealed by competitive ELISA. The heteroglycans are not immunogenic by themselves but conjugation to protein carriers significantly enhanced their ability to induce antibodies. CONCLUSION: The six clinical strains of enterococci express abundant, strain-specific cell-surface heteroglycans. These polysaccharides may provide a molecular basis for serological typing of enterococcal strains and antigens for the development of vaccines against multi-drug resistant enterococci

The dawn of the liquid biopsy in the fight against cancer

ABSTRACT Cancer is a molecular disease associated with alterations in the genome, which, thanks to the highly improved sensitivity of mutation detection techniques, can be identified in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) circulating in blood, a method also called liquid biopsy. This is a non-invasive alternative to surgical biopsy and has the potential of revealing the molecular signature of tumors to aid in the individualization of treatments. In this review, we focus on cfDNA analysis, its advantages, and clinical applications employing genomic tools (NGS and dPCR) particularly in the field of oncology, and highlight its valuable contributions to early detection, prognosis, and prediction of treatment response

Probing critical phenomena in open quantum systems using atom arrays

At continuous phase transitions, quantum many-body systems exhibit scale-invariance and complex, emergent universal behavior. Most strikingly, at a quantum critical point, correlations decay as a power law, with exponents determined by a set of universal scaling dimensions. Experimentally probing such power-law correlations is extremely challenging, owing to the complex interplay between decoherence, the vanishing energy gap, and boundary effects. Here, we employ a Rydberg quantum simulator to adiabatically prepare critical ground states of both a one-dimensional ring and a two-dimensional square lattice. By accounting for and tuning the openness of our quantum system, which is well-captured by the introduction of a single phenomenological length scale, we are able to directly observe power-law correlations and extract the corresponding scaling dimensions. Moreover, in two dimensions, we observe a decoupling between phase transitions in the bulk and on the boundary, allowing us to identify two distinct boundary universality classes. Our work demonstrates that direct adiabatic preparation of critical states in quantum simulators can complement recent approaches to studying quantum criticality using the Kibble-Zurek mechanism or digital quantum circuits