ATP6V1B2 and IFI27 and their intrinsic functional genomic characteristics associated with SARS-CoV-2

Genes functionally associated with SARS-CoV-2 and genes functionally related to COVID-19 disease can be different, whose distinction will become the first essential step for successfully fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, this first step has not been completed in all biological and medical research. Using a newly developed max-competing logistic classifier, two genes, ATP6V1B2 and IFI27, stand out to be critical in transcriptional response to SARS-CoV-2 with differential expressions derived from NP/OP swab PCR. This finding is evidenced by combining these two genes with one another gene in predicting disease status to achieve better-indicating power than existing classifiers with the same number of genes. In addition, combining these two genes with three other genes to form a five-gene classifier outperforms existing classifiers with ten or more genes. With their exceptional predicting power, these two genes can be critical in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic as a new focus and direction. Comparing the functional effects of these genes with a five-gene classifier with 100% accuracy identified and tested from blood samples in the literature, genes and their transcriptional response and functional effects to SARS-CoV-2 and genes and their functional signature patterns to COVID-19 antibody are significantly different, which can be interpreted as the former is the point of a phenomenon, and the latter is the essence of the disease. Such significant findings can help explore the causal and pathological clue between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 disease and fight against the disease with more targeted vaccines, antiviral drugs, and therapies.

Talking About Childhood Obesity

While discussing obesity with pediatric patients and their families can be difficult, it is an essential step toward appropriate weight management. There is paucity of data regarding language preferences when discussing obesity in this population. In this pilot qualitative study, we interviewed 8 parents of patients diagnosed with obesity to identify language and communication preferences for discussing their child’s weight. Interviews were analyzed for emerging themes. Important trends appeared revealing that parents prefer neutral, medical terms discussed at well-child checks or obesity-specific visits. Providers should frame lifestyle changes as positive for all patients and set achievable goals with the help of visual aids. Our analysis uncovered several important communication strategies that can better equip providers to discuss obesity with their pediatric patients. This research may serve as a foundation for larger studies into the topic.

Preservação em próteses implantossuportadas: peri-implantite / reservation in implant-supported prostheses: Peri-implantitis

Resumo: A identificação e o tratamento da infecção ao redor do implante é uma etapa essencial na manutenção do implante osseointegrativo e isso reflete na vida útil da reabilitação. O principal objetivo do tratamento da peri-implantite é a utilização de métodos de descontaminação mecânica e química para eliminar a carga bacteriana na superfície do implante. O biofilme pode ser removido por métodos não cirúrgicos ou cirúrgicos. Nos casos mais graves, geralmente é necessário tratamento cirúrgico, cujo objetivo é corrigir o defeito ósseo existente, combinado com a aplicação do enxerto, para regenerar o tecido ósseo perdido no processo inflamatório. O propósito deste estudo é realizar uma revisão de literatura tendo como o tema preservação em próteses implantossuportadas: peri-implantite, a fim de guiar a conservação das reabilitações orais. Além de buscar maiores informações acerca do desenvolvimento da doença peri-implantar, bem como sua ligação com a doença periodontal e os fatores que contribuem para seu desenvolvimento. Para tanto, foram utilizados descritores como: “peri-implantite", "manutenção de implantes" e “ossointegração” nas bases de dados: Pubmed, Scielo, google acadêmico e Lilacs. Para possibilitar um melhor resultado, foram organizados tópicos para uma discussão final, sendo eles: conceito, etiologia, diagnóstico e tratamento. Foram encontradas dificuldades na manutenção dos implantes e a necessidade de se descrever o melhor planejamento para uma melhoria nos protocolos clínicos de preservação a fim de obter-se excelência nos desfechos clínicos.Abstract: The identification and treatment of infection around the implant is an essential step in the maintenance of the osseointegrative implant and this reflects on the lifetime of the rehabilitation. The main objective of peri-implantitis treatment is the use of mechanical and chemical decontamination methods to eliminate the bacterial load on the implant surface. Biofilm can be removed by non-surgical or surgical methods. In more severe cases, surgical treatment is usually necessary, the aim of which is to correct the existing bone defect, combined with the application of a graft, to regenerate the bone tissue lost in the inflammatory process. The purpose of this study is to conduct a literature review with the theme of preservation in implant-supported prostheses: peri-implantitis, in order to guide the conservation of oral rehabilitations. In addition to seeking more information about the development of peri-implant disease, as well as its connection with periodontal disease and the factors that contribute to its development. For this purpose, descriptors such as: “peri-implantitis”, “implant maintenance” and “bone integration” were used in the following databases: Pubmed, Scielo, academic Google and Lilacs. final discussion, namely: concept, etiology, diagnosis, and treatment. Difficulties were found in the maintenance of implants and the need to describe the best planning for an improvement in clinical preservation protocols in order to obtain excellence in clinical outcomes. Plaque control maintains the health of the soft tissue-implant interface.Keywords: Dental implants; Peri-implantitis; Bacterial plaque.

Melting at Mg/Al interface in Mg-Al-Mg nanolayer by molecular dynamics simulations

The melting at the magnesium/aluminum (Mg/Al) interface is an essential step during the fabrications of Mg-Al structural materials and biomaterials. We carried out molecular dynamics simulations on the melting at the Mg/Al interface in a Mg-Al-Mg nanolayer via analyzing the changes of average atomic potential energy, Lindemann index, heat capacity, atomic density distribution and radial distribution function with temperature. The melting temperatures (T m) of the nanolayer and the slabs near the interface are significantly sensitive to the heating rate (v h) over the range of v h≤4.0 K/ps. The distance (d) range in which the interface affects the melting of the slabs is predicted to be (-98.2, 89.9) Å at v h→0, if the interface is put at d=0 and Mg (Al) is located at the left (right) side of the interface. The (T m) of the Mg (Al) slab just near the interface (e.g., d=4.0 Å) is predicted to be 926.8 K (926.6 K) at v h→0, with 36.9 K (37.1 K) below 963.7 K for the nanolayer. These results highlight the importance of regional research on the melting at an interface in the nanolayers consisting of two different metals.

Design of novel oocyte activation methods: The role of zinc

Oocyte activation occurs at the time of fertilization and is a series of cellular events initiated by intracellular Ca2+ increases. Consequently, oocytes are alleviated from their arrested state in meiotic metaphase II (MII), allowing for the completion of meiosis. Oocyte activation is also an essential step for somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) and an important tool to overcome clinical infertility. Traditional artificial activation methods aim to mimic the intracellular Ca2+ changes which occur during fertilization. Recent studies emphasize the importance of cytoplasmic Zn2+ on oocyte maturation and the completion of meiosis, thus suggesting artificial oocyte activation approaches that are centered around the concentration of available Zn2+in oocytes. Depletion of intracellular Zn2+ in oocytes with heavy metal chelators leads to successful oocyte activation in the absence of cellular Ca2+ changes, indicating that successful oocyte activation does not always depends on intracellular Ca2+ increases. Current findings lead to new approaches to artificially activate mammalian oocytes by reducing available Zn2+ contents, and the approaches improve the outcome of oocyte activation when combined with existing Ca2+ based oocyte activation methods. Here, we review the important role of Ca2+ and Zn2+ in mammalian oocyte activation and development of novel oocyte activation approaches based on Zn2+ availability.

Dual Attention Multiscale Network for Vessel Segmentation in Fundus Photography

Background: Automatic vessel structure segmentation is an essential step towards an automatic disease diagnosis system. The task is challenging due to the variance shapes and sizes of vessels across populations.Methods: A multiscale network with dual attention is proposed to segment vessels in different sizes. The network injects spatial attention module and channel attention module on feature map which size is 1 8 of the input size. The network also uses multiscale input to receive multi-level information, and the network uses the multiscale output to gain more supervision. Results: The proposed method is tested on two publicly available datasets: DRIVE and CHASEDB1. The accuracy, AUC, sensitivity, specificity on DRIVE dataset is 0.9615, 0.9866, 0.7693, and 0.9851, respectively. On the CHASEDB1 dataset, the metrics are 0.9797, 0.9895, 0.8432, and 0.9863 respectively. The ablative study further shows effectiveness for each part of the network. Conclusions: Multiscale and dual attention mechanism both improves the performance. The proposed architecture is simple and effective. The inference time is 12ms on a GPU and has potential for real-world applications. The code will be made publicly available.

SBP-SITA: A sequence-based prediction tools for S-itaconation

As a recently-reported post-translational modification, S-itaconation plays an important role in inflammation suppression. In order to understand its regulatory mechanism in many life activities, the essential step is the recognition of S-itaconation. However, it is difficult to identify S-itaconation in the proteome for the high cost, which limits further investigation. In this study, we constructed an ensemble algorithm based on Soft Voting Classifier. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) value 0.73 for ensemble model. Accordingly, we constructed the on-line prediction tool dubbed SBP-SITA for easily identifying Cystine sites. SBP-SITA is available at http://www.bioinfogo.org/sbp-sita.

PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF MEASURING CRITICAL GAPS AND FOLLOW-UP TIMES AT MEDIAN UNCONTROLLED T-INTERSECTIONS

Estimation of critical gaps and follow-up times between vehicles at uncontrolled intersections is an essential step in estimating the capacity of these objects and assessment of traffic conditions. Therefore, measurements of these parameters should be properly prepared and implemented. This paper presents issues related to the performance of field tests at median uncontrolled T-intersection. Measurements included both critical gaps and follow-up times. Based on the collected material, the authors identified problems occurring during traffic observation. Analyzed intersections were located both within and outside built-up areas. Furthermore, this article discusses the influence of selected factors on the accuracy of estimating the critical gaps and follow-up times and formulates the principles of conducting traffic measurements at selected types of intersections.

Machine learning approaches to predict the Plant-associated phenotype of Xanthomonas strains

Background The genus Xanthomonas has long been considered to consist predominantly of plant pathogens, but over the last decade there has been an increasing number of reports on non-pathogenic and endophytic members. As Xanthomonas species are prevalent pathogens on a wide variety of important crops around the world, there is a need to distinguish between these plant-associated phenotypes. To date a large number of Xanthomonas genomes have been sequenced, which enables the application of machine learning (ML) approaches on the genome content to predict this phenotype. Until now such approaches to the pathogenomics of Xanthomonas strains have been hampered by the fragmentation of information regarding pathogenicity of individual strains over many studies. Unification of this information into a single resource was therefore considered to be an essential step. Results Mining of 39 papers considering both plant-associated phenotypes, allowed for a phenotypic classification of 578 Xanthomonas strains. For 65 plant-pathogenic and 53 non-pathogenic strains the corresponding genomes were available and de novo annotated for the presence of Pfam protein domains used as features to train and compare three ML classification algorithms; CART, Lasso and Random Forest. Conclusion The literature resource in combination with recursive feature extraction used in the ML classification algorithms provided further insights into the virulence enabling factors, but also highlighted domains linked to traits not present in pathogenic strains.

Imaging of Gastric Carcinomatosis

Diagnosing the absence or presence of peritoneal carcinomatosis in patients with gastric cancer, including its extent and distribution, is an essential step in patients’ therapeutic management. Such diagnosis still remains a radiological challenge. In this article, we review the strengths and weaknesses of the different imaging techniques for the diagnosis of peritoneal carcinomatosis of gastric origin as well as the techniques’ imaging features. We also discuss the assessment of response to treatment and present recommendations for the follow-up of patients with complete surgical resection according to the presence of risk factors of recurrence, as well as discussing future directions for imaging improvement.