Assessment of COVID-19 clinical course in patients vaccinated with Spitnik V, SARS-CoV-2 S protein RBD domain variation and serum virus neutralizing activity

The COVID-19-associated mortality remains high. Studying the features of the COVID-19 course in vaccinated patients, who have got ill on different dates after vaccination, compared to unvaccinated individuals is relevant. The study was aimed to assess clinical and immunological features of the COVID-19 course, as well as to assess humoral immunity (virus neutralizing activity, VNA) and SARS-CoV-2 S protein RBD domain variation in the groups of patients, previously vaccinated with Sputnik V, and unvaccinated patients. A total of 251 patients with confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 were enrolled, of them 116 individuals were previously vaccinated with one or two Sputnik V vaccine components, and 135 patients were not vaccinated (comparison group). Individuals over 50 years of age prevailed (82.8%). The patients, who received two vaccine components, had mild to moderate COVID-19 (92.1%). In the group of unvaccinated patients, 11 individuals received treatment in the ICU, 10 of them died. The viral load was significantly lower in vaccinated patients. Mutations of SARS-CoV-2, such as S477N, S477N+A522S, E484K and E484K+S494P, were identified both in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients. Assessment of the neutralizing activity of sera revealed no significant differences in VNA against different variants of SARS-CoV-2 mutations. The data obtained demonstrate that the lack of vaccination is an aggravating factor and is capable of increasing the risk of severe course and death in patients with COVID-19.

Dynamic Analysis on Critical Responses of Pipeline and Cable During Pipeline End Termination Installation

In order to figure out the dynamic characteristics of the pipeline and cable during pipeline end termination (PLET) installation based on S-laying, numerical simulation is carried out based on a practical operation project performed at Liwan oil and gas fields in the South China Sea. Four scenarios are selected from the PLET installation process in sequence for simulation. Critical responses of the pipeline and the cable in different scenarios of the operation are analyzed in this paper with a coupled model using RIFLEX module of SIMA software. Both the pipeline and the cable are modeled by the finite element method, and the pipelaying vessel is controlled by a dynamic positioning system. The simulation results are validated by the commonly used OrcaFlex software. The critical responses analyzed include static configuration, time-domain variation of axial tension at the top of the cable and bending moment variation near the touchdown point (TDP) of the pipeline. Furthermore, the time-domain variation of the tension at the top of the cable under different wave and current directions are also compared and analyzed, in order to study the effect of sea environment on the pipeline and cable during PLET installation operation. The results show that the responses of pipeline and cable vary in different operation scenarios, and the sea environment has remarkable effect on the pipeline and cable. The study in this paper is of value to the design of PLET installation based on pipelaying and can help predict the response of pipeline and cable during the operation.

DomainScope: A disease network based on protein domain connections

Protein domains are highly conserved functional units of proteins. Because they carry functionally significant information, the majority of the coding disease variants are located on domains. Additionally, domains are specific units of the proteins that can be targeted for drug delivery purposes. Here, using information about variants sites associated with diseases, a disease network was built, based on their sharing the same domain and domain variation site. The result was 49,990 disease pairs linked by domain variant site and 533,687 disease pairs that share the same mutated domain. These pairs were compared to disease pairs made using previous methods such as gene identity and gene variant site identity, which revealed that over 8,000 of these pairs were not only missing from the gene pairings but also not found commonly together in literature. The disease network was analyzed from their disease subject categories, which when compared to the gene-based disease network revealed that the domain method results in higher number of connections across disease categories versus within a disease category. Further, a study into the drug repurposing possibilities of the disease network created using domain revealed that 16,902 of the disease pairs had a drug reported for one disease but not the other, highlighting the drug repurposing potential of this new methodology.

Cross-domain variation in the X itself as a grammatical construction

The X itself is a nominal construction that has not received much attention within cognitive linguistics despite it having a quite interesting function, as it serves to select a core part in a partonomy and thus specify lexical relations within a text. Apart from being mentioned in passing in Croft & Cruse (2004), one of the few treatments of this construction in cognitive linguistics is Jensen (2014) who builds on the comments in Croft & Cruse (2004) and proposes a hypothesis pertaining to the cognitive and discursive function of the construction. However, that hypothesis does not take into account an important aspect of the reality of language — namely, variation. This article investigates, within the framework of usage-based construction grammar, the X itself in the Open American National Corpus (OANC) to see whether the construction displays variation across the nine domains that the data in OANC are divided into. Applying quantitative techniques, including lexical diversity measures and multidimensional scaling, this article explores aspects of the discursive behavior of the X itself across these domains and addresses the extent to which the construction interacts with the registers associated with the domains. Focusing on use-based varieties (McArthur 1992, see also Quirk 1989 and Halliday et al. 1964: 77), the present article argues that the X itself is not a constructional monolith, but that it is characterized by register-sensitive functional variation and that its core selection function very likely serves a information-structural discourse-pragmatic purpose.