The Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne flavivirus that causes neonatal abnormalities and other disorders. Antibodies to the ZIKV envelope (E) protein can block infection. In this study, next-generation sequencing (NGS) of immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) mRNA transcripts was combined with single-cell PCR cloning of E-binding monoclonal antibodies for analysing antibody response in a patient from the early stages of infection to more than one year after the clearance of the virus. The patient's IgH...

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are an integral component of the host competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network. These noncoding RNAs are characterized by their unique splicing reactions to form covalently closed loop structures and play important RNA regulatory roles in cells. Recent studies showed that circRNA expressions were perturbed in viral infections and circRNAs might serve as potential antiviral targets. We investigated the host ceRNA network changes and biological relevance of circRNAs in human lung adenocarcinoma epithelial...

The adsorption of phages to hosts is the first step of phage infection. Studies have shown that tailed phages use tail fibres or spikes to recognize bacterial receptors and mediate adsorption. However, whether other phage tail components can also recognize host receptors is unknown. To identify potential receptors, we screened a transposon mutagenesis library of the marine pathogen Vibrio parahaemolyticus and discovered that a vp0980 mutant (vp0980 encodes a predicted transmembrane protein) could not be...

The single-index models (SIMs) provide an efficient way of coping with high-dimensional nonparametric estimation problems and avoid the “curse of dimensionality.” Many existing estimation procedures for SIMs were built on least square loss, which is popular for its mathematical beauty but is non-robust to non-normal errors and outliers. This article addressed the question of both robustness and efficiency of estimation methods based on a new data-driven weighted linear combination of convex loss functions instead of...

It is common to compare individualized treatment rules based on the value function, which is the expected potential outcome under the treatment rule. Although the value function is not point-identified when there is unmeasured confounding, it still defines a partial order among the treatment rules under Rosenbaum’s sensitivity analysis model. We first consider how to compare two treatment rules with unmeasured confounding in the single-decision setting and then use this pairwise test to rank multiple...

In this work, a novel flexible photoelectrochemical immunosensor is developed to determine cardiac troponin I (cTnI) in serum. The flower-like ZnIn2S4 nanospheres (ZIS), as signal amplification material, were successfully synthesized by a solvothermal method. The ZIS and Bi2Se3 were modified on the indium tin oxide- polyethylene terephthalate (ITO-PET) electrode, which effectively accelerates the electronic transition and improved the photocurrent conversion efficiency (signal on). However, the binding of antigen–antibody proteins blocks the electron transfer, resulting in...

Understanding the complex diversity patterns is one of the main aims of community ecology. It is important to take both historical and contemporary factors into account in investigating the potential roles in assembling diversity patterns. Here, We compared diversity patterns of two moth assemblages sampled from Taihang and Yanshan mountains in Northern China and performed ancestral range reconstructions using the Multi-State-Speciation and Extinction model to track the origins of these patterns. We subsequently estimate diversification...

Acinetobacter baumannii, a Gram-negative opportunistic pathogen, is a leading cause of hospital- and community-acquired infections. Acinetobacter baumannii can rapidly acquire diverse resistance mechanisms and undergo genetic modifications that confer resistance and persistence to all currently used clinical antibiotics. In this study, we found exogenous L-lysine sensitizes Acinetobacter baumannii, other Gram-negative bacteria (Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae) and a Gram-positive bacterium (Mycobacterium smegmatis) to aminoglycosides. Importantly, the combination of L-lysine with aminoglycosides killed clinically isolated multidrug-resistant...

Structural basis of HCoV-19 fusion core and an effective inhibition peptide against virus entry

Additional file 2. Daily dietary and exercise records.

Additional file 2. Daily dietary and exercise records.

Objective: To summarize the clinical characteristics of patients with ocular chemical injuries and evaluate their potential relationship with the visual outcome by analyzing the medical records of these patients from January 1, 2012, to December 31, 2017. Design: A retrospective case series study. Setting: Jinshan Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai. Methods: Patient data included age, gender, occupational classification, location of ocular chemical injury, initial and final best-corrected distance visual acuity (BCDVA), intraocular pressure (IOP),...

How insect communities are assembled in nature remains largely unknown. In particular, whether habitat filtering or competition serves as the main mechanism in forming insect communities is rarely subject to an in-depth investigation. One bottleneck lies in the difficulty of species identification when dealing with a large number of diverse insects. However, High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS) technology coupled with classic DNA barcoding offers a great opportunity to infer community assembly for this speciose group. In this...

Scabies remains a significant public health concern globally, affecting people of all ages, races, and socioeconomic groups. The epidemic characteristics of scabies are yet unravelled, especially in high-income countries and elderly population. In this study, we sought to investigate incidence and prevalence and their trends of scabies worldwide from 1990 to 2017 via the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2017. The prevalence and incidence of scabies tend to a moderate increase after age 70....

The source of secondary lower respiratory tract bacterial infections in influenza patients is not fully understood. A case–control study was conducted during the 2017–2018 influenza epidemic period in Beijing, China. Nasopharyngeal swabs were collected from 52 virologically confirmed influenza patients and 24 healthy medical staff. The nasopharyngeal microbiota taxonomic composition was analysed using high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene V3–V4 regions. The super-dominant pathobiontic bacterial genus (SDPG) was defined as that accounting for >50%...

Mobile colistin resistance (mcr) genes represent an emerging challenge. Here we describe a novel mcr gene, mcr-10, on an IncFIA plasmid of an Enterobacter roggenkampii clinical strain. mcr-10 has the highest nucleotide identity (79.69%) with mcr-9 and encodes MCR-10 with 82.93% amino acids identical to MCR-9. mcr-10 confers 4-fold increase in colistin MIC (from 1 to 4 mg/L) when cloned into a colistin-susceptible E. roggenkampii strain. By screening GenBank, mcr-10 was found in various Enterobacteriaceae...

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has a wide spectrum of disease severity from mild upper respiratory symptoms to respiratory failure. The role of neutralizing antibody (NAb) response in disease progression remains elusive. This study determined the seroprevalence of 733 non-COVID-19 individuals from April 2018 to February 2020 in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and compared the neutralizing antibody (NAb) responses of eight COVID-19 patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) with those of 42...

Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, it has rapidly spread across many other countries. While the majority of patients were considered mild, critically ill patients involving respiratory failure and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome are not uncommon, which could result death. We hypothesized that cytokine storm is associated with severe outcome. We enrolled 102 COVID-19 patients who were admitted to Renmin Hospital (Wuhan, China). All patients were classified into moderate, severe...

This study aimed to estimate the attack rates, and identify the risk factors of COVID-19 infection. Based on a retrospective cohort study, we investigated 11,580 contacts of COVID-19 cases in Guangdong Province from 10 January to 15 March 2020. All contacts were tested by RT-PCR to detect their infection of SARS-COV-2. Attack rates by characteristics were calculated. Logistic regression was used to estimate the risk factors of infection for COVID-19. A total of 515 of...

Objectives Severe or critical COVID-19 is associated with intensive care unit admission, increased secondary infection rate, and would lead to significant worsened prognosis. Risks and characteristics relating to secondary infections in severe COVID-19 have not been described. Methods Severe and critical COVID-19 patients from Shanghai were included. We collected lower respiratory, urine, catheters, and blood samples according to clinical necessity and culture and mNGS were performed. Clinical and laboratory data were archived. Results We found...

In December 2019, Wuhan, China suffered a serious outbreak of a novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID) caused by novel severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (SARS-CoV 2). To quickly identify the pathogen, we designed and screened primer sets, and established a sensitive and specific qRT-PCR assay for SARS-CoV 2; the lower limit of detection (LOD) was 15 (95% CI: 9.8–21) copies per reaction. We combined this qRT-PCR assay with an automatic integration system for nucleic acid...

Staff and employees “Zero infection” has been achieved during the whole medical activities in the COVID-19 Fangcang Shelter Hospital in Wuhan, China. This study analyses the personnel and environmental protection status of the East–West Lake Fangcang Shelter Hospital. The HCWs were mostly composed of national medical rescue teams, from different provinces in China. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, 82.64% of the HCWs had already known the proper procedure of wearing masks and other personal protective equipment...

Staff and employees “Zero infection” has been achieved during the whole medical activities in the COVID-19 Fangcang Shelter Hospital in Wuhan, China. This study analyses the personnel and environmental protection status of the East–West Lake Fangcang Shelter Hospital. The HCWs were mostly composed of national medical rescue teams, from different provinces in China. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, 82.64% of the HCWs had already known the proper procedure of wearing masks and other personal protective equipment...

Tigecycline is one of the last-resort antibiotics to treat severe infections. Recently, tigecycline resistance has sporadically emerged with an increasing trend, and Tet(X) family represents a new resistance mechanism of tigecycline. In this study, a novel chromosome-encoded tigecycline resistance gene, tet(X14), was identified in a tigecycline-resistant and colistin-resistant Empedobacter stercoris strain ES183 recovered from a pig fecal sample in China. Tet(X14) shows 67.14-96.39% sequence identity to the other variants [Tet(X) to Tet(X13)]. Overexpression of Tet(X14)...

Critically ill patients with coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) are of grave concern. Those patients usually underwent a stage of excessive inflammation before developing acute respiratory distress syndrome. In this study, we test the hypothesis that short-term, low-to-moderate-dose corticosteroids would benefit patients when used in the early phase of excessive inflammation, namely, the therapeutic window. Among a Shanghai cohort and a validation cohort, we enrolled COVID-19 patients showing marked radiographic progression. Short-term, low-to-moderate-dose corticosteroids were considered...