COMMENTARY

Global climate change and air pollution pose severe challenges to human survival and development. Pollutants and greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions can change atmospheric chemical composition and climate . To prevent an ecological crisis and ensure the harmonious coexistence of man and nature, China has proposed a vital national strategy of forging an Ecological Civilisation (EC) in the country based on socialistic principles. The agricultural sector is one of the main sources of air pollution and GHG emissions. There exists a lack of systematic research on the emission characteristics, their future paths, as well as control strategies; this hinders the coordinated responses to GHG emissions and air pollution that could otherwise lead to an improvement in the situation. By creating an emissions inventory of homologous atmospheric pollutants and GHG of similar origins in China’s agricultural sector, we analysed the drivers through the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) model. We predicted the future path based on the measured emission reduction potential. The research results show that agricultural production and GHG emissions have been steadily decoupled, with macro-control by the government being the most important driving factor in keeping emissions under control. A nature-based action plan for the coordinated control of GHGs and air pollutants in China based on eco-agriculture can result in the harmonious coexistence between man and nature in the future, by realising a socialist EC and agricultural carbon neutrality simultaneously by the middle of the 21st century.

Background: Isolated methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), an autosomal recessive disorder of propionate metabolism, is usually caused by mutations in the methylmalonyl-CoA mutase gene (mut-type MMA). Because no universal consensus was made on whether mut-type MMA should be included in newborn screening (NBS), we aimed to compare the outcome of this disorder detected by NBS with that detected clinically and investigate the influence of NBS on the disease course. Methods: In this study, 168 patients with mut-type MMA diagnosed by NBS were compared to 210 patients diagnosed after disease onset while NBS was not performed. Clinical data of these patients from 7 metabolic centers in China were analyzed retrospectively, including initial manifestations, biochemical metabolites, the responsiveness of vitamin B12 therapy, and gene variation, to explore different factors on the long-term outcome. Results: Among patients diagnosed through NBS, 77 patients (45.8%) remained asymptomatic and 87 patients (53.4%) showed favorable neurocognitive outcomes. In contrast with individuals diagnosed clinically, only 30 cases (16.2%) developed healthily. In our comparison of patients whether detected by NBS, the age at diagnosis, the incidence of disease onset, the responsiveness of vitamin B12, age at the start of vitamin B12 treatment, levels of biochemical features before and after treatment, and the long-term prognosis were remarkably different ( P<0.01). The presence of disease onset and the blood C3/C2 ratio were more associated with poor outcomes of patients whether identified by NBS. Importantly, after considering NBS, the odd ratio of disease onset for poor outcome decreased and the unresponsiveness to vitamin B12 increased. Conclusion: Through preventing major disease-related events and allowing an earlier treatment initiation, NBS is beneficial for the prognosis of infants with mut-type MMA.

WuXiUP, WuXi Biologics’ Ultra-high Productivity platform, is an intensified and integrated continuous bioprocess platform developed for production of various biologics including monoclonal antibodies, fusion proteins and bispecfic antibodies. This process technology platform has manifested its remarkable capability in boosting the volumetric productivity of various biologics and has been implemented for large scale clinical material productions. In this report, case studies of the production of different pharmaceutical proteins using two high producing and intensified culture modes of the WuXiUP and the concentrated fed-batch (CFB), as well as the traditional fed-batch (TFB) are discussed from the perspectives of cell growth, productivity, and protein quality. Both WuXiUP and CFB outperformed TFB regarding to volumetric productivity. Additionally, distinctive advantages in product quality profiles, such as charge variant, fragmentation etc., in the WuXiUP process are revealed, and therefore a simplified downstream purification process with only two chromatographic steps can be developed to deliver the target product at a satisfactory purity.

Background and Purpose: No pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) analysis method has been established for combination therapy that comprehensively reflects the efficacy of both antibiotics. Recently, nacubactam, which is a DBO-type new β-lactamase inhibitor and has antibacterial activity, is being developed as a single drug to be co-administered with cefepime or aztreonam. This study attempted to establish a PK/PD analysis method for β-lactam/β-lactamase inhibitors that incorporates instantaneous MIC (MICi) to determine practical PK/PD parameters for aztreonam/nacubactam. Experimental Approach: Based on Checkerboard MIC measurements, MICi of aztreonam against carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae in the presence of nacubactam was simulated. In vivo PD effect was evaluated by the bacterial count of thigh-infected mice after administered a combination of nacubactam and aztreonam. The mean change in the bacterial count obtained by in vivo PD study was plotted based on %fT>MICi and analysed using the Inhibitory Effect Sigmoid Imax Model. Key Results: fT>MICi calculated from the PK experiments showed a high correlation with the bactericidal effect obtained in the PD experiments, suggesting that fT>MICi is the optimal PK/PD parameter for aztreonam/nacubactam. The target values of fT>MICi achieving growth inhibition, 1 log10-kill and 2 log10-kill, were 22, 38 and 75%, respectively. Conclusion and Implications: The PK/PD analysis method proposed in this study is promising for determining practical PK/PD parameters in a combination antimicrobial therapy. In addition, this is the first report of aztreonam/nacubactam showing a potent in vivo therapeutic effect against carbapenemase-producing K. pneumoniae, particularly NDM-producing K. pneumoniae.

This paper investigates the consensus problem of an array of large mobile sensor networks. A new framework for the dynamic of mobile sensors as a continuum which described by parabolic system with boundary disturbance is proposed. The communication topology of agents is a chain graph and fixed. Leader feedback laws which is designed in a manner to the boundary control of large mobile sensor networks allow the mobile sensors achieve the formation steadily. By referring to Lyapunov functional method and employing boundary control approach, a new protocol is established to deal with formation problem for the large mobile sensor networks. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate the usefulness of the results.

The coastline of Sub-Saharan Africa hosts highly diverse fish communities of high conservation value, which are also key resources for local livelihoods. However, many costal ecosystems are threatened by overexploitation and their conservation state is frequently unknown due to limited monitoring budgets and challenges associated with their vast spatial extents. Here, we evaluated the potential of citizen science-based eDNA surveys to alleviate such chronic data deficiencies and assessed fish communities in Mozambique using two 12S metabarcoding primer sets. Samples were either collected by scientific personnel or trained local community members and results from the two metabarcoding primer sets were combined using a newly created data merging approach. Irrespective of the background of sampling personnel, a high average fish species richness was recorded (38±20 OTUs sample-1). Individual sections of the coastline largely differed in the occurrence of threatened and commercially important species, highlighting the need for regionally differentiated management strategies. A detailed comparison of the two applied primer sets revealed an important trade-off in primer choice with MiFish primers amplifying a higher number of species but Riaz primers performing better in the detection of threatened fish species. This trade-off could be partly resolved by applying our data-merging approach, which has the potential to provide a more robust baseline-data for decision-making processes. Overall, our study provides encouraging results but also highlights that eDNA-based monitoring will require further improvements of e.g., reference databases and local analytical infrastructure to facilitate routine applications in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In biomedical, industrial, and marine fields, interactions between bacteria and material interfaces are of great importance in biofilm formation, biofouling, the development of antimicrobial surface technologies, and the changing patterns of bacterial adhesion behavior on non-biological surfaces become a focus of research by researchers. Bacteria move from planktonic to adhesive behavior through near-interfacial sociological behavior, specificity (specific bacterial appendages such as hairs, flagella, curls, etc. that can bind to some chemicals on certain surfaces), non-specific interactions (van der Waals forces, electrostatic interactions, hydrophobic interactions or acid-base interactions) and surface mechanical induction, a process that the bacteria themselves can influence, the nature of the interfacial material and the environment. A variety of methods have been developed to measure cell adhesion. The continued development of atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques provides a more advanced means of exploring bacterial-surface interactions and the various physicochemical properties of bacterial cells. Based on a large amount of literature research and tracking of related technological research developments, this paper mainly introduces the domestic and international research progress on the adhesion behavior between bacteria and material interfaces in detail from the aspects of adhesion mechanism, influencing factors, and testing methods, to provide a solid theoretical basis for further advancing the study of bacterial-interface adhesion and to get more scholars’ attention.

Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) has a complex array of symptoms and is associated with high healthcare expenditures. A comprehensive care program may help to reduce expenditures of children with SCD. This research describes SCD comprehensive care program enrollees’ expenditure patterns by level of hospitalization risk over a three-year period and estimates whether coordination of care services reduced costs for those with different risk levels. Medicaid claims data were collected for program patients with SCD. Data from the one year prior to program enrollment categorized patients as High, Medium, or Low risk for incurring inpatient expenditures. We compared utilization risk groups on inpatient expenditures by year after program enrollment. The trends in expenditures are shown in the subgroup analyses (descriptively). 361 program enrollees ages 1 to 27y had SCD; 8.9% were categorized as High risk of utilizing hospitalization services, 47.9% were at Medium risk, and 43.2% were at Low risk. The High Utilization and Medium Utilization Risk groups showed trends of expenditure reduction, but the trends may be due to regression of extreme group costs toward the mean. The lack of a statistically significant cost benefit might be due to small sample size, low engagement in the program services, short duration of intervention, and inability to distinguish the appropriateness of healthcare utilization for SCD.

Background and Objective: Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is an autoimmune-mediated hemorrhagic disease. Anti-glycoprotein autoantibodies play a key role in the pathophysiology of ITP, but the relationship between platelet-specific antibodies and bleeding severity is unclear. This study aimed to analyze the relationship between anti-glycoprotein autoantibodies and bleeding severity in children with newly diagnosed ITP and platelet count <10×109/L. Method: This was a single-center prospective observational study that analyzed children with newly diagnosed ITP and platelet count <10×109/L between June 2018 and September 2021 at our hospital. The children were classified into the mild and severe groups based on the bleeding scores. The type and titer of anti-glycoprotein autoantibodies were detected using an ELISA kit (PAKAUTO). We analyzed the relationship between bleeding severity and anti-glycoprotein autoantibodies. Results: A total of 86 cases were enrolled, including 42 in the mild group and 44 in the severe group. Patients with anti-GPIIb/IIIa or anti-GPIb/IX antibodies suffered more severe bleeding than patients without them (c2=7.303, p=0.007; c2=3.875, p=0.049), but there was no significant difference between patients with or without anti-GPIa/IIa antibody (c2=0.745, p=0.388). When antibodies were analyzed together, patients with three antibodies suffered more severe bleeding than those without three antibodies (c2=5.053, p=0.025). Patients with higher antibody titer in the eluent, but not in the plasma, suffered more severe bleeding in all three antibodies (Z=-2.389, p=0.017; Z=-2.108, p=0.035; Z=-2.557, p=0.011). Conclusion: Anti-glycoprotein autoantibodies led to more severe bleeding in children under 18 years of age without drug treatment with newly diagnosed ITP and platelet count <10×109/L.

Assessment of potential surface runoff harvesting sites is an important undertaking in a country like Ethiopia, where high spatial variability in rainfall and recurrent drought and flash floods are common. In this study, the geographical information system (GIS)-based multi-Criteria Evaluation is used to select the potential rainwater harvesting sites in Oromia, Bale lowland, Ethiopia. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used for standardization of the criteria, and Weight overlay analysis of multicriteria for a combination of multi-layers using ArcGIS 10.8. Six criteria layers, including slope, runoff, soil depth, precipitation, soil texture, and the land use land cove are derived to identify rainwater-harvesting catchment. The analysis, shows that of the total 500 km 2 of the catchment area, 29.18 % of the area has highly suitable, 40 .87 of the area has Suitable ,22.49% of the total area has moderately suitable ,6.98% of the area has marginally suitable and 0.5 % of the area is not suitable for runoff water harvesting at the study area. It was noted that providing accurate and precise spatial representation of the physiology and land use for the analysis of runoff generation potential site within the study area is an important step in developing an integrated strategy for surface rainwater harvesting plan the study area.

Fatigue life estimation is one of the vital factors in the design of biomedical prostheses. But fatigue tests of a hip prosthesis require over ten million cycles, furthermore experimental methods may be too expensive and take a long time for material selection or optimization. Therefore, numerical analyses performed by Finite Elements Methods (FEM) becomes necessary to pre-estimation of fatigue life. In this study, a numerical analysis performed by FEM analysis to estimate the fatigue performance of newly designed hip prosthesis. Prior to experimental testing processes, aimed to analyze the candidate designs and to contribute to complete of the verification process in a more efficient, economical, and fast manner.

Background: Hemostatic disturbances with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can predispose to tricuspid and right heart thrombi in very rare instances. Aim: We describe a 29-year-old female patient without previous cause of thrombosis who developed large tricuspid valve thrombus (TVT) and moderate-to-severe tricuspid regurgitation (TR) during the course of COVID-19 infection. Materials and methods: Persistant fever and tachycardia with thrombocytopenia and high D-dimer increased the index of suspicion. The diagnosis was made by bedside transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR). Surgery was performed for thrombectomy and tricuspid valve replacement with a tissue valve. Discussion and conclusion: Detection of TVT in COVID-19 patients on the basis of high index of suspicion, bedside TTE and non-invasive CMR helps early surgical treatment and subsequent reduction of mortality and hospital stay.

Wildlife population dynamics are modulated by abiotic and biotic factors, typically climate, resource availability, density-dependent effects, and predator-prey interactions. Understanding if human-caused disturbances shape these processes is needed for the conservation and management of ecological communtiies within increasingly human-dominated landscapes. Garnering this understanding is difficult due to lack of long-term longitudinal data on wildlife populations, human-mediated disturbances, climate and predator density on ungulate population dynamics has been under-studied. Using a 50-year time series (1962-2012) on mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) demographics, seasonal weather, predator density, oil and gas development patterns from the North Dakota Badlands to investigate long-term effects of landscape-level disturbance. We aimed to evaluate if harsh weather conditions in-combination with energy development and predators affected fall mule deer recruitment. We found that density-dependent effects and harsh seasonal weather primarily drove recruitment in the North Dakota Badlands. Recruitment was further shaped by interacting effects of harsh seasonal weather and predator presence in the form of high coyote density. Additionally, we found that fall recruitment was subtly modulated by interactions between seasonal weather and energy development (i.e., lower recruitment when harsher weather was combined with higher density of active oil and gas wells), and that the combined effect of predator density and energy development was not interactive but rather additive. Our analysis demonstrates the effect of energy development by modulating mule deer recruitment fluctuations concurrent with main recruitment drivers being biotic (density-dependency, habitat, predation) and abiotic (harsh seasonal weather, woody vegetation encroachment). A pattern emerges of density dependence, presumably due to limited quality habitat, being the primary factor influencing fall fawn recruitment in mule deer. Secondarily, stochastic weather events periodically cause dramatic declines in recruitment. Finally, the interactions between human disturbance and predation can be additive to the aforementioned drivers of recruitment and subsequently cause further declines.

An energy-efficient and high-resolution switching scheme based on previous significant bit capacitor for bottom-plate sampled successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADC) is proposed. The process of obtaining the most significant bit (MSB) does not consume switching energy, and all the rest of comparisons adopt the switching technology based on previous significant bit. This technique switches the Vref/2 of the previous significant bit switching capacitors on only one side of the capacitors and only consumes little switching energy. Furthermore, fewer capacitors switch to GND throughout the switching process, consuming less energy compared to Tri-level switching scheme. The proposed scheme in this paper can achieve 25% savings in switching energy compared to the Tri-level switching scheme, and reduce the switching energy by 81.2% compared to the Vcm-based switching technique.

Cerebral Venous thrombosis can be caused by different conditions such as infectious, structural, hypercoagulable states, hematological, hormonal, collagen, vascular diseases, and oral contraceptive pills among other causes. Adenomyosis has been rarely associated with CVT. Increased CA-125 and Iron deficiency anemia in adenomyosis may predispose to CVT.

’Kissing molars’, were described by Van Hoof in 1973 as when the occlusal surfaces of impacted molars are united by the same follicular space and the roots point in the opposite direction[1]. There are very few published cases in the literature, it is an extremely rare form of impaction.

Title Page Title: Letter to the Editor: ” Gestational weight gain, appetite regulating hormones, and metformin treatment in polycystic ovary syndrome: A longitudinal, placebo- controlled study ”.Article type : Letter to the editor.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been widely used in the field of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image classification for their high classification accuracy. However, because CNNs learn a fairly discontinuous input-output mapping, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Unlike most existing attack manners that fool CNN models with complex global perturbations, this study provides an idea for generating more dexterous adversarial perturbations. It demonstrates that minor local perturbations are also effective for attacking. We propose a new attack method called local aggregative attack (LAA), which is a black-box method based on probability label information, to reduce the range and amplitude of adversarial perturbations. Our attack introduces the differential evolution (DE) algorithm to search for the optimal perturbations and applies the maximum between-class variance method (OTSU algorithm) to accomplish pixel-level labelling of the target and background areas, enabling attackers to generate adversarial examples of SAR images (AESIs) by adding small-scale perturbations to specific areas. Meanwhile, the structural dissimilarity (DSSIM) metric optimises the cost function to limit image distortion and improve attack stealthiness. Experiments show that our method achieves a high attack success rate against these CNN-based classifiers, and the generated AESIs are equipped with non-negligible transferability between different models.

This study conducted an in-depth investigation of the tracking controller of an aerial autonomous docking and landing trajectory system. To examine the system's overall design, a dual-machine trajectory-tracking control simulation platform was created via MATLAB Simulink. Then, an autonomous docking and landing trajectory-tracking controller based on backpropagation proportional--integral--derivative control was designed, which fulfilled the trajectory-tracking control requirements in the autonomous docking and landing process by efficiently suppressing the external airflow disturbance according to the simulation results. A YOLOv3-based vision pilot system was designed to calibrate the rate of the aerial docking and landing position to eight frame per second. The feasibility of the multi-rotor aerial autonomous docking and landing system was verified using prototype flight tests during the day and at night.

Essential thrombocythemia is a myeloproliferative neoplasm, with the risk of progression to other cancers, it is important to screen for ET in patients with acute coronary syndrome.

A case of a 12yr old female student who presented with a week-old history of abdominal pain, vomiting, and blood-stained stool and was diagnosed by ultrasonography and barium enema to have intussusception (ileocolo colic variety). She was managed successfully and subsequently followed up at the clinic

Plant metabolomics has been used widely in plant physiology, in particular to analyse metabolic responses to environmental parameters. Derivatization (via trimethylsilylation-methoximation) followed by GC-MS metabolic profiling is a major technique to quantify low molecular weight, common metabolites of primary carbon, sulphur and nitrogen metabolism. There are now excellent opportunities for new generation analyses, using high resolution, exact mass GC-MS spectrometers that are progressively becoming relatively cheap. However, exact mass GC-MS analyses for routine metabolic profiling are not common, there is no dedicated available database. Also, exact mass GC-MS is usually dedicated to structural resolution of targeted secondary metabolites. Here, we present a curated database for exact mass metabolic profiling (made of 336 analytes, 1,064 characteristic exact mass fragments) focused on molecules of primary metabolism. We show advantages of exact mass analyses, in particular to resolve isotopic patterns, localise S-containing metabolites, and avoid identification errors when analytes have common nominal mass peaks in their spectrum. We provide a practical example using leaves of different Arabidopsis ecotypes and show how exact mass GC-MS analysis can be applied to plant samples and identify metabolic profiles.

SRD5A3-CDG (MIM 612379) is an extremely rare congenital disease, with only 38 cases having been reported. Common manifestations are developmental delay, intellectual disability, ophthalmological abnormalities, cerebellar abnormalities, ataxia, and hypotonia. Here, we discuss a seven-year-old boy with SRD5A3-CDG (homozygous variant c.57G>A [p.Trp19Ter]), featuring the unprecedented finding of telangiectasia.