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  • McDonough posted an update 9 months ago

    Thus, it provides behavioural evidence for olfactory offspring recognition in male zebra finches and also the existence of appropriate phenotypic odour cues of the offspring. check details The question why females do not show any sign of behavioural response remains open, but it might be likely that females use other signatures for offspring recognition.Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is one of the most contagious diseases of cloven-hoofed animals. Disinfectants are used to inactivate FMD virus (FMDV) in Japan. Reports that heat-denatured lysozyme inactivates bacteria as well as viruses, such as norovirus and hepatitis A virus, led us to determine its effects on FMDV. We show here that heat-denatured lysozyme partially inhibited the infectivity of FMDV O/JPN/2010-1/14C but of FMDVs A/TAI/46-1/2015 and Asia1/Shamir (ISR/3/89). Further, heat-denatured lysozyme variably reduced RNA loads of FMDVs O/JPN/2010-1/14C, O/MOG/2/Ca/BU/2017, O/Taiwan/1997, Asia1/Shamir (ISR/3/89), Asia1/TUR/49/2011, SAT1/KEN/117/2009, SAT2/SAU/6/2000 and SAT3/ZIM/3/83 but could not those of O/JPN/2000, A/TAI/46-1/2015, A22/IRQ/24/64, A15/TAI/1/60 and C/PHI/7/84. These findings indicate that heat-denatured lysozyme may serve as a new disinfectant against FMDV.Nanotube can be used as a mass sensor. To design a mass sensor for evaluating a high-speed nanoparticle, in this study, we investigated the impact vibration of a cantilever nanobeam being transversally collided by a high-speed C60 at the beam’s free end with an incident velocity of vIn. The capped beam contains alternately two boron nitride zones and two carbon zones on its cross section. Hence, the relaxed beam has elliptic cross section. The vibration properties were demonstrated by molecular dynamics simulation results. Beat vibration of a slim beam can be found easily. The 1st and the 2nd order natural frequencies (f1 and f2) of the beam illustrate the vibration of beam along the short and the long axes of its elliptic cross section, respectively. f2 decreases with increasing temperature. A minimal value of vIn leads to the local buckling of the beam, and a different minimal vIn leading to damage of the beam. For the same system at a specified temperature, f2 varies with vIn. When the beam bends almost uniformly, f2 decreases linearly with vIn. If vIn becomes higher, the beam has a cross section which buckles locally, and the buckling position varies during vibration. If vIn approaches the damage velocity, a fixed contraflexture point may appear on the beam due to its strong buckling. Above the damage velocity, f2 decreases sharply. These results have a potential application in design of a mass sensor.The surgical treatment and transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) rate of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients is relatively low in West China. For various reasons, most patients do not receive timely surgical treatment. Upon transfer to an infectious disease centralized hospital, they were already classified in the Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC)-B stage. A total of 2249 BCLC-B HCC patients were analyzed. The eligible population was divided into three groups for analysis of survival and prognostic factors; These were 21 HIV infected (HIV+) HCC patients treated with TACE (TACE+), 1293 non-HIV-infected (HIV-) HCC patients treated with TACE, and 150 HIV- HCC patients who only receive medication (TACE-) as a second control group. After 12 matching, 1- and 2-year survival of HIV+ TACE+ and HIV- TACE+ groups was 64.3% and 76.5% (P = 0.453) and 45.5% vs. 50.0% (P = 0.790) respectively. We also compared one and two-year survival between HIV+ TACE+ and HIV- TACE-. One-year overall survival was 64.3% vs. 45.7% (P = 0.097) and 2-year survival was 45.5% vs. 7.1% (P = 0.004). Multivariate analysis showed that the most important prognostic factors for survival were serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and Child-Pugh score and tumor size, while HIV status had no significant effect on prognosis statistically. CD4 levels below 200 may increase the risk of opportunistic infection after surgery, but after anti-infection and systematic supportive therapy, it has no effect on survival. HIV+ patients should have the same treatment opportunities as HIV- patients. If the patient’s immune status permits, we suggest that early TACE treatment should be administered to BCLC-B HCC patients, regardless of HIV infection.T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is caused by the accumulation of multiple genetic alterations. To determine the frequency of common genetic mutations and possible prognostic markers in childhood T-ALL, we performed targeted sequencing of 67 genes across 64 cases treated according to Taiwan Pediatric Oncology Group protocols between January 2002 and December 2015. Together, 302 variants were identified in 60 genes including 233 single nucleotide variants and 69 indels. Sixty-four samples had a median number of six genetic lesions each (range 1-17). Thirteen genes had mutation frequencies > 10%, and 5 were > 20%, with the highest being NOTCH1 (70.31%). Protocadherins FAT1 (32.81%) and FAT3 (17.19%), and the ubiquitin ligase component FBXW7 (28.13%) had higher mutation frequencies than previously reported. Other mutation frequencies (PHF6, DNM2, DNMT3A, CNOT3, and WT1) were within previously reported ranges. Three epigenetic-related genes (KMT2D, DNMT3A, and EZH2) were mutated in our cohort. JAK-STAT signaling pathway genes had mutation frequencies of 3-13% and were observed in 23 cases (35.94%). Changes to genes in the ErbB signaling pathway were detected in 20 cases (31.25%). Patients with NOTCH1/FBXW7 mutations and RAS/PTEN germline exhibited better 5-year overall survival rates.Many therapeutic drugs are compounds that can be represented by simple chemical structures, which contain important determinants of affinity at the site of action. Recently, graph convolutional neural network (GCN) models have exhibited excellent results in classifying the activity of such compounds. For models that make quantitative predictions of activity, more complex information has been utilized, such as the three-dimensional structures of compounds and the amino acid sequences of their respective target proteins. As another approach, we hypothesized that if sufficient experimental data were available and there were enough nodes in hidden layers, a simple compound representation would quantitatively predict activity with satisfactory accuracy. In this study, we report that GCN models constructed solely from the two-dimensional structural information of compounds demonstrated a high degree of activity predictability against 127 diverse targets from the ChEMBL database. Using the information entropy as a metric, we also show that the structural diversity had less effect on the prediction performance.

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