Epidemiologic changes of a longitudinal surveillance study spanning 51 years of scrub typhus in mainland China.

Scrub typhus may be one of the world's most prevalent, neglected and serious, but easily treatable, febrile diseases. It has become a significant potential threat to public health in China. In this study we used national disease surveillance data to analyze the incidence and spatial-temporal distribution of scrub typhus in mainland China during 1952-1989 and 2006-2018. Descriptive epidemiological methods and spatial-temporal epidemiological methods were used to investigate the epidemiological trends and identify high-risk regions of scrub typhus infection. Over the 51-year period, a total of 182,991 cases and 186 deaths were notified. The average annual incidence was 0.13 cases/100,000 population during 1952-1989. The incidence increased sharply from 0.09/100,000 population in 2006 to 1.93/100,000 population in 2018 and then exponentially increased after 2006. The incidence was significantly higher in females than males (χ2 = 426.32, P < 0.001). Farmers had a higher incidence of scrub typhus than non-farmers (χ2 = 684.58, P < 0.001). The majority of cases each year were reported between July and November with peak incidence occurring during October each year. The trend surface analysis showed that the incidence of scrub typhus increased gradually from north to south, and from east and west to the central area. The spatial autocorrelation analysis showed that a spatial positive correlation existed in the prevalence of scrub typhus on a national scale, which had the characteristic of aggregated distribution (I = 0.533, P < 0.05). LISA analysis showed hotspots (High-High) were primarily located in the southern and southwestern provinces of China with the geographical area expanding annually. These findings provide scientific evidence for the surveillance and control of scrub typhus which may contribute to targeted strategies and measures for the government.

Epidemiological characteristics and spatiotemporal patterns of scrub typhus in Yunnan Province from 2006 to 2017.

Scrub typhus is an acute infectious disease in humans. A temporal, spatial and epidemiologic study was conducted to understand the characteristics of scrub typhus in Yunnan, to assist public health prevention and control measures. Based on the data on all cases reported in Yunnan during 2006-2017, we characterized the epidemiological features. Spatio-temporal patterns and Q-type cluster method were adopted to analyze the incidence of scrub typhus in Yunnan. In total, 27,838 scrub typhus cases were reported in Yunnan during 2006-2017. Of these, 49.53% (13,787) were male and 50.47% (14,051) were female (P > 0.05). Most patients were farmers (71.70%) (P < 0.05) and children aged 0-5 years (13.16%) (P < 0.01), which accounted for 84.86% of the total cases. An almost 20-fold increase in the number of patients was observed in 2017 (6,337 cases) compared to 2006 (307 cases). Baoshan and Lincang had the most cases accounting for 41.94%, while Diqing had the lowest incidence (only 3 cases). Sixteen municipalities infected were classified into three groups numbered in sequence. The incidence of scrub typhus in Yunnan is high and the annual incidence increased noticeably over time. Our results also indicate that surveillance and public education need to be focused on Baoshan, Lincang and Dehong.

A hybrid variable selection strategy based on continuous shrinkage of variable space in multivariate calibration.

When analyzing high-dimensional near-infrared (NIR) spectral datasets, variable selection is critical to improving models' predictive abilities. However, some methods have many limitations, such as a high risk of overfitting, time-intensiveness, or large computation demands, when dealing with a high number of variables. In this study, we propose a hybrid variable selection strategy based on the continuous shrinkage of variable space which is the core idea of variable combination population analysis (VCPA). The VCPA-based hybrid strategy continuously shrinks the variable space from big to small and optimizes it based on modified VCPA in the first step. It then employs iteratively retaining informative variables (IRIV) and a genetic algorithm (GA) to carry out further optimization in the second step. It takes full advantage of VCPA, GA, and IRIV, and makes up for their drawbacks in the face of high numbers of variables. Three NIR datasets and three variable selection methods including two widely-used methods (competitive adaptive reweighted sampling, CARS and genetic algorithm-interval partial least squares, GA-iPLS) and one hybrid method (variable importance in projection coupled with genetic algorithm, VIP-GA) were used to investigate the improvement of VCPA-based hybrid strategy. The results show that VCPA-GA and VCPA-IRIV significantly improve model's prediction performance when compared with other methods, indicating that the modified VCPA step is a very efficient way to filter the uninformative variables and VCPA-based hybrid strategy is a good and promising strategy for variable selection in NIR. The MATLAB source codes of VCPA-GA and VCPA-IRIV can be freely downloaded in the website: https://cn.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/profile/authors/5526470-yonghuan-yun.

Monoterpenoid indole alkaloids from Alstonia mairei and their cytotoxicity.

Phytochemical investigation on the 70% ethanol extract of the leaves of Alstonia mairei resulted in the isolation of three new monoterpenoid indole alkaloids, alstomairines A-C (1-3), along with one known compound, alpneumine A (4). Structural elucidation of all the compounds was accomplished by spectral methods such as 1D and 2D NMR, IR, UV, and HRESIMS. The isolated compounds were tested in vitro for cytotoxic activities against four osteosarcoma cell lines. Consequently, alkaloids 2 and 3 exhibited cytotoxic activities for all tested tumor cell lines with IC50 values from 9.2 to 13.0 µM.

Complete chloroplast genome sequences of Praxelis (Eupatorium catarium Veldkamp), an important invasive species.

Praxelis (Eupatorium catarium Veldkamp) is a new hazardous invasive plant species that has caused serious economic losses and environmental damage in the Northern hemisphere tropical and subtropical regions. Although previous studies focused on detecting the biological characteristics of this plant to prevent its expansion, little effort has been made to understand the impact of Praxelis on the ecosystem in an evolutionary process. The genetic information of Praxelis is required for further phylogenetic identification and evolutionary studies. Here, we report the complete Praxelis chloroplast (cp) genome sequence. The Praxelis chloroplast genome is 151,410 bp in length including a small single-copy region (18,547 bp) and a large single-copy region (85,311 bp) separated by a pair of inverted repeats (IRs; 23,776 bp). The genome contains 85 unique and 18 duplicated genes in the IR region. The gene content and organization are similar to other Asteraceae tribe cp genomes. We also analyzed the whole cp genome sequence, repeat structure, codon usage, contraction of the IR and gene structure/organization features between native and invasive Asteraceae plants, in order to understand the evolution of organelle genomes between native and invasive Asteraceae. Comparative analysis identified the 14 markers containing greater than 2% parsimony-informative characters, indicating that they are potential informative markers for barcoding and phylogenetic analysis. Moreover, a sister relationship between Praxelis and seven other species in Asteraceae was found based on phylogenetic analysis of 28 protein-coding sequences. Complete cp genome information is useful for plant phylogenetic and evolutionary studies within this invasive species and also within the Asteraceae family.