The impacts of national centralized drug procurement policy on drug utilization of medical institutions: an empirical study in a county-level hospital in China.

PURPOSE: Under the background of the regular implementation of the National Centralized Drug Procurement (NCDP) policy, this study aimed to assess the impacts of the NCDP policy on drug utilization of county-level medical institutions, and probe into the influencing factors of the changes in drug utilization. METHOD: A pre-post study was applied using inpatient data from a county-level medical institution in Nanjing. Drug utilization behavior of medical institutions of 88 most commonly used policy-related drugs (by generic name, including bid-winning and bid-non-winning brands) was analyzed, and the substitution of bid-winning brands for brand-name drugs after policy intervention was evaluated. RESULTS: After policy intervention, 43.18% of policy-related drugs realized the substitution of bid-winning brands for bid-non-winning brands (6.82% of complete substitution, 36.36% of partial substitution). Meanwhile, 40.90% of policy-related drugs failed to realize brand substitution. Multiple factors affected brand substitution, including: (1) Policy effect: brand substitution was more obvious after the intervention of the first and third round of NCDP. (2) Drug market competition: the greater the price reduction of bid-non-winning brands, the more the drugs for the same indication, the more likely that medical institutions keep using the same brands as they did before policy intervention. (3) Previous drug utilization of medical institutions: brand substitution was more obvious in drugs with large number of prescriptions and weak preference for brand-name drugs. CONCLUSION: The NCDP policy promoted the substitution of bid-winning brands for bid-non-winning brands. However, the NCDP policy remained to be further implemented in county-level medical institutions. Policy implememtation efforts, drug market competition and drug utilization of medical institutions would affect the implementation of the NCDP policy.

Simulation Experiment of Environmental Impact of Deep-Sea Mining: Response of Phytoplankton Community to Polymetallic Nodules and Sediment Enrichment in Surface Water.

In this paper, simulation experiments were conducted to study the response of phytoplankton biomass and community composition to the influence of polymetallic nodules and sediment at four stations in the western Pacific in 2021. Chlorophyll a, pico-phytoplankton cell abundance, and metal concentration were measured before and after 24 h of deck incubation. The results show that there were three different patterns of response, namely, restrained, stimulated, and unaffected patterns. The restrained pattern appeared in the filtered treatments at station Incub.01, and the stimulated pattern appeared in the unfiltered treatments at station Incub.02. The response of the phytoplankton was not detectable at stations Incub.03 and 04. Regardless, positive and negative responses were found in the dominant pico-phytoplankton group-Prochlorococcus-and with slight variation in Synechococcus. The concentration of manganese varied among the treatments compared to that of iron and other metals. The factors affecting the growth of the phytoplankton in this study were metal concentrations and turbidity. The phytoplankton biomass baseline may also have played an important role: the lower the biomass, the higher the growth rate. This study proved that deep-sea polymetallic nodule mining will have a specific impact on surface phytoplankton biomass, but turbidity and particle retention time could be important factors in mitigating the extent of the impact.

Distribution and assessment of heavy metals in suspended particles in the Sundarban mangrove river, Bangladesh.

The suspended particulate matter (SPM) is an important carrier of heavy metals transportation from land to sea, so it is significant to study the heavy metal pollution in SPM. The distribution and assessment of five heavy metals (Mn, Cr, Ni, Cu, and Pb) in SPM collected from Passur River and its estuary in Sundarban were studied in combination with water temperature, salinity, and turbidity. The results show that the heavy metal content and distribution in SPM are mainly controlled by runoff input, hydrodynamic process and the interaction process of salt and fresh water in estuaries. The quality evaluation results of heavy metals in SPM show that pollution degree is light. Studies on the heavy metals in SPM are of great significance to comprehensively evaluate regional pollution status and carry out early warning.

Pathways of cadmium fluxes in the root of the hyperaccumulator Celosia argentea Linn.

In order to study the mechanism of cadmium (Cd) uptake by the roots of Celosia argentea Linn. (Amaranthaceae), the effects of various inhibitors, ion channel blockers, and hydroponic conditions on Cd2+ fluxes in the roots were characterized using non-invasive micro-test technology (NMT). The net Cd2+ flux (72.5 pmol∙cm-2∙s-1) in roots that had been pretreated with Mn was significantly higher than that in non-pretreated roots (58.1 pmol∙cm-2∙s-1), indicating that Mn pretreatment enhanced Cd uptake by the roots. This finding may be explained by the fact that the addition of Mn significantly increased the expression of the transporter gene and thus promoted Cd uptake and transport. In addition, Mn pretreatment resulted in an increase in root growth, which may in turn promote root vigor. The uncoupler 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) caused a significant reduction in net Cd2+ fluxes in the roots, by 70.5% and 41.4% when exposed to Mn and Cd stress, respectively. In contrast, a P-type ATPase inhibitor (Na3VO4) had only a small effect on net Cd2+ fluxes to the plant roots, indicating that ATP has a relatively minor role in Cd uptake by roots. La3+ (a Ca channel inhibitor) had a more significant inhibitory effect on net Cd2+ fluxes than did TEA (a K channel inhibitor). Therefore, Cd uptake by plant roots may occur mainly through Ca channels rather than K channels. In summary, uptake of Cd by the roots of C. argentea appears to occur via several types of ion channels, and Mn can promote Cd uptake.

An Enhanced Pedestrian Visual-Inertial SLAM System Aided with Vanishing Point in Indoor Environments.

The visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a feasible indoor positioning system that combines the visual SLAM with inertial navigation. There are accumulated drift errors in inertial navigation due to the state propagation and the bias of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor. The visual-inertial SLAM can correct the drift errors via loop detection and local pose optimization. However, if the trajectory is not a closed loop, the drift error might not be significantly reduced. This paper presents a novel pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR)-aided visual-inertial SLAM, taking advantage of the enhanced vanishing point (VP) observation. The VP is integrated into the visual-inertial SLAM as an external observation without drift error to correct the system drift error. Additionally, the estimated trajectory's scale is affected by the IMU measurement errors in visual-inertial SLAM. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) velocity is employed to constrain the double integration result of acceleration measurement from the IMU. Furthermore, to enhance the proposed system's robustness and the positioning accuracy, the local optimization based on the sliding window and the global optimization based on the segmentation window are proposed. A series of experiments are conducted using the public ADVIO dataset and a self-collected dataset to compare the proposed system with the visual-inertial SLAM. Finally, the results demonstrate that the proposed optimization method can effectively correct the accumulated drift error in the proposed visual-inertial SLAM system.

Phytoextraction of cadmium-contaminated soil by Celosia argentea Linn.: A long-term field study.

Phytoextraction using Celosia argentea Linn. can potentially decontaminate Cd-contaminated soils. However, most earlier studies have been conducted at laboratory scale and for a relatively short remediation period. To evaluate the phytoextraction efficiency of C. argentea combined with different soil amendments (ammonium chloride, Bacillus megaterium, and citric acid), an 18-month field experiment was carried out in a farmland soil contaminated with 3.68 mg kg-1 Cd by mine tailings in southern China. Soil Cd concentrations were decreased by 6.34 ± 0.73% after the three harvestings (with no amendments), which was 2.27 times that of the no-planting control (p < 0.05). Application of ammonium chloride, B. megaterium, and citric acid increased the overall Cd reduction rate in soil by 40.5%, 46.1%, and 105%, respectively. The application of citric acid decreased total Cd in soil by up to 16.9% in the rhizosphere soil and 13.0% in the bulk soil. The highest annual shoot biomass yield and Cd extraction amount reached 8.79 t ha-1 and 273 g ha-1. Acid-soluble Cd fraction in the rhizosphere was significantly lower compared to that in the bulk soil (p < 0.05), which indicates that mobile Cd in the rhizosphere was taken up by the roots vastly. C. argentea phytoextraction also improved soil metabolic functions by increasing the activities of soil enzymes (urease, invertase, phosphatase, and catalase). These findings demonstrate that Cd phytoextraction using C. argentea with the application of soil amendments can greatly improve the quality of Cd-contaminated soils.

Deciphering the toxic effects of metals in gold mining area: Microbial community tolerance mechanism and change of antibiotic resistance genes.

Mine tailing dumps represent significant threats to ecological environments due to the presence of toxic substances. The present work investigated the relationship among microbial activity, the community, antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and trace metals in soil surrounding gold mine tailings. Using microbial metabolic activity and high-throughput sequencing analysis, we found the trace metals Cd and Hg could be main factors influencing the microbial community. According to bacterial co-occurrence pattern analysis, the effects of total cadmium and total mercury on bacterial diversity are potentially mediated by influencing bacteria community in the keystone module II. Additionally, most of metal-resistant bacteria belong to Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria, and the metal tolerance suggested to be linked with various functions including replication, recombination and repair, as well as inorganic ion transport and metabolism based on PICRUSt2 analysis. We also found that metals generated by mining activity may trigger the co-selection of antibiotic resistance in the phyla Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria due to co-resistance or cross resistance. Additionally, PLS-PM analysis revealed that metals could indirectly affect ARGs by influencing bacterial diversity in gold mining areas.

Cyclodextrin functionalized 3D-graphene for the removal of Cr(VI) with the easy and rapid separation strategy.

As a useful heavy metal ion, chromium has seen its applications in various fields. While it is also a toxic contaminant in water and may cause serious threats to the environment and human health. To develop a novel material with good adsorption capacity and easy solid-liquid separation strategy was necessary and significant. In this paper, the ß-cyclodextrin (ß-CD) functionalized three-dimensional structured graphene foam (CDGF) was successfully synthesized with the facile and one-step hydrothermal method. The SEM, BET, XRD, FT-IR and XPS analysis were carried out and the results confirmed the successfully grafting of ß-CD onto GF. The batch adsorption of Cr(VI) was also taken out and the CDGF possessed good selectivity compared with other metal ions at pH = 3. The adsorption capacity reduced gradually as the initial pH of the Cr(VI) solution grew higher, which was because the anionic species of Cr(VI) were partial to the positively charged surface of CDGF. The easy separation strategy of the CDGF was also demonstrated and the CDGF could be taken out easily with a tweezer after the adsorption of Cr(VI), which significantly simplified the separation procedure and reduced time. By comparing the FT-IR and XPD analysis results, the adsorption mechanism was explored and the hydroxyl groups on CDGF played the main role in the adsorption process. This work brings a novel material for the adsorption of Cr(VI) from water and provides an innovative direction for the easy and fast solid-liquid separation strategy in the adsorption and other application fields.

Adiponectin is down-regulated in bone marrow interstitial fluid in hematological malignancy.

Adipokines play a role in carcinogenesis in a variety of malignancies. These findings were established with regard to serum adipokines and malignancies. However, the expression of adipokines in bone marrow fluid remains unclear, and an investigation of the correlation between bone marrow adipokines and hematological malignancy is needed. The present study was designed to detect adipokine concentrations, including adiponectin, leptin and resistin, in bone marrow interstitial fluid from patients with hematological malignancy and controlled counterparts. The correlations between adipokines, body mass index, clinical parameters, and hematological malignancy were assessed. A total of 80 bone marrow samples were assessed for values of adipokines, adiponectin, leptin and resistin. Patients with hematological malignancy had lower levels of adiponectin. Adiponectin from leukemia bone marrow expressed significantly low values. The adiponectin levels were inversely correlated with body mass index. In conclusion, adiponectin was decreased in bone marrow from patients with leukemia and negatively correlated with body mass index.

Characterization of white spot syndrome virus VP52B and its interaction with VP26.

White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is one of the major pathogens of cultured shrimp. Identification of envelope protein interactions has become a central issue for the understanding of WSSV assembly. In this paper, WSSV envelope protein VP52B was fused with GST-tag and expressed in Escherichia coli BL-21(DE3). Immunogold-electron microscopy revealed that VP52B was located on the outside surface of WSSV virions. Far-Western blotting analysis suggested that VP52B might directly interact with a major viral envelope protein VP26, and their interaction was confirmed by GST pull-down assay. Further investigation showed that the VP52B binding domain was located between residues 135-170 of VP26. These findings will enhance our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of WSSV morphogenesis.

Characterization of white spot syndrome virus immediate-early gene promoters.

Twenty-one immediate-early (IE) genes of white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) have been identified so far. However, the transcriptional regulation of WSSV IE genes remains largely unknown. In this report, the 5' flanking regions of 18 WSSV IE genes were cloned and eight functional promoter regions were identified. WSSV IE gene promoters normally contained a TATA box approximately 30 bp upstream of the transcriptional initiation site. Also, the cyclic AMP response element (CRE; TGACGTCA) was frequently found within the WSSV IE promoter regions. Mutations of the CREs of WSSV IE promoters P403 and P465 reduced their activity significantly, suggesting that these elements have a role in WSSV IE gene transcription. Our findings provide a more global view of WSSV IE gene promoters and will facilitate the in-depth investigation of viral gene transcriptional regulation.

Identification of three immediate-early genes of white spot syndrome virus.

Viral immediate-early (IE) genes generally encode regulatory proteins that are critical for viral replication. Their transcription, which is independent of de novo viral protein synthesis, is driven directly by host transcription factors. In this study, we examined promoter activities of 12 predicted regulatory genes of white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) belonging to the zinc finger protein family by EGFP-reporter assays in High Five cells. The results showed that the promoters of three genes (wsv056, wsv403 and wsv465) could drive reporter gene expression, and RT-PCR analysis revealed that their expression in WSSV-infected primary crayfish hemocytes was insensitive to the protein synthesis inhibitor cycloheximide (CHX). Therefore, they are IE genes of WSSV.