[Progress of researches on acupuncture treatment of allergic rhinitis].

Acupuncture therapy has been widely used in clinical treatment of allergic rhinitis (AR), and can induce a positive therapeutic effect through multi-targets and multi-aspects. In recent 10 years, the research on the mechanisms of acupuncture in treating AR mainly focused on humoral immunity, cellular immunity, cell apoptosis, inflammatory mediators and factors, neuropeptides, etc. By regulating the level of immunoglobulin in the blood, acupuncture intervention can restore the relative balance of cellular immune response, reduce the accumulation of eosinophils and promote apoptosis, down-regulate the expression of related inflammatory mediators and factors, regulate the excitability of related nerves, modulate the release of neuropeptides and other ways to diminish the inflammatory reaction of nasal mucosa, and enhance the repair and protection of nasal mucosa, relieve the nasal symptoms at last. On the basis of the existing studies, the follow-up research should make use of the advantages of acupuncture intervention, refine the treatment process, and deeply explore the feasibility of acupuncture treatment of AR, further promote the combination of mechanism study and clinical practice, provide references for clinical application. Moreover, some shortcomings exist, for example, the unknown correlation between the therapeutic effect and duration of treatment, the unknown correlation between the effect of acupuncture and various targets, and disconnection between experimental research achievements and clinical application, etc.

Attentive Siamese Networks for Automatic Modulation Classification Based on Multitiming Constellation Diagrams.

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an essential part in a cognitive radio receiver. Benefited from the discriminative constellation characteristics among most modulations, AMC methods based on constellation diagrams usually achieve pleasant performance. However, in noncooperation communication systems, constellation diagrams expressing modulations explicitly are difficult to obtain via blind symbol timing synchronization, especially in complicated wireless channels. Therefore, this article proposes a novel constellation diagram-based AMC architecture called attentive Siamese networks (ASNs) by considering multitiming constellation diagrams (MCDs) and selecting the proper symbol timings at the feature level, which is a more robust way than the conventional signal-level symbol timing synchronization. In detail, convolutional neural networks sharing the same parameters first extract deep feature vectors for MCDs. Then, an attention inference module weights all the deep feature vectors. Finally, AMC is realized based on the weighted feature vectors. Moreover, the ASN architecture can be trained end-to-end. Comparing with the state-of-the-art methods that take diverse representations of received baseband signals as input, experimental results based on the RadioML 2018.01A dataset and non-Gaussian noise dataset demonstrate that ASN achieves a remarkable improvement, whose classification accuracy goes over 99% when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) > 10 dB.

The inhibiting effect of the transcription factor p53 on dengue virus infection by activating the type I interferon.

To investigate the role of the transcription factor p53 in the course of the dengue virus (DV) infection. The human hepatocellular carcinoma cell strain HepG2 with a low expression level of p53 was built by using the retroviral-mediated RNA interference technology, and was detected by Western blot. The wild group and the interference group were respectively infected by the type 2 DV. The viral titration was detected by the Vero plaque assay, the viral multiplication was detected by the immunofluorescence, the cell apoptosis after virus infection was detected by FCM and the level of IFN-ß was analyzed by ELISA. Compared to the wild group, the expression level of p53 in the interference group decreased significantly, which indicated that the HepG2 cell strain with the low expression level of p53 was successfully built. 24h after DV infection, the virus titration in the interference group was 100 times higher than that in the wild group. The result of the immunofluorescence showed that, the amount of green fluorescent cells in the interference group was significant higher than that in the wild group. It was indicated that the DV infection was inhibited by p53. However, 24h after DV infection, there was no significant difference in the amount of apoptotic cells in both groups. And the amount of IFN-ß in the wild group increased 6 times. The DV infection was inhibited by the transcription factor p53 by activating type I interferon pathway other than promoting the cell apoptosis.

Application of the SCCmec element in the molecular typing of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Acquisition of the staphylococcal chromosome cassette mec (SCCmec) is one of the key reasons for the resistance of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). SCCmec is composed of a mec gene complex encoding the PBP2a determinant that is responsible for the ß-lactam resistance of MRSA, and a ccr gene complex encoding recombinases that mediate the integration of SCCmec into and its excision from the recipient chromosome, and so-called three junkyard (J) regions of different sizes. The SCCmec elements carried by MRSA from different geographic locations are diverse, and each type contains characteristic DNA fragments in size. These characteristics of SCCmec element may facilitate the usage of SCCmec in the molecular typing of MRSA strains. In this review, we summarize the structure and function of SCCmec elecments, and discuss the application of SCCmec elements in the molecular typing of MRSA.

[Effect of schistosomiasis control strategy based on infection source control of Poyang Lake region in Yongxiu County promotion zone].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effect of schistosomiasis control strategy with emphasis on infection source control in the Yongxiu County promotion zone of Poyang Lake region. METHODS: The Wucheng Township of Yongxiu County was selected as the observation site, and the effect of the comprehensive control strategy was evaluated by using the method of field surveys combined with retrospective investigations. RESULTS: In 2010, there were 17 persons whose stool tests for schistosome infection were positive, and the number of calculated schistosomiasis patients was 2,331. The infection rate of cattle was 4.5%, and the area with infected Oncomelania hupensis snails was 10.00 hm². In 2011, the comprehensive control strategy was carried out, and in 2012, there were no cattle in the promotion zone. In 2013 and 2014, there were no schistosomiasis patients with positive stool tests. In 2014, no schistosome infected snails were found. CONCLUSION: The control strategy with emphasis on infection source control effectively controls the transmission of schistosomiasis in Yongxiu County promotion zone.

ROCK is involved in vimentin phosphorylation and rearrangement induced by dengue virus.

Our previous study showed that dengue virus 2 (DENV2) infection induces rearrangement of vimentin into dense structures at the perinuclear area. However, the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon is poorly characterized. In the present work, we found that vimentin and Ser71 phosphorylated vimentin display similar distributions in DENV2-infected cells. DENV2 infection also induced ROCK activation and phosphorylation of vimentin at Ser71 as the DENV2 infection progressed. Furthermore, Ser71 phosphorylation and vimentin rearrangement induced by DENV2 infection were blocked by the ROCK inhibitor Y-27632. In addition, DENV2 led to endoplasmic reticulum (ER) redistribution in the perinuclear region of the host cells, which was partially blocked by pretreatment with Y-27632. Together, these data support indicate that ROCK may have a role in governing regulating vimentin and ER rearrangement during DENV2 infection. We hypothesize that DENV2 infection, via ROCK activation, induces both vimentin rearrangement and ER redistribution around the perinuclear region, which may play a structural role in anchoring DENV2 to replication sites.

Synthesis and biological activities of novel amine-derived bis-azoles as potential antibacterial and antifungal agents.

A series of novel amine-derived bis-azole compounds were designed by the systematical structural modification of Fluconazole and synthesized by a convenient and efficient method, and the antimicrobial activities for all prepared compounds were evaluated in vitro against six representative bacterial strains and two fungal strains. Bioactive results indicated that some synthesized compounds exhibited moderate or even better activities in comparison with the reference drugs. Especially, bis-imidazole 5b and its salts gave significant antibacterial efficacy against all tested bacteria strains including MRSA, while bis-triazoles 4b-c and their corresponding salts exhibited better activities against Candida albicans, Bacillus proteus than standard drugs Fluconazole and Norfloxacin respectively. Unexpectedly, bis-bromides 3a-f presented excellent activities against all tested microbial strains.

A novel carrier molecule for high-level expression of peptide antibiotics in Escherichia coli.

Peptide antibiotics are often hard to express in engineered bacteria at high level. According to the properties of peptide antibiotics, a heterologous protein PaP3.30, encoded by ORF30 of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteriophage PaP3, was selected as a carrier molecule. The gene of the carrier molecule was constructed into the plasmid pQE-32 to give rise to the vector pQE-PaP30 for expression of peptide antibiotics in Escherichia coli. A his-tagged fusion protein was genetically constructed with a peptide antibiotic at its carboxy terminus. The novel carrier molecule was used for high-level expression of six peptide antibiotics with different sizes and isoelectric points in E. coli, which are hPAB-beta, MSI-78, Melletin, hBD-1, Cecropin A, and an ovine anion peptide. And further, one of six peptide antibiotics, hPAB-beta (an analog of a human peptide antibiotic), was taken as an example for studies of recovery of interesting products from the fusion partner, purification and antimicrobial activity evaluation. The results indicated that the expressed fusion protein existed as an inclusion body in the cytoplasm and the expression amounts of six peptide antibiotic fusions are all higher than 34% of the total cell protein. The expression products could be easily purified by Ni-NTA chromatography. Cyanogen bromide was used to cut at the methionine linker between the carrier and hPAB-beta peptide. hPAB-beta was recovered from the fusion partner and purified to homogeneity with High S cation-exchange and Bio-gel P6 gel chromatography. The bactericidal activities of the purified recombinant hPAB-beta against P. aeruginosa are 31-64 microg/ml, and against Staphylococcus aureus are > or = 128 microg/ml, being comparable to that of the chemical synthesis peptide. These results show that the carrier molecule can result in high-level expression of peptide antibiotics, and expression products can be easily recovered from their fusion partner and retain their bioactivity.