Detection of Coccidioides posadasii in a patient with meningitis using metagenomic next-generation sequencing: a case report.

BACKGROUND: Coccidioidomycosis is a systemic infection caused by dimorphic fungi Coccidioides spp. endemic to Southwestern United States and Central and South America. A history of residence and travel in these areas is essential for the diagnostic of coccidioidomycosis, which has highly variable symptoms ranging from asymptomatic to severe, disseminated infection, and even death. Immunocompromised patients of coccidioidomycosis experience a high risk of dissemination, chronic infection, and mortality. Meningitis is one of the most deleterious coccidioidomycosis and can cause various life-threatening complications. CASE PRESENTATION: Here we report a case of Coccidioides posadasii meningitis in a 49-year-old female who returned to China after one and a half years residence in Los Angeles, USA. The repeated routine cultures using CSF for bacteria or fungi were all negative. To hunt for an infectious etiology, the state-of-the-art technology metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) was then utilized, suggesting Coccidioides posadasii. Organizational pathological examination and polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) results subsequently confirmed the mNGS detection. CONCLUSION: To our knowledge, cases for coccidioidal meningitis have been rarely reported in China. While global travelling may spread this disease across continents and make the diagnosis more difficult. mNGS can detect almost all known pathogens with high sensitivity and specificity, especially for uncommon pathogen, such as Coccidioides posadasii in China.

MicroRNA 182 inhibits CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ Treg differentiation in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis.

MicroRNA 182 has been found to have a distinct contribution in the clonal expansion of activated- and functioning of specialized-helper T cells. In this study we knocked down microRNA 182 in vivo and induced experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) to determine the influences of microRNA 182 in the Treg cells functional specialization through Foxo1 dependent pathway in the peripheral lymphoid organs. Down-regulation of microRNA 182 significantly increased the proportions of Foxp3+ T cells in the peripheral lymph nodes and spleen. In vivo study verified a positive correlation between microRNA 182 levels and symptom severity of EAE, and a negative correlation between microRNA 182 and the transcriptional factor Foxp3. In vitro polarization study also confirmed the contribution of Foxo1 in microRNA 182 mediated down-regulation of Foxp3+ T cells. Together, our results provide evidence that during the development of EAE, microRNA 182 repressed Treg cells differentiation through the Foxo1 dependent pathway.

Adenosine receptor expression in a rat model of experimental autoimmune myasthenia gravis.

Extracellular adenosine is an essential negative regulator of immune reactions that acts by signaling via 4 distinct adenosine receptors. We evaluated adenosine receptor expression in Lewis rats presenting with experimental autoimmune myasthenia gravis (EAMG) to determine whether the expression of adenosine receptors are changed in the development and progression of EAMG. Lymphocyte A1AR and A2AAR mRNA and protein levels from lymphocytes harvested from the lymph nodes, spleen, and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of EAMG rats were decreased. A modest but not significant increase in A2BAR levels was observed in EAMG lymphocytes harvested from lymph nodes and PBMCs. No changes in A3AR expression were observed in lymphocytes harvested from lymph nodes, spleen, or PBMCs following EAMG induction. Results presented in this report showed that the expression levels and the distribution pattern of adenosine receptors were altered in EAMG lymphocytes.

De-Noising of Photoacoustic Microscopy Images by Attentive Generative Adversarial Network.

As a hybrid imaging technology, photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) imaging suffers from noise due to the maximum permissible exposure of laser intensity, attenuation of ultrasound in the tissue, and the inherent noise of the transducer. De-noising is an image processing method to reduce noise, and PAM image quality can be recovered. However, previous de-noising techniques usually heavily rely on manually selected parameters, resulting in unsatisfactory and slow de-noising performance for different noisy images, which greatly hinders practical and clinical applications. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based method to remove noise from PAM images without manual selection of settings for different noisy images. An attention enhanced generative adversarial network is used to extract image features and adaptively remove various levels of Gaussian, Poisson, and Rayleigh noise. The proposed method is demonstrated on both synthetic and real datasets, including phantom (leaf veins) and in vivo (mouse ear blood vessels and zebrafish pigment) experiments. In the in vivo experiments using synthetic datasets, our method achieves the improvement of 6.53 dB and 0.26 in peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity metrics, respectively. The results show that compared with previous PAM de-noising methods, our method exhibits good performance in recovering images qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, the de-noising processing speed of 0.016 s is achieved for an image with 256×256 pixels, which has the potential for real-time applications. Our approach is effective and practical for the de-noising of PAM images.

Flame Retardancy Properties and Rheological Behavior of PP/DiDOPO Conjugated Flame Retardant Composites.

A bridged 9,10-dihydro-9-oxa-10-phosphaphenanthrene-10-oxide derivative (DiDOPO) with conjugated structure was utilized as a novel conjugated flame retardant, Polypropylene(PP)/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites were papered by being melt-extruding with a twin-screw extruder. The flame retardant efficiency of PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites were investigated by cone calorimetry, limiting oxygen index (LOI), vertical burning test (UL-94). Besides, the rheological behavior of PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites are measured by ARES rheometer. The results showed that when the content of DiDOPO with conjugated structure was 16 wt%, the LOI values of PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites was 24%, and PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites reaches V-0 grade. The heat release rate (HRR), total heat release rate (THR) and CO2 of PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites decreased, so PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites had excellent flame retardant effect. Rheological analysis results indicated that DiDOPO with conjugated structure suppressed the melt dripping of PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites by enhancing the melt stability. The results showed that the DiDOPO with conjugated structure can significantly enhance the flame retardancy effect of PP/DiDOPO conjugated flame retardant composites. In addition, the materials PP/DiDOPO might be with low conductivity and charge transport mobility.

Flame-retardant properties and mechanism of LGF/PBT/DOPO-HQ-conjugated flame-retardant composites.

In this article, long fiber reinforced polybutylene terephthalate (LGF/PBT/DOPO-HQ) flame-retardant composites were prepared using 10-(2,5-dihydroxy phenyl)-10H-9-oxa-10-phosphaphenanthrene-10-oxide (DOPO-HQ) as the conjugated flame-retardant. The effects of different flame-retardant contents on the combustion properties of the composites were investigated. The results showed that after adding 14% of DOPO-HQ, the flame-retardant effect of the composite reached the V-0 level of UL-94 fire rating with an ultimate oxygen index (LOI) of 26.4%. The average heat release rate (Av-HRR), peak heat release rate (PHRR), and total heat release rate (THR) decreased by 45.9, 56.5, and 32.6%, respectively. This shows that LGF/PBT/DOPO-HQ composite has good flame-retardant properties. Meanwhile, the flame-retardant mechanism of cohesive phase and gas-phase synergy during the combustion of flame retardants was analyzed by carbon layer morphology and dynamic thermal decomposition.

Photoacoustic microscopy with sparse data by convolutional neural networks.

The point-by-point scanning mechanism of photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) results in low-speed imaging, limiting the application of PAM. In this work, we propose a method to improve the quality of sparse PAM images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), thereby speeding up image acquisition while maintaining good image quality. The CNN model utilizes attention modules, residual blocks, and perceptual losses to reconstruct the sparse PAM image, which is a mapping from a 1/4 or 1/16 low-sampling sparse PAM image to a latent fully-sampled one. The model is trained and validated mainly on PAM images of leaf veins, showing effective improvements quantitatively and qualitatively. Our model is also tested using in vivo PAM images of blood vessels of mouse ears and eyes. The results suggest that the model can enhance the quality of the sparse PAM image of blood vessels in several aspects, which facilitates fast PAM and its clinical applications.

Novel microcapsules for internal curing of high-performance cementitious system.

Conventional internal curing materials for high-performance cementitious system cannot easily have artificial modifications, such that the curing effect is difficult to control during the process. In this study, a novel microcapsule is proposed for controlled internal curing of cement-based materials. The microcapsules are synthesized by a double emulsion method to form a polymer shell-water core structure. The sensitivity of polymer shell to alkaline environments is used to trigger the release of core water. Thus, water release can be controlled by tailoring the shell thickness and microcapsules sizes by changing the polymer dosage and stirring rate during synthesis. The experimental results indicate that the novel microcapsules can effectively release water for internal curing of a cementitious matrix, which exhibits a high curing efficiency in terms of nearly autogenous shrinkage and increases the compressive strength. The novel microcapsules could be promising internal curing agents to enhance high-performance cement-based materials.

Determination of hydroxyanthraquinoids in Rhubarb by cyclodextrin-modified micellar electrokinetic chromatography using a mixed micellar system of sodium dodecyl sulfate and sodium cholate.

A cyclodextrin-modified micellar electrokinetic chromatographic (CD-MEKC) method was established to determine five hydroxyanthraquinoids in Rhubarb. The five components were successfully separated by using the mixed micellar system consisting of 20 mmol/l sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and 20 mmol/l sodium cholate (SC) with 10 mmol/l beta-cyclodextrin in phosphate buffer (pH 10.4). The separation was optimized by adjusting buffer pH, concentrations of beta-cyclodextrin and SC and applied voltage. The proposed method was validated and applied to the determination of two commercial Rhubarb samples. The results obtained were satisfactory.

[Determination of six effective components in Rheum by cyclodextrin modified micellar electrokinetic chromatography].

AIM: To determine six effective components (aloe-emodin, rhein, emodin, rhaponticin, physcion and chrysophanol) in Rheum. METHODS: Using buffer solution containing 20 mmol.L-1 borax, 20 mmol.L-1 sodium deoxycholate (SDC), 20 mmol.L-1 sodium taurocholate (STC), 15 mmol.L-1 beta-cyclodextrin (beta-CD) and O-phthalic acid as the internal standard, the six components were determined by cyclodextrin modified micellar electrokinetic chromatography. RESULTS: In less than 25 min, aloe-emodin, rhein, emodin, rhaponticin, physion and chrysophanol were separated. The separation conditions were optimized by adjusting buffer pH, concentrations of SDC, STC and beta-CD. The linearity ranges of aloe-emodin, rhein, emodin, rhaponticin, physcion and chrysophanol were 4-34, 5-40, 4-60, 5-80, 6-90 and 5-85 micrograms.mL-1 respectively. Relative standard deviation (RSD) of the method was less than 2.2%. The recoveries of aloe-emodin, rhein, emodin, rhaponticin, physcion and chrysophanol were 100.0%, 98.3%, 100.4%, 94.6%. 95.2% and 93.8% respectively. Raw Rheum, Mongolian Rheum and Rheum tanguticum samples were analyzed. CONCLUSION: This method can be an effective one for identification of Rhubarb.

Determination of active components in rhubarb and study of their hydrophobicity by micellar electrokinetic chromatography.

A micellar electrokinetic chromatographic (MEKC) method has been developed for the determination of five anthraquinones and one distyrene derivative in rhubarb. The separation conditions were optimized and two kinds of rhubarb plants and rhubarb-containing medicines were analyzed. The negatively charged solutes migrated toward the anode and were retarded by their interaction with the micelle. Hydrophobicity of the solutes was studied by both MEKC with SDS and SDS-free capillary zone electrophoresis in the buffer of 15 mmol/L NaH(2)PO(4)+ 20 mmol/L borax and 15% ethanol (v/v). Linear correlation between log k' and log P(OW) was obtained for the five anthraquinones in SDS micelle system. The capacity factor, k', and free energy differences delta(deltaG) derived from this method provided fundamental information on the interaction between the solutes and the micelle.