Inheritance and innovation: maintain academic communications in microsurgery under the normalized prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemics.

Chinese Journal of Microsurgery, based on the premise of doing well in the prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemics, shall keep on driving on the inheritance and innovation, carry forward the spirit of microsurgery, give full play to the advantages of microsurgery technology and improve the level of surgical repair and reconstruction, as well as try new ways for academic communications and give full play to the roles of an academic platform for a professional magazine;Clinical Orthopaedic Microsurgery (internal communication), the internal journal of editorial office, is the "showcase in China" to highlight and disseminate the achievements in microsurgery, focus on the support for the Chinese young microsurgeons who work in the front-line of medical services, provide a platform effectively for the young microsurgeons in China to actively participate in the Sino-English literary exchange, and truly "publish the papers on the land of our motherland".Copyright © 2022 by the authors.

The Impact of the Covid19 Pandemic on Patients with Peripheral Artery Disease

Background The impact of COVID-19 on major adverse lower extremity (MALE) and cardiovascular events (MACE) in patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD) is unknown. Methods Using the VA Corporate Data Warehouse, Veterans with PAD were identified. Rates of MALE (amputation or lower extremity revascularization [LER]), and MACE (death, MI, or coronary revascularization) were assessed in pre-pandemic (3/11/2019-3/10/2020), early-pandemic (3/11/2020-3/10/2021), and late-pandemic (3/11/2021-3/10/2022) periods. Outcomes were compared using Kaplan-Meier method. Results Of 418,042 Veterans (mean age 72 yrs) with PAD, 76.7% were white and 96.8% male. Furthermore, 89.2% had HTN, 60.4% diabetes, 49.3% CAD, 21.6% heart failure, and 20.5% atrial fibrillation. From 3/11/2019 to 3/10/2022, 3,100 had amputation, 8,187 had LER, & 2,229 had MACE. Amputation rates declined and continued to decline in early- and late-pandemic period (306 to 268 to 235;p<0.001;rates per 100k). Rates of LER declined initially and stabilized in late-pandemic period (951 to 587 to 609;p < 0.001;rates per 100k). MACE did not change significantly. (215 to 168 to 202;p<0.001;rates per 100k). Conclusion Amputation rates in Veterans with PAD did not increase despite a clinically significant decline in LER. Given the known efficacy of noninvasive therapies in PAD, these data suggest that there is a need to re-evaluate appropriate indications for LER and amputation. [Formula presented]Copyright © 2023 American College of Cardiology Foundation

Effective multipurpose sewage sludge and food waste reduction strategies: A focus on recent advances and future perspectives

Energy crisis and increasing rigorous management standards pose significant challenges for solid waste management worldwide. Several emerging diseases such as COVID-19 aggravated the already complex solid waste management crisis, especially sewage sludge and food waste streams, because of the increasingly large production year by year. As mature waste disposal technologies, landfills, incineration, composting, and some other methods are widespread for solid wastes management. This paper reviews recent advances in key sewage sludge disposal technologies. These include incineration, anaerobic digestion, and valuable products oriented-conversion. Food waste disposal technologies comprised of thermal treatment, fermentation, value-added product conversion, and composting have also been described. The hot topic and dominant research foci of each area are summarized, simultaneously compared with conventional technologies in terms of organic matter degradation or conversion performance, energy generation, and renewable resources production. Future perspectives of each technology that include issues not well understood and predicted challenges are discussed with a positive effect on the full-scale implementation of the discussed disposal methods. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Lower B-Cell Responses Rather Than Circulating Antibody Titres Are Associated With SARS-CoV-2 Infection Post Third Dose COVID-19 Vaccination

Background. Which components of the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination best protect against subsequent infection remains unclear. We explored SARS-CoV-2 specific antibody and B-cell responses post 3rd dose vaccine and their relationship to subsequent SARS-CoV-2 infection. Methods. In a multicentre prospective cohort, adult subjects provided samples before and 14 days (d14) post 3rd dose vaccine with Pfizer-BioNTech 162b2. At 18-22 weeks post vaccine, subjects self-reported SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed by PCR or antigen test). We used electrochemiluminescence assays to quantify antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 spike subunit 1 (S1), subunit 2 (S2) and receptor-binding domain (RBD) in plasma (reported inWHOIU/mL). In a subset of subjects, we assessed SARS-CoV-2 specific differentiated B-cell (plasma cell) and memory B-cell responses from peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Unstimulated plasma cells, and memory B cells stimulated with R848 and IL2, were seeded on plates coated with RBD or full Spike antigen and antigen-specific responses measured by ELISpot (Mabtech ELISpot, Sweden). We compared between group differences by Wilcoxon signed rank or Mann-Whitney tests. Data are median [IQR] unless specified. Results. Of 133 subjects (age 43 [32-50], 81.2% female (table 1), 77 subjects in the B-cell subgroup (table 2)), 47 (35.3%) reported SARS-CoV-2 infection post 3rd vaccine. Antibody titres, plasma cell and memory B-cell responses all increased significantly at d14 post 3rd vaccine (Table 1 & 2, all P< 0.001). Although d14 antibody titres did not differ in those with and without subsequent infection (table 1), those reporting subsequent infection had significantly lower d14 RBD-specific plasma cells and a lower proportion of RBD-specific memory B-cells (Figure 1a-b, both P< 0.05). Similar results were observed with full-spike-specific memory B-cell responses (Figure 1d). The differences persisted when the non-infected group was restricted only to those reporting a confirmed close contact (n=26). Conclusion. Infection following 3rd dose vaccine is associated with lower d14 circulating and memory B cell responses, but not antibody titres, suggesting B-cell responses better predict protection against subsequent SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Role of pyroptosis in severe COVID-19

Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease endangering the respirator)' traet and multiple organs of the whole body caused by severe aeute respirator)' syndrome coronavirus 2 ( SARS-CoV-2).More than 200 million people in the world have been infected with the disease, which is an unprecedented global plague.Most patients with C0VID-19 only show mild symptoms with a good prognosis, but about 20% of them may develop into severe cases and eause serious compli-cations, including acute respirator)' distress syndrome ( ARDS) , systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) , cytokine release syndrome (CRS) , etc.Pyroptosis is a kind of programmed cell death characterized by significant inflammatory response.It is often mediated by inflammatory caspase and the gasdermin family of membrane perforating proteins is the final effector molecules, resulting in cell membrane swelling and rupture to death, accompanied by the release of a large number of pro-inflammatory cytokines (such as IL-lp and IL-18, etc).Pyropto- sis affects the occurrence, progression and treatment of many diseases due to its inflammatory and morphological characteristics, and also plays an important role in severe COVID-19.Therefore, drugs that target key molecules in the pyroapoptotic pathway could he a promising breakthrough for treating severe COVID-19.This article reviews the role of pyroptosis in severe COVID-19 complications ARDS and CHS. Copyright © 2022 Publication Centre of Anhui Medical University. All rights reserved.

Inheritance and innovation: maintain academic communications in microsurgery under the normalized prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemics

Chinese Journal of Microsurgery, based on the premise of doing well in the prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemics, shall keep on driving on the inheritance and innovation, carry forward the spirit of microsurgery, give full play to the advantages of microsurgery technology and improve the level of surgical repair and reconstruction, as well as try new ways for academic communications and give full play to the roles of an academic platform for a professional magazine;Clinical Orthopaedic Microsurgery (internal communication), the internal journal of editorial office, is the "showcase in China" to highlight and disseminate the achievements in microsurgery, focus on the support for the Chinese young microsurgeons who work in the front-line of medical services, provide a platform effectively for the young microsurgeons in China to actively participate in the Sino-English literary exchange, and truly "publish the papers on the land of our motherland". © 2022 by the authors.

Graph Interaction for Automated Diagnosis of Thoracic Disease Using X-ray Images

Deep learning has shown successful performance not only in supervised disease detection but also lesion localization under the weakly supervised learning framework with medical image processing. However, few consider the semantic relationship among the diseases and lesions which plays a critical role in actual clinical diagnosis. In this work, we propose a novel framework: Feature map Graph Representational Probabilistic Class Activation Map (FGR-PCAM) to learn the graph structure of lesion-specific features and consider these relationships while also leveraging the localization ability of PCAM. Considering the relations of localized lesion-specific features has been shown to enhance both thoracic diseases classification and localization tasks on CheXpert and ChestXray14 datasets. Accurate classification and localization of Chest X-ray images would also help us fight against the COVID-19 and unveil COVID-19 fingerprints. © 2022 SPIE

[Differential circRNA expression profiles in peripheral blood mononuclear cells among mild and severe influenza-associated pneumonia patients].

Objective: To explore the difference in the expression profile of circular RNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells between patients with mild and severe influenza pneumonia. Methods: From December 2018 to March 2019, 10 inpatients with mild and 10 inpatients with severe influenza pneumonia admitted to the Department of Infection and Clinical Microbiology of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital were included. Clariom™ D gene chip was used to explore the circRNA expression profiles of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) isolated from the patients. The absolute value of the fold change (FC value)>2 and P<0.05 were used as the criteria to screen the differentially expressed circRNA, and the gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and Genome database (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, KEGG) signal pathway enrichment analysis were also performed. Results: The age of mild patients [M (P25, P75)] was 62.0 (34.5, 69.8) years old, including 4 males; the age of severe patients [M (P25, P75)] was 50.0 (37.0, 60.0) years old, all were males. A total of 137 differentially expressed circRNAs in PBMCs of mild and severe patients were screened. The numbers of up-regulated and down-regulated circRNAs in mild patients were 101 and 36, respectively. Among them, hsa_circ_0091073 (FC value=160.898, P<0.05) was the most significantly up-regulated circRNA and hsa_circ_0092219 (FC value =-17.630, P<0.05) was the most significantly down-regulated circRNA. GO enrichment analysis showed that a total of 111 secondary GO items were significantly associated with related differential expression of circRNA (P<0.05). The GO terms associated with upregulated circRNAs included DNA-templated transcription, regulation of DNA-templated transcription, regulation of transcription from RNA polymerase Ⅱ promoter, etc.; The GO terms associated with downregulated circRNAs included neutrophil degranulation, killing of cells of other organism, defense response to fungus, etc. KEGG signaling pathway analysis showed that there were 37 metabolic pathways related to differentially expressed circRNAs (P<0.05). Signaling pathways related to up-regulated circRNAs included nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) signaling pathway, mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway, tumor necrosis factor (TNF) signaling pathway, etc. Signaling pathways related to down-regulation of circRNAs included cancer transcription disorders, folate carbon pool, and other types of O-glycan biosynthesis. Conclusion: The expression of circRNA in PBMC of mild and severe influenza pneumonia patients is significantly different, and it may play a role in the pathogenic mechanism of influenza pneumonia through multiple signal pathways.

Using molecular fingerprints and unsupervised learning algorithms to find simulants of chemical warfare agents

The emergence of novel coronavirus highlights the importance of research and development of biological protective materials and functional protective equipment. As an important experimental material, the direct application of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) will cause great pollution to the environment. The effective search for simulants determines the process of CWAs experiments. This paper combines molecular fingerprint and unsupervised learning algorithm to develop a simulants selection framework. A selection strategy is developed based on the silhouette coefficient. The closest simulants are found (GA (TEP/DEEP), GB (DFP), GD (DEHP), HD (CEES), VX (Amiton)) under a threshold (Silhouette coefficient: 0.2). This study can effectively help researchers to find the best approximate simulant to a certain extent. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Current status and thinking of small-molecule drug discovery for the treatment of COVID-19

The discovery of small-molecule drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 is one of the most concerned research fields in drug discovery. Different kinds of small-molecule drugs approved or being developed are currently under clinical studies for the treatment of COVID-19. At present, the design of most clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19 is lack of rationality. Moreover, the efficacy of drugs is controversial. High-quality results of clinical research are urgently needed. There is no small-molecule drugs in clinical studies that have specific effects on SARS-CoV-2. To find more drug candidates, artificial intelligence, structure-based drug design and other methods are applied to discover pre-clinical small molecule compounds against important protein targets of SARS-CoV-2 and virus host. Resources should be further integrated to discover drugs with specific effects to treat COVID-19. © 2020, Editorial Office of Journal of International Pharmaceutical Research. All right reserved.