Quantifying the rebound of influenza epidemics after relaxing nonpharmaceutical interventions during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in China

The co-existence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and seasonal influenza epidemics has become a potential threat to human health, particularly in China in the oncoming season. However, with the relaxation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rebound extent of the influenza activities is still poorly understood. In this study, we constructed a susceptible-vaccinated-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SVIRS) model to simulate influenza transmission and calibrated it using influenza surveillance data from 2018 to 2022. We projected the influenza transmission over the next 3 years using the SVIRS model. We observed that, in epidemiological year 2021-2022, the reproduction numbers of influenza in southern and northern China were reduced by 38.6% and 30.2%, respectively, compared with those before the pandemic. The percentage of people susceptible to influenza virus increased by 138.6% and 57.3% in southern and northern China by October 1, 2022, respectively. After relaxing NPIs, the potential accumulation of susceptibility to influenza infection may lead to a large-scale and early influenza outbreak in the year 2022-2023, the scale of which may be affected by the intensity of the NPIs. And later relaxation of NPIs in the year 2023 would not lead to much larger rebound of influenza activities in the year 2023-2024. To control the influenza epidemic to the pre-pandemic level after relaxing NPIs, the influenza vaccination rates in southern and northern China should increase to 56.2% and 47.3%, respectively. Vaccination for influenza should be advocated to reduce the potential reemergence of the influenza epidemic in the next few years.

Advances and prospects in metabolic engineering for the production of amino acids / 生物工程学报

Fermentative production of amino acids is one of the pillars of the fermentation industry in China. Recently, with the fast development of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology technologies, the metabolic engineering for production of amino acids has been flourishing. Conventional forward metabolic engineering, reversed metabolic engineering based on omics data and in silico simulation, and evolutionary metabolic engineering mimicking the natural evolution, have shown increasingly promising applications. A series of highly efficient and robust amino acids-producing strains have been developed and applied in the industrial production of amino acids. The increasingly fierce market competition has put forward new requirements for strain breeding and selection, such as developing high value-added amino acids, dynamic regulation of cellular metabolism, and adapting to the requirements of new process. This review summarizes the advances and prospects in metabolic engineering for the production of amino acids.

Network Pharmacological Screening of the Active Ingredients and Hypoglycemic Effect of Isodon rubescens in the Treatment of Diabetes.

This study was firstly to study the relationship of "ingredient-target-pathway" and the pharmacological effects of Isodon rubescens for the treatment of diabetes. Based on a network pharmacology method, 138 active ingredients of Isodon rubescens were screened from the relative literatures, and their targets were confirmed by comparing these with the hypoglycemic targets in the DrugBank database. Results showed that Isodon rubescens contained 25 hypoglycemic ingredients, such as rabdoternin A, rabdoternin B, and epinodosinol. These ingredients could activate 6 hypoglycemic targets, including 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase (HMGCR), integrin α-L (ITGAL), integrin ß-2 (ITGB2), progesterone receptor (PGR), glucocorticoid receptor (NR3C1), and nuclear receptor subfamily 1 group I member 2 (NR1I2). These targets were involved in 94 signaling pathways, such as the Rap1, PI3K-Akt, and HIF-1 signaling pathways. The cell viability showed that the human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) treated with alcohol extract (1.00 g/L) and the water extract (0.13 - 0.50 g/L) exhibited high viability compared to the model group (p < 0.05), respectively. 0In animal experiments, the rats treated with water extract of Isodon rubescens showed significant hypoglycemic effects compared to rats in the model group (p < 0.05). Overall, this approach provides an efficient strategy to explore hypoglycemic ingredients of Isodon rubescens and other traditional Chinese medicine.