Network-based Virus-Host Interaction Prediction with Application to SARS-CoV-2

COVID-19, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has quickly become a global health crisis since the first report of infection in December of 2019. However, the infection spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 and its comprehensive protein-level interactions with hosts remain unclear. There is a massive amount of under-utilized data and knowledge about RNA viruses highly relevant to SARS-CoV-2 and their hosts proteins. More in-depth and more comprehensive analyses of that knowledge and data can shed new insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying the COVID-19 pandemic and reveal potential risks. In this work, we constructed a multi-layer virus-host interaction network to incorporate these data and knowledge. A machine learning-based method, termed Infection Mechanism and Spectrum Prediction (IMSP), was developed to predict virus-host interactions at both protein and organism levels. Our approach revealed five potential infection targets of SARS-CoV-2, which deserved public health attention, and eight highly possible interactions between SARS-CoV-2 proteins and human proteins. Given a new virus, IMSP can utilize existing knowledge and data about other highly relevant viruses to predict multi-scale interactions between the new virus and potential hosts.

Study on the present situation, influencing factors and countermeasures of residents' body donation in China / 中华医学教育探索杂志

Body donation is the main source of human specimens preparation in medical universities and colleges. The low donation rate in China restricts the improvement of basic medical research and clinical treatment seriously. In the investigation, deep-rooted traditional concepts, unsound legal system, and inadequate government propaganda have become the major factors influencing body donation. Combined with the practice of body donation in the localities, this study puts forward some measures to promote the body donation, such as giving targeted publicity, promoting the concept of civilized funeral and burial, strengthening legislation, and simplifying the body donation process, which would lay the foundation for the development of medical education and research.

Consensus Regularized Multi-View Outlier Detection.

Identifying different types of data outliers with abnormal behaviors in multi-view data setting is challenging due to the complicated data distributions across different views. Conventional approaches achieve this by learning a new latent feature representation with the pairwise constraint on different view data. In this paper, we argue that the existing methods are expensive in generalizing their models from two-view data to three-view (or more) data, in terms of the number of introduced variables and detection performance. To address this, we propose a novel multi-view outlier detection method with consensus regularization on the latent representations. Specifically, we explicitly characterize each kind of outliers by the intrinsic cluster assignment labels and sample-specific errors. Moreover, we make a thorough discussion about the proposed consensus-regularization and the pairwise-regularization. Correspondingly, an optimization solution based on augmented Lagrangian multiplier method is proposed and derived in details. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on five well-known machine learning data sets with different outlier settings. Further, to show its effectiveness in real-world computer vision scenario, we tailor our proposed model to saliency detection and face reconstruction applications. The extensive results of both standard multi-view outlier detection task and the extended computer vision tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Analysis of the influence of the first stage examination of clinical practitioner qualification on the education and teaching of provincial medical univrsities / 中华医学教育探索杂志

First-period examination in empirical study of clinical medical national licensing staged examination has been implemented for two years in Binzhou Medical University (BZMU).During the examination,BZMU obtained the experience of organization,guarantee,and training,which adopted corresponding reform measures including course teaching,assessment method,incentive reward and punishment,etc.The first-period examination of staged examination is national examination of quality of education and teaching on the university,which has promoting effect to strengthen the core of the education teaching and renew the idea of teachers' teaching evaluation.It can improve the evaluation system of curriculum assessment and promote students correctly using the theoretical knowledge to clinical practice skills and improve alignment between the university and hospital.Finally,it can promote the reform and development of medical education.

The Role and Significance of Bcl-2 and Bax in the Hepatic Carcinoma / El Rol y la Importancia de Bcl-2 y Bax en el Carcinoma Hepático

This study aimed to observe the regularity of liver cell apoptosis and expression of apoptosis related gene Bcl-2 and Bax in the induced cancer, and explore the relationship between apoptosis and the development of liver cancer. In this study, 84 rats were used, 72 rats as experimental group induced by drinking water containing DEN, 12 rats as control group (CG). After laparotomy, the form, color, texture of the liver and metastatic tumor in both control and experimental groups were observed and recorded. The metastatic tumor and the liver tissue were sectioned and stained with hematoxylin-eosin staining to demonstrate the characteristic in morphological changes, the Hoechst 33342 fluorescent staining was applied to show and count the rate of apoptotic cell, and the in situ hybridization technique was used to detect the Bcl-2 and Bax expression. The results showed that the process of carcinogenesis can be divided into three periods: hepatic toxic lesion, hepatic proliferation/cirrhosis and hepatic carcinogenesis. The Hoechst 33342 fluorescent staining showed that the rate of apoptosis in the CG, hepatic toxic lesion, hepatic proliferation/cirrhosis and hepatic carcinogenesis were 6.7%,18.8%,17.4% and 51.2% c2=33.62, P<0.05 respectively. In situ hybridization showed the yellow positive reaction products of Bcl-2 and Bax located in the nucleus and cytoplasm of cell in diffusive distribution. The average optical densities of Bcl-2 and Bax expression were 0.1697±0.0101 and 0.1383±0.0093 in the control group, 0.1431±0.0072 and 0.1523±0.0103 in hepatic toxic lesion, 0.1261±0.0164 and 0.1639±0.0133 in hepatic proliferation/cirrhosis, 0.1034± 0.0124 and 0.1785±0.0191 in hepatic carcinogenesis, indicating that the expression of Bcl-2 decreased, but that of Bax increased with the development of liver cancer in experimental groups. In DEN induced liver cancer, the origination and development of liver cancer were accompanied with proliferation and abnormal apoptosis, which was related to the abnormal expression of gene Bcl-2 and Bax.

Este estudio tuvo como objetivo observar la regularidad de la apoptosis en células del hígado y la expresión de apoptosis relacionada con los genes Bcl-2 y Bax en el cáncer inducido, además de explorar la relación entre apoptosis y desarrollo de cáncer hepático. Fueron utilizadas 84 ratas, 72 como grupo experimental inducido con el consumo de agua conteniendo DEN, y 12 como grupo de control (CG). Después de la laparotomía, la forma, color, textura del hígado, y del tumor metastásico fueron observadas y registradas en ambos grupos. El tumor metastásico y el tejido hepático fueron seccionados y teñidos con H-E para demostrar la característica de los cambios morfológicos; se aplicó la tinción fluorescente Hoechst 33342 para mostrar y contar la frecuencia de las células apoptóticas, y se utilizó la técnica de hibridación in situ para detectar la expresión de Bcl-2 y Bax. Los resultados mostraron que el proceso de carcinogénesis se puede dividir en tres etapas: lesión hepática tóxica, proliferación hepática/cirrosis hepática y carcinogénesis. La tinción fluorescente Hoechst 33342 mostró que la tasa de apoptosis en el CG, lesión hepática tóxica, proliferación hepática/cirrosis hepática y carcinogénesis fue de 6,7%, 18,8%, 17,4% y 51,2% (c2 = 33,62, P <0,05), respectivamente. La hibridación in situ mostró reacción positiva de productos amarillos de Bcl-2 y Bax en el núcleo y citoplasma de la célula en distribución difusa. Las densidades ópticas medias de la expresión de Bcl-2 y Bax fueron 0,1697±0,0101 y 0,1383±0,0093 en el grupo de control, 0,1431±0,0072 y 0,1523±0,0103 en lesión hepática tóxica, 0,1261±0,0164 y 0,1639 ± 0,0133 en la proliferación hepática/cirrosis y, 0,1034±0,0124 y 0,1785±0,0191 en la carcinogénesis hepática, lo que indica que la expresión de Bcl-2 se redujo, pero que el Bax aumentó con el desarrollo de cáncer de hígado en los grupos experimentales. En el cáncer hepático inducido por DEN, el origen y desarrollo de cáncer hepático fueron acompañados con proliferación anormal y apoptosis, las cuales se relacionaron con la expresión anormal de los genes Bcl-2 y Bax.