SV-VATS exhibits dual intraoperative and postoperative advantages.

BACKGROUND: The merits of spontaneous ventilation video-assisted thoracic surgery (SV-VATS) are still controversial. Our team retrospectively evaluated the intraoperative and postoperative advantages of this surgical approach, comparing with mechanical ventilation video-assisted thoracic surgery (MV-VATS). METHODS: We did a single center retrospective study at the First Affiliated Hospital of Yunnan Province. 244 patients were eventually assigned to the SV-group and MV-group, and their intraoperative indicators and thoracic surgery postoperative data were included in the comparison. RESULTS: The SV-group exhibited markedly less intraoperative bleeding and postoperative thoracic drainage, and the bleeding volume was correlated with the volume and duration of drainage. Further analysis showed that, patients undergoing SV-VATS had less activation of white blood cells and neutrophils after surgery, but they also had lower serum albumin concentrations. Risks of short-term postoperative complications, including inflammatory reactions, malignant arrhythmias, constipation, and moderate or more pleural effusions, were also significantly reduced in the SV-group. Additionally, hospitalization cost was lower in the SV-group than that in the MV-group. CONCLUSIONS: SV-VATS is suitable for various types of thoracic surgery, and effectively reduce intraoperative bleeding and postoperative thoracic drainage. With less postoperative inflammatory response, it reduces the risk of short-term postoperative complications. It is also able to help to reduce the financial burden of patients.

Diversity scaling of human vaginal microbial communities.

The composition and diversity of the human vaginal microbial community have been investigated intensively due to the diversity-stability relationship (DSR)-based hypothesis for bacterial vaginosis (BV) etiology, which was first proposed in the 1990s and has received renewed interest in recent years. Nevertheless, diversity changes (scaling) across individuals in a cohort or population have not yet been addressed, which is significant both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, biodiversity scaling is the core of biogeography, and practically, inter-subject heterogeneity is critical for understanding the etiology and epidemiology of human microbiome-associated diseases such as BV. Here we applied the diversity-area relationship (DAR), a recent extension to the classic species-area relationship (SAR), to study diversity scaling of the vaginal microbiome by reanalyzing reported data collected from 1 107 postpartum women. The model used here characterized the power-law (or its extension) relationships between accrued diversity and areas (numbers of individuals), upon which four biogeographic profiles were thus defined. Specifically, we established the DAR profile (relationship between diversity scaling parameter and so-termed diversity order (q)), similarly pair-wise diversity overlap (PDO) profile, maximal accrual diversity (MAD) profile, and ratio of individual-level to population-level diversity (RIP) profile. These four profiles offer valuable tools to assess and predict diversity scaling (changes) in the human vaginal microbiome across individuals, as well as to understand the dynamics of vaginal microbiomes in healthy women.

[A review on the bioinformatics pipelines for metagenomic research].

Metagenome, a term first dubbed by Handelsman in 1998 as "the genomes of the total microbiota found in nature", refers to sequence data directly sampled from the environment (which may be any habitat in which microbes live, such as the guts of humans and animals, milk, soil, lakes, glaciers, and oceans). Metagenomic technologies originated from environmental microbiology studies and their wide application has been greatly facilitated by next-generation high throughput sequencing technologies. Like genomics studies, the bottle neck of metagenomic research is how to effectively and efficiently analyze the gigantic amount of metagenomic sequence data using the bioinformatics pipelines to obtain meaningful biological insights. In this article, we briefly review the state-of-the-art bioinformatics software tools in metagenomic research. Due to the differences between the metagenomic data obtained from whole genome sequencing (i.e., shotgun metagenomics) and amplicon sequencing (i.e., 16S-rRNA and gene-targeted metagenomics) methods, there are significant differences between the corresponding bioinformatics tools for these data; accordingly, we review the computational pipelines separately for these two types of data.