Physically Meaningful Surrogate Data for COPD.

The rapidly increasing prevalence of debilitating breathing disorders, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), calls for a meaningful integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into respiratory healthcare. Deep learning techniques are "data hungry" whilst patient-based data is invariably expensive and time consuming to record. To this end, we introduce a novel COPD-simulator, a physical apparatus with an easy to replicate design which enables rapid and effective generation of a wide range of COPD-like data from healthy subjects, for enhanced training of deep learning frameworks.

Multivariate Multiscale Cosine Similarity Entropy and Its Application to Examine Circularity Properties in Division Algebras.

The extension of sample entropy methodologies to multivariate signals has received considerable attention, with traditional univariate entropy methods, such as sample entropy (SampEn) and fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn), introduced to measure the complexity of chaotic systems in terms of irregularity and randomness. The corresponding multivariate methods, multivariate multiscale sample entropy (MMSE) and multivariate multiscale fuzzy entropy (MMFE), were developed to explore the structural richness within signals at high scales. However, the requirement of high scale limits the selection of embedding dimension and thus, the performance is unavoidably restricted by the trade-off between the data size and the required high scale.

Variational Embedding Multiscale Sample Entropy: A Tool for Complexity Analysis of Multichannel Systems.

Entropy-based methods have received considerable attention in the quantification of structural complexity of real-world systems. Among numerous empirical entropy algorithms, conditional entropy-based methods such as sample entropy, which are associated with amplitude distance calculation, are quite intuitive to interpret but require excessive data lengths for meaningful evaluation at large scales. To address this issue, we propose the variational embedding multiscale sample entropy (veMSE) method and conclusively demonstrate its ability to operate robustly, even with several times shorter data than the existing conditional entropy-based methods.

Identification of T Cell Epitopes in the Spike Glycoprotein of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 in Rhesus Macaques.

The T cell response is an important detection index in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine development. The present study was undertaken to determine the T cell epitopes in the spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 that dominate the T cell responses in SARS-CoV-2-infected patients. PBMCs from rhesus macaques vaccinated with a DNA vaccine encoding the full-length S protein were isolated, and an ELISPOT assay was used to identify the recognized T cell epitopes among a total of 158 18-mer and 10-aa-overlapping peptides spanning the full-length S protein.

A novel DNA and protein combination COVID-19 vaccine formulation provides full protection against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques.

The current study aims to develop a safe and highly immunogenic COVID-19 vaccine. The novel combination of a DNA vaccine encoding the full-length Spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 and a recombinant S1 protein vaccine induced high level neutralizing antibody and T cell immune responses in both small and large animal models. More significantly, the co-delivery of DNA and protein components at the same time elicited full protection against intratracheal challenge of SARS-CoV-2 viruses in immunized rhesus macaques.

Characteristics of the tree shrew humoral immune system.

Preclinical studies require an immune response similar to that of humans in a small animal model that is convenient to operate. Based on genome alignment, tree shrews are small animals considered to be more similar to primates than are rodents, and many human disease models have been established with tree shrews. However, the characteristics of the humoral immune response of tree shrews remain to be elucidated.

CRISPR-Cas9 system-driven site-specific selection pressure on Herpes simplex virus genomes.

The CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9) system has been widely used for viral genome editing, transcription regulation and chromosomal localization in eukaryotic cells. In this study, a guide RNA (gRNA) that specifically recognizes HSV-1 viral genomes was used in the CRISPR-Cas9 system to inhibit viral replication. This inhibition could be achieved with both wild type Cas9 protein and Cas9 nickase (D10A).