The ongoing global novel coronavirus pneumonia COVID‐19 outbreak has engendered numerous cases of infection and death. COVID‐19 diagnosis relies upon nucleic acid detection; however, currently recommended methods exhibit high false‐negative rates and are unable to identify other respiratory virus infections, thereby resulting in patient misdiagnosis and impeding epidemic containment. Combining the advantages of targeted amplification and long‐read, real‐time nanopore sequencing, herein, nanopore targeted sequencing (NTS) is developed to detect SARS‐CoV‐2 and other respiratory viruses simultaneously within 6–10 h, with a limit of detection of ten standard plasmid copies per reaction. Compared with its specificity for five common respiratory viruses, the specificity of NTS for SARS‐CoV‐2 reaches 100%. Parallel testing with approved real‐time reverse transcription‐polymerase chain reaction kits for SARS‐CoV‐2 and NTS using 61 nucleic acid samples from suspected COVID‐19 cases show that NTS identifies more infected patients (22/61) as positive, while also effectively monitoring for mutated nucleic acid sequences, categorizing types of SARS‐CoV‐2, and detecting other respiratory viruses in the test sample. NTS is thus suitable for COVID‐19 diagnosis; moreover, this platform can be further extended for diagnosing other viruses and pathogens.

Chromatin modification is considered to be a fundamental mechanism of regulating gene expression to generate coordinated responses to environmental changes, however, whether it could be directly regulated by signals mediated by G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the largest surface receptor family, is not known. Here, we show that stimulation of delta-opioid receptor, a member of the GPCR family, induces nuclear translocation of beta-arrestin 1 (betaarr1), which was previously known as a cytosolic regulator and scaffold of GPCR signaling. In response to receptor activation, betaarr1 translocates to the nucleus and is selectively enriched at specific promoters such as that of p27 and c-fos, where it facilitates the recruitment of histone acetyltransferase p300, resulting in enhanced local histone H4 acetylation and transcription of these genes. Our results reveal a novel function of betaarr1 as a cytoplasm-nucleus messenger in GPCR signaling and elucidate an epigenetic mechanism for direct GPCR signaling from cell membrane to the nucleus through signal-dependent histone modification.

An Internet of Vehicles (IoV) allows forming a self-organized network and broadcasting messages for the vehicles on roads. However, as the data are transmitted in an insecure network, it is essential to use an authentication mechanism to protect the privacy of vehicle users. Recently, Ying et al. proposed an authentication protocol for IoV and claimed that the protocol could resist various attacks. Unfortunately, we discovered that their protocol suffered from an offline identity guessing attack, location spoofing attack, and replay attack, and consumed a considerable amount of time for authentication. To resolve these shortcomings, we propose an improved protocol. In addition, we provide a formal proof to the proposed protocol to demonstrate that our protocol is indeed secure. Compared with previous methods, the proposed protocol performs better in terms of security and performance. INDEX TERMS Internet of Vehicles, authentication, anonymity, smart card.