Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a re-emerging alphavirus which causes severe and prolonged arthralgic febrile illness. The recent global spread of the virus and lack of approved therapeutic options makes it imperative to gain greater insight into the molecular mechanisms underlying CHIKV pathogenesis, in particular host factors recruited by the virus. In the current study, we identify sphingosine kinase 2 (SK2) as a CHIKV host factor co-localized with the viral replication complex (VRC) during infection. SK2 was demonstrated to co-localize with viral RNA and nonstructural proteins. Targeted impairment of SK2 expression or function significantly inhibited CHIKV infection. Furthermore, affinity purification-mass spectrometry studies revealed that SK2 associates with a number of proteins involved in cellular gene expression specifically during viral infection, suggesting a role in replication. Collectively these results identify SK2 as a novel CHIKV host factor.

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We suggest that long-term treatments with MAO-B inhibitors may decrease cocaine-supported operant responses in cocaine-naïve mice by selectively decreasing frontal cortical metabolism of dopamine and serotonin.

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Eye gaze trackers have numerous applications in medicine, gaming, advertising, teaching and learning, intelligent transportation, etc. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach for video based eye gaze trackers. In this approach, we apply the circumcircle of triangle principle to the limbus part of human eyes. First, an image pre-processing step is used to find three triangle vertices located on limbus. Then, we use the coordinates of these points to determine the limbus center using the circumcircle of triangle principle. Furthermore, when the proposed system fails to find the three useful points on limbus of one eye, a mirror procedure is adopted to find its limbus center based on the information extracted from the other eye. The proposed method can solve the occlusion problem caused by the eyelids that cover part of limbus. The experimental results show that the average eye detection rate is 98.39% and the average error between estimated and actual centers of limbus is only 1.99 pixels. The proposed method is simple, fast, and effective.