The loss of biodiversity in the ecosystems has created the general conditions that have favored and, in fact, made possible, the insurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of factors have contributed to it: deforestation, changes in forest habitats, poorly regulated agricultural surfaces, mismanaged urban growth. They have altered the composition of wildlife communities, greatly increased the contacts of humans with wildlife, and altered niches that harbor pathogens, increasing their chances to come in contact with humans. Among the wildlife, bats have adapted easily to anthropized environments such as houses, barns, cultivated fields, orchards, where they found the suitable ecosystem to prosper. Bats are major hosts for αCoV and βCoV: evolution has shaped their peculiar physiology and their immune system in a way that makes them resistant to viral pathogens that would instead successfully attack other species, including humans. In time, the coronaviruses that bats host as reservoirs have undergone recombination and other modifications that have increased their ability for inter-species transmission: one modification of particular importance has been the development of the ability to use ACE2 as a receptor in host cells. This particular development in CoVs has been responsible for the serious outbreaks in the last two decades, and for the present COVID-19 pandemic.

If the current tree model is confirmed by a prospective study with a larger sample size, it would be useful in guiding physicians making extubation decisions in elderly medical intensive care unit patients.

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Aiming to problems in the pairwise registration of point clouds, such as keypoints are difficult to describe accurately, corresponding points are difficult to match accurately and convergence speed is slow due to uncertainty of initial transformation matrix, we propose a novel feature descriptor based on ratio of rotational volume to describe effectively keypoints, and on the basis of the feature descriptor, we proposed an improved coarse-to-fine registration pipeline of point clouds, in which we use coarse registration to obtain a good initial transformation matrix and then use fine registration based on a modified ICP algorithm to obtain an accurate transformation matrix. Experimental results show that our proposed feature descriptor has a good robustness to rotation, noise, scale and varying mesh resolution, less storage space and faster running speed than PFH, FPFH, SHOT and RoPS descriptors, and our improved pairwise registration pipeline is very effective to solve the problems in the pairwise registration of point clouds.

Pseudolaric acid B (PB) derivatives with immunosuppressive activity were found by our group. In order to find potential immunosuppressive agents with high efficacy and low toxicity, a series of novel PB derivatives were synthesized and evaluated on their immunosuppressive activities. Most of the synthesized compounds were tested in vitro on murine T and B proliferation. In particular, compound 11 exhibited excellent inhibitory activity toward murine T cells (up to 19-fold enhancement compared to that of mycophenolatemofetil) and little cytotoxicity toward normal murine spleen cells. These experimental data demonstrated that some of these PB derivatives have great potential for future immunosuppressive studies.