Accurate diagnosis of mosquito allergy has been precluded by the difficulty of obtaining salivary allergens. In this study, we expressed, purified, characterized and investigated the clinical relevance of a recombinant Aedes aegypti salivary allergen, rAed a 1. Two cDNA segments were ligated together to form the full-length Aed a 1 gene. rAed a 1 was expressed using a baculovirus/insect cell system, and purified using a combination of anion-exchange and gel-filtration chromatography. The purified rAed a 1 bound to human IgE, as detected by ELISA, ELISA inhibition tests and immunoblot analyses. Epicutaneous tests with rAed a 1 and a commercial whole-body AE: aegypti extract, and AE: aegypti bite tests were performed in 48 subjects. Nine of 31 (29%) of the subjects with positive immediate bite tests also had a positive rAed a 1 immediate skin reaction and 32% had an positive immediate test to the commercial extract. Six of 33 (18%) of the subjects with positive delayed bite tests also had a positive rAed a 1 delayed skin reaction and 6% had a positive delayed test to the commercial extract. Furthermore, rAed a 1-induced flare sizes significantly correlated with mosquito bite-induced flare sizes. None of the subjects with negative bite tests had a positive skin test to rAed a 1 or to commercial extract. We conclude that the rAed a 1 has identical antigenicity and biological activity to native Aed a 1, can be used in the in vitro and in vivo diagnosis of mosquito allergy, and is more sensitive than mosquito whole-body extract for detecting delayed skin reactions.

The mobility and resource limitation of nodes are the critical factors that affect the performance of Mobile AD hoc network (MANET). The mobility of nodes will affect the stability of links, and the limitation of node resources will lead to congestion, so it is very difficult to design a routing protocol that supports quality of service (QoS) in MANET. Especially in the scenario of high-speed node movement, frequent link interruption will damages QoS performance, so it is necessary to design MANET routing protocol that can adapt to network topology changes to support QoS. In this paper, we propose a Topological change Adaptive Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (TA-AOMDV) routing protocol, which can adapt to high-speed node movement to support QoS. In this protocol, a stable path selection algorithm is designed, which not only takes node resources (residual energy, available bandwidth and queue length) as the path selection parameters, but also considers the link stability probability between nodes. Furthermore, in order to adapt to the rapid change of topology, link interrupt prediction mechanism is integrated into the protocol, which updates the routing strategy based on periodic probabilistic estimates of link stability. Different scenarios with node speed in the range of 10-50m/s, data rate in the range of 4-40kbps and number of nodes in the range of 10-100 are simulated on NS2 platform. Our results show that the QoS metrics (packet delivery rate, end-to-end delay, and throughput) of the proposed protocol are significantly improved when the node speed is higher than 30m/s although it is slightly better when the node speed is lower than 30m/s. Our on-demand multipath routing protocol demonstrates high potential to support QoS for high-speed MANET. INDEX TERMS Mobile ad hoc network, link stability, QoS, multipath routing, cross layer.

rAed a 2 has identical antigenicity and biologic activity to its native form. It can be used in the diagnosis of mosquito allergy, and is an important species-shared antigen.

No abstract

A discrete 78-nucleus silver-sulfur nanocluster with a sulfate-centered multishell structure was isolated and characterized. Its crystal structure revealed 18 and 60 Ag atoms in the inner and outer shell, respectively. The inner shell of 18-nuclearity Ag atoms is a very rare convex polyhedron featuring an elongated triangular orthobicupola. The incorporation of a sulfate anion and multishell arrangement in the nanocluster led to a dramatic decrease in the band gap (E = 1.40 eV). Our study showed that simple anions can also induce the formation of high-nuclearity silver clusters with excellent optical properties.