A strategy to circumvent immune responses to adenovirus (Ad) resulting from natural infection or repeated vector administrations involves sequential use of vectors from different Ad serotypes. To further develop an Ad-HIV recombinant AIDS vaccine approach, a replication-defective recombinant Ad from a non-subgroup C virus was required. Using a cosmid system, we generated an Ad7deltaE1deltaE3HIV(MN) env/rev recombinant virus and compared expression of the inserted HIV genes with a similarly constructed replication-competent Ad7deltaE3HIV(MN)env/rev recombinant. Ad7deltaE1deltaE3HIV(MN)env/rev expressed both HIV env and rev gene products. The envelope protein was correctly processed and functional, mediating syncytia formation of Ad7deltaE1deltaE3HIV(MN) env/rev-infected cells and CD4(+) T lymphocytes. Ad7deltaE1deltaE3HIV(MN)env/rev could be amplified on 293-ORF6 cells, containing the E4 ORF6 gene, shown earlier to support production of an Ad7 vector lacking the E1a gene. The utility of this cell line is now extended to the production of replication-defective Ad7 recombinants lacking E1a, E1b, and protein IX genes. Sequential immunizations with Ad-HIV recombinants based in different Ad serotypes have been shown to effectively elicit both humoral and cellular HIV-specific immune responses. The recombinant Ad7deltaE1deltaE3HIV(MN)env/rev will be useful in such AIDS vaccine strategies. Further, these studies have created new cosmid vectors that can be applied to generation of single- or double-deleted Ad7 recombinants with foreign genes inserted into the E1 and/or E3 regions.

B-cell epitopes (BCEs) are a set of specific sites on the surface of an antigen that binds to an antibody produced by B-cell. The recognition of epitopes is a major challenge for drug design and vaccines development. Compared with experimental methods, computational approaches have strong potential for epitope prediction at much lower cost. Moreover, most of the currently computational methods focus on using local information around target amino acid residue for BCEs prediction without taking the global information of the whole antigen sequence into consideration. We propose a novel deep leaning method thorough combing local features and global features for BCEs prediction. In our model, two parallel modules are built to extract local and global features from the antigen separately. For local features, we use graph convolutional networks to capture information of spatial neighbors of a target amino acid residue. For global features, Attention based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks(Att-BLTM) are applied to extract information from the whole antigen sequence. Then the local and global features are combined to predict BCEs. The experiments show that the proposed method achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art BCEs prediction methods on benchmark datasets. Also, we compare the performance differences between data with or without global features. The experimental results show that global features play an important role in BCEs prediction.

Background The study examined the interactive association between sodium intake, alcohol consumption and hypertension among elderly in Inner Mongolia in Northern China.Methods This was a cross-sectional study which came from the National Survey Data for Nutrition and Adult Chronic Disease in Inner Mongolia. Sodium intake and alcohol consumption were estimated by 24-hour recalls and a weighing method. Participants were categorized into 6 subgroups according to the sodium intake status and drinking levels. Multivariate logistic regression were used to determine the interactive effects.Results 820 elderly were included in the study, of whom 523 (63.80%, standardized rate 62.33%) had been diagnosed with hypertension. The mean sodium intake was 4.88g among the residents in Inner Mongolia. Adjusting for confounders, there was interaction between sodium intake and alcohol consumption, the risk of hypertension was highest among sodium intake excessively with alcohol consumption excessively group, with odds ratio (OR) of 3.639 (95% Confidence interval [ 95% CI ]:1.666 -7.947). ConclusionsThe study highlights the interactive association between sodium intake and alcohol consumption with hypertension. Measures which reduce the intake of sodium and consumption of alcohol aimed at preventing hypertension, and improving the quality of life and health among elderly in Inner Mongolia.