Zika Virus Growth in Human Kidney Cells Is Restricted by an Elevated Glucose Level

Mosquito-borne Zika virus (ZIKV) became a real threat to human health due to the lack of vaccine and effective antiviral treatment. The virus has recently been responsible for a global outbreak leading to millions of infected cases. ZIKV complications were highlighted in adults with Guillain–Barré syndrome and in newborns with increasing numbers of congenital disorders ranging from mild developmental delays to fatal conditions. The ability of ZIKV to establish a long-term infection in diverse organs including the kidneys has been recently documented but the consequences of such a viral infection are still debated. Our study aimed to determine whether the efficiency of ZIKV growth in kidney cells relates to glucose concentration. Human kidney HK-2 cells were infected with different ZIKV strains in presence of normal and high glucose concentrations. Virological assays showed a decrease in viral replication without modifying entry steps (viral binding, internalization, fusion) under high glucose conditions. This decrease replication was associated with a lower virus progeny and increased cell viability when compared to ZIKV-infected HK-2 cells in normal glucose concentration. In conclusion, we showed for the first time that an elevated glucose level influences ZIKV replication level with an effect on kidney cell survival.     

Silver(I)-Ion-Mediated Cytosine-Containing Base Pairs: Metal Ion Specificity for Duplex Stabilization and Susceptibility toward DNA Polymerases

Spectroscopic characterization of Ag^I-ion-mediated C-Ag^I-A and C-Ag^I-T base pairs found in primer extension reactions catalyzed by DNA polymerases was conducted. UV melting experiments revealed that C-A and C-T mismatched base pairs in oligodeoxynucleotide duplexes are specifically stabilized by Ag^I ions in 1:1 stoichiometry in the same manner as a C-C mismatched base pair. Although the stability of the mismatched base pairs in the absence of Ag^I ions is in the order C-A≈C-T>C-C, the stabilizing effect of Ag^I ions follows the order C-C>C-A≈C-T. However, the comparative susceptibility of dNTPs to Ag^I-mediated enzymatic incorporation into the site opposite templating C is dATP>dTTP≫dCTP, as reported. The net charge, as well as the size and/or shape complementarity of the metal-mediated base pairs, or the stabilities of mismatched base pairs in the absence of metal ions, would be more important than the stability of the metallo-base pairs in the replicating reaction catalyzed by DNA polymerases.     

Incorporating the Raft consensus protocol in containers managed by Kubernetes: an evaluation

Replication is a technique widely used to improve the reliability of applications. State machine replication is a special approach, where a set of computers are kept synchronised in the same state despite of failures that could occur in the system. The Raft algorithm can be used to implement a total order delivery protocol, delivering requests at the same order at all replicas, which is fundamental since in this approach all replicas must execute the same sequence of requests to present the same evolution in their states. Raft is easy to understand and implement, when compared to the Paxos algorithm. On the other hand, virtualisation can be seen as a technique that helps the development of reliable applications since it maintains each virtual machine (VM) isolated from the others. Virtualisation in data centres is changing from the traditional VMs to containers. In this context, this paper proposes KRaft, an incorporation of Raft in Kubernetes, a system that manages containers. After an evaluation of performance and resource consumption of KRaft, we found that it presents performance close to Raft executing on physical machines. Moreover, KRaft demands more network transmission while Raft executed in physical machines needs more processing power and memory.     

电站EPC项目建设质量保证体系探讨

电站EPC项目建设是目前国外最重要的电力建设模式,国内电站EPC承包公司在该模式下运营过程中暴露出管理脱节、设计薄弱、多项目运营能力差、投资利益不能得到保证等潜在风险。通过与国外先进的运营模式对比分析,提出适合国内电站EPC承包公司的工程建设质量保证体系改进措施。论文重点介绍建立上下游无缝衔接的总承包质量保证体系,强调设计职能;加强多项目建设管理、移植的程序管理体系的改进措施,从而达到控制项目质量,实现项目的快速异地复制,减少项目运作成本的目的。     

Top-k query processing for replicated data in mobile peer to peer networks

In mobile ad hoc peer to peer (M-P2P) networks, since nodes are highly resource constrained, it is effective to retrieve data items using a top-k query, in which data items are ordered by the score of a particular attribute and the query-issuing node acquires data items with the k highest scores. However, when network partitioning occurs, the query-issuing node cannot connect to some nodes having data items included in the top-k query result, and thus, the accuracy of the query result decreases. To solve this problem, data replication is a promising approach. However, if each node sends back its own data items (replicas) responding to a query without considering replicas held by others, same data items are sent back to the query-issuing node more than once through long paths, which results in increase of traffic. In this paper, we propose a top-k query processing method considering data replication in M-P2P networks. This method suppresses duplicate transmissions of same data items through long paths. Moreover, an intermediate node stops transmitting a query message on-demand.