An online coronavirus analysis platform from the National Genomics Data Center

DEAR EDITOR,Since the first reported severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2(SARS-CoV-2)infection in December 2019,coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19)has become a global pandemic,spreading to more than 200 countries and regions worldwide.With continued research progress and virus detection,SARS-CoV-2 genomes and sequencing data have been reported and accumulated at an unprecedented rate.

More studies are necessary to establish the effectiveness of Jinhuang powder in the treatment of diabetic foot

Diabetes mellitus is a common global public health problem that can cause serious illness and premature death.Diabetic foot ulcer,one of the complications of diabetes,is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and is associated with many other devastating complications.Previous study found that a group of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)can be used for treating diabetic foot ulcers.More and more attention is being paid to the use of Chinese medicine to heal diabetic feet.Under the guidance of relevant theories of traditional Chinese medicine,more studies are needed to reveal the key active components and related signal pathways of TCM in the treatment of diabetic foot ulcer.One clinical study explored the treatment of diabetic foot with infection combined moist exposed burn ointment with Jinhuang powder.However,large-scale multi-center,double blind,randomized,placebo-controlled clinical trials and animal studies are necessary to establish the effectiveness of Jinhuang powder in the treatment of diabetic foot.

Enhancing Storage Efficiency and Performance: A Survey of Data Partitioning Techniques

Data partitioning techniques are pivotal for optimal data placement across storage devices,thereby enhancing resource utilization and overall system throughput.However,the design of effective partition schemes faces multiple challenges,including considerations of the cluster environment,storage device characteristics,optimization objectives,and the balance between partition quality and computational efficiency.Furthermore,dynamic environments necessitate robust partition detection mechanisms.This paper presents a comprehensive survey structured around partition deployment environments,outlining the distinguishing features and applicability of various partitioning strategies while delving into how these challenges are addressed.We discuss partitioning features pertaining to database schema,table data,workload,and runtime metrics.We then delve into the partition generation process,segmenting it into initialization and optimization stages.A comparative analysis of partition generation and update algorithms is provided,emphasizing their suitability for different scenarios and optimization objectives.Additionally,we illustrate the applications of partitioning in prevalent database products and suggest potential future research directions and solutions.This survey aims to foster the implementation,deployment,and updating of high-quality partitions for specific system scenarios.

Hadamard Encoding Based Frequent Itemset Mining under Local Differential Privacy

Local differential privacy(LDP)approaches to collecting sensitive information for frequent itemset mining(FIM)can reliably guarantee privacy.Most current approaches to FIM under LDP add"padding and sampling"steps to obtain frequent itemsets and their frequencies because each user transaction represents a set of items.The current state-of-the-art approach,namely set-value itemset mining(SVSM),must balance variance and bias to achieve accurate results.Thus,an unbiased FIM approach with lower variance is highly promising.To narrow this gap,we propose an Item-Level LDP frequency oracle approach,named the Integrated-with-Hadamard-Transform-Based Frequency Oracle(IHFO).For the first time,Hadamard encoding is introduced to a set of values to encode all items into a fixed vector,and perturbation can be subsequently applied to the vector.An FIM approach,called optimized united itemset mining(O-UISM),is pro-posed to combine the padding-and-sampling-based frequency oracle(PSFO)and the IHFO into a framework for acquiring accurate frequent itemsets with their frequencies.Finally,we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that O-UISM significantly outperforms the extant approaches in finding frequent itemsets and estimating their frequencies under the same privacy guarantee.

Asperochones A and B,two antimicrobial aromatic polyketides from the endophytic fungus Aspergillus sp.MMC-2

Two novel fungal metabolites,asperochones A and B,were obtained from an Aspergillus sp.Their structures were determined by 1D/2D nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR)spectroscopy,high resolution electrospray ionization mass spectroscopy(HRESIMS),and single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis.Asperochone A possesses an intriguing skeleton bearing 5/6/6/6/7/5/5/5 octacyclic ring system,and asperochone B also exhibits an unusual carbon skeleton with five stereochiral centers.Their structures were proposed as heterotrimeric and heterodimeric products of aromatic polyketides.In addition,asperochone A exhibited a potential anti-tuberculosis effect since it showed a moderate potency against Mycobacterium smegmatis.

BRANCHING GENERATION DURING THE FREE RADICAL COPOLYMERIZATION OF p-VINYL BENZENE SULFONYL CHLORIDE WITH STYRENE

The branching generation during the free radical copolymerization of chain transfer monomer p-vinyl benzene sulfonyl chloride （VBSC） with styrene was investigated by a simple mathematic model. Chain transfer constant of VBSC was determined to be around 0.3 by fitting the 1H-NMR monitored experimental results with a mathematic model. According to the theoretical analysis, the obtained poIy（VBSC） and its copolymers were substantiated to have a grafting-like main chain with residual pendent sulfonyl chloride groups after consuming most of the vinyl groups. The copolymerization results of VBSC with styrene at varied feed ratios demonstrated that conversion of sulfonyl chloride groups was lower than that of the monomer, which was in agreement with the theoretical results. The glass transition temperature, number average molecular weight and distribution of those obtained polymers were primarily investigated. Comparing with other chain transfer monomers, VBSC has a chain transfer constant much closer to unity therefore a more branched polymer is expected. Additionally, the branched polystyrene with residual sulfonyl chloride groups is hopefully to be further used as ATRP macro- initiators or reactive intermediates to synthesize functional polymers with complex structure.

Partial Label Learning via Conditional-Label-Aware Disambiguation

Partial label learning is a weakly supervised learning framework in which each instance is associated with multiple candidate labels,among which only one is the ground-truth label.This paper proposes a unified formulation that employs proper label constraints for training models while simultaneously performing pseudo-labeling.Unlike existing partial label learning approaches that only leverage similarities in the feature space without utilizing label constraints,our pseudo-labeling process leverages similarities and differences in the feature space using the same candidate label constraints and then disambiguates noise labels.Extensive experiments on artificial and real-world partial label datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts on classification prediction.