Delay-dependent robust stability of stochastic delay systems with Markovian switching

In recent years, the stability of hybrid stochastic delay systems, one of the important issues in the study of stochastic systems, has received considerable attention. However, the existing results do not deal with the structure of the diffusion but estimate its upper bound, which induces conservatism. This paper studies delay-dependent robust stability of hybrid stochastic delay systems. A delay-dependent criterion for robust exponential stability of hybrid stochastic delay systems is presented in terms of linear matrix inequalities （LMIs）, which exploits the structure of the diffusion. Numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness and less conservativeness of the proposed method.

Interferon-gamma ELISPOT for the screening and diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection in healthy population of China

The aim of this study was to analyze the combination of three kinds of in-house IFN-γ ELISPOT using peptide A53 and peptide mixtures (E6 + E7 and E6 + E7 + C14) with tuberculin skin test (TST) to detect latent TB infection (LTBI) in China. A total of 788 healthy people were recruited and analyzed by three kinds of IFN-g ELISPOT, 581 of them had TST results, of which 147 samples were also compared with the T- SPOT.TB test. The positive detection rates for T- SPOT.TB and three kinds of IFN-γ ELISPOT with A53, E6 + E7 and E6 + E7 + C14 were 14.28% (21/147), 29.43% (171/581), 23.24% (135/581) and 28.40% (165/581), respectively. These results were significantly lower than the positive TST results, which were positive in 82.99% (122/147) and 75.73% (440/ 581), respectively. The positive detection rates of three kinds of IFN-γ ELISPOT (31.60%, 26.65% and 32.11% in 788 cases, respectively) could better reflect over 40.00% of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection rate in China. Detection rates between contacts and non-contacts by three kinds of IFN-γ ELIS-POT were not significantly different (p > 0.05). It can be seen that the three kinds of in-house IFN-γ ELIS- POT might be used as a complementary tool of T- SPOT.TB for detecting LTBI in the healthy population of China.

GoldenFish:a rapid and efficient system to customize constructs for zebrafish transgenesis

Transgenesis, which inserts exogenous DNA into animal genomes, is a widely used technique. Traditionally, the constructs for transgenesis are generated by step-by-step subcloning of DNA fragments, which requires multiple steps depending on the construct complexity. To overcome the limitation, advanced tools such as Gateway cloning (Hartley et al., 2000;Kwan et al., 2007), In-Fusion cloning (Sleight et al., 2010), and Gibson assembly (Gibson et al., 2009) have been developed. However, due to their ligation characteristics, no systematic method for transgenesis has been developed. ‘Golden Gate’ cloning first appeared in 2008, which is a widely used DNA assembly method (Engler et al., 2008, 2009). Here, we take zebrafish transgenesis as an example and develop a standardized system called GoldenFish, which is based on Golden Gate cloning. It can customize transgenic constructs in one step and can be applied to multiple types of transgenesis such as one gene driven by one promoter, multiple genes driven by one promoter, and multiple genes respectively driven by multiple promoters, significantly reducing working time.