The correlation of drug resistance and virulence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

The low success rates in the treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis(MDR-TB)and extensively drug-resistant TB(XDR-TB),which account for 55%and 34%respectively,led the WHO to conclude that MDR/XDR-TB is a serious public health crisis.However,the virulence of MDR/XDR-Mycobacterium Tuberculosis(Mtb)has not been analyzed in details,which could provide a specific guidance for the control and prevention.In this review,we discuss different aspects of MDR/XDR-Mtb virulence and its relationship to fitness cost by probing the following questions:(1)what mediates the virulence of MDR/XDR-Mtb?(What is the relationship between fitness and virulence of Mtb?(2)Is it possible that drug-resistant Mtb(DR Mtb)can show higher fitness?(3)What is the definite effect on fitness of each drug-resistant mutant?(4)What other important factors affecting fitness in the mutant strain?(5)How to study the virulence of a large number of DR Mtb?And what prevention and control measures will be taken in the future,especially for the high virulent DR Mtb?We therefore summarized the congruent relationship between drug resistance and fitness from the global response-related genes to antibiotic resistance-contributing mutation,provided methods to explore the virulence of DR Mtb.This review may offer some critical information and concise guide to creating strategies for the prevention and control of drug-resistant Mtb.

In vivo noninvasive study of diabetic peripheral neuropathy plantar morphology and mechanical properties based on ultrasound

To the Editor:The incidence of diabetes complications increases with the increase in diabetes incidence.Diabetic peripheral neuropathy(DPN)is one of the most common complications in diabetes patients.DPN is very harmful and is an important cause of diabetic foot and amputation.The amputation rate of DPN patients is 10-20 times higher than that of nondiabetic patients.Every 30 s,somewhere in the world,a patient’s lower limb or part of a lower limb will be surgically amputated due to DPN.[1]DPN seriously interferes with the physical and mental health of patients.At the same time,the high cost of treatment and rehabilitation care also causes huge economic pressure on patients.Therefore,it is particularly important to identify,diagnose,and prevent DPN in the early or ultra-early stage.

RF-PSSM:A Combination of Rotation Forest Algorithm and Position-Specific Scoring Matrix for Improved Prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions Between Hepatitis C Virus and Human

The identification of hepatitis C virus(HCV)virus-human protein interactions will not only help us understand the molecular mechanisms of related diseases but also be conductive to discovering new drug targets.An increasing number of clinically and experimentally validated interactions between HCV and human proteins have been documented in public databases,facilitating studies based on computational methods.In this study,we proposed a new computational approach,rotation forest position-specific scoring matrix(RF-PSSM),to predict the interactions among HCV and human proteins.In particular,PSSM was used to characterize each protein,two-dimensional principal component analysis(2DPCA)was then adopted for feature extraction of PSSM.Finally,rotation forest(RF)was used to implement classification.The results of various ablation experiments show that on independent datasets,the accuracy and area under curve(AUC)value of RF-PSSM can reach 93.74% and 94.29%,respectively,outperforming almost all cutting-edge research.In addition,we used RF-PSSM to predict 9 human proteins that may interact with HCV protein E1,which can provide theoretical guidance for future experimental studies.