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A Newcastle disease virus (NDV)-vectored vaccine expressing clade 2.3.4.4b H5 Hemagglutinin was developed and assessed for efficacy against H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in specific pathogen-free (SPF) chickens, broilers, and domestic ducks. In SPF chickens, the live recombinant NDV-vectored vaccine, rK148/22-H5, achieved complete survival against HPAI and NDV challenges and significantly reduced viral shedding. Notably, the live rK148/22-H5 vaccine conferred good clinical protection in broilers despite the presence of maternally derived antibodies. Good clinical protection was observed in domestic ducks, with decreased viral shedding. It demonstrated complete survival and reduced cloacal viral shedding when used as an inactivated vaccine from SPF chickens. The rK148/22-H5 vaccine is potentially a viable and supportive option for biosecurity measure, effectively protecting in chickens against the deadly clade 2.3.4.4b H5 HPAI and NDV infections. Furthermore, it aligns with the strategy of Differentiating Infected from Vaccinated Animals (DIVA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing global spread of Newcastle disease underscores the crucial need for continued research on the efficacy of current vaccines against various circulating strains of Newcastle disease virus (NDV). The fusion gene of a representative Egyptian genotype VII.1.1 strain was used to substitute its corresponding gene in the K148/08 vaccinal strain after site directly mutating its cleavage site from 112RRQKRF117 to 112GKQGRL117. Fusion gene exchange between GVII and GI did not affect the thermostability of GI K148/08. Attenuation of the rescued virus was confirmed by mean death time 144 h with an intracerebral pathogenicity index of 0.00. Survival analysis after the challenge experiment confirmed that 107 EID50 was the protective dose of rK148/GVII-F. The haemagglutination inhibition level of antibodies required for full clinical protection was > 3.3 log2 for rK148/GVII-F and > 4.1 log2 for both K148/08 and LaSota. Oropharyngeal viral shedding was reduced on the 5th and 7th days post-challenge in the rK148/GVII-F vaccinated group. Replication and tropism investigations confirmed the respirotropic nature of LaSota, enterotropic nature of K148/08, and further attenuation of rK148/GVII-F. Altogether, rK148/GVII-F is a thermostable, safe, effective, and genetically stable vaccine candidate that could be adequate for use in countries that encounter GVII.1.1 and in those with tropical climate, such as most Middle Eastern countries. A thermostable, safe, and effective NDV GVII recombinant vaccine was generated. Fusion gene replacement with GVII did not affect GI K148/08 virus thermostability. Strain rK148/GVII-F provided adequate protection against a lethal NDV challenge. Oropharyngeal shedding was significantly reduced on post-challenge days 5 and 7. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we propose a novel deep-learning architecture with sparse learning for human activity recognition. The proposed model contains 1D CNNs and LSTM layers with a self-attention mechanism to enhance a substantial number of time points in time-series data for human activity recognition systems. Based on the recent success of squeeze-and-excite (SE) networks, the proposed deep learning model utilizes the SE module to enhance channel-wise interdependencies, which in turn leads to a boost in performance. In addition, we utilized sparse learning to retrain only weak nodes and freeze stronger nodes in a fully connected layer prior to classification layer. Furthermore, we utilized an entropy-inspired formula to find sparsely located weaker nodes and validated our model on various datasets, including Opportunity, UCI-HAR, and WISDM. Herein, we present an extensive analysis and survey of state-of-the-art studies, in addition to our proposed research. For a fair comparison, we evaluated our deep learning architecture using various performance metrics and achieved better results; the proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms for human activity recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]