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ABSTRACT African swine fever (ASF), caused by ASF virus (ASFV), is a highly infectious and severe hemorrhagic disease of pigs that causes major economic losses. Currently, no commercial vaccine is available and prevention and control of ASF relies mainly on early diagnosis. Here, a novel automated double antigen sandwich chemiluminescent immunoassay (DAgS-aCLIA) was developed to detect antibodies against ASFV p72 (p72-Ab). For this purpose, recombinant p72 trimer was produced, coupled to magnetic particles as carriers and labeled with acridinium ester as a signal trace. Finally, p72-Ab can be sensitively and rapidly measured on an automated chemiluminescent instrument. For quantitative analysis, a calibration curve was established with a laudable linearity range of 0.21 to 212.0 ng/mL (R2 = 0.9910) and a lower detection limit of 0.15 ng/mL. For qualitative analysis, a cut-off value was set at 1.50 ng/mL with a diagnostic sensitivity of 100.00% and specificity of 98.33%. Furthermore, antibody response to an ASF gene-deleted vaccine candidate can be accurately quantified using this DAgS-aCLIA, as evidenced by early seroconversion as early as 7 days post-immunization and high antibody levels. Compared with available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays, this DAgS-aCLIA demonstrated a wider linearity range of 4 to 16-fold, and excellent analytical sensitivity and agreement of over 95.60%. In conclusion, our proposed DAgS-aCLIA would be an effective tool to support ASF epidemiological surveillance.IMPORTANCEAfrican swine fever virus (ASFV) is highly contagious in wild boar and domestic pigs. There is currently no vaccine available for ASF, so serological testing is an important diagnostic tool. Traditional enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays provide only qualitative results and are time and resource consuming. This study will develop an automated chemiluminescent immunoassay (CLIA) that can quantitatively and qualitatively detect antibodies to ASFV p72, greatly reducing detection time and labour-intensive operation, and improving detection sensitivity and linearity range. This novel CLIA would serve as a reliable and convenient tool for ASF pandemic surveillance and vaccine development.

ABSTRACT: Odor emission during livestock manure treatment poses a threat to the environment and human health. However, the odor emission profiles and related factors of commonly employed poultry manure treatments have rarely been studied. Here, we explored the odor emission profiles of 3 common poultry manure treatments in China, namely, ectopic fermentation beds (EFB), annular composting troughs (ACT) and air-drying rooms (ADR). The results revealed that the total odor concentrations in the EFB, ACT and ADR groups were 2407.67 ± 512.94, 13444.00 ± 1269.92 and 621.33 ± 59.27, respectively. The ACT had the greatest number of odorants (31), followed by the ADR (27) and the EFB (24). Methyl mercaptan, acetic acid, acetaldehyde, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and acrolein were the key odorous compounds detected in all the treatments. ACT contained the greatest number of key odorants (11) and exhibited an extensive co-occurrence relationship with the bacterial community. The 3 poultry manure treatments exhibited significant differences in the beta diversities of the bacterial community. The phylum of most bacteria associated with key odorants was Firmicutes, and Enterococcus and Oceanobacillus were significantly positively correlated with methyl mercaptan. The bacterial functional groups were enriched in carbohydrate metabolism, amino acid metabolism and energy metabolism, and the functional genes shaped the odor emission patterns in the poultry manure treatments. Redundancy analysis demonstrated that odor emission in the 3 treatments was positively correlated with Firmicutes abundance, pH, electrical conductivity and moisture. Thus, our study provides a good understanding of odor emission profiles in poultry manure treatments and data for precise odor emission control during livestock production.

The next generation phased array radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) low frequency aperture array, suffer from RF interference (RFI) because of the large field of view of antenna element. The classical station beamformer used in SKA-low is resource efficient but cannot deal with the unknown sidelobe RFI. A real-time adaptive beamforming strategy is proposed for SKA-low station, which trades the capability of adaptive RFI nulling at an acceptably cost, it doesn’t require hardware redesign but only modifies the firmware accordingly. The proposed strategy uses a Parallel Least Mean Square (PLMS) algorithm, which has a computational complexity of 4N+2 and can be performed in parallel. Beam pattern and output SINR simulation results show deeply nulling performance to sidelobe RFI, as well as good mainlobe response similar to the classical beamformer. The convergence performance depends on the signal-and-interference environments and step size, wherein too large a step size leads to a non-optimal output SINR and too small a step size leads to slow convergence speed. FPGA implementation demonstrations are implemented and tested on a NI FPGA module, and test results demonstrate good real-time performance and low slice resource consumption.

African swine fever (ASF), caused by ASF virus (ASFV), is a highly contagious and lethal disease of domestic pigs leading to tremendous economic losses. As there are no vaccines and drugs available. An effective diagnosis to eliminate ASFV-infected pigs is a crucial strategy to prevent and control ASF. To this end, ASFV capsid protein p72 was expressed using Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells and subsequently conjugated with horseradish peroxidase (HRP) to develop a one-step double-antigen sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (one-step DAgS-ELISA). The performance of this ELISA for detecting ASFV antibodies was evaluated. Overall, a diagnostic sensitivity of 97.96% and specificity of 98.96% was achieved when the cutoff value was set to 0.25. No cross-reaction with healthy pig serum and other swine viruses was observed. The coefficients of variation of the intra-assay and inter-assay were both

Haemophilus parasuis is a commensal organism of the upper respiratory tract of pigs, but virulent strains can cause Glässer’s disease, resulting in significant economic losses to the swine industry. OmpP2 is an outer membrane protein of this organism that shows considerable heterogeneity between virulent and non-virulent strains, with classification into genotypes I and II. It also acts as a dominant antigen and is involved in the inflammatory response. In this study, 32 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) against recombinant OmpP2 (rOmpP2) of different genotypes were tested for reactivity to a panel of OmpP2 peptides. Nine linear B cell epitopes were screened, including five common genotype epitopes (Pt1a, Pt7/Pt7a, Pt9a, Pt17, and Pt19/Pt19a) and two groups of genotype-specific epitopes (Pt5 and Pt5-II, Pt11/Pt11a, and Pt11a-II). In addition, we used positive sera from mice and pigs to screen for five linear B-cell epitopes (Pt4, Pt14, Pt15, Pt21, and Pt22). After porcine alveolar macrophages (PAMs) were stimulated with overlapping OmpP2 peptides, we found that the epitope peptides Pt1 and Pt9, and the loop peptide Pt20 which was adjacent epitopes could all significantly upregulated the mRNA expression levels of IL-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α. Additionally, we identified epitope peptides Pt7, Pt11/Pt11a, Pt17, Pt19, and Pt21 and loop peptides Pt13 and Pt18 which adjacent epitopes could also upregulate the mRNA expression levels of most proinflammatory cytokines. This suggested that these peptides may be the virulence-related sites of the OmpP2 protein, with proinflammatory activity. Further study revealed differences in the mRNA expression levels of proinflammatory cytokines, including IL-1β and IL-6, between genotype-specific epitopes, which may be responsible for pathogenic differences between different genotype strains. Here, we profiled a linear B-cell epitope map of the OmpP2 protein and preliminarily analyzed the proinflammatory activities and effects of these epitopes on bacterial virulence, providing a reliable theoretical basis for establishing a method to distinguish strain pathogenicity and to screen candidate peptides for subunit vaccines.

The emergence and widespread of porcine circovirus-associated diseases (PCVADs), mainly caused by porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2), threatens the Chinese swine industry. In this study, to investigate the recent prevalence of PCV2 in northern Guangdong Province of China, 573 tissue samples from 132 pig farms were collected during 2016–2021 and analyzed via PCR. Overall, 51.38% (297/573, 95%CI 47.74–55.92) samples were tested PCV2 positive. The detection rate of PCV2 was significantly lower in samples collected before 2016-2018 than after the outbreak of African Swine Fever (2019-2021), being 59.85% (158/264, 95%CI 53.94–65.76) and 41.47% (141/340, 95%CI 36.43–46.71), respectively. On the other end, the genetic characteristics of 26 PCV2 strains were further analyzed. These PCV2 strains belonged to three genotypes, including PCV2a, PCV2b, and PCV2d. Specifically, the predominant genotype prevalent during two periods (2016–2018 and 2019–2021) wasPCV2b (81.82%, 9/11) and PCV2d (80.0%, 12/15), respectively. The results above illustrated the high prevalence and the genetic evolution feature of PCV2 in Guangdong Province in recent years.

Although carbon fiber reinforced epoxy composites (CF/EP) have been widely used in many fields, it is still unknown if such composites could be used in extreme environments exposed to high-intensity thermal radiation that could result in severe damage to materials. In this case, CF/CP has been prepared through thermocompression method and the thermal radiation experiment has been designed and performed. The obtained results show that the parameters including irradiation power density and irradiation time directly affect the damage degree. After irradiation with 4–6 W cm ^−2 of thermal radiation, decomposition occurred in all CF/EP composites. In addition, the numerical simulation method was used to calculate the effect process, and the results showed that when the thermal radiation coefficient was 0.88, the calculated temperature history was consistent with that of the experiment. After irradiated at 6 W cm ^−2 for 30 s, the decomposition thickness reaches to 0.7 mm, indicating the high-intensity thermal radiation has caused an obvious effect on CF/EP.

As rapid and reliable tools for diagnosis of porcine respiratory disease complex (PRDC) bacterial pathogens are getting more important over time, we established a new multiplex fluorescence quantitative polymerase chain reaction (mFQ-PCR) system with a similar symptom. Our results showed that the system could accurately and simultaneously detect 8 pathogens within 1.5 h. The detection limits were 2-5 standard DNA copies. The correlation coefficient of the standard curve was more than 0.998, with a well dynamic range from 101 to 109, and the intra- and intervariation coefficients (CVs) were less than 2.06%. After setting the positive threshold of Ct value, the coincidence rate between mFQ-PCR and conventional PCR (cPCR) could reach 92%-100%, the specificity and sensitivity of mFQ-PCR exceeded 93.5% and 90.8%, respectively. We also found that the positive rates of 8 bacteria were 12.5%-68.2%, while the rates of co-infection were 90%-100% in the clinical samples. The co-infection among Streptococcus suis (Ss), Haemophilus parasuis (Hps), and Mycoplasma hyorhinis (Mhr) accounted for 78.3%, 91.4%, 100%, respectively of all the positive samples, among Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae (App) and Mycoplasma pneumoniae (Mhp) are 45.5% and 35.7%, among Bordetella bronchis (Bb), Pasteurella multocida (Pm) and toxic Pasteurella multocida (T+Pm) are 52.2%, 41.4%, and 100%, respectively. The results demonstrated that co-infection of 2-4 pathogenic bacteria with similar symptoms was a common situation for PRDC in south of China; our method has the potential to become a reliable detection tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persimmon, Diospyros kaki L., is an important fruit tree in northern China. Japanese wax scale, Ceroplastes japonicus Green (Hemiptera: Coccoidea: Coccidae), is the most destructive pest in persimmon orchards and is difficult to control using chemical pesticides. This paper studied the variety of volatile emissions from persimmon trees attacked by wax scale or induced by applications of methyl jasmonate (MeJA), an exogenous signaling material. We also studied the role of volatiles in recruiting the ladybeetle, Chilocorus kuwanae Silvestri (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae), a primary predator of wax scale. The results showed that the ladybeetles displayed strong taxis responses to the odor sources from trees treated with MeJA and wax scaledamaged trees. Within 24 h after the trees were treated with MeJA, the number of ladybeetles responding to the treated trees fluctuated based on the amount of volatiles released over a diel period. Chemical analysis of the volatiles showed that terpenoid compounds, especially α-pinene, increased from both the wax scaledamaged and MeJA-treated trees and that this was the reason for the ladybeetle attraction. Therefore, α-pinene was used as a single signal source to examine the taxis response of C. kuwanae. The results suggest that α-pinene plays a significant role in attracting the ladybeetles. It is therefore concluded that MeJA application might be used to stimulate the defense function of persimmon trees by inducing the release of terpenoids, especially α-pinene, and thereby recruiting more ladybeetles to control the scale insects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]