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Norovirus diarrhea is a great threat to public health worldwide. To characterize the prevalence of circulating noroviruses associated with sporadic gastroenteritis cases in Guangzhou, 215 stool specimens were collected during two consecutive cold seasons in 2013-2015. Noroviruses were detected in 25 (11.63 %) samples, and GII.4 (6/9) and GII.17 (10/16) were identified as the most predominant variants of each of those seasons. The remaining strains belonged to the genotypes GII.P12/GII.3, GII.2, and GI.Pb/GI.6. The phylogenetic relationships of the GII.17 strains were analyzed based on their capsid protein sequences. This study suggests a significant shift of predominant variants associated with sporadic gastroenteritis in Guangzhou. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the genome sequence of a norovirus GII.4 strain isolated from South China was comparatively analyzed. The RNA genome of the strain GZ2013-L10 was composed of 7513 nucleotides. Phylogenetic analyses based on three ORFs confirmed its genotype as GII.Pe/GII.4-2012. Compared with other 22 genomes of the same variant, nine distinct nucleotide substitutions were found in the new genome, which resulted in three amino acid changes. All 138 capsid protein VP1 sequences of GII.4-2012 variants were also collected, and multiple alignments revealed 35 variable codons. Evolutionary analyses of GII.4-2012 variants were performed against previous pandemic GII.4 variants, and 2 distinctive changes were identified on epitopes A and E (E368, T413), which resulted in an obvious variation of their solvent-accessible surface areas. Therefore, the genome of GZ2013-L10 was extensively characterized, and new emerging variations on viral epitopes were predicted to contribute to NoV persistence in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a generalized i-vector representation framework with phonetic tokenization and tandem features for text independent as well as text dependent speaker verification. In the conventional i-vector framework, the tokens for calculating the zero-order and first-order Baum-Welch statistics are Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) components trained from acoustic level MFCC features. Yet besides MFCC, we believe that phonetic information makes another direction that can benefit the system performance. Our contribution in this paper lies in integrating phonetic information into the i-vector representation by several extensions, forming a more generalized i-vector framework. First, the tokens for calculating the zero-order statistics is extended from the MFCC trained GMM components to phonetic phonemes, trigrams and tandem feature trained GMM components, using phoneme posterior probabilities. Second, given the zero-order statistics (posterior probabilities on tokens), the feature used to calculate the first-order statistics is also extended from MFCC to tandem feature, and is not necessarily the same feature employed by the tokenizer. Third, the zero-order and first-order statistics vectors are then concatenated and represented by the simplified supervised i-vector approach followed by the standard Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) back-end. We study different token and feature combinations, and we show that the feature level fusion of acoustic level MFCC features and phonetic level tandem features with GMM based i-vector representation achieves the best performance for text independent speaker verification. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the phonetic level phoneme constraints introduced by the tandem features help the text dependent speaker verification system to reject wrong password trials and improve the performance dramatically. Experimental results are reported on the NIST SRE 2010 common condition 5 female part task and the RSR 2015 part 1 female part task for text independent and text dependent speaker verification, respectively. For the text independent speaker verification task, the proposed generalized i-vector representation outperforms the i-vector baseline by relatively 53 % in terms of equal error rate (EER) and norm minDCF values. For the text dependent speaker verification task, our proposed approach also reduced the EER significantly from 23 % to 90 % relatively for different types of trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complete genome sequence of a novel norovirus strain GZ2010-L87 identified in Guangzhou was analyzed phylogenetically in this study. The RNA genome of the GZ2010-L87 strain is composed of 7,559 nucleotides. The phylogenetic analysis based on open reading frame (ORF) 2 revealed that the strain belongs to the GII.4 genotype, forming the new cluster GII.4-2009 which was also identified in Asia and the USA since 2009. Furthermore, phylogenetic analyses of the full genome and the different open reading frame sequences of GZ2010-L87 and other representative strains suggested that the novel strain did not undergo recombination. Comparative analysis with the consensus sequence of 31 completely sequenced norovirus GII.4-2009 genomes showed 86 mismatched nucleotides (56 in ORF1, 16 in ORF2, and 14 in ORF3), resulting in 19 amino acid changes (9 in ORF1, 3 in ORF2, and 7 in ORF3). Furthermore, 12 variable sites were found on the capsid protein of norovirus GII.4-2009, and most were located at the P2 domain. Meanwhile, based on comparison with other GII.4 clusters, 14 sites were shown specific to the novel cluster. In summary, the genome of the new GII.4-2009 variant GZ2010-L87, which was first identified in China, was extensively characterized with a large panel of genetically diverse noroviruses. The genomic information obtained from the novel variant can be used not only as a full-length norovirus sequence standard in China but also as reference data for future evolution research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]