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Objective: To analyze the frequency and spectrum of thalassemia mutations in amniotic fluid samples collected from Han and Li people in Hainan province of China. Methods: We carried out a retrospective analysis on prenatal diagnosis of amniotic fluid samples collected from pregnant women who may have next generation with high risks of medium or severe thalassemia between 2005 and 2016. Diverse fetal thalassemia genotypes and mutated alleles in Han and Li people were analyzed and cmpared. Results: We examined 536 amniotic fluid samples from Han people and 588 from Li people, among which 406 Han and 500 Li samples were found to carry at least one thalassemia gene mutation, with a detection rate of 75.75% and 85.03%, respectively. Among all α- and β-thalassemia mutant alleles detected, the most frequently found mutations in Han and Li samples were SEA-type of α-thalassemia and 41/42 (–CTTT) of β-thalassemia, respectively. A total of 75 severe thalassemia cases were identified in Han samples and 53 in Li samples. In most of these severe cases, parents chose to terminate pregnancy after being informed of thalassemia-related risks. Conclusions: The thalassemia mutations shows ethnic and area specificity, and that prenatal diagnosis for high-risk thalassemia carrier pregnant women is an efficient approach to prevent and control the occurrence of severe thalassemia in the high-prevalence areas.

Hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) spreads rapidly and has been recognized as a public health problem in recent years in China. Unfortunately, there is no effective vaccine or antiviral drug currently for EV71 infection. In this study, we aim to identify biomarker which are associated with for severity of EV71 infection cases using high-throughput RNA sequencing approach. RNA sequencing of samples from severe HFMD (S) patients group (n = 10) and control HFMD (C) patients group (n = 10) were performed and the results were verified by qPCR. mRNA with the highest expression level was selected to be validated in an independent cohort comprising of 45 severe EV71 infected patients and 45 control by qPCR assay. Seventeen significant differentially expressed genes were identified. Scavenger receptor class A, member 3 (SCARA3) was one of the significantly upregulated genes with the highest expression level and was selected for validation. The mean relative expression levels in severe HFMD and control HFMD patients were 10.1-fold and 5.0-fold, respectively, P value

Sapphire single crystal is widely used in a variety of modern applications from GaN-based LED to military optical systems because of its excellent combination of optical, mechanical, thermal and chemical properties. The dislocations affecting the quality of sapphire crystal were studied by chemical etching and optical microscopy in this paper. The experimental results showed that the dislocation corrosion pits of (11-20) plane in sapphire crystals grown by Kyropoulos method is diamond-shaped and (1-102) plane is isosceles triangle and the density of dislocations in samples grown by Czochralski method is about two orders of magnitude higher than that in samples grown by Vertical Bridgman method. The formation mechanism of defects and proposes was also discussed.

The over-load protective relay is widely used for motor protection. The reliability of the over-load protective relay directly affects the safe running of a motor. The reliability testing and reliability analysis of the over-load protective relay is an important way to improve the reliability of products. In this paper, the reliability test method of the over-load protective relay is studied, and the reliability tests of the typical products are carried out on a reliability tester developed by authors. In terms of the testing results, the reliability analysis is finished. The failure reasons are found and the measures are put forward to improve the reliability of the products.

In modern mechanical systems, especially in robotics and bio-mechanics, there are needs to investigate higher pairs in more details, and to compute the d.o.f. of the relative motion between two bodies, rather than the d.o.f. of the whole system. In this paper, conjugate pairs are investigated with the aid of the theory of conjugate surfaces. This investigation provides a geometrical insight of the d.o.f. of a joint. The conjugation chain and the corresponding algorithm are introduced. They provide an instrumental tool for computing the d.o.f. of the equivalent conjugate motion between two bodies in a mechanical system. The existence of the redundant and the complementary d.o.f. is briefly explained.

An adaptive data clustering algorithm based on ant colony (ant-cluster) is presented. Enlightened by the self-organizing behavior of ant society, we assign acceptance rates on the directed edges of a pheromone digraph in ant-cluster system. The pheromone on the edges of the digraph is adaptively updated by the ants passing it. Some edges with less pheromone are progressively removed under a list of certain thresholds in the process. Strong connected components of the final digraph are extracted as clusters. The performance of ant-cluster is compared with classical K-means clustering algorithm and ACO clustering algorithm LF in terms of clustering quality and efficiency on several real datasets and clustering benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the ant-cluster is able to find clusters faster with better clustering quality and is easier to implement than K-means and LF.

Four fundamental forms for representing rigid body motion, i.e. the rotation-of-vector form, the matrix form, the quaternion form and the screw form, all based on the conventional concept that motion is specified by the movement of a reference point together with an orientation change, are expounded. The inter-relationships among these forms are elucidated. The geometric images of these representation-forms, i.e. the motion mappings, are explained, and an innovative duplex-mapping, a powerful tool for mobility analysis of multi-loop mechanisms and robots, is introduced. An exotic motion representation, based on a concept totally different from the conventional concept, is described. This is a purely geometric representation, a representation by a pair of conjugate curves on respective conjugate surfaces, and is called the conjugation form of motion representation. The conversion from the conjugation form to the rotation-of-vector form and the inverse conversion are described. These conversions, which constitute the essential and featured contents of the Theory of Conjugate Surfaces, have great potential applications in motion design for numerically controlled manufacturing and in surface generation by numerically controlled manufacturing. The basis equations for the conversions, i.e. the three relationship-equations, are deduced. The fundamental equation conjugation, the four conjugato-kinematic entities and the five differential formulas for the inverse conversion are derived.