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This paper proposes a high-capacity scheme for reversible data hiding (RDH) in encrypted images. The proposed scheme is based on a new preprocessing method by bit plane partition. Specifically, the values in the less significant bit planes are reversibly hidden into the other bit planes. Consequently, the room in the less significant bit planes can be vacated to generate a preprocessed image, from which the original image can be recovered by extracting the hidden bit values and writing them back. After encrypting the preprocessed image with a stream cipher, the vacated room can be used to accommodate extra data, which can be retrieved without image decryption. In addition, the embedding capacity can be further increased by adopting an efficient most significant bit (MSB) prediction method before image encryption. Compared with the state-of-the-art RDH schemes for encrypted images, the experimental results show that higher embedding capacity can be achieved with our proposed one. The numerical results are provided to show the performances of the proposed scheme in different cases of bit-plane partition and MSB prediction.

To explore the genetic variation of a Chinese family affected with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis and albinism.Whole exome sequencing (WES) was carried out to screen potential variants within genomic DNA extracted from the proband and his parents. Whole genome sequencing (WGS) was applied when variants were not found completely. Suspected variants were validated by Sanger sequencing.WES has identified a heterozygous c.1729GC (p.G577R) variant of NTRK1 gene and two heterozygous variants of OCA2 gene, namely c.1363AG (p.R455G) and c.1182+1GA. WGS has identified two additional heterozygous variants c.(851-798CT; 851-794CG) in deep intronic regions of the NTRK1 gene.The compound heterozygous variants of the NTRK1 gene probably underlay the congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. And the compound heterozygous variants of the OCA2 gene probably underlay the albinism in the proband. In the case where no variant is detected by WES in the coding region, WGS should be considered to screen potential variants in the whole genome.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a newly emerging coronavirus. This virus poses a great threat to human society and has been marked as the third introduction of a highly pathogenic coronavirus into the human population. This is following severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in the 21st-century. While China has achieved initial success in controlling the spread of COVID-19 and treating those infected with SARS-CoV-2, up to 14% of COVID-19 convalescents can still be detected with virus nucleic acid. Thus, there is an urgent need for more information to understand this new virus. Here we report the detailed clinical characteristics of three cases of COVID-19 convalescents that had repeated positive quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) test results for over three months. This may arouse concerns regarding the present quarantine protocol after convalescence and provide a reference for governments to consider when to reopen the community.

BACKGROUND: QRFPR is a recently identified member of the G protein‐coupled receptor and is an orphan receptor for 26Rfa, which plays important role in the regulation of many physiological functions. METHODS: Here, we employed whole exome sequencing (WES) to examine the patients with intellectual disability (ID) and difficulty in feeding. We performed SIFT and PolyPhen2 predictions for the variants. The structure model was built from scratch by I‐TASSER. Here, results derived from a number of cell‐based functional assays, including shRNA experiment, intracellular Ca(2+) measurement, the expression of PI3 K‐AKT‐mTOR, and phosphorylation. The functional effect of QRFPR variants on PI3K‐AKT‐mTOR signaling was evaluated in vitro transfection experiments. RESULT: Here, we identified two QRFPR variants at c.202 T>C (p.Y68H) and c.1111C>T (p.R371W) in 2 unrelated individuals. Structural analysis revealed that p.Y68H and p.R371W variants may affect the side chain structure of adjacent amino acids causing reduced binding of QRFPR to 26Rfa. The results show that QRFPR stimulated by 26Rfa leading to the transient rise of intracellular Ca(2+). The QRFPR variations p.Y68H and p.R371 W can reduce the mobilization of intracellular Ca(2+). The phosphorylation levels of the PI3K, Akt, and mTOR were significantly up‐ or downregulated by QRFPR overexpression or silencing, respectively. The QRFPR variations inhibited PI3K‐AKT‐mTOR signaling, resulting in downregulation of p‐mTOR. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that QRFPR acts as important role in neurodevelopment, and the effects of QRFPR are likely to be mediated by the Ca(2+)‐dependent PI3K‐AKT‐mTOR pathways. Importantly, these findings provide a foundation for future elucidation of GPCR‐mediated signaling and the physiological implications.

Background Hearing loss (HL) is a common sensory disorder in humans characterized by extreme clinical and genetic heterogeneity. In recent years, next‐generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have proven to be highly effective and powerful tools for population genetic studies of HL. Here, we analyzed clinical and molecular data from 21 Chinese deaf families who did not have hotspot mutations in the common deafness genes GJB2, SLC26A4, GJB3, and MT‐RNR1. Method Targeted next‐generation sequencing (TGS) of 127 known deafness genes was performed in probands of 12 families, while whole‐exome sequencing (WES) or trio‐WES was used for the remaining nine families. Results Potential pathogenic mutations in a total of 12 deafness genes were identified in 13 probands; the mutations were observed in GJB2, CDH23, EDNRB, MYO15A, OTOA, OTOF, TBC1D24, SALL1, TMC1, TWNK, USH1C, and USH1G, with eight of the identified mutations being novel. Further, a copy number variant (CNV) was detected in one proband with heterozygous deletion of chromosome 4p16.3‐4p15.32. Thus, the total diagnostic rate using NGS in our deafness patients reached 66.67% (14/21). Conclusions These results expand the mutation spectrum of deafness‐causing genes and provide support for the use of NGS detection technologies for routine molecular diagnosis in Chinese deaf populations., In the present study, we examined clinical and molecular data from 21 Chinese deaf families and molecular diagnosis was made in 14 of 21 families. The results identified a number of novel and previously reported mutations in rare deafness‐causing genes.

Background Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA) is a group of heterogeneous genetic disorders characterized by abnormal melanin synthesis in the hair, skin, and eyes. OCA exhibits obvious genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity. Molecular diagnosis of causal genes can be of help in the classification of OCA subtypes and the study of OCA pathogenesis． Methods In this study, Sanger sequencing and whole exome sequencing were used to genetically diagnose 20 nonconsanguineous Chinese OCA patients. In addition, prenatal diagnosis was provided to six OCA families. Results Variants of TYR, OCA2, and HPS1 were detected in 85%, 10%, and 5% of affected patients, respectively. A total of 21 distinct variants of these three genes were identified. Exons 1 and 2 were the hotspot regions of the TYR variants, and c.895C > A and c.896G > A were the hotspot variants. We also found seven novel variants: c.731G > A, c.741C > A, c.867C > A, and c.1037‐2A > T in TYR, c.695dupT and c.1054A > G in OCA2, and c.9C > A in HPS1. Genetic tests on six fetuses revealed three carrier fetuses, two normal fetuses, and one affected fetus. The follow‐up results after birth were consistent with the results of prenatal diagnosis (one fetus terminated during pregnancy was not followed up). Conclusions This study expands our understanding of the genotypic spectrum of the Chinese OCA population. The findings indicate that prenatal diagnosis can provide important information for genetic counseling., We showed the clinical phenotype and genetic diagnosis results of 20 OCA patients. A total of 21 distinct alleles, including seven novel variants, of the TYR, OCA2, and HPS1 were detected by Sanger sequencing or whole exome sequencing. This study expands our understanding of the genotypic spectrum of the Chinese OCA population and highlights that whole exome sequencing can contribute to more accurate and efficient clinical diagnoses.

Background The clinical efficacy of eye drops in the treatment of recurrent corneal erosion syndrome (RCES) is not satisfactory. Many studies have confirmed the positive effect of the bandage contact lens (BCL) in corneal diseases, but not many in patients with RCES. The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficacy of the BCL compared with deproteinized calf blood extract eye gel in the initial treatment of RCES. Methods Forty-seven patients with RCES treated in our hospital from September 2010 to September 2018 were retrospectively analyzed, including 24 cases (26 eyes) in the bandage contact lenses (BCLs) group wearing bandage contact lens and 23 cases (24 eyes) in the drug group treated with deproteinized calf blood extract eye gel. The efficacy was evaluated after 3 months of treatment, with a mean follow-up time of 21.15 ± 1.71 months in the BCL group and 20.87 ± 1.89 months in the drug group. Corneal erosion resolution, pain relief, visual acuity recovery time, recurrence and complications were observed. Results After 3 months of treatment, 22 eyes (22/26, 84.6%) in the BCLs group achieved complete resolution, compared with 14 eyes (14/24, 58.3%) in the drug group (P

To explore the genetic etiology of two patients with Perrault syndrome (PRLTS) in a family.Whole exome sequencing (WES) was carried out to screen potential variants within genomic DNA extracted from the proband. Suspected variants were validated by clinical data and results of Sanger sequencing.WES has identified two heterozygous variants of TWNK gene, namely c.1172GA (p.Arg391His) and c.1844GC (p.Gly615Ala). Sanger sequencing confirmed that the c.1172GA (p.Arg391His), a known pathogenic variant, was derived from her father, while the c.1844GC (p.Gly615Ala), a novel variant, was derived from her mother. Her brother, who was similarly affected, has carried the same compound heterozygous variants.The compound heterozygous variants c.1172GA (p.Arg391His) and c.1844GC (p.Gly615Ala) of the TWNK gene probably underlie PRLTS in the sib pair. The above results have facilitated genetic counseling and prenatal diagnosis for the affected family.

Plastid-localized glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase (ATS1) catalyzes the first-step reaction in glycerolipid assembly through transferring an acyl moiety to glycerol-3-phosphate (G3P) to generate lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), an intermediate in lipid metabolism. The effect of ATS1 overexpression on glycerolipid metabolism and growth remained to be elucidated in plants, particularly oil crop plants. Here, we found that overexpression of BnATS1 from Brassica napus enhanced plant growth and prokaryotic glycerolipid biosynthesis. BnATS1 is localized in chloroplasts and an in vitro assay showed that BnATS1 had acylation activity toward glycerol 3-phosphate to produce LPA. Lipid profiling showed that overexpression of BnATS1 led to increases in multiple glycerolipids including phosphatidylglycerol (PG), monogalactosyldiacylglycerol (MGDG), phosphatidylcholine (PC), and phosphatidylinositol (PI), with increased polyunsaturated fatty acids. Moreover, increased MGDG was attributed to the elevation of 34:6- and 34:5-MGDG, which were derived from the prokaryotic pathway. These results suggest that BnATS1 promotes accumulation of polyunsaturated fatty acids in cellular membranes, thus enhances plant growth under low-temperature conditions in Brassica napus.

Background The potential correlations between chromosomal abnormalities and craniofacial malformations (CFMs) remain a challenge in prenatal diagnosis. This study aimed to evaluate 118 fetuses with CFMs by applying chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA) and G-banded chromosome analysis. Results Of the 118 cases in this study, 39.8% were isolated CFMs (47/118) whereas 60.2% were non-isolated CFMs (71/118). The detection rate of chromosomal abnormalities in non-isolated CFM fetuses was significantly higher than that in isolated CFM fetuses (26/71 vs. 7/47, p = 0.01). Compared to the 16 fetuses (16/104; 15.4%) with pathogenic chromosomal abnormalities detected by karyotype analysis, CMA identified a total of 33 fetuses (33/118; 28.0%) with clinically significant findings. These 33 fetuses included cases with aneuploidy abnormalities (14/118; 11.9%), microdeletion/microduplication syndromes (9/118; 7.6%), and other pathogenic copy number variations (CNVs) only (10/118; 8.5%).We further explored the CNV/phenotype correlation and found a series of clear or suspected dosage-sensitive CFM genes including TBX1, MAPK1, PCYT1A, DLG1, LHX1, SHH, SF3B4, FOXC1, ZIC2, CREBBP, SNRPB, and CSNK2A1. Conclusion These findings enrich our understanding of the potential causative CNVs and genes in CFMs. Identification of the genetic basis of CFMs contributes to our understanding of their pathogenesis and allows detailed genetic counselling.

Mobile crowdsensing has become a popular data collection paradigm and has been extensively studied. Since the analysis of sensory data usually reveals privacy of mobile users, data aggrega...

Little is known regarding why a subset of COVID-19 patients exhibited prolonged positivity of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Here, we studied the sera proteomic dynamics in 37 COVID-19 patients over nine weeks, quantifying 2700 proteins with high quality. Remarkably, we found that during the first three weeks since disease onset, while clinical symptoms and outcome were indistinguishable, patients with prolonged disease course displayed characteristic immunological responses including enhanced Natural Killer cell-mediated innate immunity and regulatory T cell-mediated immunosuppression. We further showed that it is possible to predict the length of disease course using machine learning based on blood protein levels during the first three weeks. Validation in an independent cohort achieved an accuracy of 82%. In summary, this study presents a rich serum proteomic resource to understand host responses in COVID-19 patients and identifies characteristic Treg-mediated immunosuppression in patients with prolonged disease course, nominating new therapeutic target and diagnosis strategy.

Background Defining the phenotype-genotype correlation of small supernumerary marker chromosomes (sSMCs) remains a challenge in prenatal diagnosis. We karyotyped 20,481 amniotic fluid samples from pregnant women and explored the molecular characteristics of sSMCs using a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array. Results Out of the 20,481 samples, 15 abnormal karyotypes with sSMC were detected (frequency: 0.073%) and the chromosomal origin was successfully identified by SNP array in 14 of them. The origin of sSMCs were mainly acrocentric-derived chromosomes and the Y chromosome. Two cases of sSMC combined with uniparental disomy (UPD) were detected, UPD(1) and UPD(22). More than half of the cases of sSMC involved mosaicism (8/15) and pathogenicity (9/15) in prenatal diagnosis. A higher prevalence of mosaicism for non-acrocentric chromosomes than acrocentric chromosomes was also revealed. One sSMC derived from chromosome 3 with a neocentromere revealed a 24.99-Mb pathogenic gain of the 3q26.31q29 region on the SNP array, which presented as an abnormal ultrasound indicating nasal bone hypoplasia. Conclusion The clinical phenotypes of sSMCs are variable and so further genetic testing and parental karyotype analysis are needed to confirm the characteristics of sSMCs. The SNP array used here allows a detailed characterisation of the sSMC and establishes a stronger genotype-phenotype correlation, thus allowing detailed genetic counselling for prenatal diagnosis.

Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection has spread worldwide. Reports about the profile of SARS-CoV-2 viral load and serological responses are limited even in relatively short periods. We aimed to investigate profiles of viral RNA, IgM, and IgG in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia in an 8-week period. Methods: A cohort of 33 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia admitted to Wenzhou Sixth People’s Hospital from January 27 to February 13, 2020, were enrolled in this study. Samples of throat swab, sputum, stool, and blood were collected and viral load was measured by reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR). Specific IgM and IgG against spike protein (S), spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), and nucleocapsid (N) were analyzed by a chemiluminescence assay. Findings: At the early stage of symptom onset, SARS-CoV-2 viral load is higher in throat swab and sputum, but lower in stool. The median (IQR) time of undetectable viral RNA in throat swab, sputum, and stool was 18·5 (13·25-22) days, 22 (18·5-27·5) days, and 17 (11·5-32) days, respectively. In sputum, 17 (51·5%) patients had undetectable viral RNA within 22 days (short persistence), and 16 (48·5%) had persistent viral RNA more than 22 days (long persistence). Three (9·1%) patients were detected relapse of viral RNA in sputum in two weeks after discharge from hospital. One patient had persistent viral RNA for 59 days or longer. The median (IQR) seroconversion time of anti-S IgM, anti-RBD IgM, and anti-N IgM was 10·5 (7·75-15·5), 14 (9-24), and 10 (7-14) days, respectively. The median (IQR) seroconversion time of anti-S IgG, anti-RBD IgG, and anti-N IgG was 10 (7·25-16·5), 13 (9-17), and 10 (7-14) days, respectively. In week 8 after symptom onset, IgM were negative in many of the previously positive patients, IgG levels remained less than 50% of the peak levels in more than 20% of the patients. SARS-CoV-2 RNA coexisted with antibodies for more than 50 days. Anti-RBD IgM and IgG levels, anti-RBD IgM levels at presentation and peak time, were significantly higher in viral RNA short persistence patients than in long persistence patients. Interpretation: In both sputum and stool, SARS-CoV-2 RNA persists for a long time. Seroconversion time and the peak level of anti-RBD are important for viral RNA clearance. Specific anti-RBD may be a potential protective antibody against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Funding Statement: This study was supported by The Research Project for Emergent prevention of Novel Coronavirus Infected Pneumonia of The Bureau of Science and Technology, Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province (ZY202004). Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by the Ethics Commission of Wenzhou Central Hospital (L2020-01-036). Written informed consent was signed by patients themselves.

Little is known regarding why a subset of COVID-19 patients exhibited prolonged positivity of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Here, we present a longitudinal sera proteomic resource for 37 COVID-19 patients over nine weeks, in which 2700 proteins were quantified with high quality. Remarkably, we found that during the first three weeks since disease onset, while clinical symptoms and outcome were indistinguishable, patients with prolonged disease course displayed characteristic immunological responses including enhanced Natural Killer (NK) cell-mediated innate immunity and regulatory T cell-mediated immunosuppression. We further showed that it is possible to predict the length of disease course using machine learning based on blood protein levels during the first three weeks. Validation in an independent cohort achieved an accuracy of 82%. In summary, this study presents a rich serum proteomic resource to understand host responses in COVID-19 patients and identifies characteristic Treg-mediated immunosuppression in LC patients, nominating new therapeutic target and diagnosis strategy.

Additional file 1: Additional table and figure.

Recently, reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDH-EI) has been developed to transmit additional data. Besides extracting the hidden data, the original or processed image should be obtained when needed. In this paper, a new RDH-EI method for homomorphic encrypted images is proposed by utilizing the additive homomorphism and self-blinding property in Paillier cryptosystem. Specifically, part of the hidden data may be extracted before image decryption while the rest can be extracted after image decryption. In addition, no preprocessing is required so that homomorphic processing can be performed before data embedding. The experimental results on test images validate that the proposed method is compatible with homomorphic image processing before data embedding. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, higher embedding capacity can be obtained with the proposed method while the original or processed image can be correctly generated.

Image encryption techniques can be used to ensure the security and privacy of valuable images. The related works in this field have focused more on raster images than on compressed images. Many existing JPEG image encryption schemes are not quite well compatible with the JPEG standard, or the file size of an encrypted JPEG image is apparently increased. In this paper, a novel bitstream-based JPEG image encryption method is presented. First, the groups of successive DC codes that encode the quantized DC coefficient differences with the same sign are permuted within each group. Second, the left half and the right half of a group, whose size will increase with the number of iterations, of consecutive DC codes may be swapped with each other, depending on whether an overflow of quantized DC coefficients occurs during decoding. Third, all AC codes are classified into 63 categories according to their zero-run lengths, then the AC codes within each category are, respectively, scrambled. Finally, all MCUs, except for DC codes, are randomly shuffled as a whole. Moreover, an image-content-related encryption key is employed to provide further security. The experimental results show that the file size of an encrypted JPEG image is almost the same as that of the corresponding plaintext image except for slight variations because of byte alignment. In addition, the quantized DC coefficients decoded from an encrypted JPEG image will not fall outside the valid range. Improved format compatibility is provided compared with other related methods. Moreover, it is unnecessary to perform entropy encoding again because all of the encryption operations are performed directly on the JPEG bitstream. The proposed method proves to be secure against brute-force attacks, differential cryptanalysis, known plaintext attacks, and outline attacks. Our proposed method can also be applied to color JPEG images.

Intellectual disability (ID) is often sporadic, and its complex etiology makes clinical diagnosis extremely difficult. The aims of this study were to detect copy number variations (CNVs) in patients with ID and to analyze the correlation between pathogenic CNVs and clinical phenotype. After cases of ID caused by metabolic dysfunction or environmental factors were excluded, 64 patients with moderate to severe ID were enrolled. Karyotype and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array analyses were performed for all patients. The relationship between CNVs and phenotype was identified with genotype–phenotype comparisons and by searching CNV databases. Karyotype analysis showed four patients with chromosomal aneuploidy and seven with chromosomal structural abnormality. After excluding the four cases with chromosomal aneuploidy, the remaining 60 cases were analyzed using SNP array. The results revealed 87 CNVs in 45 cases, including 16 pathogenic CNVs in 12 individuals, with a diagnostic yield of 20.0% (12/60). We found large deletions at 16q22.2q23.1 and 3q24q25.32 in two patients, respectively, in whom specific syndromes had not been defined. Our array analysis showed one case carried a 210 kb deletion at 1p21.2p21.3, which included only one coding gene LPPR4, which might be a candidate gene for ID phenotype. Use of the genome-wide array method can improve the detection rate of CNVs, reveal chromosomal abnormalities that have not been well-characterized by cytology, and provide a new way to locate genes for patients with the ID phenotype. Interpretation of CNVs remains a major challenge. Sharing of CNVs and phenotype information from different laboratories in public databases is important.

Recently, several image contrast enhancement methods have been proposed such that the original image can be recovered from its contrast-enhanced version. Hence a flexibility in changing image contrast can be provided when needed. However, the artificial distortions may be introduced into the image content after adopting these methods. Meanwhile, there is lack of using the adequate image quality metrics for performance evaluation. In this paper, a novel reversible data hiding method is proposed for image contrast enhancement. To better preserve image quality, it is restricted that only the adjacent bins in the original image histogram may be merged in the pre-processing. The proposed method has been applied to two image sets and compared with the previous methods. For image quality assessment, the PSNR, SSIM and three no-reference metrics have been adopted in performance evaluation. The experimental results have clearly shown that better visual quality can be achieved with the proposed method. Besides recovering the original images, extra data can be hidden into the contrast-enhanced images and correctly extracted.

Using optical microscopy and atomic force microscopy, we studied systematically crystallization patterns in thin films of a low molecular weight poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) resulting from a kinetically controlled self-seeding approach. In particular, the influence of seeding temperature (Ts) and heating rate (Vh) on the various resulting crystallization patterns was investigated. Crystallization at 49 °C resulted in dendritic PEO crystals consisting of almost exclusively twice-folded chains. Upon heating these crystals, we observed crystal thickening due to a reduction in the average number of chain folds. On the basis of the detected morphology, we deduced that the density of seeded PEO crystals decreased when increasing Ts from 54 to 57 °C. At the highest Vh (i.e., 100 °C/min), only a few well-separated faceted single crystals of PEO were grown from individual seeds. In contrast to such random distribution of crystals, because of a faster reduction of chain folds at the edges of PEO lamellae, an almost c...

Objective.Estimation of mental workload (MWL) levels by electroencephalography (EEG)-based mental state monitoring systems has been widely explored. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), elicited by ignored auditory probes, minimizes intrusiveness and has shown high performance for estimating MWL level when tested in laboratory situations. However, when facing real-world applications, the characteristics of ERP waveforms, like latency and amplitude, are often affected by noise, which leads to a decrease in classification performance. One approach to mitigating this is using spatial covariance, which is less sensitive to latency and amplitude distortion. In this study, we used ignored auditory probes in a single-stimulus paradigm and tested Riemannian processed covariance-based features for MWL level estimation in a realistic flight-control task.Approach.We recorded EEG data with an eight-channel system from participants while they performed a simulated drone-control task and manipulated MWL levels (high and low) by task difficulty. We compared support vector machine classification performance based on frequency band power features versus features generated via the Riemannian log map operator from spatial covariance matrices. We also compared accuracy of using data segmented as auditory ERPs versus non-ERPs, for which data windows did not overlap with the ERPs.Main results.Classification accuracy of both types of features showed no significant difference between ERPs and non-ERPs. When we ignore auditory stimuli to perform continuous decoding, covariance-based features in the gamma band had area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.883, which was significantly higher than band power features (AUC = 0.749).Significance.This study demonstrates that Riemannian-processed covariance features are viable for MWL classification under a realistic experimental scenario.

The neuropeptide 26RFa plays important roles in the regulation of many physiological functions. 26RFa has been recognized as an endogenous ligand for receptor GPR103. In the present study, we demonstrate that GPR103 dually couples to Gαq and Gαi/o proteins. However, two naturally occurring missense mutations were identified from a young male patient. In the first, Y68H, induction of Ca2+ mobilization was noted without detection of ERK1/2 activation. In the second, R371W, the potential to activate ERK1/2 signaling was retained but with failure to evoke Ca2+ mobilization. Further analysis provides evidence that Gαq, L-type Ca2+ channel and PKCβI and βII are involved in the Y68H-mediated signaling pathway, whereas Gαi/o, Gβγ, and PKCζ are implicated in the R371W-induced signaling. Our results demonstrate that two point mutations, Y68H and R371W, affect the equilibrium between the different receptor conformations, leading to alteration of G protein-coupling preferences. Importantly, these findings provide a foundation for future elucidation of GPCR-mediated biased signaling and the physiological implications of their bias.

Spatial crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are two emerging crowdsourcing paradigms, which enable a variety of location-based query and sensing tasks. In spatial crowdsourcing, mobile workers are required to travel physically to target locations in order to complete query tasks. Most existing work, hence, has focused on designing efficient query task assignment schemes to maximize the task completion rate under traveling constraints of workers for spatial crowdsourcing systems. In crowdsensing, on the other hand, sensor recordings of workers’ smartphones are of interest and have been collected to build various applications. Therefore, work concerning crowdsensing has strived to maximize the coverage area of sensor trajectories by selecting a set of workers. In this paper, we investigate the integration of these two paradigms. We notice a key link between these paradigms: While a worker is traveling to the target location of a query task, his trajectory may provide valuable coverage for a sensing task. Therefore, we propose a task management framework, named SpatialRecruiter, to efficiently match workers to the merged query and sensing tasks. We propose two coverage estimation functions to compute the coverage potential of a worker. Then, we design a greedy heuristic to select and assign workers. The experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed strategies are efficient and effective in meeting the requirements of both paradigms.

Provable data possession (PDP) allows a user to outsource data with a guarantee that the integrity can be efficiently verified. Existing publicly verifiable PDP schemes require the user to perform expensive computations, such as modular exponentiations for processing data before outsourcing to the storage server, which is not desirable for weak users with limited computation resources. In this paper, we introduce and formalize an online/offline PDP (OOPDP) model, which divides the data processing procedure into offline and online phases. In OOPDP, most of the expensive computations for processing data are performed in the offline phase, and the online phase requires only lightweight computations like modular multiplications. We present a general OOPDP transformation framework which is applicable to PDP-related schemes with metadata aggregatability and public metadata expansibility . Following the framework, we present two efficient OOPDP instantiations. Technically, we present aggregatable vector Chemeleon hash functions which map a vector of values to a group element and play a central role in the OOPDP transformation. Theoretical and experimental analyses confirm that our technique is practical to speed-up PDP schemes.

Rainbow is one of the most important signature schemes in multivariate public key cryptography. It enjoys a strong security guarantee and is a promising signature scheme in Post-Quantum Cryptography. However, it suffers from large key size. In this paper, we propose Circulant Rainbow with shorter private key and higher signing efficiency. In Circulant Rainbow, we introduce rotating relations into parts of Rainbow private key to speed up the signing procedure and reduce the private key size. We carefully choose security parameters so that our Circulant Rainbow is secure against all known attacks. In our experiment, Circulant Rainbow is about three times faster than original Rainbow and it can reduce the private key size by about 45%. We also make a comparison of Circulant Rainbow with some traditional signature schemes, the results show that Circulant Rainbow is a promising candidate in Post-Quantum Cryptography.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is increasingly being used in smart city research to collect data, such as environmental assessment and traffic monitoring. However, this approach introduces a number of privacy and efficiency challenges, as sensing report includes the user's sensitive location and assigned attributes. Many methods adopt differential privacy scheme to protect users' privacy, while the assumption that the server is trusted is not realistic in practical application. Recently, local differential privacy has paved the way for more efficient and private data collection for the untrusted model, though it remains a challenge to obtain effective statistical analysis when applied to small and medium-sized MCS tasks. In this paper, we improve the local ∈-differential privacy method for MCS data aggregation to preserve participant privacy and achieve accurate data analysis. Considering the different attributes of sensing data, we first adopt a distinct local differential privacy procedure to diverse sensing attributes. Then we propose a data aggregation algorithm to count and remove the noise data provided by participants. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves analysis accuracy and reduces the lowest number of participants in a task, compared with existing similar solutions.

To explore the genetic etiology of two pedigrees affected with congenital arthrogryposis.Whole exome sequencing (WES) was used to screen potential variations in the proband. Suspected variations were analyzed with bioinformatics software and validated by Sanger sequencing.A heterozygous c.1123GA (p.Glu375Lys) variation was detected in the proband and an affected fetus from pedigree 1, while a de novo heterozygous c.118 GA (p.Val40Met) variation was detected in an affected fetus from pedigree 2.The two heterozygous variations of the MYH3 gene probably underlie the disease in the pedigrees. Above results have facilitated genetic counseling and prenatal diagnosis.

To carry out mutation analysis for a Chinese family affected with autosomal recessive spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay (ARSACS).Whole exome sequencing (WES) was used to screen potential mutations within genomic DNA extracted from the proband. Suspected mutation was validated by combining clinical data and results of Sanger sequencing.A homozygous deletional mutation c.3665_3675delGTGCTGTCTTA (p.S1222fs) was found in the proband, for which her parents were both heterozygous carriers.WES is capable of detecting mutation underlying this disorder and facilitating genetic counseling and prenatal diagnosis for the affected family. A novel pathogenic mutation of the SACS gene was discovered.

Crowd-sensing applications, such as traffic monitoring and environmental detection, have brought great convenience to people's lives, but they also face with some problems, for example, participant's privacy leakage at sensing phase, querier's privacy leakage at service phase, and so on. However, the existing privacy protection solutions are difficult to solve the above problems simultaneously. In response to this situation, we design a privacy-preserving metro passenger flow acquisition and query system that can settle these issues simultaneously. Our system can not only provide the metro passenger flow query service, which makes it convenient for the people, but also protect the participant's identity and location privacy as well as querier's query privacy. We exploit the Paillier cryptosystem, pseudonym mechanism, and Secure kNN to achieve these properties in our system. Besides, we also realized the participant accountability, which means that a malicious participant can be banned from participating in the system tasks and prosecuted if he/she is detected to “pollutes” the aggregation results. The privacy analysis and experiments demonstrate that our system is practical and meet the privacy preserving and security requirement.

Arachis hypogaea abscisic acid transporter like-1 (AhATL1) modulates abscisic acid (ABA) sensitivity by specifically influencing the importing of ABA into cells, and is a key player in plant stress responses. However, there is limited information on ABA transporters in crops. In this study, we found that the level of AhATL1 expression and AhATL1 distribution increased more rapidly in the second drought (D2) compared with in the first drought (D1). Compared with the first recovery (R1), the AhATL1 expression level and ABA content remained at a higher level during the second recovery (R2). The heterologous overexpression of AhATL1 in Arabidopsis changed the expression pattern of certain memory genes and changed the post response gene type into the memory gene type. Regarding the proline and water content of Col (Arabidopsis thaliana L. Heynh., Col-0), atabcg22, and AhATL1-OX during drought training, the second drought (D2) was more severe than the first drought (D1), which was more conducive to maintaining the cell osmotic balance and resisting drought. In summary, drought stress memory resulted in a rapid increase in the AhATL1 expression and AhATL1 distribution level, and then raised the endogenous ABA content and changed the post response gene type into the memory gene type, which enhanced the drought resistance and recovery ability.

N-Doped ordered mesoporous titania on carbon fibers (NOMT/CFs) has been prepared by a liquid-crystal template (LCT) method with the aid of supercritical deposition. The NOMT/CFs product has been characterized by X-ray diffraction analysis, scanning electron and transmission electron microscopies, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, N2 sorption, UV/Vis diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry, and photoluminescence. The photoactivity of the obtained product in the degradation of acid orange 7 (AO7) solution under visible-light irradiation has been evaluated. A photocatalytic mechanism involving three synergistic effects of NOMT/CFs is proposed, whereby the titania acts as an electron/hole generator with its ordered mesostructure facilitating electron–hole separation, N-doping enhances visible-light adsorption, and the CFs serve to concentrate the pollutant around the active sites, favor electron transfer, and facilitate convenient recycling. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry have been used to analyze the intermediates generated in the conversion of AO7, allowing a tentative decomposition pathway to be proposed. The effects of catalyst amount, pH, and initial AO7 concentration have been examined as operational parameters. The photocatalytic reactions follow pseudo-first-order kinetics and are discussed in terms of a modified Langmuir–Hinshelwood model.

Access control is an indispensable security component of cloud computing, and hierarchical access control is of particular interest since in practice one is entitled to different access privileges. This paper presents a hierarchical key assignment scheme based on linear-geometry as the solution of flexible and fine-grained hierarchical access control in cloud computing. In our scheme, the encryption key of each class in the hierarchy is associated with a private vector and a public vector, and the inner product of the private vector of an ancestor class and the public vector of its descendant class can be used to derive the encryption key of that descendant class. The proposed scheme belongs to direct access schemes on hierarchical access control, namely each class at a higher level in the hierarchy can directly derive the encryption key of its descendant class without the need of iterative computation. In addition to this basic hierarchical key derivation, we also give a dynamic key management mechanism to efficiently address potential changes in the hierarchy. Our scheme only needs light computations over finite field and provides strong key indistinguishability under the assumption of pseudorandom functions. Furthermore, the simulation shows that our scheme has an optimized trade-off between computation consumption and storage space.

More and more clients would like to store their data to public cloud servers (PCSs) along with the rapid development of cloud computing. New security problems have to be solved in order to help more clients process their data in public cloud. When the client is restricted to access PCS, he will delegate its proxy to process his data and upload them. On the other hand, remote data integrity checking is also an important security problem in public cloud storage. It makes the clients check whether their outsourced data are kept intact without downloading the whole data. From the security problems, we propose a novel proxy-oriented data uploading and remote data integrity checking model in identity-based public key cryptography: identity-based proxy-oriented data uploading and remote data integrity checking in public cloud (ID-PUIC). We give the formal definition, system model, and security model. Then, a concrete ID-PUIC protocol is designed using the bilinear pairings. The proposed ID-PUIC protocol is provably secure based on the hardness of computational Diffie–Hellman problem. Our ID-PUIC protocol is also efficient and flexible. Based on the original client’s authorization, the proposed ID-PUIC protocol can realize private remote data integrity checking, delegated remote data integrity checking, and public remote data integrity checking.

Objective: This study aimed to determine the rates of different fetal chromosomal abnormalities among women of advanced maternal age in China and to discuss the possible misdiagnosis risks of newer molecular techniques, for selection of appropriate prenatal screening and diagnostic technologies. Materials and Methods: Second trimester amniocentesis and fetal karyotype results of 46,258 women were retrospectively reviewed. All women were ≥ 35 years old with singleton pregnancies. The rates of clinically significant chromosomal abnormalities (CSCAs), incidence of chromosomal abnormalities, and correlations with age were determined. Results: From 2001 to 2010, the proportion of women of advanced maternal age undergoing prenatal diagnosis increased from 20% to 46%. The mean age was 37.4 years (range, 35–46 years). A total of 708 cases of CSCAs, with a rate of 1.53% were found. Trisomy 21 was the most common single chromosome abnormality and accounted for 55.9% of all CSCAs with an incidence of 0.86%. Trisomy 13, trisomy 18, and trisomy 21, the most common chromosome autosomal aneuploidies, accounted for 73.6% of all CSCAs, with a rate of 1.13%. As a group, the most common chromosomal aneuploidies (13/18/21/X/Y) accounted for 93.9% of all abnormalities, with a rate of 1.44%. The incidence of trisomy 21, trisomy 13/18/21 as a group, and 13/18/21/X/Y as a group was significantly greater in women aged 39 years and older (p

Eight years ago, Pei et al. described a matrix public-key encryption scheme based on the matrix factorisation over a finite field. Recently, Gu and Zheng also proposed a similar scheme based on the non-abelian factorisation assumption. The security of these schemes is essentially based on a two-side matrices exponentiation (TSME) problem. In this study, the authors show that the TSME problem is susceptible to a very efficient linearisation equations attack. Regardless of the public key parameters, the authors can easily find an equivalent key only in polynomial time O(2n 5 (log n +1)) from the public key alone, and thus it is very practical and can be implemented within less than 1/20 of a second on the recommended system parameters of the schemes.

Being a member of the post quantum cryptography family, multivariate public key cryptographic (MPKC) system enjoys many useful properties such as fast implementation and moderate resources requirement, which is quite suitable for the wireless sensor network (WSN). However, MPKC system requires the usage of large public and private keys to ensure security which makes it inapplicable to wireless sensors with very limited system resources. In this paper, we propose an online/offline signature scheme based on a well known MPKC scheme: unbalanced oil and vinegar signature scheme for the wireless sensor network. Our scheme can reduce the cost of hardware running on signing process and the storage space of private key in the online signing phase. What is more, by combining a recent technique, the total storage requirement in a WSN node reduces by 85.8 % for the recommended parameters, which makes our new scheme feasible for the practical deployment on the WSN platforms.

Inversions in small finite fields are playing a key role in many areas. We present techniques to exploit binary trees for fast inversions in $GF(2^n)$ and $GF(p)$ , where $n$ is a positive integer and $p$ is a prime number. The non-pipelined versions of our design in $GF(2^n)$ and $GF(p)$ have the execution time of $(n-1)(T_{AND}+T_{XOR})$ and $\lfloor \log _2p\rfloor (T_{AND}+T_{XOR})$ , where $T_{AND}$ and ${T_{XOR}}$ are delays of AND and XOR gates, respectively. The pipelined version of our design has a throughput rate of one result per $T_{AND}$ (or $T_{XOR}$ ). The latency is the greater value between $T_{AND}$ and $T_{XOR}$ . In other words, the time complexities of non-pipelined and pipelined versions are $O(n)$ (or $O(log_2p)$ ) and $O(1)$ , respectively. Experimental results and comparisons show that our design provides significant reductions in both the execution time and time–area product, e.g. the execution time of inversion in $GF(2^{12})$ is reduced by 73 $\%$ and time–area product of inversion in $GF(2^6)$ is reduced by 77 $\%$ .

Image sharing can be utilized to protect important commercial, military or private images against a single point of failure. Many existing image sharing schemes may have one or more of the security weaknesses as follows: First, noise-like image shares may easily arouse the attackers' attention; Second, cheating in the recovery of the secret image cannot be prevented effectively; Third, the requisite size of cover images may be very large; Finally, poor quality of the stego-images may lessen camouflage effects. In this paper, a novel secure image sharing scheme with high quality stego-images is proposed. With the use of LOCO-I compression as a preprocessing approach, the statistical correlations between neighboring pixels of a secret image drop significantly, which may greatly enhance the visual security of the proposed scheme. And the necessary size of cover images is reduced. Moreover, the PSNR values of stego-images are much higher than the related works. In order to detect three kinds of deception during secret image reconstruction, the hash-based message authentication codes of an image share, the value of argument x and the identity ID of a participant are embedded into a cover image together with the image share. In addition, the application of dynamic embedding with a random strategy further enhance the security of our scheme.

Rainbow is an effective multivariate digital signature scheme proposed by Ding and Schmidt. However, a lot of attacks against it have been proposed. To resist all these attacks, designer should be very careful with its choice of parameters. In this study, the authors will propose a new approach to build a secure variant of Rainbow. According to our security analysis, it could resist all the existing attacks against Rainbow and save some memory in the meantime.

Recent years have witnessed the fast proliferation of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and wearable devices) in people's lives. In addition, these devices possess powerful computation and communication capabilities and are equipped with various built-in functional sensors. The large quantity and advanced functionalities of mobile devices have created a new interface between human beings and environments. Many mobile crowd sensing applications have thus been designed which recruit normal users to contribute their resources for sensing tasks. To guarantee good performance of such applications, it's essential to recruit sufficient participants. Thus, how to effectively and efficiently motivate normal users draws growing attention in the research community. This paper surveys diverse strategies that are proposed in the literature to provide incentives for stimulating users to participate in mobile crowd sensing applications. The incentives are divided into three categories: entertainment, service, and money. Entertainment means that sensing tasks are turned into playable games to attract participants. Incentives of service exchanging are inspired by the principle of mutual benefits. Monetary incentives give participants payments for their contributions. We describe literature works of each type comprehensively and summarize them in a compact form. Further challenges and promising future directions concerning incentive mechanism design are also discussed.

Data deduplication is a technique for eliminating duplicate copies of data, and has been widely used in cloud storage to reduce storage space and upload bandwidth. However, there is only one copy for each file stored in cloud even if such a file is owned by a huge number of users. As a result, deduplication system improves storage utilization while reducing reliability. Furthermore, the challenge of privacy for sensitive data also arises when they are outsourced by users to cloud. Aiming to address the above security challenges, this paper makes the first attempt to formalize the notion of distributed reliable deduplication system. We propose new distributed deduplication systems with higher reliability in which the data chunks are distributed across multiple cloud servers. The security requirements of data confidentiality and tag consistency are also achieved by introducing a deterministic secret sharing scheme in distributed storage systems, instead of using convergent encryption as in previous deduplication systems. Security analysis demonstrates that our deduplication systems are secure in terms of the definitions specified in the proposed security model. As a proof of concept, we implement the proposed systems and demonstrate that the incurred overhead is very limited in realistic environments.

As cloud storage becomes more popular, concerns about data leakage have been increasing. Encryption techniques can be used to protect privacy of videos stored in the cloud. However, the recently proposed sketch attack for encrypted H.264/AVC video, which is based on the macroblock bitstream size (MBS), can generate the outline images of both intra-frames and inter-frames from a video encrypted by most existing encryption schemes; thus, the protection of the original video may be considered a failure. In this paper, a novel selective encryption scheme for H.264/AVC video with improved visual security is presented. Two different scrambling strategies that do not destroy the format compatibility are proposed to change the relative positions between macroblocks in intra-frames and inter-frames respectively, which in turn substantially distort the sketched outline images so that they do not disclose meaningful information. Moreover, the sign bits of non-zero DCT coefficients are encrypted to contribute to the visual security of our scheme, and an adaptive encryption key related to the intra prediction mode and the DCT coefficient distribution of each frame is employed to provide further security. The experimental results show that our encryption scheme can achieve a better visual scrambling effect with a small adverse impact on the video file size. Furthermore, the security analysis demonstrates that our scheme can successfully resist the MBS sketch attack compared with other related schemes. The proposed method is also proven secure against some other known attacks.

JPEG images are widely used in daily life. Reversible data hiding (RDH) in JPEG images is useful for many applications. How to avoid image distortion and preserve file size is very important for RDH in JPEG images. In this paper, a novel RDH scheme is proposed for JPEG images based on improved block ordering and frequency selection. The distortion that may be caused by the data embedding in each block is estimated more accurately based on the DCT coefficient distribution, and the blocks that result in less distortion will be firstly used for data embedding. Moreover, the non-zero AC coefficients with the frequencies having higher embedding efficiency will be used preferentially to further reduce image distortion. Consequently, less side information on frequency selection is needed for data extraction and image recovery with our scheme. Extensive experiments are conducted on several typical images and 500 images randomly selected from BOSSbase image database, and the numerical results demonstrate that better performance in terms of visual quality and file size preservation can be achieved with the proposed scheme compared to the state-of-the-art RDH schemes for JPEG images.