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Pond wetlands have been widely used in the treatment of drainage water from paddy fields. However, wetland hydraulic performance and purification effects are affected by many factors, such as water depth, flow rate, aspect ratio and vegetation distribution, and the better understanding of these factors would be helpful to improve the quality of wetland design, operation and management. This paper analyzed the effect of three different water depths (20, 40 and 60 cm) on the hydraulic performance of pond wetland through the dye tracer experiments with Rhodamine WT. The hydraulic indices, i.e., effective volume ratio, nominal serial complete mixing tanks (N), hydraulic efficiency (λ), were selected for analysis through the hydraulic residence time distribution (RTD) curve. The results showed that the effective volume rate rose from 0.421 to 0.844 and the hydraulic efficiency from 0.281 to 0.604 when the water depth declined from 60 cm to 20 cm. This indicated that the wetland hydraulic performance improved as the water depth decreased. In addition, the hydraulic performance of the first half of the wetland was significantly better than that of the second half. The flow regime of the first half approached complete mixing because of the mixing index (N) approaching 1 and its effective volume rate was above 0.9 when the water depth was relatively low (20 and 40 cm). The normalized RTD curves demonstrated a good agreement between moment analysis parameters and hydraulic parameters, and a great consistency between the hydraulic parameters and moment index which was not affected by tail truncation error. The experimental study concluded that a lower water depth was favorable to improve the hydraulic performance of pond wetlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Hadamard product of known frequency domain preamble sequence and its conjugate shift sequence, a new sequence with much better auto-correlation property was constructed. Combined with the arithmetic of cross-correlation, an improved integer frequency offset (IF()) estimation algorithm was proposed. Through Monte-Carlo simulations, the distribution of the expectations and variances of the metric function of newly developed algorithm was analyzed over AWGN channels. The proposed algorithm has been applied in IEEE 802.16d system and simulations were carried out. Simulation results show that the newly proposed method can overcome the serious disturbance introduced by large timing offset. When the SNR is greater than 10 dB, the detection probability of IFO can be accurately obtained without increasing the complexity of calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avian influenza virus is acquiring the ability to cross the species barrier between birds and mammals. However, the genetic mechanism of this ability is not well known. We successfully rescued an influenza A virus A/Chicken/Guangdong/03 (H5N1), which is highly pathogenic to both SPF chickens and BALB/c mice, by plasmid-based reverse genetics. The rescued virus, R-A/Chicken/Guangdong/03 (R-CG), and the wild-type A/Chicken/Guangdong/03 (W-CG) were found to share similar biological properties, such as in titres of 50% egg infectious dose (EID50), 50% tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) and intravenous pathogenicity index (IPVI). R-CG, like W-CG, is highly pathogenic in mice following natural route infection. Both R-CG and W-CG viruses can be isolated from many organs of mice such as brain, lung, kidney and spleen. As a result, the constructed R-CG reverse genetic system can be used as a tool in the investigation of the molecular mechanism of infection of the mammalian host by avian influenza virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To prepare the monoclonal antibodies(mAb) against the HA protein of subtype H1 of swine influenza virus (SIV)., Methods: To construct recombinant expression plasmid subtype H1 of SIV HA gene of A/Swine/Guangdong/LM/2004(H1N1).BALB/c mice of 6-8 weeks old were immunized endemically with the recombinant plasmid.The splenocytes from the immunized mice were fused with Sp2/0 myeloma cells after the last immunization. Hybridoma cells were screened by ELISA and hemagglutination inhibition (HI) tests.The activity and specificity of mAbs were evaluated by HI test and Western blot assay., Results: Three hybridoma cell lines secreting specific mAbs named 8C4, 8C6, and 9D6 were developed. The ELISA titer of these mAbs was 1:16 000-1:256 000, the HI titer was 1:512-1:256 000; The neutralized titer of 8C4, 8C6, and 9D6 to A/Swine/Guangdong/LM/2004(H1N1) was 10(-2.83), 10(-6.4) and 10(-5.8). Western blot analysis confirmed that mAbs only reacted with HA protein of subtype H1 of SIV., Conclusion: These mAbs can be used as a useful tool to analyze the antigenic variation.They also provide the effective reagents for the rapid detection of subtype H1 of SIV.

To study the genetic variation and evolutionary characteristics of H1N1 swine influenza virus, all the eight genes of LM were amplified by RT- PCR, cloned into pMD18-T vector and sequenced respectively. The results showed that neither insertion nor deletion was observed in nucleotides of LM. The amino acids sequence of cleavage site of HA is IPSIQSR decrease G, suggesting that LM did not have the molecular characteristics of high pathogen. HA had highly conservative N-glycosylation site at position 11, 23, 87 and 276 sites of HA1, and two more at position 154 and 213 sites of HA2. NA had highly conservative N-glycosylation site at position 58, 63, 68, 88, 146, and two more at position 44 and 235 sites, which might be one molecular characteristics of H1N1 subtype of SIV. The results of Bast showed HA gene had high homology to the strain of 'human-like' SIV (99%), while others had high homology to the 'classical' SIV. So it is inferred that HA of LM might originate from human-like linage swine influenza virus, while others might originate from 'classical' swine influenza virus.

High-yield H3N2 subtype swine influenza virus for large-scale vaccine production in cell culture was generated by reverse genetics. The rescued H3N2 (rH3N2) candidate virus contained hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genes derived from a field isolate A/Swine/Henan/S4/01 (H3N2), PB2 gene from A/PR/8/34, and the other five internal genes from A/Goose/Dalian/3/01 (H9N2). The rH3N2 virus titer in MDCK cell culture were measured by hemagglutination assay and the maximum virus titre of 1:512 hemagglutination unit was obtained after infection of MDCK cell for 60 h. The results of the present study indicated that rH3N2 virus was suitable for growth in MDCK cell culture and is feasible to be used for the production of cell grown influenza vaccine.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza A (HPAI) viruses of the H5N1 subtypes caused enormous economical loss to poultry farms in China and Southeastern Asian countries. The vaccination program is a reliable strategy in controlling the prevalence of these disastrous diseases. The six internal genes of the high-yield influenza virus A/Goose/Dalian/3/01 (H9N2), the hemagglutinin (HA) gene of A/Goose/HLJ/QFY/04 (H5N1) strain, and the neuraminidase gene from A/Duck/Germany/1215/73 (H2N3) reference strain were amplified by RT-PCR technique. The HA gene was modified by the deletion of four basic amino acids of the connecting peptide between HA1 and HA2. Eight gene expressing plasmids were constructed, and the recombinant virus rH5N3 was generated by cells transfection. The infection of chicken embryos and the challenge tests involving chickens demonstrated that the recombinant H5N3 (rH5N3) influenza virus is avirulent. The allantoic fluids of rH5N3-infected eggs contain high-titer influenza viruses with hemagglutination unit of 1:2048, which are eight times those of the parental H5N1 virus. The rH5N3 oil-emulsified vaccine could induce hemagglutination inhibition (HI) antibodies in chickens in 2 weeks post-vaccination, and maximum geometric mean HI-titer were observed 4 approximately 5 weeks post-vaccination and were kept under observation for 18 weeks. The rH5N3-vaccinated chickens were fully protected against morbidity and mortality of the lethal challenge of the H5N1 HPAI viruses, A/Goose/Guangdong/1/96 and A/Goose/HLJ/QFY/04, which had 8 years expansion and differences among multiple amino acids in HA protein. The N3 neuraminidase protein marker makes it possible to distinguish between H5N1 infected- and H5N3 vaccinated animals.