Potential competing interests: No potential competing interests to declare.The rating given is for the quality of presentation and writing in general, that stands flawless, but as a mathematical modeller, I am ill at ease to accept comments on 'modelling' that has no mathematics or statistics in them.Perhaps this is the nature of
An entry from the Cambridge Structural Database, the world’s repository for small molecule crystal structures. The entry contains experimental data from a crystal diffraction study. The deposited dataset for this entry is freely available from the CCDC and typically includes 3D coordinates, cell parameters, space group, experimental conditions and quality measures.
In this study, we present an immuno-epidemic model to understand mitigation options during an epidemic break. The model incorporates comorbidity and multiple-vaccine doses through a system of coupled integro-differential equations to analyze the epidemic rate and intensity from a knowledge of the basic reproduction number and time-distributed rate functions. Our modeling results show that the interval between vaccine doses is a key control parameter that can be tuned to significantly influence disease spread. We show that multiple doses induce a hysteresis effect in immunity levels that offers a better mitigation alternative compared to frequent vaccination which is less cost-effective while being more intrusive. Optimal dosing intervals, emphasizing the cost-effectiveness of each vaccination effort, and determined by various factors such as the level of immunity and efficacy of vaccines against different strains, appear to be crucial in disease management. The model is sufficiently generic that can be extended to accommodate specific disease forms.
Abstract Extracting “high ranking” or “prime protein targets” (PPTs) as potent MRSA drug candidates from a given set of ligands is a key challenge in efficient molecular docking. This study combines protein-versus-ligand matching molecular docking (MD) data extracted from 10 independent molecular docking (MD) evaluations — ADFR, DOCK, Gemdock, Ledock, Plants, Psovina, Quickvina2, smina, vina, and vinaxb to identify top MRSA drug candidates. Twenty-nine active protein targets (APT) from the enhanced DUD-E repository ( http://DUD-E.decoys.org ) are matched against 1040 ligands using “forward modeling” machine learning for initial “data mining and modeling” (DDM) to extract PPTs and the corresponding high affinity ligands (HALs). K-means clustering (KMC) is then performed on 400 ligands matched against 29 PTs, with each cluster accommodating HALs, and the corresponding PPTs. Performance of KMC is then validated against randomly chosen head, tail, and middle active ligands (ALs). KMC outcomes have been validated against two other clustering methods, namely, Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and density based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN). While GMM shows similar results as with KMC, DBSCAN has failed to yield more than one cluster and handle the noise (outliers), thus affirming the choice of KMC or GMM. Databases obtained from ADFR to mine PPTs are then ranked according to the number of the corresponding HAL-PPT combinations (HPC) inside the derived clusters, an approach called “reverse modeling” (RM). From the set of 29 PTs studied, RM predicts high fidelity of 5 PPTs (17%) that bind with 76 out of 400, i.e., 19% ligands leading to a prediction of next-generation MRSA drug candidates: PPT2 (average HPC is 41.1%) is the top choice, followed by PPT14 (average HPC 25.46%), and then PPT15 (average HPC 23.12%). This algorithm can be generically implemented irrespective of pathogenic forms and is particularly effective for sparse data. Graphical Abstract
Dengue fever is a self-limiting communicable viral disease, transmitted through mosquito bites. Its Case Fatality Grade (CFG) varies across population due to variations in viral load, immunity of the patient, early diagnosis, and availability of high-end treatment facility. This study describes an initial effort to automate the process of Dengue CFG predictions. Two established Statistical Machine Learning (SML) algorithms, Multiple Linear Regressions (MLR) and Multinomial Logistic Regressions (MnLR), are combined to substitute the existing Deep Learning methods for clinical decision making. We consider a vector of eleven sign-symptoms (independent variables), each weighted between [0,1] on a 3-point scale - ‘Mild’ (CFG<=0.33), ‘Moderate’ (0.33<CFG< 0.66), and ‘Severe’ (CFG>0.66). Results show that both classifiers are effective in early screening with similar accuracy levels (68% for MLR versus 72% for MnLR) although precision levels are far superior with MnLR (88%) than MLR (61%). This study is a futuristic step towards Machine Learning (ML) aided clinical diagnostic paradigms, as an alternative to computationally intensive Artificial Intelligence.
The velocity and attenuation of longitudinal and transverse ultrasonic waves in (PbO)x–(V2O5)y–(P2O5)1−x−y glass systems of different compositions have been measured at temperatures between 80 and 300 K using the ultrasonic pulse echo overlap technique at 10 MHz. For each sample the velocity data have been used to find the elastic moduli and Debye temperature at different temperatures. The results indicate that for each sample, the velocities decrease slowly and steadily with increasing temperature. The temperature dependence of ultrasonic attenuation has been explained in terms of a thermally activated relaxation process. On the other hand, the combined effect of relaxation, anharmonicity, and the effect due to frozen-in fluctuation is taken into consideration to explain the variation of velocity with temperature.