PLoS ONE最新文献

FDA approved remdesivir, which was though very effective against SARS-corona virus in cell culture system but in human its efficacy was below 10%, as reported. The main reasons are due to the poor stability of remdesivir in presence plasma. In order to increase the protective strength of remdesivir we took couple of approaches, one, to make an alternative but better derivative of remdesivir as remdesivir bis-propionate, and the other is to use our platform- designed biopolymer (NV387) to protect remdesivir compound from degradation in presence of plasma. Here we present our results as: (1) Remdesivir-bP is much more stable in vivo compared to remdesivir alone. (2) Remdesivir-bP when encapsulated within biopolymer, NV387, its stability is further enhanced. (3) The antiviral activity is also increased against NL-63 infection to rat model, compared to naked and/or encapsulated remdesivir. (4) The antiviral efficacy of the remdesivir pro-drug, therefore, can be mathematically drawn as follows: remdesivir-bP-encapsulated > remdesivir-encapsulated > remdesivir-bP > remdesivir.

Public sector reforms are crucial for improving governance efficiency, accountability, and service delivery. Their success, however, hinges on key factors such as ethics, meritocracy, and professionalism. This study utilizes Q methodology to explore various perspectives on public sector reforms, drawing on New Public Management (NPM) theory to identify critical priorities and challenges in reform implementation. By employing a structured sorting technique, the study captures stakeholders' subjective viewpoints in governance and public administration, revealing six distinct perspectives. The findings highlight the vital role of ethical governance (Factor 1) in fostering transparency and public trust while also stressing the importance of strong political will to reduce political interference (Factor 2). Furthermore, the institutionalization of meritocracy and professionalism (Factor 3) is essential for improving administrative efficiency, minimizing bureaucratic inefficiencies, and creating clear career pathways. A collaborative approach that incorporates civil society and private-sector engagement (Factor 4) is also deemed necessary for sustaining reform efforts. However, deeply rooted bureaucratic cultures and institutional resistance (Factor 5) pose significant obstacles to the implementation of reform. Additionally, the study emphasizes the need for continuous learning, leadership development, and adaptive governance strategies (Factor 6) to ensure the long-term sustainability of reforms. The variety of stakeholder perspectives indicates a complex interaction of ethical considerations, political dynamics, bureaucratic structures, and professional development needs. This research contributes to the discourse on public sector transformation by offering policy recommendations for ethical leadership, merit-based policies, and professional capacity building. Future studies should investigate these dynamics across different governance systems to reinforce institutional reforms worldwide.

Taking consumer-generated advertising as the research object, hypotheses are proposed on the influential relationship between purchase experiences, information channels and privacy costs and consumer-generated advertising. Then, a between-groups experimental design was adopted. For 402 samples, through questionnaires and interview experiments, ANOVA was used to analyze consumer-generated advertising, exploring the relationship between the behavior of consumer-generated advertising and their influence factors in different consumption scenarios. The results of the study show that: (1)information channels, purchase experiences and privacy costs all have significant effects on consumer-generated advertising. (2)The effect of purchase experiences on consumer-generated advertising is moderated by information channels. (3)The effect of privacy costs on consumer-generated advertising is moderated by information channels and purchase experiences. (4)There is no significant interaction effect among purchase experiences, information channels and privacy costs. The results of the study are helpful for enterprises to manage consumer-generated advertising reasonably and enhance the marketing management capabilities of enterprises.

Background: The Neck Disability Index (NDI) is widely used to assess neck pain-related disability. It is commonly combined with objective measures, particularly range of motion and peak velocity, but these variables usually show weak correlations with patient-reported outcomes. Functional data analysis (FDA) makes it possible to analyze complete kinematic waveforms and provides tools to identify relevant motion features most related to disability.

Objective: This study aimed to examine whether scalar-on-function regression of cervical angular velocity curves can predict NDI scores in patients with nonspecific neck pain and which motion variables and sub-phases contribute most to the prediction.

Methods: We analyzed 56 recordings from 28 patients, each paired with an NDI questionnaire, which were collected over two sessions. Cervical flexion-extension, lateral flexion, and axial rotation velocities were processed using functional principal component analysis to reduce dimensionality while retaining the main modes of variation. Univariate and bivariate scalar-on-function regression models were estimated. Model selection was based on a procedure that combined the Akaike Information Criterion, Bayesian Information Criterion, and measures of goodness-of-fit, ensuring a balance between model simplicity and predictive accuracy. Comparisons were made using non-functional regressions, including demographic and anthropometric variables.

Results: The bivariate flexion-extension plus lateral flexion model showed the best performance (r = 0.677), which was clearly higher than that of the non-functional regressions (r [Formula: see text] 0.391). The coefficient functions indicated that the acceleration and deceleration phases were the most informative in explaining variability in NDI scores. The inclusion of anthropometric variables did not improve model performance.

Conclusions: Functional regression of velocity curves improves the prediction of NDI scores and highlights specific phases of movement that are clinically relevant. Larger studies are required to confirm these findings and assess their clinical applicability.

The study of bacteriophages (phages) and effects on their microenvironments expanded exponentially within the last decade. While there are multiple described methods for phage quantitation, there is still a need for a rapid, label-free method. To this end, we established a procedure for rapid phage quantitation through novel use of a particle size analyzer with Polarization Intensity Differential (PIDS) technology and eliminated the need for labels or knowledge of bacterial host. We validated the procedure and analysis method, termed PhageFOTO (Fast Optical Tallying of Objects) using several physiologically different phages ranging from ~6 nm capsid width (Inoviridae) to ~90 nm capsid width (Caudoviricetes). PhageFOTO demonstrated 89 ± 4.3%, 98 ± 1.7%, and 94 ± 2.7% accuracy for quantitating PhiX, M13, and T4 phages/mL respectively as compared to the gold standard plaque assay with limit of detection for particle concentration occurring around 107 phages/mL. PhageFOTO proved to be a novel, rapid, label free method for phage counting that does not rely on knowledge of the bacterial host presenting unique capability for quantitation of phage samples.

Food security is a key foundation for the Yangtze River Economic Belt's high-quality development. Using a multidimensional food security evaluation framework that encompasses quantity, quality, ecology, and capacity, this paper analyzes 131 prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2022 through Gini coefficient decomposition, kernel density estimation, and convergence modeling. The study reveals an overall steady rise in food security, characterized by shrinking but still significant regional disparities and increasing coordination. The region's distribution dynamics exhibit an olive-shaped structure, characterized by being "big in the middle and small at the ends." Further analysis reveals that the midstream region converges the fastest due to policy alignment and technology diffusion, whereas the downstream region, hindered by urbanization and market segmentation, experiences the "high β coefficient - low convergence speed" paradox. The key drivers of divergent convergence paths are policy heterogeneity and misallocated resources. Based on these findings, differentiated governance strategies are proposed to promote integrated food security and ecological protection.

The growing emphasis on situational variables has significantly advanced research in sports performance analysis, yet studies focusing on referees from this perspective remain limited. This study examines how multiple situational variables influence foul calls metrics during the 2022-2023 Chinese Basketball Association League (CBA) season. Drawing on 18,519 foul events from 441 games, with the final analytical sample comprising 18,182 events from 439 games, independent-sample t-tests were used to assess the effects of individual situational variables, and binary logistic regression models were applied to examine their associations. The situational variables analyzed included game system, game type, team quality difference, score differential, and foul differential. Results show that while a clear home advantage emerges in home-and-away games, the overall foul number does not differ across systems. Stronger teams were called more fouls in games with large team quality gap, particularly in the fourth quarter. Leading teams were consistently called for more fouls when score differential widened, and teams with fewer accumulated fouls were more likely to receive subsequent calls, suggesting a potential balancing tendency in officiating. Logistic regression showed that foul calls was significantly associated with score differential, foul differential, and team quality difference, whereas the main effects of game type were limited. Importantly, several variables that were non-significant in single-factor tests emerged as significant in the multivariable models, underscoring the situational nature of officiating. This study enriches understanding of officiating performance within the framework of sports performance analysis. These findings highlight that referees' decisions are "context-sensitive" rather than random or rigid, meaning they vary across specific competitive situations. Such situational sensitivity may sustain competitive balance and game flow but also introduces risks of officiating bias. Recognizing this dual nature is valuable not only for referee evaluation, but also for leagues governance, as well as for teams seeking to anticipate officiating tendencies during games.

Background: Telehealth has become an increasingly important approach in healthcare delivery, particularly in improving accessibility, continuity, and efficiency of nursing services. This study investigated the status and influencing factors of telehealth readiness among nurses in Ningxia, China.

Methods: A multicenter cross-sectional study was conducted from September to December 2024 across 57 public hospitals in Ningxia, utilizing a multistage stratified sampling method. Data were collected through questionnaires that included the Chinese version of the Telehealth Readiness Assessment Tool (TRAT), the Cognitive Telehealth Scale (CTS), the Innovative Behavior Scale (IBS), and the Spiritual Climate Scale (SCS). Statistical analyses included univariate, correlation, and hierarchical multiple linear regression analyses.

Results: A total of 1000 valid questionnaires were collected. The participants were 33.16 ± 7.17 years, and 951 (95.1%) were female. The mean total scores for telehealth readiness, CTS, IBS, and SCS were 62.29 ± 13.61, 67.75 ± 15.82, 34.85 ± 8.59, and 15.96 ± 3.07, respectively. Hierarchical multiple linear regression analysis revealed that education level, professional title, years of work experience, monthly income, perceived adequacy of the nursing workforce for telehealth services, CTS, IBS, and SCS were all significantly and positively associated with telehealth readiness (all P < 0.05), explaining 51.2% of the variance in telehealth readiness.

Conclusion: Telehealth readiness among nurses in Ningxia was moderate and influenced by demographic characteristics and psychological factors (cognitive, innovative, and spiritual dimensions). These findings highlight the need for multifaceted interventions that focus on competency building and supportive workplace environments to facilitate telehealth adoption.

Most existing methods for 3D human motion generation focus primarily on global style statistics in the temporal dimension, which limits their ability to capture local stylistic variations in dynamic motions. This often results in generated sequences lacking expressive detail. To address this challenge, a contrastive learning-driven framework is proposed for spatiotemporal dynamically adaptive stylized 3D human motion generation. Building upon conventional spatial attention (SA) and temporal attention (TA) modules, two instance normalization variants-spatial attention instance normalization (SAIN) and temporal attention instance normalization (TAIN)-are introduced to disentangle and extract motion style features from local and global perspectives, respectively. Simultaneously, a dual-path structure is employed to isolate pure motion content at both local and global levels, ensuring effective separation of style and content information. A style injector, composed of spatially adaptive dynamic attention (SADA) and temporally adaptive dynamic attention (TADA) modules, is developed to integrate the extracted style features with motion content in a temporally and spatially ordered manner, enabling fine-grained style injection. During training, style contrastive loss and content contrastive loss are incorporated to enforce compact clustering of features with similar styles or contents in the feature space, while promoting separation of dissimilar ones. This enhances both the stylistic diversity and content fidelity of the generated sequences. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the Xia dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method, achieving an FID of 0.06, accuracy of 96.70%, diversity of 5.67, and multimodality of 0.97, all of which are close to real data (FID 0.01). In the motion style transfer task, our model attains 94.11 CRA and 89.41 SRA, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

Dissociation and sense of agency disruptions are related, but the causal pattern between them is unknown. This two-phase study explored whether laboratory-induced dissociative experiences impair the sense of agency. Study 1 tested the feasibility of generating dissociation and investigated its effect on explicit (self-reported) agency. N = 98 undergraduate students underwent one of two mirror-gazing manipulation conditions (with or without a suggestive cue) or a control condition (video watching). Mirror-gazing induced dissociation and decreased agency, especially among high trait dissociators, but the control condition was not sufficiently differentiated, as it also increased absorption, a construct which is considered a part of the domain of dissociative experiences. In Study 2, N = 199 undergraduates underwent the same manipulations with an additional improved control condition (article reading) and performed a task assessing agency implicitly. Mirror-gazing impaired explicit agency only among those high in self-reported trait dissociation, whereas it impaired implicit agency generally, perhaps bypassing self-report bias. Reading proved to be a better control condition for dissociation induction. The findings provide pioneering evidence of the causal relationship between dissociation and impairments of the sense of agency. Clinical implications are discussed.