STUDY QUESTION Do inactivated coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) vaccines affect IVF outcomes among the vaccine recipients? SUMMARY ANSWER The receipt of inactivated COVID-19 vaccines before ovarian stimulation has little effect on the outcomes of IVF, including ovarian stimulation outcomes, embryo development and pregnancy rates. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY Limited studies have reported that COVID-19 vaccines do not affect ovarian function, embryo development or pregnancy outcomes. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION This was a retrospective cohort study performed at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University on 240 women vaccinated with either CoronaVac or Sinopharm COVID-19 before ovarian stimulation in the exposed group and 1343 unvaccinated women before ovarian stimulation in the unexposed group. All participants received fresh embryo transfers between 1 March 2021 and 15 September 2021. The included women were followed up until 12 weeks of gestation. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS Vaccination information of all subjects was followed up by a nurse, and the IVF data were obtained from the IVF data system. The following aspects were compared between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated groups: parameters of ovarian stimulation, embryo development and pregnancy rates. Regression analyses were performed to control for confounders of embryo development and pregnancy rates. Propensity score matching (PSM) was performed to balance the baseline parameters of the two groups. The primary outcome was the ongoing pregnancy rate. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE Liner regression analysis revealed that the number of oocytes retrieved (regression coefficient (B) = −0.299, P = 0.264), embryos suitable for transfer (B = −0.203, P = 0.127) and blastocysts (B = −0.250, P = 0.105) were not associated with the status of vaccination before ovarian stimulation, after adjusting for the confounders. The ongoing pregnancy rate in the women of the vaccinated group was not significantly lower than that in the unvaccinated group (36.3% vs 40.7%, P = 0.199) (adjust odd ratio = 0.91, 95% CI = 0.68–1.22, P = 0.52). After PSM, the rates of ongoing pregnancy (36.0% vs 39.9%, P = 0.272), implantation (35.4% vs 38.3%, P = 0.325), biochemical pregnancy (47.3% vs 51.6%, P = 0.232), clinical pregnancy (44.4% vs 47.4%, P = 0.398) and early miscarriage (15.0% vs 12.1%, P = 0.399) were not significantly different between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated groups. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION This is a retrospective study of women with infertility. The results from the present study warrant confirmation by prospective studies with a larger cohort. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS This is the first study with a large sample size on the effect of inactivated COVID-19 vaccines on ongoing pregnancy rates of women undergoing IVF. The present results showed that vaccination has no detrimental effect on IVF outcomes. Therefore, women are recommended to receive COVID-19 vaccines before undergoing their IVF treatment. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S) This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2018YFC1003803 to J.L.), the Guangzhou Science and Technology Plan Project (No. 202102010076 to H.L.) and the Medical Key Discipline of Guangzhou (2021-2023), as well as the Sino-German Center for Research Promotion Rapid Response Funding Call for Bilateral Collaborative Proposals between China and Germany in COVID-19 Related Research (No. C-0032 to Xingfei Pan). The authors declare no conflicts of interest. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER N/A.

Mycotoxin contamination causes disease and death in both humans and animals. Monascus Red, produced by Monascus purpureus, is used as a food colorant. However, its application is limited by contamination of the nephrotoxin citrinin, which is also produced by the fungus. Suppressing citrinin production by genetic engineering is difficult in a polykaryotic fungus such as M. purpureus. Hence, we developed a CRISPR/Cas system to delete large genomic fragments in polykaryotic fungi. Protoplast preparation and regeneration were optimized, and a dual-plasmid CRISPR/Cas system was designed to enable the deletion of the 15-kb citrinin biosynthetic gene cluster in M. purpureus industrial strain KL-001. The obtained homokaryotic mutants were stable, and citrinin was unambiguously eliminated. Moreover, the Monascus Red pigment production was increased by 2−5%. Our approach provides a powerful solution to solve this long-standing problem in the food industry and enables engineering of polykaryotic fungi for mycotoxin eliminations.

SUMMARYCognitive femtocell has been considered as a promising technique that can improve the capacity and the utilization of spectrum efficiency in wireless networks because of the short transmission distance and low transmit power. In this paper, we study the win-win solution of energy-efficient radio resource management in cognitive femtocell networks, where the macrocell tries to maximize its revenue by adjusting spectrum utilization price while the femtocells try to maximize their revenues by dynamically adjusting the transmit power. When the spectrum utilization price is given by macrocell, we formulate the power control problem of standalone femtocells as an optimization problem and introduce a low-complexity iteration algorithm based on gradient-assisted binary search algorithm to solve it. Besides, non-cooperative game is used to formulate the power control problem between collocated femtocells in a collocated femtocell set, and then low complexity and widely used gradient-based iteration algorithm is applied to obtain the Nash-equilibrium solution. Specially, asymptotic analysis is applied to find the approximate spectrum utilization price in macrocell, which can greatly reduce the computational complexity of the proposed energy-efficient radio resource management scheme. Finally, extensive simulation results are presented to verify our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.