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Objectives Identifying recent infections is necessary to monitor HIV/AIDS epidemic; however, it needs to be further developed. Methods and Results Participants were defined as having recent infection or older infection according to the estimated duration of HIV-1 infection and further assigned into training set and validation set according to their entering time points. Western blot (WB) confirmatory test and BED-CEIA were performed. The performance of the two methods on recent HIV-1 diagnosis was evaluated and compared. 81 subjects were enrolled in the training set and 72 in the validation set. Relative grey ratios of p24, p39, p31, p66, gp41, and gp160 were significantly higher in older infected patients of the training set. The present status of p55 was more frequently missing in recently infected patients in both sets. The logistic stepwise regression analysis of WB method shows sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 93.02%, 92.11%, and 92.59%. For BED-CEIA, they were 76.74%, 86.84%, and 81.48%. In the validation set, overall agreement rate, sensitivity, and specificity were 88.46%, 84.78%, and 86.11% in the WB-based method and 50.00%, 84.78%, and 72.22% in the BED-CEIA method. Conclusions WB-based method is a promising approach to predict recent HIV-1 infection, especially in resource-limited regions.

Background Tuberculosis (TB) is a major global health problem and has replaced HIV as the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. Methods Here, we applied high throughput sequencing to study the immune repertoire of nine pulmonary tuberculosis patients and nine healthy control samples. Results Tuberculosis patients and healthy controls displayed significantly different high express clones and distinguishable sharing of CDR3 sequences. The TRBV and TRBJ gene usage showed higher expression clones in patients than in controls and we also found specific high express TRBV and TRBJ gene clones in different groups. In addition, six highly expressed TRBV/TRBJ combinations were detected in the CD4 group, 21 in the CD8 group and 32 in the tissue group. Conclusion In conclusion, we studied the patients with tuberculosis as well as healthy control individuals in order to understand the characteristics of immune repertoire. Sharing of CDR3 sequences and differential expression of genes was found among the patients with tuberculosis which could be used for the development of potential vaccine and targets treatment.

Sarcoidosis is a systemic granulomatous disorder highly related with immune response. The diversity and stability of the immune system could be measured by hypervariable complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) segments of the T cell receptor (TCR). Here we used a combination of multiplex PCR and next-generation sequencing to conduct a good quality analysis of the T-cell receptor BV complementarity-determining region 3 (TCR BV CDR3) gene in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 7 sarcoidosis patients and lung sarcoidosis tissue from 6 patients. The length distribution of CDR3 sequences identified a significant difference among CD4+, CD8+ and tissue samples. The analysis of Gini coefficient, Shannon entropy and HEC number showed that they all presents in sarcoidosis tissue group clones in a more skewed manner than that of in PMBCs groups. 2 nucleotide sequences and 2 amino acid sequences were shared by all samples. The comparison of TRBV, TRBJ usage and VJ combination frequency identified 2 TRBV genes, 2 TRBJ genes differentially expressed among different groups and different higher usage and lower usage of V-J combinations between each group.