SUMMARY:The regulatory mechanism of miRNA induction in response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection has not been clearly established. Autophagy has recently been identified as an effective way to control intracellular survival of MTB. In the present study, we demonstrate a novel role of miR-30A in the negative regulation of the autophagy-mediated anti-MTB response. We found that overexpression of miR-30A suppresses the elimination of intracellular MTB through the inhibition of autophagy. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between concentrations of miR-30A and beclin-1 in MTB positive patients and miR-30A expression decreased after anti-TB treatment. Our results indicate that miR-30A plays a key role in immune response against MTB and, therefore, may serve as a potential target for future treatments of tuberculosis infection.

BackgroundPrevious studies indicated that the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TLR9 gene might be associated with Tuberculosis (TB) risk. However, the results are inconsistent and inconclusive.Methods1745 articles from four databases were involved in our study. A meta-analysis on the associations between the seven polymorphisms and TB risk was carried out by comparison using different genetic models.ResultsIn this systematic review 8 studies from seven English articles were analyzed. Our results showed that rs352139 is significantly associated with TB risk (AA vs. AG, OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.65-0.92, P = 0.004). In the ethnic subgroup analysis, Indonesians with AA genotype had a decreased susceptibility while Mexicans with GG allele had an increased risk.ConclusionsThe meta-analysis indicated that rs352139 polymorphism might be associated with decreased TB risk in Indonesians whereas increased risk in Mexicans. Whether the observed association was due to causal effect needs to be further studied.

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The occurrence of natural disasters has caused great loss of lives and properties that affected many people. To improve the efficiency of the emergency rescue efforts, the problem of road planning for emergency workers, vehicles, and other mobile objects should be overcome. Due to the characteristics of the emergency planning for rescue paths, timely, effective, and rapid efforts should be taken into effect based on geographical data in the road-free environment. This paper analyzes trafficability, researches both access ability and traffic efficiency, and uses traffic efficiency concerning the road-free environment as an influential weight and timeliness to improve the A∗ algorithm, which realizes the rapid planning of the mobile objects’ emergency rescue paths in the road-free environment, providing decision-making services for the rescue path planning of disaster emergencies in the environment of no road network. Finally, the experiments were carried out using available data for Shuozhou City, Shanxi Province. The results show that the research can provide a reference for the rescue path planning of disaster emergencies and has contributed to theoretical and applicable aspects of the research.

An oligonucleotide probe has been designed and compounded for detecting the ethambutol (EMB) resistance gene of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It was placed on a nitrocellulose membrane for use in the reverse dot-blot hybridization assay, with the PCR product labeled with biotin. Analysis was carried out on 82 M. tuberculosis clinical isolates. The results indicate that among the 31 EMB-sensitive strains, the single-strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP) spectrum and reverse dot-blot (RDB) assay results on the embB gene in 26 strains were completely identical to those of the standard strain (H37Rv), testing positive for E1 hybridization; the SSCP spectrum of the remaining five strains indicated that migration had occurred. Among the 51 EMB-resistant strains, 24 strains tested positive for E1 hybridization; of the remaining 27 strains, 18 strains tested positive for E1b hybridization, two tested positive for E1c hybridization, five tested positive for E1d hybridization, one tested positive for E1e hybridization, and one tested positive for E1f hybridization. The lowconcentration (64.70%) drug-resistant strains did not have the mutation at the codon 306 of embB. Among the 18 highconcentration drug-resistant strains, 15 strains tested positive for E1b hybridization, two tested positive for E1c hybridization, and one tested positive for E1f hybridization. The mutation detection rate was 52.94%. The RDB technology may be an easy and rapid method for detecting the codon 306 mutation of embB gene in some M. tuberculosis clinical isolates. We conclude that the ATG→GTG and ATG→CTG mutations of codon 306 of embB are one of the main causes of stron g EMB drug resistance in M. tuberculosis.