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BackgroundWeb-based medical consultation, which has been adopted by patients in many countries, requires a large number of doctors to provide services. However, no study has provided an overall picture of the doctors who provide online services.ObjectiveThis study sought to examine doctors’ participation in medical consultation practice in an online consultation platform. This paper aimed to address the following questions: (1) which doctors provide Web-based consultation services, (2) how many patients do the doctors get online, and (3) what price do they charge. We further explored the development of market segments in various departments and various provinces.MethodsThis study explored the dataset including all doctors providing consultation services in their spare time on a Chinese Web-based consultation platform. We also brought in statistics for doctors providing offline consultations in China. We made use of Bonferroni multiple comparison procedures and z test to compare doctors in each group.ResultsThere are 88,308 doctors providing Web-based consultation in their spare time on Haodf, accounting for 5.25% (88,308/1,680,062) of all doctors in China as of September 23, 2017. Of these online doctors, 49.9% (44,066/88,308) are high-quality doctors having a title of chief physician or associate chief physician, and 84.8% (74,899/88,308) come from the top, level 3, hospitals. Online doctors had an average workload of 0.38 patients per doctor per day, with an online and offline ratio of 1:14. The average price of online consultation is ¥32.3. The online ratios for the cancer, internal medicine, ophthalmology-otorhinolaryngology, psychiatry, gynecology-obstetrics-pediatrics, dermatology, surgery, and traditional Chinese medicine departments are 16.1% (2,983/18,481), 4.4% (16,231/372,974), 6.3% (8,389/132,725), 9.5% (1,600/16,801), 5.8% (12,955/225,128), 18.0% (3,334/18,481), 10.8% (24,030/223,448), and 3.8% (8,393/22,3448), respectively. Most provinces located in eastern China have more than 4000 doctors online. The online workloads for doctors from most provinces range from 0.3 to 0.4 patients per doctor per day. In most provinces, doctors’ charges range from ¥20 to ¥30.ConclusionsQuality doctors are more likely to provide Web-based consultation services, get more patients, and charge higher service fees in an online consultation platform. Policies and promotions could attract more doctors to provide Web-based consultation. The online submarket for the departments of dermatology, psychiatry, and gynecology-obstetrics-pediatrics developed better than other departments such as internal medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. The result could be a reference for policy making to improve the medical system both online and offline. As all the data used for analysis were from a single website, the data might be biased and might not be a representative national sample of China.

Human behavior is the largest source of variance in health-related outcomes, and the increasingly popular online health communities (OHC) can be used to promote healthy behavior and outcomes. We explored how the social influence (social integration, descriptive norms and social support) exerted by online social relationships does affect the health behavior of users. Based on an OHC, we considered the effect of three types of social relationships (friendship, mutual support group and competing group) in the OHC. We found that social integration, descriptive norms and social support (information and emotional support) from the OHC had a positive effect on dietary and exercise behavior. Comparing the effects of different social relationships, we found that the stronger social relationship—friendship—had a stronger effect on health behavior than the mutual support group and competing group. Emotional support had a stronger effect on health behavior than informational support. We also found that the effects of social integration and informational support became stronger as membership duration increased, but the effects of the descriptive norms and emotional support became smaller. This study extended the research on health behavior to the online social environment and explored how the social influence exerted by various social relationships in an OHC affected health behavior. The results could be used for guiding users to make use of online social relationships for changing and maintaining healthy behavior, and helping healthcare websites improve their services.

Copy number variation (CNV) contributes in phenotypically relevant ways to the genetic variability of many organisms. Cost-effective genomewide methods for identifying copy number variation are necessary to elucidate the contribution that these structural variants make to the genomes of model organisms. We have developed a novel approach for the identification of copy number variation by next generation sequencing. As a proof of concept our method has been applied to map the deletions of three Drosophila deficiency strains. We demonstrate that low sequence coverage is sufficient for identifying and mapping large deletions at kilobase resolution, suggesting that data generated from high-throughput sequencing experiments are sufficient for simultaneously analyzing many strains. Genomic DNA from two Drosophila deficiency stocks was barcoded and sequenced in multiplex, and the breakpoints associated with each deletion were successfully identified. The approach we describe is immediately applicable to the systematic exploration of copy number variation in model organisms and humans. S TRUCTURAL variation is known to contribute extensively to the genetic variability of humans, mammals, and many model organisms. One class of structural variant, termed copy number variation (CNV), includes deletions, duplications, insertions, and genomic rearrangements which affect the number of occurrences of a specific DNA sequence present in the genome . CNV is known to occur extensively in the Drosophila genome with functionally significant consequences (Bridges 1936;Dopman and Hartl 2007;Tibshirani and Wang 2008;Zhou et al. 2008). In one study of 15 Drosophila strains, as many as 10% of genes were observed to harbor CNVs (Emerson et al. 2008). Cryptic CNVs that affect the phenotype observed in a model organism have the potential to confound research on multiple levels. For example, a recent report indicates that terminal deletions on chromosome (chr) 2L are frequent among deficiency kit stocks with mutations on the second chromosome and that the associated deletion of lgl has distorted the results of several previous studies (Roegiers et al. 2009). Despite widespread existence of CNV, the biological consequences of this phenomenon remain largely unexplored due to the lack of efficient tools for detection and characterization.Until recently, comparative genomic hybridization with whole-genome tiling arrays (array-CGH) was the primary method for characterizing CNVs (Carter 2007); however, several limitations for this platform reduce its efficacy and efficiency. First, cross-hybridization and reliance on intensity scores lead to data that are difficult to interpret. Second, custom array design and optimization is labor intensive and costly. Third, array-CGH methods can only detect CNV, not other complex rearrangements such as balanced translocations and inversions. Finally, the overall cost of array-CGH methods is relatively high, particularly when high-resolution, whole-genome tiling arrays are employed.Direct sequencing usin...

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were rapidly synthesized using an exopolysaccharide from Arthrobacter sp. B4 (B4-EPS). The optimum condition for AgNPs synthesis was under the concentration of 5 g/L B4-EPS and 1 mM AgNO3 at 80°C between pH 7.0 and 8.0. The resulting AgNPs displayed a face-centred-cubic structure with the size range from 9 nm to 72 nm. Further analysis showed that flocculation and reduction of B4-EPS played a pivotal role in the formation of AgNPs. Furthermore, these nanoparticles exhibited great stability, excellent antimicrobial activity, and low phytotoxicity. The aforementioned data provide a feasible and efficient approach for green synthesis of AgNPs using microbial polysaccharides with flocculation and reduction activity, which will be promising in medical filed.