Background: The emerging 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has pushed several countries into state of emergency all over the world. The possible transmission of 2019-nCoV by conjunctiva is controversial and has substantial public health implications. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was initiated to investigate the possible transmission of 2019-nCoV through aerosol contact with conjunctiva. We enrolled 67 cases of confirmed or suspected cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP) during 17–28 Jan 2020. Nasopharyngeal and conjunctival swabs were collected for real time RT-PCR analysis to detect 2019-nCoV. Results: 63 patients were identified as laboratory-confirmed NCP and the remaining four were suspected NCP. Conjunctival swab samples from one NCP patient yielded positive PCR results and two NCP patients yielded probable positive PCR results. None of the three patients had ocular symptoms. The only one NCP patient with conjunctivitis as the first symptom had negative conjunctival sac 2019-nCoV test. Conjunctival swab samples from the four suspected cases of NCIP were negative. Conclusion: 2019-nCoV can be detected in the conjunctival sac of patients with NCP. Through clinical analysis, viral transmission via the conjunctival route was not supported by the data. Good clinical protection can effectively cut off the transmission path.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease of the central retina, with no suitable biomarkers for early diagnosis and treatment. This study aimed to find potential diagnostic biomarker candidates for AMD and investigate their immune-related roles in this pathology. Weight gene correlation analysis was first performed based on data from the Gene Expression Omnibus database and 20 hub genes were identified. The functional enrichment analyses showed that the innate immune response, inflammatory response, and complement activation were key pathways associated with AMD. Complement C1s (C1S), adrenomedullin (ADM), and immediate early response 5 like (IER5L) were identified as the crucial genes with favorable diagnostic values for AMD by using LASSO analysis and multiple logistic regression. Furthermore, a 3-gene model was constructed and proved to be of good diagnostic and predictive performance for AMD (AUC = 0.785, 0.840, and 0.810 in training, test, and validation set, respectively). Finally, CIBERSORT was used to evaluate the infiltration of immune cells in AMD tissues. The results showed that the NK cells, CD4 memory T cell activation, and macrophage polarization may be involved in the AMD process. C1S, ADM, and IER5L were correlated with the infiltration of the above immune cells. In conclusion, our study suggests that C1S, ADM, and IER5L are promising diagnostic biomarker candidates for AMD and may regulate the infiltration of immune cells in the occurrence and progression of AMD.

Early screening for dry eye disease (DED) is crucial to identify and provide timely intervention to high-risk susceptible populations. Currently, clinical methods for diagnosing DED include the tear break-up time test, meibomian gland analysis, tear osmolarity test, and tear river height test, which require in-hospital detection. Unfortunately, there is no convenient way to screen for DED yet. In this paper, we propose SDE, a contactless, convenient, and ubiquitous DED screening system based on RF signals. To extract biomarkers for early screening of DED from RF signals, we construct frame chirps variance and extract fine-grained spontaneous blinking action. SDE is carefully designed to remove interference in RF signals and refine the characterization of biomarkers that denote the symptoms of DED. To endow SDE with the ability to adapt to new users, we develop a deep learning-based model of unsupervised domain adaptation to remove the influence of different users and environments in local and global two-level feature spaces. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate SDE with 54 volunteers in 4 scenes. The experimental results confirm that SDE can accurately screen for DED in a new user in real environments such as eye examination rooms, clinics, offices, and homes.

Adult mammalian central nervous system (CNS) axons do not spontaneously regenerate after injury. We recently identified multiple genes that promote optic nerve regeneration, protect retinal ganglion cell (RGC) somata and axons, and preserve visual function in mouse glaucoma models. Here, we investigated the downstream molecular mechanisms driving the regenerative and neuroprotective effects of the actin depolymerization molecule gelsolin ( Gsn , one of the top up-regulated genes in regenerating RGCs) and the actin regulatory molecules (annexin A2, destrin, cofilin, profilin, latrunculin, and cytochalasin). Adeno-associated virus (AAV)–mediated specific expression of these genes in RGCs or topical delivery of small molecules promoted optic nerve regeneration and RGC protection in an optic nerve crush model and an ocular hypertension glaucoma mouse model. These regenerative effects were associated with a decrease in F-actin in axon shafts. Ex vivo mechanistic studies, furthermore, demonstrated that actin depolymerization enhances axonal mitochondrial transport in RGC axons, suggesting a mechanistic nodal point on which these pro-regeneration molecules converge. We showed that the natural compound latrunculin B targets this unified mechanism in both mouse and human RGCs to promote axon outgrowth. In addition, we detected up-regulated F-actin in aqueous humors of patients with severe glaucoma, emphasizing the translational potential of our findings.