Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a highly pathogenic virus that has caused the global COVID-19 pandemic. Tracing the evolution and transmission of the virus is crucial to respond to and control the pandemic through appropriate intervention strategies. This paper reports and analyses genomic mutations in the coding regions of SARS-CoV-2 and their probable protein secondary structure and solvent accessibility changes, which are predicted using deep learning models. Prediction results suggest that mutation D614G in the virus spike protein, which has attracted much attention from researchers, is unlikely to make changes in protein secondary structure and relative solvent accessibility. Based on 6324 viral genome sequences, we create a spreadsheet dataset of point mutations that can facilitate the investigation of SARS-CoV-2 in many perspectives, especially in tracing the evolution and worldwide spread of the virus. Our analysis results also show that coding genes E, M, ORF6, ORF7a, ORF7b and ORF10 are most stable, potentially suitable to be targeted for vaccine and drug development.

The mutual information (MI) measure has become a popular metric to assess image fusion performance. However, despite its publicity, it provides a questionable result that consistently favours additive fusion (averaging) over multi-scale decomposition (MSD) fusion algorithms. Presented is a localised variation of MI to assess image fusion performance while preserving the importance of local structural similarity. The presented metric has been validated with extensive tests on popular image fusion test cases.

Understanding Zika virus infection dynamics is essential, as its recent emergence revealed possible devastating neuropathologies in humans, thus causing a major threat to public health worldwide. R...

Zika virus infection in new born is linked to congenital syndromes, especially microcephaly. Studies have shown that these neuropathies are the result of significant death of neuronal progenitor cells in the central nervous system of the embryo, targeted by the virus. Although cell death via apoptosis is well acknowledged, little is known about possible pathogenic cellular mechanisms triggering cell death in neurons. We used in vitro embryonic mouse primary neuron cultures to study possible upstream cellular mechanisms of cell death. Neuronal networks were grown on microelectrode array and electrical activity was recorded at different times post Zika virus infection. In addition to this method, we used confocal microscopy and Q-PCR techniques to observe morphological and molecular changes after infection. Zika virus infection of mouse primary neurons triggers an early spiking excitation of neuron cultures, followed by dramatic loss of this activity. Using NMDA receptor antagonist, we show that this excitotoxicity mechanism, likely via glutamate, could also contribute to the observed nervous system defects in human embryos and could open new perspective regarding the causes of adult neuropathies. This model of excitotoxicity, in the context of neurotropic virus infection, highlights the significance of neuronal activity recording with microelectrode array and possibility of more than one lethal mechanism after Zika virus infection in the nervous system.