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Insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) is considered as a pathogenic factor contributing to sebaceous gland dysfunction, which leads to acne vulgaris. Paeoniflorin (Pae), a bioactive monomer derived from total glycosides of paeony, has shown potential in treating various diseases. However, its anti-acne effects on human sebocytes are not well understood. In this study, we investigated the effects of Pae on acne development induced by IGF-1 in SZ95 sebocytes. Following IGF-1 stimulation, SZ95 sebocytes were exposed to Pae and then determined for proliferation, cell cycle, apoptosis, lipogenesis and pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion. We also analyzed the expression of proteins involved in the PI3K/Akt/FoxO1 and JAK2/STAT3 pathways. In vitro experiments demonstrated that Pae significantly inhibited colony formation, induced G1/S cell cycle arrest, promoted apoptosis, inhibited lipogenesis and cytokine synthesis in IGF-1-treated SZ95 sebocytes. Furthermore, Pae suppressed the phosphorylation of Akt, FoxO1, JAK2, and STAT3. Importantly, the sebo-suppressive and anti-inflammatory effects of Pae were enhanced by blocking PI3K and JAK2. In summary, our findings suggest that Pae has potent anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic effects in SZ95 sebocytes. Additionally, Pae effectively protects against IGF-1-induced lipogenesis and inflammation by targeting the PI3K/Akt/FoxO1 and JAK2/STAT3 signaling pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel aerobic denitrifying bacterium Bacillus cereus J1 was isolated from a sewage treatment plant. Its characteristics under two distinct nitrogen sources were systematically investigated. According to the results of whole-genome sequencing, we inferred that strain J1 removes nitrogen through processes such as aerobic denitrification, dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium, and ammonium assimilation. The degradation process of COD and total inorganic nitrogen (TIN) correlated to the zero-order degradation kinetics equation, and the maximum removal rate of NO3−−N reached 3.17 mg/L/h and that of NH4+−N was 3.79 mg/L/h. Utilizing single-factor experiments and response surface methodology, the optimal conditions for nitrate removal were determined as a shaking speed of 115 rpm, COD/nitrogen mass (C/N ratio) of 12.25, and salinity of 3.44 g/L, with the C/N ratio exerting the most significant influence. Similarly, for the maximum ammonium removal, the ideal conditions involved a shaking speed of 133 rpm, C/N ratio of 29, and salinity of 13.30 g/L, with the shaking speed exerting the most significant influence. These findings demonstrate that large amounts of ammonium and nitrate can be quickly removed with the help of Bacillus cereus J1, indicating that strain J1 may be applied to alleviate nitrogen pollution in aquatic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treponema pallidum is the causative factor of syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) characterized by perivascular infiltration of inflammatory cells, vascular leakage, swelling and proliferation of endothelial cells (ECs). The endothelium lining blood and lymphatic vessels is a key barrier separating body fluids from host tissues and is a major target of T. pallidum. In this review, we focus on how T. pallidum establish intimate interactions with ECs, triggering endothelial dysfunction such as endothelial inflammation, abnormal repairment and damage of ECs. In addition, we summarize that migration and invasion of T. pallidum across vascular ECs may occur through two pathways. These two mechanisms of transendothelial migration are paracellular and cholesterol‐dependent, respectively. Herein, clarifying the relationship between T. pallidum and endothelial dysfunction is of great significance to provide novel strategies for diagnosis and prevention of syphilis, and has a great potential prospect of clinical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of norms, which express constraints on people's behaviour within a specific range, are contained in normative documents. In writing and revising normative documents, conflicts between two norms often arise. The task Norm Conflict Identification (NCI) aims to identify such conflicts. The existing NCI methods based on statistical learning are all pipelines, which cause errors to accumulate, and cannot sufficiently extract helpful information. According to the characteristics of NCI, we propose a neural network model called NeuralConflict. This end‐to‐end model can avoid the accumulation of errors and makes it easier to obtain the optimal global solution. The model sets up an auxiliary task to predict whether two norms are semantically related and shares part of the information with the task NCI. In addition, the model uses a convolutional neural network with differently sized convolution kernels to extract local semantic information from the norms. Finally, the model inputs the shared and local semantic information into a fully connected neural network to predict whether the two norms conflict. We construct a Chinese dataset and use it with an existing English dataset for the experiments. Experimental results show that NeuralConflict achieves optimum results on both datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dermal papilla cells (DPCs) undergo premature ageing in androgenetic alopecia and senescent alopecia. As critical components of hair follicle reconstruction, DPCs are also prone to senescence in vitro, resulting in a diminished hair follicle inductivity capacity. Dermal sheath cup cells (DSCCs), a specific subset of hair follicle mesenchymal stem cells, intimately linked to the function of DPCs. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the anti‐ageing effect of exosomes derived from DSCCs (ExoDSCCs) on DPCs. Exosomes were utilized to treat H2O2‐induced DPCs or long‐generation DPCs(P10). Our findings demonstrate that ExoDSCCs(P3) promote the proliferation, viability and migration of senescent DPCs while inhibiting cell apoptosis. The expression of senescence marker SA‐β‐Gal were significantly downregulated in senescent DPCs. When treated with ExoDSCCs(P3), expression of inducibility related markers alkaline phosphatase and Versican were significantly upregulated. Additionally, ExoDSCCs(P3) activated the Wnt/β‐catenin signalling in vitro. In patch assay, ExoDSCCs(P3) significantly promoted hair follicle reconstruction in senescent DPCs. In summary, our work highlights that ExoDSCCs(P3) may restore the biological functions and improve the hair follicle induction ability of senescent DPCs. Therefore, ExoDSCCs(P3) may represent a new strategy for intervening in the ageing process of DPCs, contributing to the prevention of senile alopecia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) caused by Treponema pallidum (T. pallidum), has had a worldwide resurgence in recent years and remains a public health threat. As such, there has been a great deal of research into clinical strategies for the disease, including diagnostic biomarkers and possible strategies for treatment and prevention. Although serological testing remains the predominant laboratory diagnostic method for syphilis, it is worth noting that investigations pertaining to the DNA of T. pallidum, non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), chemokines, and metabolites in peripheral blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and other bodily fluids have the potential to offer novel perspectives on the diagnosis of syphilis. In addition, the global spread of antibiotic resistance, such as macrolides and tetracyclines, has posed significant challenges for the treatment of syphilis. Fortunately, there is still no evidence of penicillin resistance. Hence, penicillin is the recommended course of treatment for syphilis, whereas doxycycline, tetracycline, ceftriaxone, and amoxicillin are viable alternative options. In recent years, efforts to discover a vaccine for syphilis have been reignited with better knowledge of the repertoire of T. pallidum outer membrane proteins (OMPs), which are the most probable syphilis vaccine candidates. However, research on therapeutic interventions and vaccine development for human subjects is limited due to practical and ethical considerations. Thus, the preclinical model is ideal for conducting research, and it plays an important role in clinical transformation. Different preclinical models have recently emerged, such as in vitro culture and mouse models, which will lay a solid foundation for clinical treatment and prevention of syphilis. This review aims to provide a comprehensive summary of the most recent syphilis tactics, including detection, drug resistance treatments, vaccine development, and preclinical models in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quality of the phrase embedding is related to the performance of many NLP downstream tasks. Most of the existing phrase embedding methods are difficult to achieve satisfactory performance, or the robustness is ignored in pursuit of performance. In response to these problems, this paper proposes an effective phrase embedding method called Multi-loss Optimized Self-supervised Phrase Embedding (MOSPE). This method inputs pre-trained phrase embedding and component word embedding into an encoder composed of LSTM, a fully connected network, and an attention mechanism to obtain a embedding vector. Subsequently, the entire network is trained by the embedding vector to the original input through multiple loss functions. LSTM can capture the sequence information of component words. The attention mechanism can capture the importance of different component words. The fully connected network can effectively integrate the above information. Different loss functions are called weighted mean square error loss functions. They use the cosine similarity to calculate the correlation between the component word embedding and the distributed embedding of the phrase to measure the component word's importance weight. They can also measure the ratio of the phrase's internal and external information through the elements sum of the phrase constituent words and the cosine similarity of the phrase embeddings. This method does not need the supervision data and can get well-represented phrase embeddings. We use four evaluation methods to conduct experiments on three widely used phrase embedding evaluation datasets. The experimental results show that the Spearman correlation coefficient of the method on the English phrase similarity dataset reaches 0.686, the Chinese phrase similarity dataset reaches 0.846, and the F1 value on the phrase classification dataset reaches 0.715. Overall, it outperforms strong baseline methods with good robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black-odorous water bodies in the Pearl River Delta have been treated. However, the re-release of nitrogen (N)-containing compounds in sediment can cause a relapse of black-odorous water bodies. Sediment–water ratio (SWR) and hydraulic residence time (HRT) influence pollutant release. Therefore, how to control SWR and HRT during the treatment process has become an urgent problem. This study focuses on the dynamic release of endogenous inorganic N from sediments into overlying water in a river channel of Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. Physicochemical parameters (dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN), NH4+-N, NO3−-N, NO2−-N, dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, oxidation-reduction potential (ORP), chemical oxygen demand (COD), Fe and total phosphorus (TP)) of overlying water were monitored under different SWRs (0.71, 0.38, and 0.16) and HRTs (13 days and 6.5 days), and the nitrogen release flux under different conditions was compared. Finally, the correlation and influence pathways among environmental factors were analyzed. The results showed that SWR significantly affected DO, pH, ORP, and sediment N release fluxes while prolonging HRT-promoted denitrification. DIN → NO2−-N → DO pathway had a total effect of 19.6%, and DIN may promote low DO concentration via NO2− oxidation. Maintaining reasonable SWR and HRT can reduce the release of inorganic N from sediment into the overlying water. This study provides a theoretical basis for controlling black-odorous water bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can form symbiosis with many plants and the effect of AMF on phytoremediation of heavy metal has been a hot topic. But the effects of AMF on pollutants and microbes in rhizosphere and non-rhizosphere soil are still scarce. Therefore, the effects of AMF on plant growth, Pb translocation, and bacteria community in rhizosphere and non-rhizosphere soils spiked with Pb were investigated. It was found that AMF could significantly increase the uptake of Pb by Paspalum notatum, and Pb content was about 11 to 197 times higher in the root than that in the leaves. Besides, concentration of soil exchangeable Pb was significantly reduced after plant cultivation, and application of AMF increased the reduction (the exchangeable Pb concentrations of Pb300M and Pb3000M in the rhizosphere were 26.3% and 23.6% lower than that of Pb300 and Pb3000, respectively). The reduction was generally higher in the rhizosphere soil than that in the non-rhizosphere soil. The amount of Pb uptake by plants only accounted for a small part (4.9–21.7%) of the soil decreased exchangeable Pb, irrespective of AMF application, and most of the original exchangeable Pb was transformed into stabilized forms. Although bacteria community exhibited some differences between rhizosphere and non-rhizosphere soils, PCoA analysis indicated that both AMF and Pb were stronger impact factors affecting the beta-diversity of soil bacteria community than rhizosphere. The results of this study can help to clarify the impacts of AMF on phytoremediation of heavy metal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizing and managing policy documents (PDs) issued to the public in a good way can improve the efficiency of government employees and make it easier for the public to find the needed policy information. However, existing PDs are organized only by dates and manually defined categories; besides, PDs issued by different government branches are isolated from each other. These problems make it challenging and time‐consuming for the public to find the needed policy information. We argue that implicit links should be established between PDs based on their relevance, thus helping the public find the needed policy information efficiently. To this end, we propose an unsupervised relevance scoring method for PDs consist six modules, taking Chinese social security policies as the application case. The method combines the TextRank algorithm, TF‐IDF representation, mutual information and left–right information entropy algorithm, and BERT. The method can decrease the interference of noisy words in PDs to relevance scoring. In addition, the method can consider multiple features of PDs simultaneously so that the measure of relevance can be more comprehensive. The method is not driven by domain‐specific labelled data, hence can be easily generalized to PDs in various domains. We construct a dataset containing 5000 Chinese social security policies and then conduct experiments on it to evaluate our method. Experimental results show that our method is feasible and can bring convenience to government agencies and the public to a certain extent. Furthermore, our method achieves more than a 3% improvement in evaluation results on test tasks than the methods with a similar purpose in the legal AI community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, using lexicon information to improve the performance of Chinese named entity recognition has been proven to be effective. Moreover, the lexicon-based method represented by Lattice-LSTM has also become the mainstream. Although Lattice-LSTM can introduce lexicon information into characters to augment named entity recognition performance, it cannot make good use of unlabeled data, which contains abundant semantic information to assist the network to improve effect. And because Lattice-LSTM introduces much lexicon information, there is currently no suitable way to assign weights to each word. In this work, we propose a method that can effectively introduce lexicon information, which is also simple to implement and can be applied to various networks. Based on the lexicon method, this method uses external unlabeled data to count the word frequency and improved mutual information to represent the weight of the word to introduce lexicon information. And attention mechanism is used to dynamically assign weights to each part of lexicon information. In this method, the fusion of character and lexicon information is processed before the input layer, so that the method has a faster training speed and better versatility. Compared with other methods that are based on lexicon information, this method introduces additional prior knowledge, namely unlabeled data, and achieves better results when the scale of dataset is small. And when combined with the pre-trained language model, the performance is better (the F1 scores on Weibo dataset and Resume dataset are 96.73% and 71.53% respectively). Experimental research shows that our method surpasses many other excellent baseline methods in training speed and performance on two small-scale public Chinese named entity recognition datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Outcomes of ultrasound‐guided saline enema include successful treatment, unsuccessful treatment, or recurrence. This study aimed to investigate the value of ultrasonic parameters of the ileocecal region during hydrostatic reduction to predict enema outcomes. Methods: Ultrasound images of patients diagnosed with ileocolic intussusception and treated with ultrasound‐guided saline enema at two different institutions between January 2019 and April 2021 were retrospectively analyzed to assess ileocecal‐valve diameter (ICVD), intussusceptum thickness (IT), and the ratio of IT to ICVD (I/I). Logistic regression analysis was used to explore correlations between ICVD, IT, I/I, and patient characteristics (sex, age, symptom duration, and enema outcome). Results: Of 291 patients with ileocolic intussusception (207 boys; mean ICVD, 8.6 [SD: 0.1] mm; mean IT, 26 [SD: 0.2] mm; mean I/I, 3.0 [SD: 0.01]), 268 had first successful reduction; 23, first failed reduction; 7, final failed reduction; and 41, early recurrence. Significant risk factors for failed reduction included symptom duration >24 hours (odds ratio [OR] = 10, P =.012), ICVD ≤ 8.5 mm (OR = 8, P =.01), and I/I > 3.25 (OR = 16, P <.001). Significant risk factors for early recurrence post‐enema included age >1 year (OR = 10, P =.028), ICVD > 8.5 mm (OR = 4, P =.003), and I/I ≤ 2.95 (OR = 6, P <.001). Conclusions: ICVD and IT measured during ultrasound‐guided hydrostatic reduction can predict enema outcomes. The mismatch between IT and ICVD is the primary cause of poor outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Intimately coupled photocatalysis and biodegradation (ICPB) is a novel wastewater treatment technology with potential applications in the degradation of bio‐recalcitrant compounds. Although visible light has some advantages over UV light in the ICPB technology, it has never been used to treat 2,4,6‐trichlorophenol (2,4,6‐TCP)‐contaminated wastewater with this approach. RESULTS: TiO2/sponge composites with good photocatalytic activity under visible light were prepared and used as biofilm supports to develop a novel ICPB system. The latter showed highly efficient degradation properties and could mineralize 2,4,6‐TCP, with performances superior to those of the individual biological and photocatalytic systems. The removal of 2,4,6‐TCP using the ICPB system reached almost 100% after 4 h, whereas the mineralization rate approached 83% after 12 h. The key feature of the presented ICPB method is that photocatalytic reactions can occur after detachment of biofilms from the outer surface of the composite, and the resulting photocatalytic products are biodegraded by the protected biofilms inside the composites. The interior of the composites exhibited a marked enrichment in Acinetobacter, Methylophilus, Pseudomonas, Acidovorax and Flavobacterium species, which played an important role in the ICPB system. CONCLUSIONS: This study introduces a new bio‐photocatalytic degradation system and provides insight into the mechanism of chlorophenol‐contaminated wastewater treatment using ICPB. © 2022 Society of Chemical Industry (SCI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reaction performance of producing acetylene by light cycle oil (LCO) high temperature pyrolysis was investigated with a self-made electromagnetic induction heating device. The results showed that the reaction temperature and residence time were the main factors restricting the production of acetylene during LCO high temperature cracking. When the reaction temperature was 1800 °C and the residence time was 8.24 ms, the yield of acetylene reached 7.90%. At the same time, the comparative study of different raw materials shows that Yangzhou heavy cycle oil (YZHCO) with a higher content of chain alkanes, cycloalkanes, and tetrahydro-naphthalene aromatics was beneficial to the formation of acetylene, and the highest yield of acetylene reached to 12.7%. The preliminary characterization of byproduct carbon black showed it had a good structure and could be used for lithium electron conductive agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of Text-to-SQL task is to map natural language queries into equivalent structured query languages(NL2SQL). On the WikiSQL dataset, the method used by the state-of-the-art models is to decouple the NL2SQL task into subtasks and then build a dedicated decoder for each subtask. There are some problems in this method, such as the model is too complicated, and the ability to learn the dependency between different subtasks is limited. To solve these problems, this paper innovatively introduces the sharing mechanism of multi-task learning into the NL2SQL task and realizes sharing by letting different subtasks share the same decoder. Firstly, sharing decoders for different subtasks can effectively reduce the complexity of the model, and at the same time, allows different subtasks to share knowledge during the training process so that the model can better learn the dependencies between different subtasks. This paper also designed a re-weighted loss to balance the complexity of the SELECT clause and the WHERE clause. We have evaluated the method in this article on the WikiSQL dataset. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed model is better than state-of-the-art on the WikiSQL without execution guided decoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Our study aimed to investigate the relationship between MALAT-1 (metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1) expression and the chemotherapy drug resistance in osteosarcoma. Methods: The U-2OS osteosarcoma cell line was selected for the experiment. The cells were treated with methotrexate, doxorubicin, cisplatin, and ifosfamide, respectively. RT-PCR was applied to detect the MALAT-1 expression in cells. The doxorubicin-resistant cell line was constructed. The cells were divided into doxorubicin-sensitivity group (DS/shCtrl), doxorubicin-resistance group (DR/shCtrl) and shMALAT1-doxorubicin-resistance group (DR/shMALAT1). The colony formation assay and 5-ethynyl-2ʹ-deoxyuridine (EdU) assay were used to detect cell proliferation. PI staining was used to detect the cell cycle. Transwell assay and wound healing assay were used to observe the migration and invasion ability. Annexin V-FITC assay was used to detect cell apoptosis. Western blot was used to detect the protein expression and potential mechanism. The impacts of MALAT-1 expression were verified in vivo. Results: The MALAT-1 was upregulated in the doxorubicin-resistant U-2OS osteosarcoma cells. Downregulating MALAT-1 in the doxorubicin-resistant cells inhibited the proliferation, migration, and invasiveness, increased the ratio of cells in the G0/G1 phase, promoted apoptosis. In the doxorubicin-resistant U-2OS cells, the extracellular regulated protein kinases (ERK) phosphorylation was declined, which could be reversed by downregulating MALAT-1. In vivo assay indicated that the growth of doxorubicin-resistant solid osteosarcoma could be suppressed by downregulating MALAT-1. Conclusion: Our study provides evidence that doxorubicin may upregulate MALAT-1 in osteosarcoma. Downregulating MALAT-1 in the doxorubicin resistance U-2OS cells could reverse the resistance and may improve chemotherapeutic efficiency. Some conclusions in previous literature may be one-sided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to formate provides an effective way to solve the environmental problems caused by excessive carbon dioxide emissions and produce value‐added products. Herein, we report the preparation of a Sn‐doped CeO2 catalyst, where oxygen vacancies are formed by thermal treatment in Ar/H2 atmosphere, leading to enhanced carbon dioxide electroreduction to formate. The Faraday efficiency of formate production is found to reach 81.10 %, with a geometric current density of 9.13 mA cm−2 at a potential of −1.10 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode. Density functional theory calculations show that the incorporation of tin into CeO2 promotes electron transport, lowers the energy barrier to form formate through HCOO*, and increases the selectivity of formate. Results from this study highlight the importance of metal‐doping in CeO2 towards the selective reduction of CO2 to formate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Melanoma is the most malignant tumor among skin tumors, and its morbidity and mortality are increasing year by year. Although melanoma biology has been increasingly studied, no prognostic biomarkers have yet been incorporated into clinical protocols. Histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6) has been shown to act as a prognostic biomarker in several cancers. Here, we aimed to investigate the predictive value of HDAC6 for the prognosis of cutaneous melanoma patients. Methods: Eighty cutaneous melanoma patients were enrolled in this study. The protein and mRNA expression levels of HDAC6 were detected, and the clinical features and survival time of cutaneous melanoma patients with HDAC6 expression were analyzed. Results: The results suggested that high HDAC6 expression was significantly associated with unfavorable clinicopathological features. High HDAC6 expression was related to melanoma metastasis and was also associated with a reduced survival time in melanoma patients, and this association remained significant in multivariate analysis adjusted for all other factors. Conclusion: These findings validate the utility of HDAC6 expression as an independent biomarker for the prognostication of patients with cutaneous melanoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Full-thickness wounds severely affect patients' life quality and become challenging problems for clinicians. Stem cells have great prospects in the treatment of wounds. Our previous study confirmed that autologous basal cell suspension could promote wound healing, and epidermal stem cells (ESCs) were detected in the basal cell suspension. Herein, this study aimed to explore the effect of ESCs on full-thickness wounds. Methods: Rat ESCs were isolated and expanded and then were transfected with lentivirus to stably express enhanced green fluorescent protein. The experimental rats were randomly divided into 2 groups: in the ESC group, the rat ESCs were sprayed on the full-thickness wounds of rats; in the control group, phosphate-buffered saline was sprayed the on the wounds. Next, wound healing and neovascularization were evaluated. Colonization, division, and differentiation of ESCs on the wound were analyzed by immunofluorescence. Results: The rat ESCs colonized, divided, and proliferated in the wound. Additionally, rat ESCs around blood vessels differentiated into vascular endothelial cells and formed a lumen-like structure. Compared with the control group, the ESC group showed enhanced angiogenesis and accelerated wound healing. Conclusions: Our study confirmed that rat ESCs are safe and effective for treating full-thickness wounds. Additionally, under certain conditions, ESCs can differentiate into vascular endothelial cells to promote angiogenesis and wound healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by energy shortages and in view of current efforts to develop clean, renewable energy sources based on fusion, a solar‐driven strategy has been developed for deuterium evolution. Deuterium is a critical resource for many aspects. However, the limited natural abundance of deuterium and the complexity of established technologies, such as quantum sieving (QS) for deuterium production under extreme conditions, pose challenges. The new method has the potential for robust and sustainable deuterium evolution, enabling deuterium production at a high rate of 9.745 mmol g−1 h−1. The activity, thermodynamic, and kinetic characteristics are also investigated and compared between photocatalytic heavy water (D2O) splitting and water (H2O) splitting. This study opens a new avenue to discover promising photocatalytic deuterium generation systems for advanced solar energy utilization and deuterium enrichment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing a robust biofilm is a prerequisite for a biotrickling filter to obtain the good performance in removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But the biofilm formation can be seriously disturbed under intermittent loading condition due to carbon starvation stress in idle time. In this study, a biotrickling filter, with its packing materials being modified by 3% sodium alginate and 5% polyvinyl alcohol (v/v = 1:3), was employed to treat intermittent VOCs. Results showed that the removal efficiencies of toluene, ethylbenzene, p-xylene, m-xylene, and o-xylene was significantly enhanced in the BTF compared to the control one. Under relatively lower inlet loading, nearly complete removal of the five pollutants was achieved. A quantitative analysis showed that the concentration of total organic compound (TOC) in the leachate maintained at a high level, and had a strongly positive correlation with the divergence of microbial communities. The capacity of biofilm formation in the BTF was approximately four-fold higher than the control BTF, while the quantity of EPS secreted was more than ten-fold. EPS comprised largely of protein, and to less extent, polysaccharide. The biofilm formed on the modified packing materials maintained higher levels of microbial diversity and stability, even when modifiers were complete depleted or the VOCs inlet loading was increased. This study highlights the importance of packing materials for reducing the gap in performance between laboratory and industrial applications of BTFs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black phosphorus has recently emerged as an excellent 2D semiconductor with high charge-carrier mobility and wide tunable bandgap for photocatalysis. In this research, a simple method was developed to manufacture reticulated carbon nitride materials (CN-4N). Utilizing the self-capturing property of CN-4N to capture black phosphorus quantum dots (BQ) uniformly dispersed in aqueous solution, BQ were successfully implanted in the interior surface of CN-4N to form a unique structure instead of the normal exterior surface contact pattern. The optimized CN-4N(BQ) showed good stability and achieved an excellent hydrogen production rate of 13.83 mmol h−1 g−1, which was 3.3- and 35.5-fold higher than that of CN-4N and bulk CN (NCN), respectively. The experimental results illustrated that the greatly improved photocatalytic performance of CN-4N(BQ) was attributed to the joint actions of the abundant active sites provided by the ultra-porous structure, the excellent vis-NIR absorption capability, the spatially separated reactive sites for the redox reaction, and the greatly enhanced photoinduced electron–hole separation efficiency. This research provides novel insight for the rational fabrication of CN-based hybrids for various applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel medium consisting of iron oxide-coated porous ceramsite (modified ceramsite) was investigated for NO removal under thermophilic conditions in this study. We used a surface coating method with FeCl3⋅6H2O as the modifier. When ceramsite was calcined for 4 h at 500 °C, the surface pH value decreased to 3.46, which is much lower than the isoelectric point of ceramsite, ensuring its surface was electropositive. The surface of modified ceramsite changed from two-to three-dimensional and exhibited excellent adsorption behavior to assist microbial growth; the maximum dry weight of the biofilm was 1.28 mg/g. It only took 8 days for the biofilter constructed from the modified ceramsite to start up, whereas that packed with commercial ceramsite took 22 days. The NO removal efficiency of the biofilter did not decrease apparently at high NO inlet concentration of above 1600 mg/m³ and maintained an average value of above 90% during the whole operation period. Additionally, the morphological observation showed that the loss of the surface coating was not obvious, and the coating properties remained stable during long-term operation. The maximum NO inlet loading of the biotrickling filter was 80 g/(m³⋅h) with an average removal efficiency of 91.1% along with a quick start-up when using the modified ceramsite filler. Thus, modified ceramsite can be considered a very effective medium in biotrickling filters for NO removal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The catalytic conversion of palmitic acid was studied over Co/SiO2, H‐ZSM‐22 (HZ‐22), Co/H‐ZSM‐22 (Co/HZ‐22), mesoporous H‐ZSM‐22 (HZP‐22), and Co/H‐ZSM‐22 (Co/HZP‐22) catalysts. For the bifunctional catalysts, on the one hand, the porosity of zeolitic supports provided uniform accommodation for Co particles to realize the good distribution and downsizing of metal particles; on the other hand, the impregnation of Co into zeolitic supports improved the acidity of bifunctional catalysts that presented more weak/strong acid sites and stronger acid strength. Compared to sole metal centers over Co/SiO2 (no isomerization), the hydrodeoxygenation and hydroisomerization of palmitic acid were achieved simultaneously over bifunctional Co/HZ‐22 and Co/HZP‐22 catalysts (4 wt % Co loading) in one step. Mesoporous Co/HZP‐22 possessed an excellent catalytic performance during the upgrading of palmitic acid to yield the highest amount of iso‐alkanes. Importantly, the metal/zeolite bifunctional catalysts tailored the deoxygenation route significantly from hydrodecarbonylation (major) over sole metal catalysts or zeolites (only metal centers and only acid sites) to the hydrodeoxygenation route (major) over Co/zeolite bifunctional catalysts (both metal centers and acid sites). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial municipal wastewater was treated successfully by the bioaugmentation of Bacillus sp. K5 capable of simultaneous nitrification and denitrification (SND) within a sequencing batch reactor (SBR). During the long-term operation, the bioaugmentation system exhibited an excellent and steady COD and NH4+-N removal without nitrite and nitrate accumulation. The average removal efficiency for COD and NH4+-N achieved to 98% and 95%, respectively. PCR-DGGE, SEM and FISH revealed that the introduced Bacillus sp. K5 should be an important functional strain and exerted a critical influence on the structure of microbial community. qPCR analysis indicated that the strain K5 facilitated aerobic nutrients removal capabilities and SND might be the primary pathway for the nitrogen removal in the SBR. Overall, the SBR system used in our study should be very promising for the future wastewater treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extraction and quantitative analysis of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) have been frequently reported in studies of activated sludge. However, little is currently known about the EPS in the biofilms of biofilter systems. This study investigates the EPS in biofilms of Chelatococcus daeguensis TAD1 established in a suspended biofilter for nitric oxide (NO) removal under thermophilic conditions. Polysaccharide was the main EPS component under all experimental operation conditions of the aerobic biofilter, although the EPS contents and components varied under different operating conditions. As the concentration of the inlet NO varied from 200 to 2000 mg/m, the EPS and protein contents generally increased. At the highest inlet concentration (2000 mg/m), the EPS and protein contents reached 0.118 and 0.055 mg/g, respectively (representing increases of 7.3 and 35 %, respectively, over the inlet concentration of 200 mg/m). In contrast, the polysaccharide content was quite stable against inlet NO concentration. Decreasing the empty bed residence time increased the EPS and polysaccharide contents, but exerted little effect on the protein content. Varying the pH of the circulating fluid from 4 to 8 changed the EPS and its components in complex ways. We also found a strong correlation between the total EPS content and the NO removal efficiency. Therefore, it is possible to take EPS into consideration for biofilter control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, noChelatococcus daeguensisstrain has been reported to be an aerobic denitrifier. In this study, an aerobic denitrifier was isolated from the biofilm of a field biotrickling filter and its aerobic denitrification activity was evaluated under various conditions in batch reactor experiments at 50°C. Based on biochemical studies and 16S rRNA sequencing analysis, the isolate was identified asC. daeguensisstrain TAD1. The strain TAD1 was examined to determine the effects of different carbon sources, C/N ratios, and dissolved oxygen concentration on aerobic denitrification activity at 50°C.C. daeguensisTAD1 efficiently removed nitrate using disodium succinate as the sole carbon source. Nitrate was hardly reduced when glucose was used at 50°C. The optimal C/N ratio was 9, giving a denitrification efficiency of 96.1% and higher carbon concentrations did not inhibit cell growth and denitrification activity.C. daeguensisTAD1 tolerated oxygen levels about 5.1 mg/L. The denitrification efficiency ofC. daeguensisTAD1 was higher than that of mesophilic bacteria. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cr(VI) pollution is increasing continuously as a result of ongoing industrialization. In this study, we investigated the thermophilic denitrifying bacterium Chelatococcus daeguensis TAD1, isolated from the biofilm of a biotrickling filter used in nitrogen oxides (NO) removal, with respect to its ability to remove Cr(VI) from an aqueous solution. TAD1 was capable of reducing Cr(VI) from an initial concentration of 10 mg/L to non-detectable levels over a pH range of 7-9 and at a temperature range of 30-50°C. TAD1 simultaneously removed both Cr(VI) and NO -N at 50°C, when the pH was 7 and the initial Cr(VI) concentration was 15 mg/L. The reduction of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) correlated with the growth metabolic activity of TAD1. The presence of other heavy metals (Cu, Zn, and Ni) inhibited the ability of TAD1 to remove Cr(VI). The metals each individually inhibited Cr(VI) removal, and the extent of inhibition increased in a cooperative manner in the presence of a combination of the metals. The addition of biodegradable cellulose acetate microspheres (an adsorption material) weakened the toxicity of the heavy metals; in their presence, the Cr(VI) removal efficiency returned to a high level. The feasibility and applicability of simultaneous nitrate removal and Cr(VI) reduction by strain TAD1 is promising, and may be an effective biological method for the clean-up of wastewater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major obstacle to biological denitrification is the cost of the carbon source used as electron donor. Therefore, it is desirable to identify inexpensive alternatives to enable efficient denitrification. Corn husk, a type of agroforestrial waste, has the potential to release organic materials. This study investigated the possibility of enhancing aerobic denitrification by thermophilic Chelatococcus daeguensis TAD1 when corn husk that had been pretreated with hydrolysate was employed as the carbon source. The results showed that the particle size of 10-40 mesh, the NaOH dose of 0.01 mol L, the loading dose of 60 g L, the temperature of 40 °C, and pretreatment time of 24 h were appropriate to release available carbon source for denitrification by TAD1. Additionally, an initial pH of 8.5 was optimal for denitrification with maximum NO production as low as 0.053 % of denitrified NO -N, which was the least at pH 6.0-9.0, taking advantage of corn husk hydrolysate (CHH). At an initial NO -N of 253.36 mg L, the denitrification rate and removal efficiency reached 24.55 mg L h and 96.91 %, respectively, without accumulation of nitrite and NO utilizing CHH as a sole carbon source. To sum up, CHH was an economical and efficient carbon source for aerobic denitrification by TAD1 with low levels of NO, capable of tolerating the fluctuation of pH and the high nitrate load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-doped BiVO nanoparticles with enhanced visible light activity have been successfully synthesized by a hydrothermal method. The synthesized materials were characterized by X-ray diffraction, Raman, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, BET surface areas analysis, and ultraviolet-visible diffuse reflectance spectra. In comparison with pure BiVO, the In-doped BiVO displayed greater photocatalytic activity in the degradation of methyl blue under visible light illumination. All samples possessed a single monoclinic structure. The introduction of In ions resulted in structural distortion and the decreased band gap energy, producing more electrons and holes for photocatalytic reaction. In the meantime, the doping In ions entails a red shift in the absorption edge and an increase in the intensity of light absorption. The best photocatalytic performance was obtained with the BiVO sample containing 5.0 mol% In ions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present work, bismuth vanadate composited photocatalysts were synthesized and characterized. X-ray diffractometry and Raman results showed that the particles were well crystallized, and formed by the complex of monoclinic Bi VO4 and TiO2. On electron microscopy, the photocatalyst exhibited high crystallization, agglutination and irregular shape, and was surrounded by numerous TiO2 particles. The study of surface areas showed that the specific surface area of 30-Bi VO4/TiO2 composited was 112 m2·g−1, which was nearly 10 times that of pure Bi VO4. The ultraviolet-visible diffuse reflectance spectra indicated the composited photocatalyst were activated in visible light. The activity of photocatalytic water splitting was studied. The results showed that monomer Bi VO4 photocatalyst was not able to produce hydrogen under any light source. Bi VO4/TiO2 composited photocatalysts, however, were capable of generating hydrogen. Under UV light irradiation for 120 min, 1 g catalyst dispersed in 50 mL deionized water produced almost 1 mL hydrogen, such that the productivity of hydrogen was higher than that of P25-TiO2. Photocatalytic decomposition of water under visible light also confirmed that the Bi VO4/TiO2 composited photocatalyst had the ability of water splitting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bio-based degradable plastic is superior to petroleum-based plastic in terms of environmental protection and preservation of resources. A novel cross-linking system using tributyl citrate (TBC) as a cross-linking agent was used to create a bio-based degradable plastic via acetylation modified starch acetate (SA) and cellulose acetate (CA). Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy of the new plastic films revealed that a cross-Claisen ester condensation reaction had indeed occurred among TBC, CA and SA in the cross-linking system. Thermogravimetric analysis, X-ray diffraction, Scanning electron microscopy and mechanical properties tests confirmed that the fabricated films had mechanical properties and thermal stability that were comparable to conventional plastic films. A degradation-in-soil test showed that the fabricated films have controllable biodegradation properties by adjusting the amount of SA added. The tensile stress of two films-one with mass ratio of SA to CA1:3 and the other with mass ratio of 2:3-reached 3.5 and 3.0 MPa, respectively, the corresponding tensile strains were 22.3 and 17.9 %. The highest thermal stability temperature for both films was 205 °C. After being buried in soil for 35 days, the first film was 36 % degraded, and the second film was 41 % degraded. This paper is expected to promote the study and fabricate of bio-based degradable plastic film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A particularly successful polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) in industrial applications is poly (3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB). However, one of the major obstacles for wider application of PHB is the cost of its production and purification. Therefore, it is desirable to discover a method for producing PHB in large quantities at a competitive price. Glycerol is a cheap and widely used carbon source that can be applied in PHB production process. There are numerous advantages to operating fermentation at elevated temperatures; only several thermophilic bacteria are able to accumulate PHB when glycerol is the growth substrate. Here, we report on the possibility of increasing PHB production at low cost using thermophilic Chelatococcus daeguensis TAD1 when glycerol is the growth substrate in a fed-batch culture. We found that (1) excess glycerol inhibited PHB accumulation and (2) organic nitrogen sources, such as tryptone and yeast extract, promoted the growth of C. daeguensis TAD1. In the batch fermentation experiments, we found that using glycerol at low concentrations as the sole carbon source, along with the addition of mixed nitrate (NHCl, tryptone, and yeast extract), stimulated PHB accumulation in C. daeguensis TAD1. The results showed that the PHB productivity decreased in the following order: two-stage fed-batch fermentation > fed-batch fermentation > batch fermentation. In optimized culture conditions, a PHB amount of 17.4 g l was obtained using a two-stage feeding regimen, leading to a productivity rate of 0.434 g l h, which is the highest productivity rate reported for PHB to date. This high PHB biosynthetic productivity could decrease the total production cost, allowing for further development of industrial applications of PHB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]