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Despite wide applications of noble metal-based catalysts in 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) oxidation, promoting the catalytic performance at low loading amounts still remains a significant challenge. Herein, a series of metal oxide modified MOx-Au/TiO2 (M = Fe, Co, Ni) catalysts with low Au loading amount of 0.5 wt% were synthesized. Addition of transition metal oxides promotes electron transfer and generation of the Auδ−–Ov–Ti3+ interface. A combination study reveals that the dual-active site (Auδ−-Ov-Ti3+) governs the catalytic performance of the rate-determining step, namely hydroxyl group oxidation. Auδ− site facilitates chemisorption and activation of O2 molecules. At the same time, Ov-Ti3+ site acts as the role of “killing two birds with one stone”: enhancing adsorption of both reactants, accelerating the activation and dissociation of H2O, and facilitating activation of the adsorbed O2. Besides, superoxide radicals instead of base is the active oxygen species during the rate-determining step. On this basis, a FDCA yield of 71.2% was achieved under base-free conditions, complying with the “green chemistry” principle. This work provides a new strategy for the transition metal oxides modification of Au-based catalysts, which would be constructive for the rational design of other heterogeneous catalysts.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines, mask mandates, product shortages, and business closures have caused serious impact in virtually all regions of the world. The COVID-19 has devastated the modern society and economy, which is particularly detrimental to the food supply chain industry. The crisis is expected to be long-lasting, which demands the food supply chain industry to responsively adapt and evolve through transformation and optimization of its management model. This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food supply chain in China regarding its disruptions as well as challenges and explores the potential optimization solution to recalibrate its management model. Specifically, it looks at the phenomenon of delays and stoppages in food factories, shortage issues in an imported food market, rising costs and alarming food safety concerns that food supplies encountered, vexing food transportation issues, and the domino effect within the entire industry. To better cope with these problems, the study also aims at developing practical solutions to optimize the supply chain across sectors, including building and maintaining a cooperative relationship with suppliers, initiating contingency plans, and employing effective tools to maximize food traceability. Furthermore, study limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Lithium-sulfur batteries have great potential for next-generation electrochemical storage systems owing to their high theoretical specific energy and cost-effectiveness. However, the shuttle effect of soluble polysulfides and sluggish multi-electron sulfur redox reactions has severely impeded the implementation of lithium-sulfur batteries. Herein, we prepared a new type of Ti

Biological and experimental evidence support restoration of normal zinc levels in malignant prostate cells as a promising prostate cancer treatment, yet the influence of zinc supplementation after diagnosis on prostate cancer survival in a human population is unknown.We prospectively assessed post-diagnostic zinc supplementation in relation to prostate cancer survival among 5,788 men with nonmetastatic prostate cancer in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1986-2019). We used Cox regression models to estimate the multivariable hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals of lethal prostate cancer (distant metastases or prostate cancer-specific death) and all-cause mortality according to post-diagnostic zinc supplement use and dosage.During a median follow-up of 11 years, we documented 527 lethal prostate cancer events and 3,198 all-cause deaths. Fifteen percent of men reported zinc supplement use post-diagnosis. Compared to nonusers, post-diagnostic zinc supplement use was associated suggestively with a lower risk of lethal prostate cancer (HR [95% CI], 0.82 [0.60-1.13]) and significantly with all-cause mortality (0.84 [0.74-0.96]). The inverse association was mostly observed among men who used post-diagnostic zinc supplements of 1-24 mg/d (lethal prostate cancer: 0.55 [0.32-0.96]; all-cause mortality: 0.77 [0.64-0.93]), while higher dosage did not show a lower risk.Post-diagnostic low-dose zinc supplement use among nonmetastatic prostate cancer patients was associated with lower risk of lethal prostate cancer and all-cause mortality. A potential benefit of low-dose post-diagnostic zinc supplement for prostate cancer survival merits further study.

Graph-based recommender system has attracted widespread attention and produced a series of research results. Because of the powerful high-order connection modeling capabilities of the Graph Neural Network, the performance of these graph-based recommender systems are far superior to those of traditional neural network-based collaborative filtering models. However, from both analytical and empirical perspectives, the apparent performance improvement is accompanied with a significant time overhead, which is noticeable in large-scale graph topologies. More importantly, the intrinsic data-sparsity problem substantially limits the performance of graph-based recommender systems, which compelled us to revisit graph-based recommendation from a novel perspective. In this article, we focus on analyzing the time complexity of graph-based recommender systems to make it more suitable for real large-scale application scenarios. We propose a novel end-to-end graph recommendation model called the Collaborative Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (CVGA), which uses the information propagation and aggregation paradigms to encode user–item collaborative relationships on the user–item interaction bipartite graph. These relationships are utilized to infer the probability distribution of user behavior for parameter estimation rather than learning user or item embeddings. By doing so, we reconstruct the whole user–item interaction graph according to the known probability distribution in a feasible and elegant manner. From the perspective of the graph auto-encoder, we convert the graph recommendation task into a graph generation problem and are able to do it with approximately linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that CVGA can be trained at a faster speed while maintaining comparable performance over state-of-the-art baselines for graph-based recommendation tasks. Further analysis shows that CVGA can effectively mitigate the data sparsity problem and performs equally well on large-scale datasets.

The prevalence of dementia can vary by region and there is a cluster of more than 10 modifiable risk factors for dementia. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the prevalence of dementia in Xiamen, China, and identify independent risk factors associated with dementia.This cluster sampling-based cross-sectional study enrolled elder adults from Xiamen City and conducted face-to-face interviews between April and August 2019. Data on the demographic characteristics and prevalence of dementia were collected. Multivariable logistic regression was used to analyse the factors associated with dementia.A total of 6430 subjects were enrolled. The prevalence of dementia was 7.62% (490/6430). A total of 490 patients were in the dementia group and 196 healthy matched subjects were selected for the control group with similar profiles for age, gender, and occupation as the dementia patients. Dementia patients were at increased risk for cerebrovascular disease, traumatic brain injury, and hypertension (all P 0.05). Multivariable logistic regression analysis showed hypertension (odds ratio (OR) = 2.4, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.62-3.63, P 0.001) and traumatic brain injury (OR = 2.19, 95% CI: 1.16-4.53, P = 0.023) were independent risk factors for dementia.The prevalence of dementia was high among elder adults residing in Xiamen, China. Dementia patients were more likely to have hypertension and traumatic brain injury than the matched control group.

Objective: The efficacy of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy in acetaminophen-induced liver injury has been investigated in animal experiments, but individual studies with a small sample size cannot be used to draw a clear conclusion. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of preclinical studies to explore the potential of using MSCs in acetaminophen- induced liver injury. Methods: Eight databases were searched for studies reporting the effects of MSCs on acetaminophen hepatoxicity. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were used. SYRCLE’s risk of bias tool for animal studies was applied to assess the methodological quality. A meta-analysis was performed by using RevMan 5.4 and STATA/ SE 16.0 software. Results: Eleven studies involving 159 animals were included according to PRISMA statement guidelines. Significant associations were found for MSCs with the levels of alanine transaminase (ALT) (standardized mean difference (SMD) - 2.58, p < 0.0001), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) (SMD - 1.75, p = 0.001), glutathione (GSH) (SMD 3.7, p < 0.0001), superoxide dismutase (SOD) (SMD 1.86, p = 0.022), interleukin 10 (IL-10) (SMD 5.14, p = 0.0002) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) (SMD - 4.48, p = 0.011) compared with those in the control group. The subgroup analysis showed that the tissue source of MSCs significantly affected the therapeutic efficacy (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Our meta-analysis results demonstrate that MSCs could be a potential treatment for acetaminophen- related liver injury. The protocol for this meta-analysis was prospectively registered in PROSPERO (Number: CRD42020212677).

Acquired lymphedema is a common and often severe complication of breast cancer surgery and radiology that seriously affects patients' quality of life. Nevertheless, the pathogenesis for acquired lymphedema is complex and remains unclear. The aim of this study is to find out possible genetic markers and potential drugs for acquired lymphedema.First, the GSE4333 datasets, which include expression data for six female humanized hairless immunocompetent SKH-1 mice (the condition of whom mimics acquired lymphedema), were reanalyzed. According to the criteria of a fold change (FC) ≥1.4 and an adjusted P value0.05, we identified the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between a normal group and the lymphedema group. Next, we analyzed the Gene Ontology (GO) terms and enriched signaling pathways associated with these DEGs with an online tool DAVID. We also constructed protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks and selected meaningful gene modules for additional gene-drug interaction research. Finally, the extant drugs targeting these module genes were identified for further study of their therapeutic effects against acquired lymphedema.A total of 481 DEGs were identified that were closely associated with the immune system, inflammatory response, and extracellular matrix (ECM) structural constituent terms, among others. Moreover, we identified the top 10 significant genes in the PPI networks and identified one extant drug, fiboflapon, that targets theWe ultimately identified 10 hub genes, molecular mechanisms, and one extant drug related to acquired lymphedema. The findings identified targets and a potential drug for further research on acquired lymphedema.

Multivitamin supplement is commonly used among older adults in the United States. Evidence on multivitamin use and prostate cancer risk is limited, and some suggested potential risk for clinically important subtypes of cancer.A total of 48,137 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study were followed from 1986 to 2017. Multivitamin use and frequency were self-reported at baseline and updated biennially. Clinical features of prostate cancer included advanced, lethal and high-grade outcomes. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate multivariable hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of multivitamin use and incidence of prostate cancer.The median followup for men without prostate cancer diagnosis or death was 30.7 years. We documented 7,108 incident prostate cancer cases including 564 advanced and 1,065 lethal. Overall, we observed a null association between multivitamin use and risk of prostate cancer. Compared to never-users, men who used multivitamin 10 or more tablets per week had similar risk of advanced (HR: 1.14, 95% CI: 0.77-1.70, PRegular or long-duration multivitamin use among older, generally well-nourished men was not associated with either increased or lower risk of overall or aggressive prostate cancer.

Host-managed shingled magnetic recording drives (HM-SMR) are advantageous in capacity to harness the explosive growth of data. For key-value (KV) stores based on log-structured merge trees (LSM-trees), the HM-SMR drive is an ideal solution owning to its capacity, predictable performance, and economical cost. However, building an LSM-tree-based KV store on HM-SMR drives presents severe challenges in maintaining the performance and space utilization efficiency due to the redundant cleaning processes for applications and storage devices (i.e., compaction and garbage collection). To eliminate the overhead of on-disk garbage collection (GC) and improve compaction efficiency, this article presents GearDB , a GC-free KV store tailored for HM-SMR drives. GearDB improves the write performance and space efficiency through three new techniques: a new on-disk data layout, compaction windows, and a novel gear compaction algorithm. We further augment the read performance of GearDB with a new SSTable layout and read ahead mechanism. We implement GearDB with LevelDB, and use zonefs to access a real HM-SMR drive. Our extensive experiments confirm that GearDB achieves both high performance and space efficiency, i.e., on average 1.7× and 1.5× better than LevelDB in random write and read, respectively, with up to 86.9% space efficiency.

Intervertebral disk (IVD) degeneration, which can cause lower back pain, is a major predisposing factor for disability and can be managed through multiple approaches. However, there is no satisfactory strategy currently available to reconstruct and recover the natural properties of IVDs after degeneration. As tissue engineering develops, scaffolds with embedded cell cultures have proved critical for the successful regeneration of IVDs.In this study, an integrated scaffold for IVD replacement was developed. Through scanning electron microscopy and other mechanical measurements, we characterized the physical properties of different hydrogels. In addition, we simulated the physiological structure of natural IVDs. Nucleus pulposus (NP) cells and annulus fibrosus-derived stem cells (AFSCs) were seeded in gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) hydrogel at different concentrations to evaluate cell viability and matrix expression.It was found that different concentrations of GelMA hydrogel can provide a suitable environment for cell survival. However, hydrogels with different mechanical properties influence cell adhesion and extracellular matrix component type I collagen, type II collagen, and aggrecan expression.This tissue-engineered IVD implant had a similar structure and function as the native IVD, with the inner area mimicking the NP tissue and the outer area mimicking the stratified annulus fibrosus tissue. The new integrated scaffold demonstrated a good simulation of disc structure. The preparation of efficient and regeneration-promoting tissue-engineered scaffolds is an important issue that needs to be explored in the future. It is hoped that this work will provide new ideas and methods for the further construction of functional tissue replacement discs.

Years of outbreaks of woody canker (Cryptosphaeria pullmanensis) in the United States, Iran, and China have resulted in massive economic losses to biological forests and fruit trees. However, only limited information is available on their distribution, and their habitat requirements have not been well evaluated due to a lack of research. In recent years, scientists have utilized the MaxEnt model to estimate the effect of global temperature and specific environmental conditions on species distribution. Using occurrence and high resolution ecological data, we predicted the spatiotemporal distribution of C. pullmanensis under twelve climate change scenarios by applying the MaxEnt model. We identified climatic factors, geography, soil, and land cover that shape their distribution range and determined shifts in their habitat range. Then, we measured the suitable habitat area, the ratio of change in the area of suitable habitat, the expansion and shrinkage of maps under climate change, the direction and distance of range changes from the present to the end of the twenty-first century, and the effect of environmental variables. C. pullmanensis is mostly widespread in high-suitability regions in northwestern China, the majority of Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey, northern Chile, southwestern Argentina, and the west coast of California in the United States. Under future climatic conditions, climate changes of varied intensities favored the expansion of suitable habitats for C. pullmanensis in China. However, appropriate land areas are diminishing globally. The trend in migration is toward latitudes and elevations that are higher. The estimated area of possible suitability shifted eastward in China. The results of the present study are valuable not only for countries such as Morocco, Spain, Chile, Turkey, Kazakhstan, etc., where the infection has not yet fully spread or been established, but also for nations where the species has been discovered. Authorities should take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to restrict the spread of C. pullmanensis. Countries with highly appropriate locations should increase their surveillance, risk assessment, and response capabilities.

Glaesserella parasuis (G. parasuis.) is the etiological pathogen of Glässer’s disease, which causes high economic losses to the pig industry. The heme-binding protein A precursor (HbpA) was a putative virulence-associated factor proposed to be potential subunit vaccine candidate in G. parasuis. In this study, three monoclonal antibodies (mAb) 5D11, 2H81, and 4F2 against recombinant HbpA (rHbpA) of G. parasuis SH0165 (serotype 5) were generated by fusing SP2/0-Ag14 murine myeloma cells and spleen cells from BALB/c mice immunized with the rHbpA. Indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA) demonstrated that the antibody designated 5D11 showed a strong binding affinity with the HbpA protein and was chosen for subsequent experiments. The subtypes of the 5D11 were IgG1/κ chains. Western blot analysis showed that mAb 5D11 could react with all 15 serotype reference strains of G. parasuis. None of the other bacteria tested reacted with 5D11. In addition, a linear B-cell epitope recognized by 5D11 was identified by serial truncations of HbpA protein and then a series of truncated peptides were synthesized to define the minimal region that was required for mAb 5D11 binding. The 5D11 epitope was located on amino acids 324-LPQYEFNLEKAKALLA-339 by testing the 5D11 monoclonal for reactivity with 14 truncations. The minimal epitope 325-PQYEFNLEKAKALLA-339 (designated EP-5D11) was pinpointed by testing the mAb 5D11 for reactivity with a series of synthetic peptides of this region. The epitope was highly conserved among G. parasuis strains, confirmed by alignment analysis. These results indicated that mAb 5D11 and EP-5D11 might potentially be used to develop serological diagnostic tools for G. parasuis. Three-dimensional structural analysis revealed that amino acids of EP-5D11 were in close proximity and may be exposed on the surface of the HbpA protein.