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In this study, we discussed the relationship between Entermorpha linza polysaccharide (EP) and Bacillus subtilis, which can transform nitrate. A sole carbon source experiment showed that Bacillus subtilis could utilize EP, and the bacterial density was maximally increased by 54.43% in the EP groups. The results of reducing sugar determination proved the secretion of polysaccharide-degrading enzymes. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that the EP groups had fewer spores and shrunken bacteria, indicating that EP could improve the growth environment and maintain bacterial integrity. Additionally, the ratios of periplasmic nitrate reductase (NAP), nitrite reductase (NIR), and dissimilatory nitrate reductase (D-NRase) in the EP groups were maximally increased by 107.22%, 84.70% and 36.10%, respectively. Transcriptome analysis further confirmed the above mentioned results. For example, the high expression of quorum sensing genes indicated that EP groups had higher bacterial density. Moreover, the high expression of antioxidant genes in the EP groups may be related to morphological integrity. Our study provides a basis for further discussion of the mechanism.

The etiology for a considerable proportion of patients with congenital radioulnar synostosis (RUS) remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the genetic cause of RUS without a known cause.Patients with RUS were investigated. Exome sequencing and/or Sanger sequencing was performed. Bioinformatics analysis was also performed. Pathogenicity was evaluated for variants of interest.We identified unique missense variants in MECOM (encodes EVI1) associated with RUS in 8 families. Of them, 6 families had variants in residue R781, including 3 families with R781C (c.2341CT), 2 families with R781H (c.2342GA), and 1 family with R781L (c.2342GT). Another 2 variants included I783T (c.2348TC) in 1 family and Q777E (c.2329CG) in 1 family. All these variants were clustered within the ninth zinc finger motif of EVI1. Phenotype evaluation identified that most of these patients with RUS harboring mutant MECOM had finger malformations, but none of them had identifiable hematological abnormalities. Functional experiments showed that MECOM R781C led to alterations in TGF-β-mediated transcriptional responses.This study examined MECOM variants by focusing on RUS instead of hematological abnormalities. The R781 residue in EVI1 is a hotspot for human RUS variants. Mutant MECOM is the second most common cause for familial RUS.

Precisely segmenting teeth from digitized 3D dental models is an essential task in computer-aided orthodontic surgical planning. In recent years, various deep learning-based methods have been proposed to process dental models for teeth segmentation, however, these methods usually ignore or coarsely model the dependency between vertices/mesh cells in local space, which fails to exploit local geometric details that are critical to capture complete teeth structure. In this paper, we propose a specific end-to-end network for teeth segmentation on 3D dental models. By constructing a graph for the raw mesh data, our network adopts a series of graph attentional convolution layers and a global structure branch to extract fine-grained local geometric feature and global feature, respectively. Subsequently, these two features are further fused to learn comprehensive information for cell-wise segmentation tasks. We have evaluated our network on a real-patient dataset of dental models acquired through 3D intraoral scanners, and experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning methods for 3D shape segmentation.

Burst suppression (BS) is an electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern in which signals alternates between high-amplitude slow waves (burst waves) and nearly flat low-amplitude waves (suppression waves). In this study, we used wide-field (8.32 mm × 8.32 mm) fluorescent calcium imaging to record the activity of glutamatergic neurons in the parietal and occipital cortex, in conjunction with EEG recordings under BS induced by different anesthetics (sevoflurane, isoflurane, and propofol), to investigate the spatiotemporal pattern of neural activity under BS. The calcium signal of all observed cortices was decreased during the phase of EEG suppression. However, during the phase of EEG burst, the calcium signal in areas of the medial cortex, such as the secondary motor and retrosplenial area, was excited, whereas the signal in areas of the lateral cortex, such as the hindlimb cortex, forelimb cortex, barrel field, and primary visual area, was still suppressed or only weakly excited. Correlation analysis showed a strong correlation between the EEG signal and the calcium signal in the medial cortex under BS (except for propofol induced signals). As the burst-suppression ratio (BSR) increased, the regions with strong correlation coefficients became smaller, but strong correlation coefficients were still noted in the medial cortex. Taken together, our results reveal the landscape of cortical activity underlying BS.

In this study, density functional theory calculations have been carried out to study the hydrogen storage properties of high entropy alloy (HEA) TiZrVMoNb. It reveals that a BCC→FCC phase transformation occurs when the hydrogen content reaches 1.5 wt% during hydrogenation process, and octahedral and tetrahedral interstitial sites are preferable for hydrogen occupation before and after phase transformation, respectively. Further energetic analyses show that different hydrogen occupations in HEAs play an important role in the thermal stability of hydrides. The maximum hydrogen storage capacity for TiZrVMoNb is predicted to be 2.65 wt%, which is comparable to the largest value of 2.7 wt% for TiZrVHfNb and larger than that of other reported HEA hydrogen storage materials reported in the literature. As compared with the previously reported HEA TiZrHfMoNb with the change of only one principal element, the TiZrVMoNb not only has much higher hydrogen storage capacity, but also has more moderate hydrogen desorption temperature. The difference in hydrogen storage properties between these two HEAs is mainly attributed to the atomic weight, site occupation, lattice distortion and chemical effect of metal elements. The present study thus suggests that the TiZrVMoNb HEA has great potential as hydrogen storage materials and proposes a strategy to enhance the hydrogen storage properties of HEAs.

In this study, we generated chitosan nanoparticles by exploiting the electrostatic interactions between positively charged hydroxypropyltrimethyl ammonium chloride chitosan (HACC) and negatively charged carboxymethyl chitosan (CMC), and examined the effects of altering the molecular weight and carboxymethyl substitution sites of the chitosan molecules. Particle size, potential, and encapsulation efficiency of the various chitosan nanoparticles were examined; the particle size range was 162.40-332.80 nm, the charge range was 19.50-40.60 mV, and the encapsulation efficiency range was 48.4-70.7%. We then examined the immunostimulatory effects of the nanoparticle variants on dendritic cells (DCs); we found that the site of carboxymethyl substitution significantly affected the immunostimulatory effects of the nanoparticles. Two nanoparticle types, 200 kDa N,O-carboxymethyl chitosan-HACC (NO-CMC-HACC) and N-carboxymethyl chitosan-HACC (N-CMC-HACC), greatly promoted the expression of interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor, and interleukin-1β in DCs. Moreover, NO-CMC-HACC nanoparticles caused an increase in major histocompatibility complex-II (MHC-II), CD11c, CD80, and CD86 secretion in DCs, indicating that these nanoparticles promoted antigen presentation. We then examined chitosan nanoparticle uptake by DCs using laser confocal microscopy; we found that the NO-CMC-HACC nanoparticles were more readily absorbed by DCs compared to the N-CMC-HACC nanoparticles. Therefore, we concluded that 200 kDa NO-CMC-HACC nanoparticles exhibited strong potential as immunological adjuvants.

Geographical variation of animal venom is common among venomous animals. This kind of intraspecific variation based on geographical location mainly concerned from envenomation cases and brought new problems in animal venom studies, including venom components regulatory mechanisms, differentiation of venom activities, and clinical treatment methods. At present, food is considered as the most related factor influencing venom development. Related research defined the variational venomous animal species by the comparison of venom components and activities in snakes, jellyfish, scorpions, cone snails, ants, parasitoid wasps, spiders and toads. In snake venom studies, researchers found that antivenom effectiveness was variated to different located venom samples. As described in some snake venom research, developing region-specific antivenom is the development trend. The difficulties of developing region-specific antivenom and theoretical solutions have been discussed. This review summarized biological studies of animal venom geographical variation by species, compared venom components and major biological activities of the vary venom from the same species, and listed the basic methods in comparing venom protein compositions and major toxicity differences to provide a comprehensive reference.

A series of Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb high-entropy alloys with different Mo concentrations were developed as candidate materials for hydrogen/tritium storage in solid phase. The crystal structures and hydrogenation properties of the Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb alloys were investigated by X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry techniques. All the alloys have a body-centred cubic single phase structure. The results demonstrate that the cell volume of the Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb hydride decreases with increasing Mo concentration, which reduces their thermal stability. The theoretical calculation proposes that the lower binding energy of the Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb hydride decreases the thermal stability of Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb alloys with higher Mo content. The great hydrogenation performance for all the Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb alloys is owing to their reversible single-phase transformation during the hydrogen absorption-desorption cycle, which would be beneficial to improving the hydrogen recycling rate and preventing the disproportionation. The compositional dependence of the hydrogenation performance of the Ti-Zr-Hf-Mo-Nb alloys was established and will be useful in designing novel hydrogen/tritium storage materials to satisfy the requirements of different application fields in hydrogen, solar thermal and nuclear energy.

The direct steam generation (DSG) solar power system using two stage accumulators and cascade steam-organic Rankine cycle (RC-ORC) has remarkably enlarged storage capacity. It can facilitate stable power generation and address the challenges of conventional DSG systems. Regenerator is generally an issue worthy of discussion in organic Rankine cycle (ORC) systems. However, its influence on the newly proposed DSG system has not been investigated yet and is expected to be appreciable. Introducing a regenerator affects not only the ORC efficiency, RC-ORC efficiency, heat exchanger area, but also heat storage capacity, discharge duration, discharge efficiency, aperture area of collectors and the net profit ( Δ P ). Detailed performance comparison between the DSG systems without/with regenerator is carried out in this paper. The results indicate that at a given power output, aperture area is reduced by the regenerator especially for MM, R365mfc and pentane due to the increment in ORC, RC-ORC and discharge efficiencies, as well as the decrement in heat input. Discharge duration is shortened by 0.01–1.78 h depending on ORC fluids. R365mfc exhibits the maximum Δ P (4.19 ∼ 6.48 million USD), followed by MM and pentane. On the contrary, Δ P is negative for benzene (−5.61 ∼ -4.31 million USD).

The compressibility of the vapour–liquid phase is indispensable in simulating liquid hydrogen or liquid nitrogen cavitating flow. In this paper, a numerical simulation method considering compressibility and combining the thermal effects of cryogenic fluids was developed. The method consisted of the compressible thermal cavitation model and RNG k–e turbulence model with modified turbulent eddy viscosity. The cavitation model was based on the Zwart–Gerber–Belamri (ZGB) model and coupled the heat transfer and vapour–liquid two-phase state equations. The model was validated on cavitating hydrofoil and ogive, and the results agreed well with the experimental data of Hord in NASA. The compressibility and thermal effects were correlated during the phase change process and compressibility improved the accuracy of the numerical simulation of cryogenic cavitating flow based on thermal effects. Moreover, the thermal effects delayed or suppressed the occurrence and development of cavitation behaviour. The proposed modified compressible ZGB (MCZGB) model can predict compressible cryogenic cavitating flow at various conditions.

Jellyfish Cyanea nozakii venom is a complex mixture of various toxins, most of which are proteinous biological macromolecules and are considered to be responsible for clinical symptoms or even death after a severe sting. Previous transcriptome and proteome analysis identified hundreds of toxins in the venom, including hemolysins, C-type lectin, phospholipase A