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Soybean seeds show great potential as a safe and cost-effective host for the large-scale production of biopharmaceuticals and industrially important macromolecules. However, the yields of desired recombinant proteins in soybean seeds are usually lower than the economic threshold for their potential commercialization. Our previous study demonstrated that polypeptide fusion such as maize γ-zein or elastin-like polypeptide (ELP) could significantly increase the accumulation of foreign proteins. In the present study, a recombination strategy of polypeptide fusions (γ-zein or ELP) and suppression of intrinsic storage proteins (glycinin or conglycinin) via RNA interference was further exploited to improve the yield of the target protein in soybean seeds. Transgenic soybean plants harboring both polypeptide-fused green fluorescent protein (GFP) and glycinin/conglycinin RNAi expression cassettes were generated and confirmed by molecular analysis. The results showed that on both the glycinin and conglycinin suppression backgrounds, the average accumulation levels of recombinant zein-GFP and GFP-ELP proteins were significantly increased as compared to that of their counterparts without such suppressions in our previous study. Moreover, zein-GFP and GFP-ELP accumulation was also remarkably higher than unfused GFP on the glycinin suppression background. However, no significant differences were detected in the glycinin or conglycinin suppression backgrounds for the same polypeptide fusion constructs, though suppression of one of the storage proteins in soybean seeds led to a significant increase in the other. Additionally, the increases in the recombinant protein yield did not affect the total protein content and the protein/oil ratio in soybean seeds. Taken together, the results indicate that both the fusion of the foreign protein with polypeptide tags together with the depletion of endogenous storage proteins contributed to a higher accumulation of the recombinant proteins without affecting the total protein content or the protein/oil ratio in soybean seeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Cephalopods are not only important economic products in fisheries, but also located in the middle pyramid of the marine ecosystem, playing a role of carrying the top and bottom. Cephalopods are the meals of large marine mammals, and their soft tissues are mostly digested in the stomach, and the beaks can be retained as hard tissues of cephalopods, which are structurally stable and resistant to corrosion. Therefore, the biodiversity of cephalopods can be analyzed by studying the beaks. However, there are many difficulties in the identification of beaks, such as the high level of similarity between different species of beaks and the variability arising from the growth process. The local shallow features, namely texture features and morphological features, and the global deep features were used, and the two types of features were fused for identification. This study verifies the complementarity between the two types of features and further contributes to the progress of beak recognition, providing a new approach to analyzing the biodiversity of cephalopods. Cephalopods are an essential component of marine ecosystems, which are of great significance for the development of marine resources, ecological balance, and human food supply. At the same time, the preservation of cephalopod resources and the promotion of sustainable utilization also require attention. Many studies on the classification of cephalopods focus on the analysis of their beaks. In this study, we propose a feature fusion-based method for the identification of beaks, which uses the convolutional neural network (CNN) model as its basic architecture and a multi-class support vector machine (SVM) for classification. First, two local shallow features are extracted, namely the histogram of the orientation gradient (HOG) and the local binary pattern (LBP), and classified using SVM. Second, multiple CNN models were used for end-to-end learning to identify the beaks, and model performance was compared. Finally, the global deep features of beaks were extracted from the Resnet50 model, fused with the two local shallow features, and classified using SVM. The experimental results demonstrate that the feature fusion model can effectively fuse multiple features to recognize beaks and improve classification accuracy. Among them, the HOG+Resnet50 method has the highest accuracy in recognizing the upper and lower beaks, with 91.88% and 93.63%, respectively. Therefore, this new approach facilitated identification studies of cephalopod beaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers around the world, with a high mortality rate. Despite substantial advancements in diagnoses and therapies, the outlook and survival of patients with lung cancer remains dismal due to drug tolerance and malignant reactions. New interventional treatments urgently need to be explored if natural compounds are to be used to reduce toxicity and adverse effects to meet the needs of lung cancer clinical treatment. An internalizing arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (iRGD) modified by a tumour-piercing peptide liposome (iRGD-LP-CUR-PIP) was developed via co-delivery of curcumin (CUR) and piperine (PIP). Its antitumour efficacy was evaluated and validated via in vivo and in vitro experiments. iRGD-LP-CUR-PIP enhanced tumour targeting and cellular internalisation effectively. In vitro, iRGD-LP-CUR-PIP exhibited enhanced cellular uptake, suppression of tumour cell multiplication and invasion and energy-independent cellular uptake. In vivo, iRGD-LP-CUR-PIP showed high antitumour efficacy, mainly in terms of significant tumour volume reduction and increased weight and spleen index. Data showed that iRGD peptide has active tumour targeting and it significantly improves the penetration and cellular internalisation of tumours in the liposomal system. The use of CUR in combination with PIP can exert synergistic antitumour activity. This study provides a targeted therapeutic system based on natural components to improve antitumour efficacy in lung cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Diffuse midline glioma, H3 K27-altered are central nervous system tumors that primarily affect the pediatric population. Currently, there are no curative therapies, with several completed and on-going clinical trials exploring many different therapeutic options. In this systematic review, we utilized individual participant data from published clinical trials to assess the effect of treatment options, molecular makeup and clinical characteristics on overall survival. These findings are intended to provide guidance for future interventions along with indicate the need to continue to assess results from clinical trials as they become available at a larger scale. Diffuse midline glioma (DMG), H3 K27-altered are highly aggressive, incurable central nervous system (CNS) tumors. The current standard palliative treatment is radiotherapy, with most children succumbing to the disease in less than one year from the time of diagnosis. Over the past decade, there have been significant advancements in our understanding of these heterogeneous tumors at the molecular level. As a result, most of the newer clinical trials offered utilize more targeted approaches with information derived from the tumor biopsy. In this systematic review, we used individual participant data from seven recent clinical trials published over the past five years that met our inclusion and exclusion criteria to analyze factors that influence overall survival (OS). We found that the most prominent genetic alterations H3.3 (H3F3A) and TP53 were associated with worse OS and that ACVR had a protective effect. In addition, re-irradiation was the only statistically significant treatment modality that showed any survival benefit. Our findings highlight some important characteristics of DMG, H3 K27-altered and their effects on OS along with the importance of continuing to review clinical trial data to improve our therapies for these fatal tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIPR) has great potential for intelligent transportation systems for constructing smart cities, but it is challenging to utilize due to the huge modal discrepancy between visible and infrared images. Although visible and infrared data can appear to be two domains, VIPR is not identical to domain adaptation as it can massively eliminate modal discrepancies. Because VIPR has complete identity information on both visible and infrared modalities, once the domain adaption is overemphasized, the discriminative appearance information on the visible and infrared domains would drain. For that, we propose a novel margin-based modal adaptive learning (MMAL) method for VIPR in this paper. On each domain, we apply triplet and label smoothing cross-entropy functions to learn appearance-discriminative features. Between the two domains, we design a simple yet effective marginal maximum mean discrepancy (M 3 D) loss function to avoid an excessive suppression of modal discrepancies to protect the features' discriminative ability on each domain. As a result, our MMAL method could learn modal-invariant yet appearance-discriminative features for improving VIPR. The experimental results show that our MMAL method acquires state-of-the-art VIPR performance, e.g., on the RegDB dataset in the visible-to-infrared retrieval mode, the rank-1 accuracy is 93.24% and the mean average precision is 83.77%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As two environmental pollutants of great concern, polystyrene microplastics (PS-MPs) and nonylphenol (NP) often coexist in the environment and cause combined pollution. Batch adsorption experiments were carried out by varying parameters such as pH, the particle sizes of the PS-MPs, the initial concentration of NP, and metal ion content. The results showed that the particle size of the PS-MPs in the range tested (0.1, 1, 10, 50, and 100 μm) had a significant effect on their NP adsorption capacity. The NP adsorption process of the PS-MPs was best described by the pseudo-second-order kinetic model and the Langmuir isotherm model, while the intraparticle diffusion and Bangham models were also involved in determining the NP adsorption process of 0.1 μm PS-MPs. Both PS-MPs and NP significantly affected cell proliferation, which had been confirmed by reduced cell viability, a blocked cell cycle G1 phase, and elevated apoptosis by affecting the basic cell functions. Furthermore, the negative effects of 0.1 μm PS-MPs on cell proliferation and function were aggravated after the adsorption of NP. Further research on the potential health risks of PS-MPs combined with NP or other environmental contaminants is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Acute ischemic stroke (IS) is one of the main causes of human disability and death. Therefore, multifunctional nanosystems that effectively cross the blood–brain barrier (BBB) and efficiently eliminate reactive oxygen species (ROS) are urgently needed for comprehensive neuroprotective effects. (2) Methods: We designed a targeted transferrin (Tf)-based manganese dioxide nanozyme (MnO2@Tf, MT) using a mild biomimetic mineralization method for rebalancing ROS levels. Furthermore, MT can be efficiently loaded with edaravone (Eda), a clinical neuroprotective agent, to obtain the Eda-MnO2@Tf (EMT) nanozyme. (3) Results: The EMT nanozyme not only accumulates in a lesion area and crosses the BBB but also possesses satisfactory biocompatibility and biosafety based on the functional inheritance of Tf. Meanwhile, EMT has intrinsic hydroxyl radical-scavenging ability and superoxide-dismutase-like and catalase-like nanozyme abilities, allowing it to ameliorate ROS-mediated damage and decrease inflammatory factor levels in vivo. Moreover, the released Mn2+ ions in the weak acid environment of the lesion area can be used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to monitor the treatment process. (4) Conclusions: Our study not only paves a way to engineer alternative targeted ROS scavengers for intensive reperfusion-induced injury in ischemic stroke but also provides new insights into the construction of bioinspired Mn-based nanozymes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the third year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination remains the most effective tool against infections and symptomatic illness. Comprehension regarding immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is limited, and the durability of immune responses after vaccination is currently not clear. In this study, we randomly collected 395 questionnaires to analyze the current state of COVID-19 vaccination. At the same time, the serum of 16 individuals who had received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were collected at different times before and after the booster vaccination. We analyzed the dynamic changes of SARS-CoV-2 S-specific binding antibodies in serum and immunological indicators. By collecting public opinion surveys and analyzing variational trends of SARS-CoV-2 S-specific binding antibodies and immune indicators after COVID-19 booster vaccination, we endeavored to demonstrate the concerns affecting people's booster vaccinations, as well as the frequency, timing, and necessity of COVID-19 booster vaccinations. The analysis of antibody results in 16 vaccinated volunteers showed that the antibody concentration decreased six months after the second dose and the protective effect of the virus was reduced. The third dose of COVID-19 vaccination is necessary to maintain the antibody concentration and the protective effect of the virus. The vaccination with the vaccine booster depends not only on the time interval but also on the initial concentration of the SARS-CoV-2 S-specific binding antibody before the booster. Our study has important implications for raising public awareness of vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2 and the necessity of COVID-19 booster vaccinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic leucine zipper (bZIP) is an important transcription factor required for fungal development, nutrient utilization, biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, and defense against various stresses. Aspergillus flavus is a major producer of aflatoxin and an opportunistic fungus on a wide range of hosts. However, little is known about the role of most bZIP genes in A. flavus. In this study, we developed a high-throughput gene knockout method based on an Agrobacterium-mediated transformation system. Gene knockout construction by yeast recombinational cloning and screening of the null mutants by double fluorescence provides an efficient way to construct gene-deleted mutants for this multinucleate fungus. We deleted 15 bZIP genes in A. flavus. Twelve of these genes were identified and characterized in this strain for the first time. The phenotypic analysis of these mutants showed that the 15 bZIP genes play a diverse role in mycelial growth (eight genes), conidiation (13 genes), aflatoxin biosynthesis (10 genes), oxidative stress response (11 genes), cell wall stress (five genes), osmotic stress (three genes), acid and alkali stress (four genes), and virulence to kernels (nine genes). Impressively, all 15 genes were involved in the development of sclerotia, and the respective deletion mutants of five of them did not produce sclerotia. Moreover, MetR was involved in this biological process. In addition, HapX and MetR play important roles in the adaptation to excessive iron and sulfur metabolism, respectively. These studies provide comprehensive insights into the role of bZIP transcription factors in this aflatoxigenic fungus of global significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxytropis plants are widely distributed in the grasslands in northern China. Some Oxytropis species have been reported to contain the mycotoxin swainsonine, an alkaloid which causes poisoning in livestock, referred to as locoism. Previous studies showed that endophytic fungi (Alternaria oxytropis) symbiotically associate with these Oxytropis species to produce swainsonine. However, the influence of variation within the Oxytropis genus on the fixation or loss of symbiosis and toxicity is poorly understood, as is the influence of environmental factors. Here we used a collection of 17 common Oxytropis species sampled in northern China to assess genetic diversity using genotyping by sequencing which was compared with the levels of the endophyte and swainsonine. Results showed that nine Oxytropis species have detectable A. oxytropis colonisation, and seven Oxytropis species contain sufficient swainsonine to be considered poisonous, whereas the rest may be non-toxic. Species variation rather than the genetic lineage was associated with the fixation or loss of endophyte and swainsonine production, which appears to have resulted from genetic drift. Genotype × Environment (G × E) effects were also found to influence endophyte and swainsonine levels amongst species of the Oxytropis genus. Our study will provide a better understanding about the evolutionary basis of A. oxytropis symbiosis and swainsonine biosynthesis in locoweeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fokas–Lenells equation and its multi-component coupled forms have attracted the attention of many mathematical physicists. The Fokas–Lenells equation and two coupled Fokas–Lenells equations are investigated from the perspective of Lie symmetries and conservation laws. The three systems have been turned into real multi-component coupled systems by appropriate transformations. By procedures of symmetry analysis, Lie symmetries of the three real systems are obtained. Explicit conservation laws are constructed using the symmetry/adjoint symmetry pair method, which depends on Lie symmetries and adjoint symmetries. The relationships between the multiplier and the adjoint symmetry are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investigation of township consumption patterns has become highly significant in order to emphasize the importance of township consumption patterns in economic development and policy formulation. To attain township consumption development in underdeveloped areas is a significant way to meet the general criterion of "rich life" under China's Rural Revitalization strategy. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the driving forces that contribute to the development of township consumption in underdeveloped areas such as Gansu Province, China, and then scientifically design and implement a strategy for township consumption development in Gansu, all of which are related to the broader interests of rural revitalization. The study used 1233 township data of Gansu Province, China. The study integrated geographically weighted regression (GWR) and a spatial econometric global (SEG) model for data analysis and interpretation. The integration of these two models can comprehensively capture both spatial heterogeneity and spatial independence concurrently. First, we conducted integrated analyses of GWR and SEG models using consistent settings of spatial weight matrix elements, with GWR focusing on spatial heterogeneity and SEG models on spatial spillover. Second, the permanent resident population, the number of financial institution outlets, the types of townships, and the characteristics of townships had a substantial significant effect on the development of township consumption in Gansu, China. In addition, the ratio of residents with access to basic medical insurance was found to be negatively significant. The revitalization strategy for township consumption in Gansu Province, China should prioritize increasing the permanent resident population of townships, accelerating the development of township urbanization, accelerating the construction of township consumption infrastructures, and strengthening financial support from township financial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to effectively develop the benefit evaluation model of prefabricated houses in seasonal frozen soil areas, and improve the comprehensive benefits of prefabricated buildings, this paper proposes a life cycle benefit evaluation model for prefabricated buildings in seasonally frozen regions. According to the climatic characteristics of the area, the impact of the seasonally frozen regions is listed as an evaluation index in the construction stage for comprehensive analysis. The 16 indicators that affect the comprehensive benefits of prefabricated buildings are grouped by the nearest neighbor element analysis method. Fuzzy cluster analysis and analytic hierarchy process are used to filter out the most influential index group to calculate the index weight. Then the model proposed in this paper is compared with the existing model to test the validity of the model. The research results show that research and development costs weight is 0.23, design cost weight is 0.10, construction cost weight is 0.22, resource consumption weight is 0.25, building demolition cost weight is 0.04, and seasonal freezing effect weight is 0.16. The calculation result passed the consistency test and the expert scoring result conformed to the normal distribution, which proved the accuracy of the conclusion. It is proposed that the calculation result of the comprehensive benefit score of the model is 1.8% lower than the previous results, which proves the validity of the model. The model can speed up the efficiency of comprehensive benefit evaluation of prefabricated buildings thereby improving the development level of prefabricated buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyperus esculentus produces large amounts of oil as one of the main oil storage reserves in underground tubers, making this crop species not only a promising resource for edible oil and biofuel in food and chemical industry, but also a model system for studying oil accumulation in non-seed tissues. In this study, we determined the chloroplast genome sequence of the cultivated C. esculentus (var. sativus Boeckeler). The results showed that the complete chloroplast genome of C. esculentus was 186,255 bp in size, and possessed a typical quadripartite structure containing one large single copy (100,940 bp) region, one small single copy (10,439 bp) region, and a pair of inverted repeat regions of 37,438 bp in size. Sequence analyses indicated that the chloroplast genome encodes 141 genes, including 93 protein-coding genes, 40 transfer RNA genes, and 8 ribosomal RNA genes. We also identified 396 simple-sequence repeats and 49 long repeats, including 15 forward repeats and 34 palindromes within the chloroplast genome of C. esculentus. Most of these repeats were distributed in the noncoding regions. Whole chloroplast genome comparison with those of the other four Cyperus species indicated that both the large single copy and inverted repeat regions were more divergent than the small single copy region, with the highest variation found in the inverted repeat regions. In the phylogenetic trees based on the complete chloroplast genomes of 13 species, all five Cyperus species within the Cyperaceae formed a clade, and C. esculentus was evolutionarily more related to C. rotundus than to the other three Cyperus species. In summary, the chloroplast genome sequence of the cultivated C. esculentus provides a valuable genomic resource for species identification, evolution, and comparative genomic research on this crop species and other Cyperus species in the Cyperaceae family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As pH value almost affects the function of cells and organisms in all aspects, in biology, biochemical and many other research fields, it is necessary to apply simple, intuitive, sensitive, stable detection of pH and base characteristics inside and outside the cell. Therefore, many research groups have explored the design and application of pH probes based on surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). In this review article, we discussed the basic theoretical background of explaining the working mechanism of pH SERS sensors, and also briefly described the significance of cell pH measurement, and simply classified and summarized the factors that affected the performance of pH SERS probes. Some applications of pH probes based on surface enhanced Raman scattering in intracellular and extracellular pH imaging and the combination of other analytical detection techniques are described. Finally, the development prospect of this field is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green transportation is a kind of urban transportation system with low pollution and multiple urban environments. At present, the development of green transportation in China is progressing and gradually occupying a relatively important position. In order to understand the development of green transportation in China, based on the concept of green transportation, this paper analyzes the development of green transportation in Zhoushan as an example, and selects the data from three aspects: basic indicators, means of transportation and road construction in Zhoushan City. The entropy weight method is used to determine the entropy value and weight of each index, and the index evaluation system is established. In addition, the ideal solution method was used to calculate the relative closeness degree to analyze the development of green transportation in Zhoushan city from 2016 to 2018. According to the relative proximity degree calculation data, it can be shown that the calculation value of 2017 is larger than that of 2018. The results show that the development of green transportation in Zhoushan in 2017 is the best, followed by 2018. The above results help to understand the current development status of Zhoushan green transportation, further understand the existing problems and the important factors affecting the development of Zhoushan green transportation. In order to promote the development of urban green transportation in China, suggestions are put forward on the basis of the analysis of the development of Zhousan's green transportation to promote the development of green transportation in Zhoushan from four aspects: strengthening the construction of urban road transportation system, optimizing transportation, improving the infrastructure of new energy vehicles and promoting the concept of green transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ammonia is one of the major pollutants in the aquatic ecosystem. Hyriopsis cumingii has great potential for the restoration of eutrophic water. However, there is no study investigating the effect of ammonia exposure in H. cumingii. The median lethal concentration (96 h LC50) of unionized ammonium was 12.86 mg/L in H. cumingii. In the study, H. cumingii were exposed to 6.43 mg L−1 unionized ammonium (1/2 96 h LC50) for 0, 6, 12, 24, 48, 72, and 96 h. High environment ammonia induced antioxidant response to protect the body from oxidative damage. After exposure to ammonia, there was a same trend of induction followed by inhibition of the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), and glutathione-S-transferases (GST) in the hepatopancreas and gills of H. cumingii. However, the antioxidant response could not completely counteract the oxidation effect during the exposure period, resulting in lipid peroxidation (LPO) and tissue injury in the hepatopancreas and gills of H. cumingii eventually. Moreover, this study indicated that glutamine synthetase (GS), glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH), alanine aminotransaminase (ALT), and aspartate aminotransaminase (AST) in the hepatopancreas and gills may play an important role in ammonia detoxification of H. cumingii. Our results will be helpful to understand the mechanism of aquatic toxicology induced by ammonia in shellfish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficacy of eleven essential oils (EOs) against Aspergillus flavus NRRL 3357 was investigated. The highest antifungal activity against this aflatoxigenic fungus was exhibited by cinnamon, oregano and lemongrass, which showed low minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values under vapor conditions. Interactions of the three EOs were evaluated by the fractional inhibition concentration index (FICI), and the composite essential oils (CEO) showed synergistic inhibitory activities. Chemical analysis of the composite essential oils of cinnamon, oregano, and lemongrass (COL-CEO) revealed that (Z)-citral (33.44%), (E)-citral (32.88%) and carvacrol (19.84%) were the dominant components, followed by limonene (4.29%) and cinnamaldehyde (3.76%). COL-CEO not only inhibited fungal growth but also decreased aflatoxin B1 production by A. flavus. Downregulation of the relative expression of aflatoxin genes in the aflatoxin biosynthetic pathway by COL-CEO revealed its anti-aflatoxigenic mechanism. COL-CEO could also affect the colonization of A. flavus on maize grains. Therefore, COL-CEO may be considered as a potential natural antifungal agent, which could be used for the storage of maize and other grains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) has been recognized as one of the most promising catalysts to replace Pt for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysis because of the elemental abundance, excellent catalytic potential, and stability. However, its HER efficiency is still below that of Pt. Recent research advances have revealed that the modification of pristine MoS2 is a very effective approach to boost its HER performance, including improving the intrinsic activity of sites, increasing the number of edges, and enhancing the electrical conductivity. In this review, we focus on the recent progress on the modification strategies of MoS2 for enhanced electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution. Moreover, some urgent challenges in this field are also discussed to realize the large-scale application of the modified-MoS2 catalysts in industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many plant endophytes produce mycotoxins, but how host genetic variation influences endophyte colonization and mycotoxin production under natural conditions is poorly understood. This interaction has not been fully considered in many previous studies which used controlled experiments with agronomic or model plant species. Here, we investigated this interaction in a naturally occurring forb (a locoweed species) Oxytropis ochrocephala, its symbiotic endophyte Alternaria oxytropis, and the mycotoxin swainsonine. Host genetic variation was characterized by microsatellite markers. Endophyte infection rate and swainsonine levels were determined by PCR and HPLC, respectively. Genetic markers defined two distinct host populations and revealed that host genetics were significantly correlated with geographical location, elevation, and precipitation. As the host diverged, symbiotic interactions were reduced or failed to produce detectable swainsonine in one host population. Host genotype and precipitation had a significant impact in shaping swainsonine production at the population level. This study highlights the effect of host genotype in influencing this interaction in locoweeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent analyses show that transcriptome sequencing can be utilized as a diagnostic tool for rare Mendelian diseases. The third generation sequencing de novo detects long reads of thousands of base pairs, thus greatly expanding the isoform discovery and identification of novel long noncoding RNAs. In this study, we developed TGStools, a bioinformatics suite to facilitate routine tasks such as characterizing full-length transcripts, detecting shifted types of alternative splicing, and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) identification in transcriptome analysis. It also prioritizes the transcripts with a visualization framework that automatically integrates rich annotation with known genomic features. TGStools is a Python package freely available at Github. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) has been recognized as one of the most promising catalysts to replace Pt for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) electrocatalysis because of the elemental abundance, excellent catalytic potential, and stability. However, its HER efficiency is still below that of Pt. Recent research advances have revealed that the modification of pristine MoS 2 is a very effective approach to boost its HER performance, including improving the intrinsic activity of sites, increasing the number of edges, and enhancing the electrical conductivity. In this review, we focus on the recent progress on the modification strategies of MoS 2 for enhanced electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution. Moreover, some urgent challenges in this field are also discussed to realize the large-scale application of the modified-MoS 2 catalysts in industry., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.