Characterization of recycled carbon fibers reinforcing thermoplastic polymers

In recent years, the metallic materials used in the automotive sector have been replaced by plastic materials. Also associated with this, the recycling or reuse of plastics parts is increasingly important. This work appears framed within a project that intends to substitute thermosetting materials for thermoplastics materials, that will be apply in the automotive sector. So, this article compares two thermoplastics materials reinforced by recycled carbon fibers. In the first case, the used materials were layers of recycled carbon fiber prepreg with polypropylene (PP) and in the second case it were used layers of recycling carbon fiber and layers of PP nonwovens. Both materials were processed by compression moulding process, at the same temperature. After processing, the composite materials obtained were evaluated mechanically, physically and thermally. A flammability test was also carried out to verify if it could be used in the automotive sector. After the characterization tests, as a conclusion, the material that offers the better properties is the recycled carbon fiber prepreg with polypropylene, with both materials fulfilling the requirements of the flammability standard.P2020 - Individual Project SI I&DT nº NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-009292 - “Functional_dashboard – Functional components in composite material for vehicle interiors”.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

PLANTAS COM PROVÁVEL AÇÃO ANTIFÚNGICA UTILIZADAS PELOS MORADORES DO BAIRRO CIDADE VERDE, CUIABÁ, MATO GROSSO

  RESUMO (Plantas com provável ação antifúngica utilizadas pelos moradores do bairro Cidade Verde, Cuiabá, Mato Grosso). A utilização de plantas com ação medicinal é dos componentes da diversidade cultural do Brasil e possui um estreito relacionamento com a sua ocupação. Este trabalho visa conhecer o uso de plantas com provável ação antifúngicas em Cuiabá, Mato Grosso. Realizou-se um estudo qualitativo com a seleção de 27 moradores (19 mulheres e 8 homens) do bairro Cidade Verde, zona oeste de Cuiabá, com conhecimento do uso de plantas antifúngicas. A idade dos selecionados varia entre 30 e 90 anos. Foram utilizadas entrevistas semi-estruturadas e abertas com abordagem qualitativa para identificação não só das plantas como também dos seus órgãos e formas de uso. Foram registradas 10 famílias botânicas e um total de 13 espécies. A família botânica com maior número de espécies foi Fabaceae com quatro espécies seguidas das demais famílias com uma espécie cada. As espécies pesquisadas possuem indicação terapêutica popularmente para: coceiras, frieiras, pano branco, queda de cabelo e unheiro. Das espécies mais citadas para as afecções destacam-se: a) Coceiras: Asclepias curassavica L., Jacaranda decurens Cham., Talinum patens L. Willd e Momordica charantia L., b) Frieiras: Lavandula officinalis Choix & Kitt e Operculina macrocarpa (Linn) Urb, c) Pano branco: Senna aculeata (Benth.) L. E. B., Pterodon pubescens (Benth) Benth d) Queda de cabelo: Nicotina tabacum L., e Unheiro: Aloe vera (L.) Burm. As partes das plantas geralmente utilizadas pelos entrevistados são: cascas, folhas, frutos, látex e raiz. Dentre as formas de preparo temos o chá, o banho e o sumo. Das 13 espécies registradas, apenas seis são espécies nativas do Cerrado. Palavras-chave: etnobotânica, uso potencial, área urban

Extended treatment with interferon and ribavirin in a hemodialysis patient with chronic hepatitis C

Hemodialysis patient with chronic HCV infection,who was started on monotherapy with interferon.Qualitative HCV RNA remained positive at 12 weeks of treatment; ribavirin was associated. HCV RNA was negative at week 24 and treatment was extended to 72 weeks. HCV RNA negative six months after treatment.19319

Clonal expansion across the seas as seen through CPLP-TB database: A joint effort in cataloguing Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity in Portuguese-speaking countries

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major health problem within the Community of Portuguese Language Speaking Countries (CPLP). Despite the marked variation in TB incidence across its member-states and continued human migratory flux between countries, a considerable gap in the knowledge on the Mycobacterium tuberculosis population structure and strain circulation between the countries still exists. To address this, we have assembled and analysed the largest CPLP M. tuberculosis molecular and drug susceptibility dataset, comprised by a total of 1447 clinical isolates, including 423 multidrug-resistant isolates, from five CPLP countries. The data herein presented reinforces Latin American and Mediterranean (LAM) strains as the hallmark of M. tuberculosis populational structure in the CPLP coupled with country-specific differential prevalence of minor clades. Moreover, using high-resolution typing by 24-loci MIRU-VNTR, six cross-border genetic clusters were detected, thus supporting recent clonal expansion across the Lusophone space. To make this data available to the scientific community and public health authorities we developed CPLP-TB (available at http://cplp-tb.ff.ulisboa.pt), an online database coupled with web-based tools for exploratory data analysis. As a public health tool, it is expected to contribute to improved knowledge on the M. tuberculosis population structure and strain circulation within the CPLP, thus supporting the risk assessment of strain-specific trends.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Photocatalytic ozonation of urban wastewater and surface water using immobilized TiO2 with LEDs: Micropollutants, antibiotic resistance genes and estrogenic activity

Photocatalytic ozonation was employed for the first time in continuous mode with TiO2-coated glass Raschig rings and light emitting diodes (LEDs) to treat urban wastewater as well as surface water collected from the supply area of a drinking water treatment plant (DWTP). Different levels of contamination and types of contaminants were considered in this work, including chemical priority substances (PSs) and contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), as well as potential human opportunistic antibiotic resistant bacteria and their genes (ARB&ARG). Photocatalytic ozonation was more effective than single ozonation (or even than TiO2 catalytic ozonation) in the degradation of typical reaction by-products (such as oxalic acid), and more effective than photocatalysis to remove the parent micropollutants determined in urban wastewater. In fact, only fluoxetine, clarithromycin, erythromycin and 17-alpha-ethinylestradiol (EE2) were detected after photocatalytic ozonation, by using solid-phase extraction (SPE) pre-concentration and LC-MS/MS analysis. In surface water, this treatment allowed the removal of all determined micropollutants to levels below the limit of detection (0.01-0.20 ng L(-1)). The efficiency of this process was then assessed based on the capacity to remove different groups of cultivable microorganisms and housekeeping (16S rRNA) and antibiotic resistance or related genes (intI1, blaTEM, qnrS, sul1). Photocatalytic ozonation was observed to efficiently remove microorganisms and ARGs. Although after storage total heterotrophic and ARB (to ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, meropenem), fungi, and the genes 16S rRNA and intI1, increased to values close to the pre-treatment levels, the ARGs (blaTEM, qnrS and sul1) were reduced to levels below/close to the quantification limit even after 3-days storage of treated surface water or wastewater. Yeast estrogen screen (YES), thiazolyl blue tetrazolium reduction (MTT) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) assays were also performed before and after photocatalytic ozonation to evaluate the potential estrogenic activity, the cellular metabolic activity and the cell viability. Compounds with estrogenic effects and significant differences concerning cell viability were not observed in any case. A slight cytotoxicity was only detected for Caco-2 and hCMEC/D3 cell lines after treatment of the urban wastewater, but not for L929 fibroblasts.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

HERVs establish a distinct molecular subtype in stage II/III colorectal cancer with poor outcome

© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most lethal malignancies. The extreme heterogeneity in survival rate is driving the need for new prognostic biomarkers. Human endogenous retroviruses (hERVs) have been suggested to influence tumor progression, oncogenesis and elicit an immune response. We examined multiple next-generation sequencing (NGS)-derived biomarkers in 114 CRC patients with paired whole-exome and whole-transcriptome sequencing (WES and WTS, respectively). First, we demonstrate that the median expression of hERVs can serve as a potential biomarker for prognosis, relapse, and resistance to chemotherapy in stage II and III CRC. We show that hERV expression and CD8+ tumor-infiltrating T-lymphocytes (TILs) synergistically stratify overall and relapse-free survival (OS and RFS): the median OS of the CD8-/hERV+ subgroup was 29.8 months compared with 37.5 months for other subgroups (HR = 4.4, log-rank P < 0.001). Combing NGS-based biomarkers (hERV/CD8 status) with clinicopathological factors provided a better prediction of patient survival compared to clinicopathological factors alone. Moreover, we explored the association between genomic and transcriptomic features of tumors with high hERV expression and establish this subtype as distinct from previously described consensus molecular subtypes of CRC. Overall, our results underscore a previously unknown role for hERVs in leading to a more aggressive subtype of CRC.The biobanking of CRC from Hospital Santa Maria, Lisbon, Portugal, was supported by a grant from the Official Portuguese Funding Agency for Science and Technology (FCT: PIC/IC/82821/2007).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene.

MotivationThe BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Main types of variables includedThe database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, the database contains metadata relating to sampling methodology and contextual information about each record.Spatial location and grainBioTIME is a global database of 547,161 unique sampling locations spanning the marine, freshwater and terrestrial realms. Grain size varies across datasets from 0.0000000158 km2 (158 cm2) to 100 km2 (1,000,000,000,000 cm2).Time period and grainBioTIME records span from 1874 to 2016. The minimal temporal grain across all datasets in BioTIME is a year.Major taxa and level of measurementBioTIME includes data from 44,440 species across the plant and animal kingdoms, ranging from plants, plankton and terrestrial invertebrates to small and large vertebrates.Software format.csv and .SQL