An Autopsy Study of a Fouled Reverse Osmosis Membrane Used for Ultrapure Water Production

This study investigated the fouling and cleaning behaviors of reverse osmosis (RO) membranes in a lab-scale ultrapure water (UPW) production system via membrane autopsies and characterization of dissolved organic matter (DOM) and membrane foulants. Most of DOM were effectively removed by the MFC filter, with the exception of the peak at 150 Da. The RO membranes were effective in reducing conductivity, DOM, total nitrogen (TN), and ultraviolet A (UVA(254nm)) concentration; the polishing stage using IER filter resulted in ultra-trace levels of all these parameters required for semiconductor manufacturing (> 18.2 Omega M). The quantity of the desorbed RO membrane foulants, in terms of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), varied considerably depending on the type of desorbing agents: 0.1 N NaCl (65.12 mgC m(-2)) > 0.1 N NaOH (46.14 mgC m(-2)) > deionized water (25.39 mgC m(-2)) > 0.1 N HCl (15.95 mgC m(-2)). The high cleaning efficiency of the salt solution (0.1 N NaCl) was attributed to the efficient desorption of hydrophilic DOM foulants from the RO membrane surfaces. These results demonstrate that the salt cleaning may provide a promising option to recover the performance of the RO membranes fouled primarily by hydrophilic DOM fractions

Team size matters : collaboration and scientific impact since 1900

This paper provides the first historical analysis of the relationship between collaboration and scientific impact, using three indicators of collaboration (number of authors, number of addresses, and number of countries) and including articles published between 1900 and 2011. The results demonstrate that an increase in the number of authors leads to an increase in impact–-from the beginning of the last century onwards—and that this is not simply due to self-citations. A similar trend is also observed for the number of addresses and number of countries represented in the byline of an article. However, the constant inflation of collaboration since 1900 has resulted in diminishing citation returns: larger and more diverse (in terms of institutional and country affiliation) teams are necessary to realize higher impact. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential causes of the impact gain in citations of collaborative papers

From Tuberculosis Bedside to Bench: UBE2B Splicing as a Potential Biomarker and Its Regulatory Mechanism

Alternative splicing (AS) is an important approach for pathogens and hosts to remodel transcriptome. However, tuberculosis (TB)-related AS has not been sufficiently explored. Here we presented the first landscape of TB-related AS by long-read sequencing, and screened four AS events (S100A8-intron1-retention intron, RPS20-exon1-alternaitve promoter, KIF13B-exon4-skipping exon (SE) and UBE2B-exon7-SE) as potential biomarkers in an in-house cohort-1. The validations in an in-house cohort-2 (2274 samples) and public datasets (1557 samples) indicated that the latter three AS events are potential promising biomarkers for TB diagnosis, but not for TB progression and prognosis. The excellent performance of classifiers further underscored the diagnostic value of these three biomarkers. Subgroup analyses indicated that UBE2B-exon7-SE splicing was not affected by confounding factors and thus had relatively stable performance. The splicing of UBE2B-exon7-SE can be changed by heat-killed mycobacterium tuberculosis through inhibiting SRSF1 expression. After heat-killed mycobacterium tuberculosis stimulation, 231 ubiquitination proteins in macrophages were differentially expressed, and most of them are apoptosis-related proteins. Taken together, we depicted a global TB-associated splicing profile, developed TB-related AS biomarkers, demonstrated an optimal application scope of target biomarkers and preliminarily elucidated mycobacterium tuberculosis-host interaction from the perspective of splicing, offering a novel insight into the pathophysiology of TB