The Study on Prospect and Early Opportunities for Carbon Capture and Storage in Guangdong Province, China

AbstractCCS is regarded as an important and strategic technology option to reduce CO2 emission, and has received tremendous attention around the world. Guangdong, as the largest economic and energy-consuming province in China, is necessary to take CCS as an important option to reduce its future CO2 emission. This paper presents the partial outcome of the first CCS-related research in Guangdong, which is aiming for preliminary assessment on the feasibility of CCS development in Guangdong. The main objective of the study is to characterize the industrial CO2 emissions and understand its CCS prospects. Coal-fired power plants in Guangdong are the major point sources, contributing to more than 90% of CO2 emissions from the electric power generation. The power plants are mainly located in the Pearl River Delta, while the newly built and projected large plants are mainly located in eastern coastal zone, which provides a great potential for CO2 capture. For the storage potential, there are six sedimentary basins in or around Guangdong with effective storage capacity of 568 GtCO2. Since the onshore storage capacity in Guangdong is limited, the northern portion of the Pear River Mouth Basin (PRMB) was considered the most promising choice for Guangdong to storage CO2. By considering the distance between source and sink, technology maturity, land resources and other factors, it can be concluded that in the short term the power plants under construction and projected located in the eastern coastal areas will be the most promising resources for CO2 capture and the corresponding storage sites are the existing oil/gas fields which located in the northeast of PRMB. But in the long term, as technologies and the international carbon market mature, the extensively retrofitting of existing coal-fired power plants in the Pearl River Delta region with CO2 capture will become possible. In order to promote the development of CCS in Guangdong, more basic investigation and policy research are necessary in the coming years

Diversifying Question Generation over Knowledge Base via External Natural Questions

Previous methods on knowledge base question generation (KBQG) primarily focus on enhancing the quality of a single generated question. Recognizing the remarkable paraphrasing ability of humans, we contend that diverse texts should convey the same semantics through varied expressions. The above insights make diversifying question generation an intriguing task, where the first challenge is evaluation metrics for diversity. Current metrics inadequately assess the above diversity since they calculate the ratio of unique n-grams in the generated question itself, which leans more towards measuring duplication rather than true diversity. Accordingly, we devise a new diversity evaluation metric, which measures the diversity among top-k generated questions for each instance while ensuring their relevance to the ground truth. Clearly, the second challenge is how to enhance diversifying question generation. To address this challenge, we introduce a dual model framework interwoven by two selection strategies to generate diverse questions leveraging external natural questions. The main idea of our dual framework is to extract more diverse expressions and integrate them into the generation model to enhance diversifying question generation. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks for KBQG demonstrate that our proposed approach generates highly diverse questions and improves the performance of question answering tasks.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Proteasome activator 28A: A clinical biomarker and pharmaceutical target in acute cerebral infarction therapy

Purpose: To determine the dynamic changes in serum levels of PA28α in patients with acute cerebral infarction (ACI), and to investigate its correlation with infarct size and neurological deficit of the disease. Methods: A total of 100 ACI patients and 100 healthy volunteers were recruited from The First Affiliated Hospital of Xinxiang Medical University as case and control groups, respectively. Their serum levels of PA28α were determined by quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The potential of PA28α in predicting the incidence of ACI was assessed by plotting ROC curves. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was conducted to investigate the risk factors of ACI. In addition, an ACI model in rats was established, and ACI rats were classified into 1, 3, 5, 7 and 14 day subgroups based on the duration post-ACI. Rats in the sham group served as control. Results: Serum level of PA28α was significantly higher in ACI patients than in controls. Moreover, the serum level of PA28α at admission was positively correlated to the NIHSS score and infarct volume of ACI patients. The level of PA28α in ACI rats gradually increased post-ACI, reaching a peak on day 7. The number of apoptotic brain cells in ACI rats gradually decreased after ACI. In addition, PA28α level was negatively correlated to the number of apoptotic brain cells in ACI rats (R2 = 0.5148, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The serum level of PA28α is elevated in ACI patients, and is positively correlated to infarct volume and neurological deficit of the disease. The dynamic change in brain cell apoptosis post-ACI is negatively correlated to the serum level of PA28α. These findings may provide theoretical basis for the diagnosis and treatment of ACI

CRISPR/Cas12a-based approaches for efficient and accurate detection of Phytophthora ramorum

IntroductionPhytophthora ramorum is a quarantine pathogen that causes leaf blight and shoot dieback of the crown, bark cankers and death on a number of both ornamental and forest trees, especially in North America and northern Europe, where it has produced severe outbreaks. Symptoms caused by P. ramorum can be confused with those by other Phytophthora and fungal species. Early and accurate detection of the causal pathogen P. ramorum is crucial for effective prevention and control of Sudden Oak Death.MethodsIn this study, we developed a P. ramorum detection technique based on a combination of recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) with CRISPR/Cas12a technology (termed RPACRISPR/ Cas12a).ResultsThis novel method can be utilized for the molecular identification of P. ramorum under UV light and readout coming from fluorophores, and can specifically detect P. ramorum at DNA concentrations as low as 100 pg within 25 min at 37°C.DiscussionWe have developed a simple, rapid, sensitive, unaided-eye visualization, RPA CRISPR/Cas12a-based detection system for the molecular identification of P. ramorum that does not require technical expertise or expensive ancillary equipment. And this system is sensitive for both standard laboratory samples and samples from the field

Di-2-pyridylhydrazone Dithiocarbamate Butyric Acid Ester Exerted Its Proliferative Inhibition against Gastric Cell via ROS-Mediated Apoptosis and Autophagy

Diversified biological activities of dithiocarbamates have attracted widespread attention; improving their feature or exploring their potent action of mechanism is a hot topic in medicinal research. Herein, we presented a study on synthesis and investigation of a novel dithiocarbamate, DpdtbA (di-2-pyridylhydrazone dithiocarbamate butyric acid ester), on antitumor activity. The growth inhibition assay revealed that DpdtbA had important antitumor activity for gastric cancer (GC) cell lines (IC50 = 4.2 ± 0.52 μM for SGC-7901, 3.80 ± 0.40 μM for MGC-803). The next study indicated that growth inhibition is involved in ROS generation in mechanism; accordingly, the changes in mitochondrial membrane permeability, apoptotic genes, cytochrome c, bax, and bcl-2 were observed, implying that the growth inhibition of DpdtbA is involved in ROS-mediated apoptosis. On the other hand, the upregulated p53 upon DpdtbA treatment implied that p53 could also mediate the apoptosis. Yet the excess generation of ROS induced by DpdtbA led to cathepsin D translocation and increase of autophagic vacuoles and LC3-II, demonstrating that autophagy was also a contributor to growth inhibition. Further investigation showed that DpdtbA could induce cell cycle arrest at the G1 phase. This clearly indicated the growth inhibition of DpdtbA was via triggering ROS formation and evoking p53 response, consequently leading to alteration in gene expressions that are related to cell survival

Study on the construction technology of β-alanine synthesizing Escherichia coli based on cellulosome assembly

Introduction: β-Alanine is the only β-amino acid in nature; it is widely used in food additives, medicines, health products, and surfactants. To avoid pollution caused by traditional production methods, the synthesis of β-alanine has been gradually replaced by microbial fermentation and enzyme catalysis, which is a green, mild, and high-yield biosynthesis method.Methods: In this study, we constructed an Escherichia coli recombinant strain for efficient β-alanine production using glucose as the raw material. The microbial synthesis pathway of L-lysine-producing strain, Escherichia coli CGMCC 1.366, was modified using gene editing by knocking out the aspartate kinase gene, lysC. The catalytic efficiency and product synthesis efficiency were improved by assembling key enzymes with cellulosome.Results: By-product accumulation was reduced by blocking the L-lysine production pathway, thereby increasing the yield of β-alanine. In addition, catalytic efficiency was improved by the two-enzyme method to further increase the β-alanine content. The key cellulosome elements, dockerin (docA) and cohesin (cohA), were combined with L-aspartate-α-decarboxylase (bspanD) from Bacillus subtilis and aspartate aminotransferase (aspC) from E.coli to improve the catalytic efficiency and expression level of the enzyme. β-alanine production reached 7.439 mg/L and 25.87 mg/L in the two engineered strains. The β-alanine content reached 755.465 mg/L in a 5 L fermenter.Discussion: The content of β-alanine synthesized by constructed β-alanine engineering strains were 10.47 times and 36.42 times higher than the engineered strain without assembled cellulosomes, respectively. This research lays the foundation for the enzymatic production of β-alanine using a cellulosome multi-enzyme self-assembly system

A genome-wide association study of anorexia nervosa suggests a risk locus implicated in dysregulated leptin signaling

J. Kaprio, A. Palotie, A. Raevuori-Helkamaa ja S. Ripatti ovat työryhmän Eating Disorders Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium jäseniä. Erratum in: Sci Rep. 2017 Aug 21;7(1):8379, doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-06409-3We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of anorexia nervosa (AN) using a stringently defined phenotype. Analysis of phenotypic variability led to the identification of a specific genetic risk factor that approached genome-wide significance (rs929626 in EBF1 (Early B-Cell Factor 1); P = 2.04 x 10(-7); OR = 0.7; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.61-0.8) with independent replication (P = 0.04), suggesting a variant-mediated dysregulation of leptin signaling may play a role in AN. Multiple SNPs in LD with the variant support the nominal association. This demonstrates that although the clinical and etiologic heterogeneity of AN is universally recognized, further careful sub-typing of cases may provide more precise genomic signals. In this study, through a refinement of the phenotype spectrum of AN, we present a replicable GWAS signal that is nominally associated with AN, highlighting a potentially important candidate locus for further investigation.Peer reviewe

Meta-analysis of shared genetic architecture across ten pediatric autoimmune diseases

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified hundreds of susceptibility genes, including shared associations across clinically distinct autoimmune diseases. We performed an inverse χ(2) meta-analysis across ten pediatric-age-of-onset autoimmune diseases (pAIDs) in a case-control study including more than 6,035 cases and 10,718 shared population-based controls. We identified 27 genome-wide significant loci associated with one or more pAIDs, mapping to in silico-replicated autoimmune-associated genes (including IL2RA) and new candidate loci with established immunoregulatory functions such as ADGRL2, TENM3, ANKRD30A, ADCY7 and CD40LG. The pAID-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were functionally enriched for deoxyribonuclease (DNase)-hypersensitivity sites, expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs), microRNA (miRNA)-binding sites and coding variants. We also identified biologically correlated, pAID-associated candidate gene sets on the basis of immune cell expression profiling and found evidence of genetic sharing. Network and protein-interaction analyses demonstrated converging roles for the signaling pathways of type 1, 2 and 17 helper T cells (TH1, TH2 and TH17), JAK-STAT, interferon and interleukin in multiple autoimmune diseases