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

Doxorubicin resistance in breast cancer xenografts and cell lines can be counterweighted by microRNA-140-3p, through PD-L1 suppression

Background. Doxorubicin, a first-line chemotherapeutic drug for breast cancer, kills cancer cells by inducing DNA-crosslinking damage. Dysregulated micro-RNA (miRNA) is associated with the drug resistance of tumors. However, little is known about the effect of miRNA-140-3p on DOX resistance of breast cancer. Methods. The miRNA microarray was used to sequence the transcripts of DOX-chemoresistant breast cancer tissues and DOX-chemosensitive tissues. Then, the breast cancer tissue chip in the GEO database was also analyzed to screen the target gene. Flow cytometry, in situ hybridisation (ISH), immunohistochemistry (IHC), Western blot, cell proliferation assay, real-time PCR analyses (qRT-PCR), and pull-down assay were used to explore the effects of miRNA-140-3p and programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) on the chemoresistance of DOX-resistant breast cancer cells treated with DOX. In vivo, the DOX-resistant breast cancer cell lines treated with miRNA-140-3p overexpression were injected subcutaneously into mice to construct breast cancer subcutaneous xenograft tumor models. Results. Based on miRNA microarray, GEO database, and bioinformatics analysis, it was found that miRNA-140-3p and PD-L1 are the core molecules in the DOX resistance regulatory network in breast cancer, and lower miRNA-140-3p and higher PD-L1 expression levels were observed in DOX-resistant breast cancer tissues and cells. IHC results showed that compared with breast cancer tissues with high miRNA-140-3p expression, PD-L1 protein expression levels in breast cancer tissues with low miRNA-140-3p were significantly higher (P<0.01). Moreover, compared with DOX-sensitive tissues, the levels of PD-L1 protein expression in DOX-resistant tissues were significantly higher (P<0.01). In in vitro and in vivo experiments, the introduction of miRNA-140-3p decreased PD-L1 expression. Mechanically, we found that the MCF7/DOX and HS598T/DOX cells pretreated with miRNA140-3p inhibitor or exosomes containing PD-L1 have higher stemness and lower apoptosis rate, which can be abrogated by co-treating cells with anti-PD-L1 antibody or miRNA-140-3p mimic. Conclusions. MiRNA-140-3p can suppress PD-L1 expression in breast cancer cell-derived exosomes, thereby attenuating the chemoresistance induced by DOX in breast cancer

A tunable plasmonic refractive index sensor with nanoring-strip graphene arrays

In this paper, a tunable plasmonic refractive index sensor with nanoring-strip graphene arrays is numerically investigated by the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The simulation results exhibit that by changing the sensing medium refractive index nmed of the structure, the sensing range of the system is large. By changing the doping level ng, we noticed that the transmission characteristics can be adjusted flexibly. The resonance wavelength remains entirely the same and the transmission dip enhancement over a big range of incidence angles [0,45] for both TM and TE polarizations, which indicates that the resonance of the graphene nanoring-strip arrays is insensitive to angle polarization. The above results are undoubtedly a new way to realize various tunable plasmon devices, and may have a great application prospect in biosensing, detection and imaging

In vivo breast sound-speed imaging with ultrasound tomography

We discuss a bent-ray ultrasound tomography algorithm with total-variation (TV) regularization. We have applied this algorithm to 61 in vivo breast datasets collected with our in-house clinical prototype for imaging sound-speed distributions in the breast. Our analysis showed that TV regularization could preserve sharper lesion edges than the classic Tikhonov regularization. Furthermore, the image quality of our TV bent-ray sound-speed tomograms was superior to that of the straight-ray counterparts for all types of breasts within BI-RADS density categories 1-4. For all four breast types from fatty to dense, the improvements for average sharpness (in the unit of (m{center_dot} s) {sup -1}) of lesion edges in our TV bent-ray tomograms are between 2.1 to 3.4 fold compared to the straight ray tomograms. Reconstructed sound-speed tomograms illustrated that our algorithm could successfully image fatty and glandular tissues within the breast. We calculated the mean sound-speed values for fatty tissue and breast parenchyma as 1422 {+-} 9 mls (mean{+-} SD) and1487 {+-} 21 mls, respectively. Based on 32 lesions in a cohort of 61 patients, we also found that the mean sound-speed for malignant breast lesions (1548{+-}17 mls) was higher, on average, than that of benign ones (1513{+-}27 mls) (one-sided p&lt;O.OOl). These results suggest that, clinically, sound-speed tomograms can be used to assess breast density (, and therefore, breast cancer risk), as well as detect and help differentiate breast lesions. Finally, our sound-speed tomograms may also be a useful tool to monitor clinical response of breast cancer patients to neo-adjuvant chemotherapy

Apoptosis of supraoptic AVP neurons is involved in the development of central diabetes insipidus after hypophysectomy in rats

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It has been reported that various types of axonal injury of hypothalamo-neurohypophyseal tract can result in degeneration of the magnocellular neurons (MCNs) in hypothalamus and development of central diabetes insipidus (CDI). However, the mechanism of the degeneration and death of MCNs after hypophysectomy in vivo is still unclear. This present study was aimed to disclose it and to figure out the dynamic change of central diabetes insipidus after hypophysectomy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The analysis on the dynamic change of daily water consumption (DWC), daily urine volume(DUV), specific gravity of urine(USG) and plasma vasopressin concentration showed that the change pattern of them was triphasic and neuron counting showed that the degeneration of vasopressin neurons began at 10 d, aggravated at 20 d and then stabilized at 30 d after hypophysectomy. There was marked upregulation of cleaved Caspase-3 expression of vasopressin neurons in hypophysectomy rats. A "ladder" pattern of migration of DNA internucleosomal fragments was detected and apoptotic ultrastructure was found in these neurons. There was time correlation among the occurrence of diabetes insipidus, the changes of plasma vasopressin concentration and the degeneration of vasopressin neurons after hypophysectomy.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study firstly demonstrated that apoptosis was involved in degeneration of supraoptic vasopressin neurons after hypophysectomy in vivo and development of CDI. Our study on time course and correlations among water metabolism, degeneration and apoptosis of vasopressin neurons suggested that there should be an efficient therapeutic window in which irreversible CDI might be prevented by anti-apoptosis.</p

A tunable plasmonic refractive index sensor with nanoring-strip graphene arrays

In this paper, a tunable plasmonic refractive index sensor with nanoring-strip graphene arrays is numerically investigated by the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The simulation results exhibit that by changing the sensing medium refractive index nmed of the structure, the sensing range of the system is large. By changing the doping level ng, we noticed that the transmission characteristics can be adjusted flexibly. The resonance wavelength remains entirely the same and the transmission dip enhancement over a big range of incidence angles [0,45] for both TM and TE polarizations, which indicates that the resonance of the graphene nanoring-strip arrays is insensitive to angle polarization. The above results are undoubtedly a new way to realize various tunable plasmon devices, and may have a great application prospect in biosensing, detection and imaging

Thermal cycle stability of Co 64 V 15 Si 17 Al 4 high-temperature shape memory alloy

Abstract(#br)The microstructure, martensitic transformation and thermal cycle stability of Co 64 V 15 Si 17 Al 4 high-temperature shape memory alloy were studied. The results show that the martensite transformation of L2 1 /D0 22 occurred in the Co 64 V 15 Si 17 Al 4 alloy. In the Co 64 V 15 Si 17 Al 4 alloy, the transformation temperatures of forward transformation and reverse transformation are pretty high, reaching 589.6 °C and 649.1 °C, respectively. The temperatures of the martensitic transformation and the transformation heat show a neglectable difference after 200 thermal cycles in the alloy. This alloy exhibits good thermal stability during 200 thermal cycles between room temperature and 850 °C, in which the microstructure and martensitic transformation behavior have no obvious change