247 research outputs found
Bridges Structural Health Monitoring and Deterioration Detection Synthesis of Knowledge and Technology
INE/AUTC 10.0
Nanoenhanced Materials for Reclamation of Mine Lands and Other Degraded Soils: A Review
Successful mine soil reclamation facilitates ecosystem recovery, minimizes adverse environmental impacts, creates additional lands for agricultural or forestry uses, and enhances the carbon (C) sequestration. Nanoparticles with extremely high reactivity and deliverability can be applied as amendments to improve soil quality, mitigate soil contaminations, ensure safe land–application of the conventional amendment materials (e.g., manures and biosolids), and enhance soil erosion control. However, there is no report on using nanoenhanced materials for mine soil reclamation. Through reviewing the up-to-date research results on using environment-friendly nanoparticles for agricultural soil quality improvement and for contaminated soil remediation, this paper synthesizes that these nanomaterials with high potentials for mine soil reclamation include zeolites, zero-valent iron nanoparticles, iron oxide nanoparticles, phosphate-based nanoparticles, iron sulfide nanoparticles and C nanotubes. Transport of these particles in the environment and their possible ecotoxicological effects are also discussed. Additionally, this article proposes a practical and economical approach to applying nanotechnology for mine soil reclamation: adding small amounts of nanoparticles to the conventional soil amendment materials and then applying the mixtures for soil quality improvements. Hence the cost of using nanoparticles is reduced and the benefits of both nanoparticles and the conventional amendment materials are harnessed
Development of Mining Technology and Equipment for Seafloor Massive Sulfide Deposits
Seafloor massive sulfide(SMS) deposits which consist of Au, Ag, Cu, and other metal elements, have been a target of commercial mining in recent decades. The demand for established and reliable commercial mining system for SMS deposits is increasing within the marine mining industry. The current status and progress of mining technology and equipment for SMS deposits are introduced. First, the mining technology and other recent developments of SMS deposits are comprehensively explained and analyzed.
The seafloor production tools manufactured by Nautilus Minerals and similar mining tools from Japan for SMS deposits are compared and discussed in turn. Second, SMS deposit mining technology research being conducted in China is described, and a new SMS deposits mining tool is designed according to the environmental requirement. Finally, some new trends of mining technology of SMS deposits are summarized and analyzed. All of these conclusions and results have reference value and guiding significance for the research of SMS deposit mining in China
Circulating MicroRNA Expression Profiles in Patients with Stable and Unstable Angina
OBJECTIVES: High incidence and case fatality of unstable angina (UA) is, to a large extent, a consequence of the lack of highly sensitive and specific non-invasive markers. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have been widely recommended as potential biomarkers for numerous diseases. In the present study, we characterized distinctive miRNA expression profiles in patients with stable angina (SA), UA, and normal coronary arteries (NCA), and identified promising candidates for UA diagnosis. METHODS: Serum was collected from patients with SA, UA, and NCA who visited the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases of the Meizhou People’s Hospital. Small RNA sequencing was carried out on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform. miRNA expression in different groups of patients was profiled and then confirmed based on that in an independent set of patients. Functions of differentially expressed miRNAs were predicted using gene ontology classification and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis. RESULTS: Our results indicated that circulating miRNA expression profiles differed between SA, UA, and NCA patients. A total of 36 and 161 miRNAs were dysregulated in SA and UA patients, respectively. miRNA expression was validated by reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that circulating miRNAs are potential biomarkers of UA
SOAP3-dp: Fast, Accurate and Sensitive GPU-based Short Read Aligner
To tackle the exponentially increasing throughput of Next-Generation
Sequencing (NGS), most of the existing short-read aligners can be configured to
favor speed in trade of accuracy and sensitivity. SOAP3-dp, through leveraging
the computational power of both CPU and GPU with optimized algorithms, delivers
high speed and sensitivity simultaneously. Compared with widely adopted
aligners including BWA, Bowtie2, SeqAlto, GEM and GPU-based aligners including
BarraCUDA and CUSHAW, SOAP3-dp is two to tens of times faster, while
maintaining the highest sensitivity and lowest false discovery rate (FDR) on
Illumina reads with different lengths. Transcending its predecessor SOAP3,
which does not allow gapped alignment, SOAP3-dp by default tolerates alignment
similarity as low as 60 percent. Real data evaluation using human genome
demonstrates SOAP3-dp's power to enable more authentic variants and longer
Indels to be discovered. Fosmid sequencing shows a 9.1 percent FDR on newly
discovered deletions. SOAP3-dp natively supports BAM file format and provides a
scoring scheme same as BWA, which enables it to be integrated into existing
analysis pipelines. SOAP3-dp has been deployed on Amazon-EC2, NIH-Biowulf and
Tianhe-1A.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, submitted to PLoS ONE, additional files
available at "https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bhclhxpoiubh371/O5CO_CkXQE".
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Forest restoration decouple soil C:N:P stoichiometry but has little effects on microbial biodiversity globally
11 páginas.- 7 figuras.- 71 referenciasIntroduction: Forest restoration is an effective way to promote ecosystem functions and mitigate climate change. However, how forest restoration affect soil C:N:P stoichiometry and microbial biodiversity, as well as their linkage across contrasting forest types globally remains largely illusive. Materials and Methods: Here we conducted a global meta-analysis by synthesizing 121 published papers with 1649 observations to explore how forest restoration affect soil C:N:P stoichiometry and microbial biodiversity globally. Results: Forest restoration significantly increased soil total carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) content, whereas having no significant impact on most microbial diversity indicator, except for an enhancement in bacterial operational taxonomic unit and fungal Simpson. Meanwhile, forest restoration effects on soil C:N:P stoichiometry varied with different forest types, with promoting more soil C and P in ectomycorrhizal than those in arbuscular mycorrhizal forests. Meanwhile, forest restoration induced changes in soil N and P were positively correlated with microbial Shannon index. More importantly, forest restoration effects on soil C:N:P stoichiometry and microbial biodiversity were regulated by climate factors such as mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation. Conclusion: Our results highlight the crucial role of forest restoration in decoupling the biogeochemical cycles of C, N and P through changes in microbial biodiversity. Therefore, incorporating the decouple effects of forest restoration on soil C:N:P stoichiometry into Earth system models may improve predictions of climate–forest feedbacks in the Anthropocene. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture and Environment published by Global Initiative of Sustainable Agriculture and Environment and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.Guiyao Zhou was supported by Humboldt Research Foundation. This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 32071593, 31930072, 31770559, 31600387, 31370489 and 42203076).Peer reviewe
Global systematic review with meta-analysis shows that warming effects on terrestrial plant biomass allocation are influenced by precipitation and mycorrhizal association
Biomass allocation in plants is fundamental for understanding and predicting
terrestrial carbon storage. Yet, our knowledge regarding warming effects on root: shoot ratio (R/S) remains limited. Here, we present a meta-analysis encompassing more than 300 studies and including angiosperms and gymnosperms as well as different biomes (cropland, desert, forest, grassland, tundra, and wetland). The meta-analysis shows that average warming of 2.50 °C (median = 2 °C) significantly increases biomass allocation to roots with a mean increase of 8.1% in R/S. Two factors associate significantly with this response to warming: mean annual precipitation and the type of mycorrhizal fungi associated with plants. Warming-induced allocation to roots is greater in drier habitats when compared to shoots (+15.1% in R/S), while lower in wetter habitats (+4.9% in R/S). This R/S pattern is more frequent in plants associated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, compared to ectomycorrhizal fungi. These results show that precipitation variability and mycorrhizal association can affect terrestrial carbon dynamics by influencing biomass allocation strategies in a warmer world, suggesting that climate change could influence belowground C sequestration
TreeFam: a curated database of phylogenetic trees of animal gene families
TreeFam is a database of phylogenetic trees of gene families found in animals. It aims to develop a curated resource that presents the accurate evolutionary history of all animal gene families, as well as reliable ortholog and paralog assignments. Curated families are being added progressively, based on seed alignments and trees in a similar fashion to Pfam. Release 1.1 of TreeFam contains curated trees for 690 families and automatically generated trees for another 11 646 families. These represent over 128 000 genes from nine fully sequenced animal genomes and over 45 000 other animal proteins from UniProt; ∼40–85% of proteins encoded in the fully sequenced animal genomes are included in TreeFam. TreeFam is freely available at and
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