PSSP-RFE: Accurate Prediction of Protein Structural Class by Recursive Feature Extraction from PSI-BLAST Profile, Physical-Chemical Property and Functional Annotations

Protein structure prediction is critical to functional annotation of the massively accumulated biological sequences, which prompts an imperative need for the development of high-throughput technologies. As a first and key step in protein structure prediction, protein structural class prediction becomes an increasingly challenging task. Amongst most homological-based approaches, the accuracies of protein structural class prediction are sufficiently high for high similarity datasets, but still far from being satisfactory for low similarity datasets, i.e., below 40% in pairwise sequence similarity. Therefore, we present a novel method for accurate and reliable protein structural class prediction for both high and low similarity datasets. This method is based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) in conjunction with integrated features from position-specific score matrix (PSSM), PROFEAT and Gene Ontology (GO). A feature selection approach, SVM-RFE, is also used to rank the integrated feature vectors through recursively removing the feature with the lowest ranking score. The definitive top features selected by SVM-RFE are input into the SVM engines to predict the structural class of a query protein. To validate our method, jackknife tests were applied to seven widely used benchmark datasets, reaching overall accuracies between 84.61% and 99.79%, which are significantly higher than those achieved by state-of-the-art tools. These results suggest that our method could serve as an accurate and cost-effective alternative to existing methods in protein structural classification, especially for low similarity datasets

Fast Quantification of Phosphorus in Crude Soybean Oil by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

The existing methods for the determination of phosphorus content are unable to regulate the addition of acid and base in the refining process of crude soybean oil through real-time monitoring. Therefore, a novel rapid method for determining the phosphorus content of crude soybean oil based on near-infrared spectroscopy was proposed in this study. It was found that standard normal variate transformation was more effective than two other spectral preprocessing methods evaluated for denoising the spectral data indicative of the phosphorus content in soybean crude oil. The characteristic absorption band of phosphorus was optimized by synergy interval partial least squares (SiPLS). A back propagation (BP) neural network prediction model of the phosphorus content in crude soybean oil was established with learning efficiency of 0.005 and 108 training cycles. The determination coefficient (R2), root mean square error (RMSE) and relative standard deviation (RSD) for the correction set were 0.979 7, 0.859 3 and 1.89%, respectively. The R2, RMSE and RSD for the validation set were 0.978 5, 0.963 8 and 2.15%, respectively. The above results showed that NIR spectroscopy can achieve rapid, accurate and non-destructive detection of the phosphorus content in, and provide a feasible method for the refining of crude soybean oil

Overview of China’s Antarctic research progress 1984–2016

It is more than 30 years since the first Chinese National Antarctic Research Expedition (CHINARE) landed in Antarctica in 1984, representing China’s initiation in polar research. This review briefly summarizes the Chinese Antarctic scientific research and output accomplished over the past 30 years. The developments and progress in Antarctic research and the enhancement of international scientific cooperation achieved through the implementation of the CHINARE program have been remarkable. Since the 1980s, four permanent Chinese Antarctic research stations have been established successively and 33 CHINAREs have been completed. The research results have been derived from a series of spatiotemporal observations in association with various projects and multidisciplinary studies in the fields of oceanography, glaciology, geology, geophysics, geochemistry, atmospheric science, upper atmospheric physics, Antarctic astronomy, biology and ecology, human medicine, polar environment observation, and polar engineering

THE INTERMEDIATE EFFECT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL BETWEEN CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE

As the soft power of enterprises, the impact of corporate culture on employee performance and its intrinsic psychological mechanism has been paid close attention to by researchers. Based on the existing research, this paper discusses the impact of corporate culture on the psychological capital of employees and the intermediate role of psychological capital between corporate culture and job performance. 377 employees of a large state-owned petrochemical enterprise were investigated. The results show that: 1) the corporate culture has a significant positive impact on the dimensions of psychological capital (self-efficacy, optimism, hope, resilience) and work performance; 2) psychological capital take a part of the intermediary effect between the corporate culture and work performance. The results of this study have some implications for the management practice of using corporate cultural influence to promote employees&#39; psychological capital and improve performances.</p

ORC units driven by engine waste heat – a simulation study

ORC (organic Rankine cycle) technology is promising in industry for utilizing low-grade heat to generate electricity. It is acknowledged that in an internal combustion engine, only a small amount of primary fuel energy can be effectively used for the power generation, and the other part of the energy lost through exhaust gas, cooling of elements and overcoming friction. The heat in exhaust gas and cooling system (jacket water) can be used as a heat source to drive ORC units for power generation. In this way, the energy lost can be recovered to generate extra power. In this study, Ricardo Wave software was used to investigate the amount of waste heat available from a 1-cylinder diesel engine and THERMOLIB toolbox in SIMULINK was used to simulate and evaluate the performance of a small ORC unit designed for the application. The simulation results from the engine and ORC models were validated against experimental data from other researchers. Two different heating methods to the ORC were used: a) directly driven by the exhaust gas and jacket water (EG-JW); b) thermal oil (TO) was used to collect the waste heat from the engine exhaust gas; the heated thermal oil together with jacket water were then used to drive the ORC. It was found that the performance of the ORC was improved and it was more stable when using TO under different engine running conditions than that directly driven by EG-JW

Reconstruction of interface oxygen vacancy for boosting CO2 hydrogenation by Cu/CeO2 catalysts with thermal treatment

The interfacial structure of metal and oxide support plays a pivotal role in reverse water gas shift (RWGS). However, rare work investigated the factor of the metal-oxide interface during RWGS reaction. In this work, the interface of Cu/CeO2 catalysts was designed through the thermal treatment of copper nitrate salt on CeO2 with an H2 atmosphere under different temperatures, and CO2 hydrogenation performance was studied at 400 °C to investigate the effect of interfacial structure on RWGS reaction. Among these prepared catalysts, Cu/CeO2-400 catalysts achieved the best CO2 conversion activity (CO production rate 1.23 mol/gcat.h). Cu interacted with CeO2 to form Cu-O-Ce interface and induced more oxygen vacancy formation. The oxygen vacancy around the Cu-CeO2 interface enhanced CO2 adsorption and promoted CO2 conversion. CO2 reacted with active hydrogen to COOH, then COOH species dissociated into CO and OH adsorbed on the surface of Cu-CeO2. These results gave insights into the design of a highly effective catalyst for CO2 hydrogenation

Fundamental and Technical Challenges for a Compatible Design Scheme of Oxyfuel Combustion Technology

Oxyfuel combustion with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a carbon-reduction technology for use in large-scale coal-fired power plants. Significant progress has been achieved in the research and development of this technology during its scaling up from 0.4 MWth to 3 MWth and 35 MWth by the combined efforts of universities and industries in China. A prefeasibility study on a 200 MWe large-scale demonstration has progressed well, and is ready for implementation. The overall research development and demonstration (RD&D) roadmap for oxyfuel combustion in China has become a critical component of the global RD&D roadmap for oxyfuel combustion. An air combustion/oxyfuel combustion compatible design philosophy was developed during the RD&D process. In this paper, we briefly address fundamental research and technology innovation efforts regarding several technical challenges, including combustion stability, heat transfer, system operation, mineral impurities, and corrosion. To further reduce the cost of carbon capture, in addition to the large-scale deployment of oxyfuel technology, increasing interest is anticipated in the novel and next-generation oxyfuel combustion technologies that are briefly introduced here, including a new oxygen-production concept and flameless oxyfuel combustion

Investigation of K2CO3-modified CaO sorbents for CO2 capture using in-situ X-ray diffraction

Alkali metal salt promoters, such as K2CO3 investigated in this work, are known to affect the cyclic performance of CaO-based sorbents – sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Thus far, the influence of K2CO3 (and other salt-based promoters) is poorly understood, and detailed investigations on the interaction of K2CO3 with CaO are missing. We find that low amounts of K2CO3 in the sorbents improve the cyclic performance of CaO significantly (up to a factor of three), both under mild and harsh CO2 release conditions, while large amounts of K2CO3 (>1 mol.%) reduce the positive effect on the CO2 uptake performance. Aided by in-situ X-ray diffraction measurements, we observe that the gas environment has an important influence on the stability of K-containing phases in the sorbent. At typical carbonation conditions (650 °C, 15 vol% CO2/N2), CaO and K2CO3 readily form K-Ca double carbonates (K2Ca(CO3)2, which reacts further to form K2Ca2(CO3)3). When the calcination reaction is carried out in pure N2, the K-Ca double carbonates decompose above ∼730 °C, forming K2CO3 that becomes partially volatile near its melting point of ∼900 °C, and leads to a reduction of the K content in the samples with cycling. When the calcination reaction is carried out in a CO2-rich environment, the cyclic loss of K2CO3 is reduced substantially, but the sintering of the sorbent is increased. There are indications that very low quantities of K are incorporated into the CaO structure, and the formation of K-Ca double carbonates appears to influence the structural evolution of the CaCO3 phase formed during carbonation. With very low amounts of K2CO3 present in the sorbent, we observe an increase in pore volume for pore diameters between 20 and 80 nm, which ultimately may explain the improved CO2 uptake performance compared to the CaO sorbent without K2CO3.ISSN:0300-9467ISSN:1385-8947ISSN:1873-3212ISSN:0923-046