Comparison of lignocellulose composition in four major species of Miscanthus

Miscanthus is a perennial grass rich in lignocellulose that has attracted interest as a non-food crop for renewable bioenergy with major environmental and economic benefits for China. The lignocellulose composition of whole stems of four major species of Miscanthus was assessed. The average values of total moisture content (TMC) (61.90%) and hemicelluloses (34.86%) were the highest while cellulose (32.71%) and acid detergent lignin (ADL) (8.90%) were the lowest in Miscanthus floridulus. On the contrary, the contents of cellulose (42.11%) and ADL (13.64%) were the highest and total ash (TA) (2.89%) was the lowest in Miscanthus lutarioriparius. The Shannon–Weaver diversity indices of components for the four species showed that hemicellulose content (H’= 2.00±0.11) was the most variable trait followed by cellulose (H’= 1.84±0.07), then ADL (H’= 1.84±0.07). The variational range of each component was relatively higher in Miscanthus sacchariflorus. In M. lutarioriparius, the diversity indices of each component were moderate. The diversity of cellulose was the highest and hemicellulose, ADL, TA and TMC were low in Miscanthus sinensis. By correlation analysis, neutral detergent fiber (NDF) significantly and positively correlated with ADF, cellulose and ADL at P<0.01 as well as the relationship of cellulose and ADL in the four species. Hemicellulose showed significant (P<0.01) but negative correlation with cellulose and ADL in M. floridulus, M. lutarioriparius and M. sacchariflorus. By principal component analysis (PCA), the components ADF and cellulose were the PC1 that were considered the foremost for the evaluation and selection of resource in the four species. The conclusions show that lignocellulose composition contents of Miscanthus culms were different. M. floridulus was more fit to ethanol fermentation. Though the components contents in M. sinensis and M. sacchariflorus were moderate, the range of choice was large. It provided a possible means to screen the appropriate materials according to different utilization. M. lutarioriparius had more superiorities relatively. So the four species of Miscanthus were appropriate for extension as excellent herbaceous energy plants, though, reasonable species choice should be employed according to the conversion approach and the growth characteristics, productivity levels and biomass quality characteristics of these tall grasses.Keywords: Miscanthus, bioenergy, lignocellulose compositions, detergent fiber, diversity analysis, PC

M3PT: A Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging

POI tagging aims to annotate a point of interest (POI) with some informative tags, which facilitates many services related to POIs, including search, recommendation, and so on. Most of the existing solutions neglect the significance of POI images and seldom fuse the textual and visual features of POIs, resulting in suboptimal tagging performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging, namely M3PT, which achieves enhanced POI tagging through fusing the target POI's textual and visual features, and the precise matching between the multi-modal representations. Specifically, we first devise a domain-adaptive image encoder (DIE) to obtain the image embeddings aligned to their gold tags' semantics. Then, in M3PT's text-image fusion module (TIF), the textual and visual representations are fully fused into the POIs' content embeddings for the subsequent matching. In addition, we adopt a contrastive learning strategy to further bridge the gap between the representations of different modalities. To evaluate the tagging models' performance, we have constructed two high-quality POI tagging datasets from the real-world business scenario of Ali Fliggy. Upon the datasets, we conducted the extensive experiments to demonstrate our model's advantage over the baselines of uni-modality and multi-modality, and verify the effectiveness of important components in M3PT, including DIE, TIF and the contrastive learning strategy.Comment: Accepted by KDD 202

Altered Functional and Causal Connectivity of Cerebello-Cortical Circuits between Multiple System Atrophy (Parkinsonian Type) and Parkinson’s Disease

Lesions of the cerebellum lead to motor and non-motor deficits by influencing cerebral cortex activity via cerebello-cortical circuits. It remains unknown whether the cerebello-cortical “disconnection” underlies motor and non-motor impairments both in the parkinsonian variant of multiple system atrophy (MSA-P) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). In this study, we investigated both the functional and effective connectivity of the cerebello-cortical circuits from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data of three groups (26 MSA-P patients, 31 PD patients, and 30 controls). Correlation analysis was performed between the causal connectivity and clinical scores. PD patients showed a weakened cerebellar dentate nucleus (DN) functional coupling in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and inferior parietal lobe compared with MSA-P or controls. MSA-P patients exhibited significantly enhanced effective connectivity from the DN to PCC compared with PD patients or controls, as well as declined causal connectivity from the left precentral gyrus to right DN compared with the controls, and this value is significantly correlated with the motor symptom scores. Our findings demonstrated a crucial role for the cerebello-cortical networks in both MSA-P and PD patients in addition to striatal-thalamo-cortical (STC) networks and indicated that different patterns of cerebello-cortical loop degeneration are involved in the development of the diseases

Stemness And Chemotherapeutic Drug Resistance Induced By Eif5a2 Overexpression In Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most lethal malignancies of the digestive tract in East Asian countries. Multimodal therapies, including adjuvant chemotherapy and neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, have become more often used for patients with advanced ESCC. However, the chemotherapy effect is often limited by patients' drug resistance. This study demonstrated that EIF5A2 (eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A2) overexpression induced stemness and chemoresistance in ESCC cells. We showed that EIF5A2 overexpression in ESCC cells resulted in increased chemoresistance to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), docetaxel and taxol. In contrast, shRNAs suppressing eIF5A2 increased tumor sensitivity to these chemotherapeutic drugs. In addition, EIF5A2 overexpression was correlated with a poorer overall survival in patients with ESCC who underwent taxane-based chemotherapy after esophagectomy (P > 0.05). Based on these results, we suggest that EIF5A2 could be a predictive biomarker for selecting appropriate chemo-treatment for ESCC patients and EIF5A2 inhibitors might be considered as combination therapy to enhance chemosensitivity in patients with ESCC.published_or_final_versio

Pre-matching study of the natural gas engine turbocharging system based on the coupling of experiments and numerical simulation

In this study, a pre-matching method was developed based on measured performance parameters and theoretical calculations of turbochargers. First, the turbocharger of a natural gas engine was subjected to a comprehensive performance experiment. According to the experimental results, the maximum efficiencies of the turbine and compressor are 70% and 75%, respectively, and the efficiency of the turbine drops sharply from 70% to 56.6% as the pressure ratio increases from 1.25 to 2.4. In this thesis, a specific turbocharger pre-matching software has been developed in conjunction with a database. Three turbines and three compressors were selected from the self-developed database for matching and comparative study using this method. The simulation results showed that the maximum efficiency of turbine #1, #2 and #3 is 71.3%, 72.2% and 72.7%, respectively, and the efficiency of these three turbines is concentrated between 65% and 72.5%. Obviously, the maximum efficiency of the turbine has increased by 1.3–2.7% and the overall efficiency has improved after the pre-matching. Therefore, this developed pre-matching method can reduce time cost, improve work efficiency and engine performance, and is important for the design and development of turbochargers

Association between intraoperative dexmedetomidine and all-cause mortality and recurrence after laparoscopic resection of colorectal cancer: Follow-up analysis of a previous randomized controlled trial

BackgroundDexmedetomidine (DEX) has been widely applied in the anesthesia and sedation of patients with oncological diseases. However, the potential effect of DEX on tumor metastasis remains contradictory. This study follows up on patients who received intraoperative DEX during laparoscopic resection of colorectal cancer as part of a previous clinical trial, examining their outcomes 5 years later.MethodsBetween June 2015 and December 2015, 60 patients undergoing laparoscopic colorectal resection were randomly assigned to the DEX and control groups. The DEX group received an initial loading dose of 1μ/kg before surgery, followed by a continuous infusion of 0.3μg/kg/h during the operation and the Control group received an equivalent volume of saline. A 5-year follow-up analysis was conducted to evaluate the overall survival, disease-free survival, and tumor recurrence.ResultsThe follow-up analysis included 55 of the 60 patients. The DEX group included 28 patients, while the control group included 27 patients. Baseline characteristics were comparable between the two groups, except for vascular and/or neural invasion of the tumor in the DEX group (9/28 vs. 0/27, p = 0.002). We did not observe a statistically significant benefit but rather a trend toward an increase in overall survival and disease-free survival in the DEX group, 1-year overall survival (96.4% vs. 88.9%, p = 0.282), 2-year overall survival (89.3% vs. 74.1%, p = 0.144), 3-year overall survival (89.3% vs. 70.4%, p = 0.08), and 5-year overall survival (78.6% vs. 59.3%, p = 0.121). The total rates of mortality and recurrence between the two groups were comparable (8/28 vs. 11/27, p = 0.343).ConclusionAdministration of DEX during laparoscopic resection of colorectal cancer had a nonsignificant trend toward improved overall survival and disease-free survival.Clinical Trial Registrationhttp://www.chictr.org.cn/, identifier ChiCTRIOR-15006518