An Emotion Type Informed Multi-Task Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to jointly extract emotion clauses and the corresponding cause clauses from a document, which is important for user evaluation or public opinion analysis. Existing research addresses the ECPE task through a two-step or an end-to-end approach. Although previous work shows promising performances, they suffer from two limitations: 1) they fail to take full advantage of emotion type information, which has advantages for modelling the dependencies between emotion and cause clauses from a semantic perspective; 2) they ignored the interaction between local and global information, which is important for ECPE. To address these issues, we propose an ECPE Pair Generator (ECPE-PG), with a Clause-Encoder layer, a Pre-Output layer and an Information Interaction-based Pair Generation (IIPG) Module embedded. This model first encodes clauses into vector representations through the Clause-Encoder layer and then preforms emotion clause extraction (EE), cause clause extraction (CE) and emotion type extraction (ETE), respectively, through the Pre-Output layer, on the basis of which the IIPG module analyzes the complex emotional logic of relationships between clauses and estimates the candidate pairs based on the interaction of global and local information. It should be noted that emotion type information is regarded as a crucial indication in the IIPG module to assist the identification of emotion-cause pairs. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets

MMS2plot: An R Package for Visualizing Multiple MS/MS Spectra for Groups of Modified and Non-Modified Peptides

A large number of post-translational modifications (PTMs) in proteins are buried in the unassigned mass spectrometric (MS) spectra in shot-gun proteomics datasets. Because the modified peptide fragments are low in abundance relative to the corresponding non-modified versions, it is critical to develop tools that allow facile evaluation of assignment of PTMs based on the MS/MS spectra. Such tools will preferably have the ability to allow comparison of fragment ion spectra and retention time between the modified and unmodified peptide pairs or group. Herein, MMS2plot, an R package for visualizing peptide-spectrum matches (PSMs) for multiple peptides, is described. MMS2plot features a batch mode and generates the output images in vector graphics file format that facilitate evaluation and publication of the PSM assignment. MMS2plot is expected to play an important role in PTM discovery from large-scale proteomics datasets generated by liquid chromatography-MS/MS. The MMS2plot package is freely available at https://github.com/lileir/MMS2plot under the GPL-3 license

The multi-facets of sustainable nanotechnology : lessons from a nanosafety symposium

An international symposium for nanosafety was held recently at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Topics relating to understanding nanomaterial properties, tools, and infrastructure required for predicting hazardous outcomes, measuring nanomaterial exposure levels, systems approach for risk assessment and public's perception of nanotechnology were covered. The need for a multidisciplinary approach, across both natural and social sciences, for developing sustainable nanotechnology solutions was heavily emphasized. This commentary highlights the major issues discussed and the commitment of the nanosafety research community in Singapore to contribute collectively to realise the vision of sustainable nanotechnology

A Comprehensive Analysis of the T and B Lymphocytes Repertoire Shaped by HIV Vaccines

The exploitation of various human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) vaccines has posed great challenges for the researchers in precisely evaluating the vaccine-induced immune responses, however, the understanding of vaccination response suffers from the lack of unbiased characterization of the immune landscape. The rapid development of high throughput sequencing (HTS) makes it possible to scrutinize the extremely complicated immunological responses during vaccination. In the current study, three vaccines, namely N36, N51, and 5-Helix based on the HIV-1 gp41 pre-hairpin fusion intermediate were applied in rhesus macaques. We assessed the longitudinal vaccine responses using HTS, which delineated the evolutionary features of both T cell and B cell receptor repertoires with extreme diversities. Upon vaccination, we unexpectedly found significant discrepancies in the landscapes of T-cell and B-cell repertoires, together with the detection of significant class switching and the lineage expansion of the B cell receptor or immunoglobulin heavy chain (IGH) repertoire. The vaccine-induced expansions of lineages were further evaluated for mutation rate, lineage abundance, and lineage size features in their IGH repertoires. Collectively, these findings conclude that the N51 vaccine displayed superior performance in inducing the class-switch of B cell isotypes and promoting mutations of IgM B cells. In addition, the systematic HTS analysis of the immune repertoires demonstrates its wide applicability in enhancing the understanding of immunologic changes during pathogen challenge, and will guide the development, evaluation, and exploitation of new generation of diagnostic markers, immunotherapies, and vaccine strategies

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Quantitative analysis of carbon dioxide emission reduction pathways: Towards carbon neutrality in China's power sector

China has continually reduced the intensity of its carbon emissions, increased its efforts to fulfil its Nationally Determined Contributions, and boosted its efforts to mitigate climate change. Due to its vast power generation sector, China is at present the world's top carbon dioxide emitter (CO2). Utilizing the Low-Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) – which is an integrated, scenario-based energy and environmental modelling tool created by the Stockholm Environment Agency – four scenarios other than the baseline scenario were devised and compared. The current study builds on two Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) scenarios and two Carbon Neutral (CNT) scenarios in which emissions peak in the year 2025 or 2030, allowing for an examination of ambitious actions necessary beyond business as usual and existing policy trajectories to attain net-zero emissions. This study also looked at how the learning curve affected the expenses in the aforementioned scenarios. It was determined that scenarios that deployed Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) technologies were more favourable in realizing China's carbon neutrality goal before 2060 by reaching negative emissions, and scenarios that achieved emissions peak earlier proved higher cost benefits as well. The findings of the study further revealed that the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) savings in the NDC 2025, NDC 2030, CNT 2025, and CNT 2030 scenarios will be 104.23 Gt, 76.77 Gt, 142.74 Gt, and 130.92 Gt respectively, in the study period 2020–2060 and the cost-benefit associated with them per tonne of CO2 will be 8.4, 8.5, 26.4, 30.4 CNY/t CO2, respectively. Moreover, under the CNT 2025 scenario, annual installed capacity of wind power should be greater than 46.8 GW between 2025 and 2030, and greater than 55.2 GW between 2030 and 2060; while the annual installed capacity of solar PV should be greater than 59.2 GW between 2025 and 2030, and greater than 61.3 GW between 2030 and 2060. The Chinese power production industry must seek to convert to a larger-scale deployment of carbon capture technologies such as CCS and BECCS