Viral genomics and epidemiology have been increasingly important tools for analysing the spread of key pathogens affecting daily lives of individuals worldwide. With the rapidly expanding scale of ...pathogen genome sequencing efforts for epidemics and outbreaks efficient workflows in extracting genomic information are becoming increasingly important for answering key research questions.
Here we present Genofunc, a toolkit offering a range of command line orientated functions for processing of raw virus genome sequences into aligned and annotated data ready for analysis. The tool contains functions such as genome annotation, feature extraction etc. for processing of large genomic datasets both manual or as part of pipeline such as Snakemake or Nextflow ready for down-stream phylogenetic analysis. Originally designed for a large-scale HIV sequencing project, Genofunc has been benchmarked against annotated sequence gene coordinates from the Los Alamos HIV database as validation with downstream phylogenetic analysis result comparable to past literature as case study.
Genofunc is implemented fully in Python and licensed under the MIT license. Source code and documentation is available at: https://github.com/xiaoyu518/genofunc .
The study examines the relationships between knowledge acquisition from social media, two forms of market orientation (proactive and reactive), social media strategic capability, and brand innovation ...strategy in the context of China's online technology industry. Analysis of 357 online technology ventures, created during the past 6years, suggests that brand innovation is affected by both knowledge acquisition from social media and market orientation. Social media strategic capability positively affects brand innovation and acts as a moderator between knowledge acquisition, market orientation, and brand innovation. It further enhances both types of market orientations in achieving brand innovation, suggesting that on social media, customer's needs, both expressed and latent (or unexpressed), can be identified more comprehensively than that of the traditional setting. Hence, the context of social media provides a different set of rules for competition and strategic behavior, in which online technology ventures should note. Implications are useful to improve the current understanding of social media brand innovation strategy, here in China's dynamic social media scene.
•The present study focuses on the knowledge acquired from social media channels leading to brand innovation.•Brand innovation is affected by both knowledge acquisition from social media and market orientation (pro- and reactive).•Social media strategic capability acts as a moderator between knowledge acquisition, market orientation, and brand innovation.•On social media, customer's needs can be identified more comprehensively than that of the traditional setting.•The context of social media provides a different set of rules for competition and strategic behavior.
This study investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on firm innovation. Using data on China's A-share listed companies for 2001–2017, we find that EPU is in general negatively ...associated with firms' innovation output. Further, we observe that the negative association between EPU and innovation mainly exists in firms whose executives have a low risk preference and in firms with weak risk-taking ability. Additionally, we find that corporate innovation has a stronger positive effect on firm value when EPU is lower. Our research provides important evidence about the effect of EPU on firm innovation from a risk-taking perspective.
Accurate estimation of terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) is crucial to understand the water cycle and partitioning of turbulent energy fluxes at the land surface. However, large-scale ET estimation ...is always difficult to achieve due to the complexity of controlling factors and the heterogeneity of landscapes. A recent model, referred to as the surface flux equilibrium (SFE) model, proposes that evaporative fraction (EF, the ratio of ET to available energy at the surface) can be estimated accurately from near-surface specific humidity and air temperature, which makes it applicable to common weather stations and climate reanalysis datasets. However, previous validation only focused on the evaluation of this model at site and basin scale for ET estimation, making the real performance of the SFE model for EF estimation heretofore unknown. There also exists a gap in the comparison between the SFE model and other existing products in the representation of global ET patterns and variation trend. Against this background, a comprehensive validation was performed in this study to evaluate the accuracy of the SFE model for both EF and ET estimation. The validation against 136 flux towers worldwide shows that the ground-based SFE model achieved EF estimation with a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 0.22 and 0.16 at daily and monthly scale, respectively. The corresponding RMSE of ET estimation was 0.94 mm/day and 16.37 mm/month. The application of the SFE model on a global scale was achieved by using two reanalysis products (ERA5-Land and GLDAS-CLSM) as inputs respectively. The results indicate that the SFE model did hold potential to reduce the RMSE of these two products for ET estimation, but the cost was the decrease in correlation coefficient (r). The comparison with five existing global ET products (BESS, GLEAM, AVHRR, MOD16, and SSEBop) shows that the SFE model performed on the basis of ERA5-Land product has achieved moderate accuracy among these products. Judged from r, mean absolute error, RMSE, and bias, its accuracy was ranked as fourth, fourth, second, and second, respectively. However, a further evaluation over different land cover types suggests that the ERA-based SFE model has significant superiority over cropland, relative superiority over forest and savannas, and significant inferiority over shrubland and grassland. This analysis is the first global validation of the SFE model for EF estimation as well as its comparison with existing global ET products. The validation analysis proves that this simple model has generally achieved comparable accuracy to existing complex models in the representation of global ET patterns and variation trend.
•Surface flux equilibrium (SFE) model is evaluated and validated on a global scale.•Global ET is mapped by the SFE model based on two reanalysis products.•SFE model is compared with five products in the representation of global ET.•A correction factor varying with land cover is suggested to improve its accuracy.
Laparoscopy is employed in conventional minimally invasive surgery to inspect internal cavities by viewing two-dimensional images on a monitor. This method has a limited field of view and provides ...insufficient information for surgeons, increasing surgical complexity. Utilizing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology to reconstruct laparoscopic scenes can offer more comprehensive and intuitive visual feedback. Moreover, the precision of the reconstructed models is a crucial factor for further applications of surgical assistance systems. However, challenges such as data scarcity and scale uncertainty hinder effective assessment of the accuracy of endoscopic monocular SLAM reconstructions. Therefore, this paper proposes a technique that incorporates existing knowledge from calibration objects to supplement metric information and resolve scale ambiguity issues, and it quantifies the endoscopic reconstruction accuracy based on local alignment metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that the reconstructed models restore realistic scales and enable error analysis for laparoscopic SLAM reconstruction systems. This suggests that for the evaluation of monocular SLAM three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction accuracy in minimally invasive surgery scenarios, our proposed scheme for recovering scale factors is viable, and our evaluation outcomes can serve as criteria for measuring reconstruction precision.
Ecosystem health assessment is an important method for obtaining information on ecosystem conditions, and it plays a vital role in preserving and enhancing ecosystem health status. In addition, it ...provides useful information and knowledge for urban agglomeration development decision makers. However, ecological phenomena often vary considerably from one observation to the next, which makes it difficult to distinguish different status of the ecosystem health. In this study, hidden Markov model (HMM) was employed to simulate the internal-external correlations of ecosystem status through establishing the relationships between internal ecological health level and combination state of external observation. Based on the statistics and land use data in 2001, 2007 and 2013, the Vigor-Organization-Resilience (VOR) framework was employed to identify the ecosystem health in Shanghai-Hangzhou Bay Metropolitan (SHBM), in which the ecosystem health state was considered as a hidden state that could be estimated according to the conditions of vigor, organization and resilience. In addition, two parameter learning cases including mathematical statistics and extensible sequence method were employed to solve the iterative convergence problem of parameters in short-time series of ecosystem health simulation. Results show that HMM not only provides a comparable descriptive ability to that of the VOR model, but also can monitor ecosystem health at the optimal grid scale in SHBM. The combination of HMM and VOR greatly expands the spatiotemporal characteristics and provides a new research approach for the study of ecosystem health assessment of urban agglomerations.
•The ecosystem health in the southern part of SHBM area and the southwestern and southeastern coastal areas are in good health and quality, and the areas with poor quality are mainly concentrated in the northeast coastal areas.•8 km is the best scale that can include the maximum combination of hidden states.•The combination of HMM and VOR provides a new research approach for the study of ecosystem health assessment.
•A SiC whisker-toughened mullite coating was successfully fabricated on SiC-coated carbon/carbon composites by sol–gel process.•The oxidation resistance and thermal cycling durability of coated ...sample was investigated in a cyclic jet fuel burner rig operated at a temperature of 1450±55°C.•Oxidation and thermal cycling resistance of the mullite outer coating improved significantly upon the incorporation of the SiC whisker.•The toughening mechanisms of SiC whisker were mainly attributed to whisker bridging and crack deflection.
An oxidation protective SiC whisker-toughened mullite coating was prepared on SiC coated carbon/carbon (C/C) composites by a novel sol–gel technique. The thermal cycling and oxidation behavior of the coated C/C coupons was investigated by thermally cycling between room temperature and 1450±55°C on a jet fuel burner rig facility. Results show that incorporating proper amounts of SiC whiskers can significantly improve the thermal cycling resistance of the mullite coating due to the energy dissipation mechanism induced by the whisker bridging and crack deflection.
Ovarian cancer (OC) is one of the most common tumors in female reproductive organs with a five-year survival rate of less than 45%. Metastasis is a crucial contributor to OC development. ETS ...transcription factor (ELK3), as a transcriptional factor, have been involved in multiple tumor development. However, its role in OC remains elusive. In this study, we observed high expression of ELK3 and AEG1 in human OC tissues. OVCAR-3 and SKOV3 cells were treated with hypoxia to mimic tumor microenvironment in vivo. We found that the expression of ELK3 was significantly increased in cells under hypoxia compared with normoxia. ELK3 knockdown inhibited cell migration and invasion abilities under hypoxia. Moreover, ELK3 knockdown decreased β-catenin expression and inhibited the activation of Wnt/β-catenin pathway in SKOV3 cells under hypoxia. Astrocyte-elevated gene-1 (AEG1) has been reported to promote OC progression. Our results showed that the mRNA level of AEG1 was decreased when ELK3 knockdown under hypoxia. Dural luciferase assay confirmed that ELK3 bound to gene AEG1 promoter (−2005–+15) and enhanced its transcriptional activity under hypoxia. Overexpression of AEG1 increased the migration and invasion abilities of SKOV3 cell with ELK3 knockdown. In the absence of ELK3, the activation of β-catenin was recovered by AEG1 overexpression. To sum up, we conclude that ELK3 promotes AEG1 expression by binding to its promoter. ELK3 could promote migration and invasion of OC cells by targeting AEG1, which provides a potential basis for therapeutic approaches to OC.
A sensor operating at room temperature has low power consumption and is beneficial for the detection of environmental pollutants such as ammonia and benzene vapor. In this study, polyaniline (PANI) ...is made from aniline under acidic conditions by chemical oxidative polymerization and doped with tin dioxide (SnO2) at a specific percentage. The PANI/SnO2 hybrid material obtained is then ground at room temperature. The results of scanning electron microscopy show that the prepared powder comprises nanoscale particles and has good dispersibility, which is conducive to gas adsorption. The thermal decomposition temperature of the powder and its stability are measured using a differential thermo gravimetric analyzer. At 20 °C, the ammonia gas and benzene vapor gas sensing of the PANI/SnO2 hybrid material was tested at concentrations of between 1 and 7 ppm of ammonia and between 0.4 and 90 ppm of benzene vapor. The tests show that the response sensitivities to ammonia and benzene vapor are essentially linear. The sensing mechanisms of the PANI/SnO2 hybrid material to ammonia and benzene vapors were analyzed. The results demonstrate that doped SnO2 significantly affects the sensitivity, response time, and recovery time of the PANI material.
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