A family of alloys based on the Mg-Al-Zn-Ca-Mn system (Mg-3Al-1Zn-1Ca-0.3Mn, Mg-3Al-1.5Zn-0.5Ca-0.3Mn, and Mg-3Al-1Ca-0.3Mn, wt pct) was developed for extrusion. Their mechanical properties were ...evaluated by tensile testing at room temperature, and compared to those of the benchmark Mg-alloy Mg-3Al-1Zn-0.3Mn (AZ31). The microstructures of the extruded alloys were characterized in detail in order to reveal the effect of Ca on microstructural evolution, and consequently the alloy strength. The addition of Ca to the AZ31 stifles dynamic recrystallization and grain growth, with only ~30 pct recrystallization and a recrystallized grain size of ~480 nm. In contrast, the benchmark alloy is essentially completely recrystallized with an average grain size of ~2.3
μ
m. A high density of low-angle grain boundaries (LAGBs) and dislocations were observed in Ca-containing alloys, and were identified as a major factor in the observed strengthening. Such LAGBs form cellular subgrains predominantly along initial grain boundaries, or newly formed boundaries that are closely spaced (~ 600 nm) and nearly parallel to the extrusion direction. The subgrains have an ultrafine size of 100 to 400 nm, and difficult to convert to recrystallized grains. Solute segregation to grain boundaries was also observed. It is hypothesized that it is the Ca segregation to dislocation cores along LAGBs that decreases the dislocation mobility and stabilizes LAGBs, by thermodynamically decreasing the dislocation energy and/or kinetically imposing a solute drag effect.
Heterosis is widely used in breeding, but the genetic basis of this biological phenomenon has not been elucidated. We postulate that additive and dominance genetic effects as well as two-locus ...interactions estimated in classical QTL analyses are not sufficient for quantifying the contributions of QTL to heterosis. A general theoretical framework for determining the contributions of different types of genetic effects to heterosis was developed. Additive x additive epistatic interactions of individual loci with the entire genetic background were identified as a major component of midparent heterosis. On the basis of these findings we defined a new type of heterotic effect denoted as augmented dominance effect di* that comprises the dominance effect at each QTL minus half the sum of additive x additive interactions with all other QTL. We demonstrate that genotypic expectations of QTL effects obtained from analyses with the design III using testcrosses of recombinant inbred lines and composite-interval mapping precisely equal genotypic expectations of midparent heterosis, thus identifying genomic regions relevant for expression of heterosis. The theory for QTL mapping of multiple traits is extended to the simultaneous mapping of newly defined genetic effects to improve the power of QTL detection and distinguish between dominance and overdominance.
Aims
Diseases caused by pathogenic fungi was a major constrain in increasing productivity and improving quality of Panax notoginseng. The aim of this research was to evaluate the inhibitory activity ...of essential oils (EOs) from Asteraceae family, Chrysanthemum indicum and Laggera pterodonta, against pathogenic fungi of P. notoginseng.
Methods and Results
The antifungal activity was investigated using multiple methods, disclosing that the EOs from C. indicum and L. pterodonta are active against hypha growth of different fungi but with different degrees of potency. Checkerboard testing indicated that the combination of EOs with hymexazol had synergistic effect against Pythium aphanidermatum, and exhibited additive effects against bulk of targeted pathogenic fungi. Besides, we found that the baseline sensitivity of Fusarium oxysporum to L. pterodonta EOs was higher than those of C. indicum by means of mycelium growth rate method. Finally, the practicability of those EOs as plant pesticide was confirmed by in vivo model showing that EOs can significantly inhibit the occurrence of root rot of P. notoginseng caused by F. oxysporum.
Conclusion
Those studies suggest that the EOs from C. indicum and L. pterodonta had the potential to develop into new pollution‐free pesticides for the protection of precious Chinese herbal medicines.
Significance and Impact of the Study
This study provided a new way of biological control for overcoming the frequent diseases occurrence of P. notoginseng.
Periodontitis and hepatitis virus infection significantly impact individuals' well-being and are prevalent public health concerns globally. Given the current scarcity of large-scale cross-sectional ...epidemiological studies, this study seeks to enrich the evidence base by examining the link between these two conditions.
A cross-sectional study was conducted using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) spanning the years 2003–2018. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to assess the association between periodontitis and hepatitis virus infection, adjusting for the potential confounding factors. Subsequently, a stratified analysis was conducted to explore the relationship between periodontitis and hepatitis virus infection based on age, gender, race, marital status, alcohol consumption, smoking status, and the presence of chronic diseases.
In this study, which included 5755 participants, there was a positive association between hepatitis virus infection and periodontitis (odds ratio OR: 2.609 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.513, 4.499). Furthermore, a significant association was observed between moderate periodontitis and hepatitis virus infection (OR: 2.136 95% CI: 1.194, 3.822), and this association was even stronger for severe periodontitis (OR: 3.583 95% CI: 1.779, 7.217). Importantly, this positive association between hepatitis virus infection and periodontitis was consistent across different subgroups.
This study presents evidence of a significant association between periodontitis and hepatitis virus infection. These findings highlight the crucial importance of integrating periodontal health and liver health considerations into public health interventions. Further research is necessary to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and develop targeted interventions for effectively managing periodontitis and hepatitis virus infection.
Terrestrial LiDAR is an established method for 3D data acquisition in close-range applications. A new category of low-cost LiDAR sensors for autonomous driving has become available with similar ...specifications. However, these new sensors lack the guarantee of survey-grade performance. Initial experiments have broadly confirmed the specification of one such low-cost sensor but have also raised issues with the radiometric behaviour. This study investigates through practical experiments how the intensity information of the Livox-Mid40 laser scanner is influenced by time, reflectance, distance and angle of incidence. The quantitative analysis of the experiments shows an expected relationship between surface reflectance and recorded intensity. However, the result indicate that intensity can significantly influence the distance measurement at very close ranges.
•First report of NiTi parts created by WAAM using dedicated Ni-rich NiTi wire.•The as-built parts exhibit superelasticity.•The as-deposited material is fully austenitic at room temperature.•Potential ...of using WAAM to deposit advanced functional materials is demonstrated.
Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) was used for fabrication of NiTi parts using a commercialy available Ni-rich NiTi wire as the feedstock material. The as-built parts are near fully austenitic at room temperature as confirmed by differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction and superelastic cycling. The as-built microstructure changed from collumnar, in the first deposited layers, to equiaxed in the last deposited ones as a result of the different thermal cycle conditions. This is the first work where WAAM NiTi parts exhibit superelastic behavior under tensile conditions, highlighting the potential use of the technique for the creation of parts shaped in a complex manner based on this material and process. The potential to use WAAM for deposition of advanced functional materials is demonstrated.
This paper presents proof-of-concept methods and results on a passive synthetic aperture radar for surface change monitoring. The bistatic topology comprises navigation satellites (such as Global ...Positioning System, GLObal Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), Galileo, or Beidou) as transmitters of opportunity and a fixed receiver on the ground. Surface monitoring is to be provided through coherent change detection. An experimental test bed built to confirm the concept of the system is described, and the appropriate experimental program is presented. Preliminary signal processing algorithms for change detection are derived. Experimentally measured changes are compared to the theoretical predictions, and the obtained results are discussed.
Normal tissue samples are often employed as a control for understanding disease mechanisms, however, collecting matched normal tissues from patients is difficult in many instances. In cancer ...research, for example, the open cancer resources such as TCGA and TARGET do not provide matched tissue samples for every cancer or cancer subtype. The recent GTEx project has profiled samples from healthy individuals, providing an excellent resource for this field, yet the feasibility of using GTEx samples as the reference remains unanswered.
We analyze RNA-Seq data processed from the same computational pipeline and systematically evaluate GTEx as a potential reference resource. We use those cancers that have adjacent normal tissues in TCGA as a benchmark for the evaluation. To correlate tumor samples and normal samples, we explore top varying genes, reduced features from principal component analysis, and encoded features from an autoencoder neural network. We first evaluate whether these methods can identify the correct tissue of origin from GTEx for a given cancer and then seek to answer whether disease expression signatures are consistent between those derived from TCGA and from GTEx.
Among 32 TCGA cancers, 18 cancers have less than 10 matched adjacent normal tissue samples. Among three methods, autoencoder performed the best in predicting tissue of origin, with 12 of 14 cancers correctly predicted. The reason for misclassification of two cancers is that none of normal samples from GTEx correlate well with any tumor samples in these cancers. This suggests that GTEx has matched tissues for the majority cancers, but not all. While using autoencoder to select proper normal samples for disease signature creation, we found that disease signatures derived from normal samples selected via an autoencoder from GTEx are consistent with those derived from adjacent samples from TCGA in many cases. Interestingly, choosing top 50 mostly correlated samples regardless of tissue type performed reasonably well or even better in some cancers.
Our findings demonstrate that samples from GTEx can serve as reference normal samples for cancers, especially those do not have available adjacent tissue samples. A deep-learning based approach holds promise to select proper normal samples.
Exploring hit positions of recorded events can help to understand and suppress backgrounds in rare event searches. We propose a pulse shape analysis method to discriminate single-site events (SSEs) ...in the inner and outer layer of a small contact P-type germanium detector (HPGe). SSEs in the inner and outer layer have different pulse shape features, of which the rise time of the
(
T
Q
)
and current pulse
(
T
I
)
are selected for discrimination. A 500 Bq Thorium-228 (Th-228) source is used to determine the boundaries between the two layers. The double escape peak events from 2614.5 keV
γ
-ray are selected as typical SSEs, their numbers in the two layers are used to calculate the volumes and shapes of those layers. Considering the statistical and systematic uncertainties, the inner layer volume is evaluated to be 47.2% ± 0.26%(stat.) ± 0.18%(sys.) ± 0.22%(sys.) of the total sensitive volume. Selecting the inner layer as the analysis volume can reduce the external background in the signal region of Ge-76 neutrinoless double beta (0
ν
β
β
)
decay. We use the Th-228 data to validate the inner layer model and evaluate the background suppression power in the 0
ν
β
β
signal region
(
Q
β
β
=
2039
keV). The virtual segmentation further reduces the background from the external Th-228 source by about 10%. The virtual segmentation could be used to efficiently suppress surface background like electrons from Ar-42 decay in 0
ν
β
β
experiments using germanium detectors immersed in liquid argon.
The use of pediatric donor liver for pediatric liver transplantation (LT) remains controversial and few studies have focused on pediatric deceased donors. To address this issue, we decided to perform ...a retrospective research, trying to compare the clinical effects between deceased donor LTs (DDLTs) and living donor LTs (LDLTs).
A retrospective review of pediatric LTs using grafts from deceased donors and living donors from June 2013 to August 2016 was performed. The children were divided into a DDLT group and a LDLT group based on their donor styles. The incidence of early vascular complications (VC), biliary complications, and graft and patient survival rates were observed between the 2 groups.
There were 217 cases of pediatric LTs performed in our hospital from June 2013 to August 2016 (83 DDLTs and 134 LDLTs). The 1-year cumulative survival rates of grafts and recipients were 89.16% and 91.57% in DDLTs, and 95.47% and 95.52% in LDLTs, respectively (P > .05). The incidence of early VC was lower in LDLTs than that in DDLTs (3.7% vs 19.3%, P < .001). The incidence of HAT in children aged less than 1 year was significantly higher in the DDLT group (P < .001) and can be up to 31.82%. The incidence of biliary complications was similar in the 2 groups (8.4% vs 13.5%, P = .285).
Pediatric DDLTs have similar graft and patient survival rates with LDLT. The incidence of early VC was higher in DDLTs, and children aged less than 1 year are at a higher risk of developing HAT.
•Along with considerable development of organ donation after death of people in China, pediatric donation has become an important supplement to the graft pool, which has an important role in decreasing mortality among patients on the waiting list.•This study evaluated the efficacy of pediatric liver transplantation (LT) using deceased donor whole liver and living donor liver, and compares the outcomes.•There were 217 cases of pediatric LTs performed in our hospital from June 2013 to August 2016 (83 DDLTs and 134 LDLTs).•The 1-year cumulative survival rates of grafts and recipients were 89.16%, 91.57% in DDLT, and 95.47%, 95.52% in LDLT, respectively (P > .05). The ratio of early VC was lower in LDLTs than that in DDLTs (3.73% vs 19.28%, P < .001).•The incidence of HAT in children aged less than 1 year was significantly higher among the DDLT group (P < .001), and the ratio can be up to 31.82%.•Our study showed that pediatric DDLT have a similar graft and patient survival rates with LDLT. The incidence of VC was higher in DDLT, and children aged less than 1 year are at higher risk of developing HAT.
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