There is increasing interest in both relating the mechanical behavior of high-entropy alloys to their microstructural evolution and in their development for various applications. A special two-day ...international workshop on the above topic was held in Guiyang, China, in December 2014. The workshop gathered scientists and engineers to exchange information on recent progress in high-entropy alloys, to discuss the scientific issues and challenges to foster international collaborations, and to identify future directions. In this paper, a summary of this workshop is presented, including aspects of definition/terminology, phase formation, microstructure and phase stability, strengthening mechanisms, and high-temperature properties. Future research directions are also outlined.
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•Recent progress in several critical topics of the high-entropy alloys was briefly summarized.•Special emphasis was placed on the relationship between mechanical properties and microstructure.•Future research directions of the discussed areas in HEAs are also outlined.
Customized zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) form the basis of a broadly applicable tool for highly efficient genome modification. ZFNs are artificial restriction endonucleases consisting of a ...non-specific nuclease domain fused to a zinc finger array which can be engineered to recognize specific DNA sequences of interest. Recent proof-of-principle experiments have shown that targeted knockout mutations can be efficiently generated in endogenous zebrafish genes via non-homologous end-joining-mediated repair of ZFN-induced DNA double-stranded breaks. The Zinc Finger Consortium, a group of academic laboratories committed to the development of engineered zinc finger technology, recently described the first rapid, highly effective, and publicly available method for engineering zinc finger arrays. The Consortium has previously used this new method (known as OPEN for Oligomerized Pool ENgineering) to generate high quality ZFN pairs that function in human and plant cells.
Here we show that OPEN can also be used to generate ZFNs that function efficiently in zebrafish. Using OPEN, we successfully engineered ZFN pairs for five endogenous zebrafish genes: tfr2, dopamine transporter, telomerase, hif1aa, and gridlock. Each of these ZFN pairs induces targeted insertions and deletions with high efficiency at its endogenous gene target in somatic zebrafish cells. In addition, these mutations are transmitted through the germline with sufficiently high frequency such that only a small number of fish need to be screened to identify founders. Finally, in silico analysis demonstrates that one or more potential OPEN ZFN sites can be found within the first three coding exons of more than 25,000 different endogenous zebrafish gene transcripts.
In summary, our study nearly triples the total number of endogenous zebrafish genes successfully modified using ZFNs (from three to eight) and suggests that OPEN provides a reliable method for introducing targeted mutations in nearly any zebrafish gene of interest.
New arylamine-based sensitizers for p-type dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have been synthesized and used for p-type DSSCs. The best conversion efficiency reaches ∼0.1%. Sensitizers with two ...anchoring carboxylic acids lead to higher open-circuit voltages, short-circuit currents, and energy conversion efficiencies.
To evaluate the interobserver agreement among uveitis experts on the diagnosis of the specific uveitic disease.
Interobserver agreement analysis.
Five committees, each comprised of 9 individuals and ...working in parallel, reviewed cases from a preliminary database of 25 uveitic diseases, collected by disease, and voted independently online whether the case was the disease in question or not. The agreement statistic, κ, was calculated for the 36 pairwise comparisons for each disease, and a mean κ was calculated for each disease. After the independent online voting, committee consensus conference calls, using nominal group techniques, reviewed all cases not achieving supermajority agreement (>75%) on the diagnosis in the online voting to attempt to arrive at a supermajority agreement.
A total of 5766 cases for the 25 diseases were evaluated. The overall mean κ for the entire project was 0.39, with disease-specific variation ranging from 0.23 to 0.79. After the formalized consensus conference calls to address cases that did not achieve supermajority agreement in the online voting, supermajority agreement overall was reached on approximately 99% of cases, with disease-specific variation ranging from 96% to 100%.
Agreement among uveitis experts on diagnosis is moderate at best but can be improved by discussion among them. These data suggest the need for validated and widely used classification criteria in the field of uveitis.
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