Early dysbiosis in the gut microbiota may contribute to the severity of acute pancreatitis (AP), however, a comprehensive understanding of the gut microbiome, potential pathobionts, and host ...metabolome in individuals with AP remains elusive. Hence, we employed fecal whole-metagenome shotgun sequencing in 82 AP patients and 115 matched healthy controls, complemented by untargeted serum metabolome and lipidome profiling in a subset of participants. Analyses of the gut microbiome in AP patients revealed reduced diversity, disrupted microbial functions, and altered abundance of 77 species, influenced by both etiology and severity. AP-enriched species, mostly potential pathobionts, correlated positively with host liver function and serum lipid indicators. Conversely, many AP-depleted species were short-chain fatty acid producers. Gut microflora changes were accompanied by shifts in the serum metabolome and lipidome. Specifically, certain gut species, like enriched Bilophila wadsworthia and depleted Bifidobacterium spp., appeared to contribute to elevated triglyceride levels in biliary or hyperlipidemic AP patients. Through culturing and whole-genome sequencing of bacterial isolates, we identified virulence factors and clinically relevant antibiotic resistance in patient-derived strains, suggesting a predisposition to opportunistic infections. Finally, our study demonstrated that gavage of specific pathobionts could exacerbate pancreatitis in a caerulein-treated mouse model. In conclusion, our comprehensive analysis sheds light on the gut microbiome and serum metabolome in AP, elucidating the role of pathobionts in disease progression. These insights offer valuable perspectives for etiologic diagnosis, prevention, and intervention in AP and related conditions.
New volatile memory (e.g. Phase Change Memroy) presents fast access, large capacity, byte-addressable, and non-volatility features. These features will bring impacts on the design of current software ...system. It has become a hot research topic of how to manage it and provide what kind of interface for upper application to use it. This paper proposes FP-Heap. FP-Heap supports direct access to non-volatile memory through a persistent heap interface. With FP-Heap, traditional persistent object systems can benefit directly from the byte-persistency of non-volatile memory. FP-Heap extends current virtual memory manager (VMM) to manage non-volatile memory and maintain a persistent mapping relationship. Also, FP-Heap offers a lightweight transaction mechanism to support atomic update of persistent data, a simple namespace to facilitate data indexing, and a basic access control mechanism to support data sharing. Compared with previous work Mnemosyne, FP-Heap achieves higher performance by its customized VMM and optimized transaction mechanism.
The yield and quality of potatoes, an important staple crop, are seriously threatened by high temperature and drought stress. In order to deal with this adverse environment, plants have evolved a ...series of response mechanisms. However, the molecular mechanism of potato's response to environmental changes at the translational level is still unclear. In this study, we performed transcriptome- and ribosome-profiling assays with potato seedlings growing under normal, drought, and high-temperature conditions to reveal the dynamic translational landscapes for the first time. The translational efficiency was significantly affected by drought and heat stress in potato. A relatively high correlation (0.88 and 0.82 for drought and heat stress, respectively) of the fold changes of gene expression was observed between the transcriptional level and translational level globally based on the ribosome-profiling and RNA-seq data. However, only 41.58% and 27.69% of the different expressed genes were shared by transcription and translation in drought and heat stress, respectively, suggesting that the transcription or translation process can be changed independently. In total, the translational efficiency of 151 (83 and 68 for drought and heat, respectively) genes was significantly changed. In addition, sequence features, including GC content, sequence length, and normalized minimal free energy, significantly affected the translational efficiencies of genes. In addition, 28,490 upstream open reading frames (uORFs) were detected on 6463 genes, with an average of 4.4 uORFs per gene and a median length of 100 bp. These uORFs significantly affected the translational efficiency of downstream major open reading frames (mORFs). These results provide new information and directions for analyzing the molecular regulatory network of potato seedlings in response to drought and heat stress.
Real-time collaborative programming is an emerging approach that supports a team of programmers to view and edit shared source code at the same time. Each programmer can edit any part of the source ...code, and changes become instantly visible at other collaborating sites. With a broad range of application scenarios and benefits, real-time collaborative programming has attracted increasing interest from academia and industry. Lightweight integrated development environments (lightweight IDEs) have rapidly grown in popularity in the recent years, but there are serious problems and limitations with existing real-time collaboration support for lightweight IDEs. In this study, we contribute a novel real-time collaborative programming environment named CoVSCode that supports unconstrained and flexible real-time collaboration based on Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular and widely used lightweight IDEs. We present design objectives and rationales, the workflow and functional design from collaborating programmers’ perspectives, major technical issues and solutions, and prototype implementation, as well as a set of experimental evaluations that have demonstrated the technical feasibility and good performance of the prototype system. All approaches, techniques and solutions derived in this work are generic, which can also be applied in building real-time collaborative programming environments for other lightweight IDEs.
While overweight/obesity has become a major public health issue worldwide, any association between body mass index (BMI) and therapeutic response in neoadjuvant targeted therapy treated HER2 positive ...breast cancer patients remain unclear. The information from a total of four-hundred and ninety-one neoadjuvant targeted therapy treated HER2 positive breast cancer patients from four institutions were retrospectively collected. Univariate and multivariate logistic analysis was developed to determine the association between BMI and therapeutic response. A meta-analysis of published literature was then conducted to confirm the effect of overweight/obesity on pCR for patients treated with neoadjuvant targeted therapy. Restricted cubic spline (RCS) adjusted for confounding factors demonstrated a decrease pCR with increasing BMI (OR = 0.937, P = 0.045). Patients were then categorized into under/normal weight (n = 299) and overweight/obesity (n = 192). Overweight/obese patients were independently associated with a poor therapeutic response. In the subgroup analysis, a significant negative impact of overweight/obesity on pCR can be observed both in single-targeted (OR = 0.556; P = 0.02) and dual-targeted (OR = 0.392; P = 0.021) populations. Six eligible studies involving 984 neoadjuvant targeted therapy treated HER2 positive breast cancer patients were included in the meta-analysis. The meta-analysis also demonstrated that overweight/obesity was significantly associated with a poor response to neoadjuvant anti-HER2 therapy (OR = 0.68; P = 0.007). Our result show that overweight and obese HER2 positive breast cancer patients are less likely to achieve pCR after neoadjuvant targeted therapy.
Dangling pointer error is pervasive in C/C++ programs and it is very hard to detect. This paper introduces an efficient detector to detect dangling pointer error in C/C++ programs. By selectively ...leave some memory accesses unmonitored, our method could reduce the memory monitoring overhead and thus achieves better performance over previous methods. Experiments show that our method could achieve an average speed up of 9% over previous compiler instrumentation based method and more than 50% over previous page protection based method.
Abstract
Based on the historical load data collected in July and August 2020 in Chongqing, and in view of the characteristics of the regional load in summer Chongqing, a new short-term load ...forecasting method was put forward in this paper, which is based on BP neural network and takes into account social activities and meteorological factors. The simulation results show that the proposed short-term load forecasting method can accurately realize the daily maximum load forecasting, it provides a theoretical reference for load forecasting and power resource optimization of smart grid in the future.
Porous antimony-based anode by electrospinning treated in air exhibits excellent potassium ion storage performance.
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Due to the large ionic radius and associated slow reaction kinetics ...of potassium ions, it is a major challenge to find suitable anode materials for potassium-ion batteries. Herein, we design porous antimony-based nanofibres via a simple, low-cost and large scalable method to promote the electrochemical performance of potassium-ion batteries. Unlike those traditionally treated in inert atmospheres, using the different decomposition processes of polyacrylonitrile and polyvinylpyrrolidone in air, we obtain antimony trioxide embedded in porous carbon nanofibres (Sb2O3@PCN). The porous structure can promote the permeation of electrolyte into electrode materials and increase the active sites of the redox reaction. The porous carbonaceous fibre skeleton structure establishes a fast ion transport channel and enhances the kinetic performance. In a concentrated 5 M potassium bis(fluorosulfonyl)-imide/dimethyl carbonate electrolyte, Sb2O3@PCN exhibits a stable discharge specific capacity of 437.3 mAh g-1 at a current density of 100 mA g−1 after 50 cycles, which is much higher than that treated in a N2 atmosphere (247.5 mAh g-1). This method provides a new approach for the preparation of efficient potassium-ion battery electrode materials.
Semi-continuous experiments were carried out in lab-scale continuous stirred tank reactors to evaluate the effects of fermentation temperature (37 ± 1 °C and 55 ± 1 °C) and total solids (TS) contents ...(3 %, 6 %, and 12 %) on biohydrogen production from the dark fermentations (DF) of rice straw (RS) and the total operation duration was 105 days. The experimental results show that biohydrogen production (0.46–63.60 mL/g VSadded) from the thermophilic (55 ± 1 °C) DF (TDF) was higher than the mesophilic (37 ± 1 °C) DF (MDF) (0.19–2.13 mL/g VSadded) at the three TS contents, and achieved the highest of 63.60 ± 2.98 mL/g VSadded at TS = 6 % in TDF. The pH, NH4+-N and total volatile fatty acid of fermentation liquids in the TDF were all higher than those in the MDF. The high abundance of lactic acid-producing bacteria resulted in low biohydrogen produced at TS = 3 %. Under the TDF with TS = 6 %, the highest abundance of hydrolytic bacteria (Ruminiclostridium 54.24 %) led to the highest biohydrogen production. The increase of TS content from 6 % to 12 % induced degradation pathway changes from biohydrogen production to methane production. This study demonstrated that butyric acid fermentation was the main pathway to produce biohydrogen from RS in both DFs.
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•Thermophilic dark fermentation (DF) has higher bio-H2 production than mesophilic DF.•The highest biohydrogen yield was obtained at the thermophilic DF with 6 % TS.•Degradation pathway of organic matter changes with increase of TS content.•Butyric acid fermentation was the main biohydrogen-producing pathway for both DFs.•The pH of fermentation liquid increased with the increase of TS in both DFs.
The crystallization behavior of amorphous alloys during welding is more complex than that of traditional metals. In this paper, the Zr-based amorphous alloy and copper crystals were welded by pulsed ...laser butt welding method, the crystallization behavior of the amorphous alloy/crystalline metal welding interface is deeply studied. The results show that Zr2Cu and Zr2Ni crystal phases appear at the interface between Zr based amorphous alloy and copper, and a Cu rich region is formed at the amorphous side of the interface. A small amount of Zr, Ni, Ti diffuses to the Cu side, forming ZrO2, TiO2, CuO and other oxides on the surface of the sample. These oxides will cause changes in the voltage potential at the interface.