This paper proposes an interleaved equalization architecture for series-connected lithium-ion battery strings, which can deliver energy from a battery module to the cells in the next adjacent battery ...module, resulting in an enhancement of the equalization current and efficiency. Particularly, the global equalization is achieved without the need of additional stage circuits to balance among modules, leading to a small size and low cost. A two-module equalizer based on resonant LC converter and buck converter with soft switching is implemented to verify the validity of the proposed interleaved architecture. Furthermore, a self-learning fuzzy logic control (SLFLC) algorithm is employed to online regulate the equalization period based on the voltage difference among cells and the cell voltage, not only greatly abbreviating the balancing time but also effectively preventing overequalization. The SLFLC has the outstanding advantages of high balancing precision, easy implementation, and strong robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed equalizer has good balancing performances with soft switching and high efficiency, and achieves zero-voltage gap among cells. Moreover, the proposed SLFLC algorithm abridges the total equalization time by about 27%, and reduces the equalization cycles by about 59% compared with the traditional control algorithm.
Low-carbon steel has been popularly applied in numerous applications because of its unique features, such as good plasticity, high strength, great hardness, and excellent toughness. Additionally, the ...semi-solid thixotropic forging forming method has been widely used in light alloys, due to its advantages of low forming force and high forming quality, whereas its application in ferrous materials is still limited. In this study, the semi-solid thixotropic forging forming process is proposed for producing the low-carbon steel claw pole, with the main stages being radial forging deformation, isothermal treatment, and forging forming. The effect of the area reduction rate on the effective strain from the cross sections of the radial-forged metal bar was studied using numerical simulations. The effect of the isothermal holding process on the microstructures of radial-forged billets was investigated, to obtain the ideal semi-solid microstructures. The microstructure and mechanical properties of low-carbon steel claw poles from the thixotropic forging experiment are presented and discussed. It was found that when the area reduction rate was 67%, the effective strain at the edge of the metal bar exceeded 5.0, while the effective strain at the center was above 1.2, indicating an excellent quality of forging for the bar. The optimization of the process parameters for preparing low-carbon steel semi-solid billets with fine and globular microstructures was achieved with an area reduction rate of 67%, an isothermal temperature of 1500 °C, and a duration time of 15 min. Moreover, the low-carbon steel claw pole fabricated with the optimized operating parameters was found fully filled, with a sharp profile and a flat surface, where the yield strength and tensile strength increased by 88.5% and 79.8%, respectively, compared to the starting materials.
•Well-defined seasonal patterns of AOC, kOH and ROx production were found in rural Hong Kong.•kOH was dominated by oxidation of NO2 and OVOCs in later summer and of CO and OVOCs in autumn and ...winter.•Major primary ROx sources were photolysis of O3 and HONO in late summer and photolysis of O3 and HCHO in autumn and winter.
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Atmospheric oxidizing capacity (AOC), dominated by the hydroxyl radical (OH), is an important index of the self-cleaning capacity of atmosphere and plays a vital role in the tropospheric chemistry. To better understand the key processes governing the chemistry of rural atmosphere of southern China, we analyzed the oxidation capacity and radical chemistry at a regional background site in Hong Kong from 23 August to 22 December 2012, which covered the summer, autumn and winter seasons. A chemical box model built on the latest Master Chemical Mechanism (v3.3) was used to elucidate the OH reactivity and sources of ROX radicals (ROX=OH+HO2+RO2). The AOC showed a clear seasonal pattern with stronger intensity in late summer compared to autumn and winter. Reactions with NO2 (30%) and oxygenated volatile organic compounds (OVOCs) (31%) together dominated the OH loss in summer, while reactions with CO (38% in autumn and 39% in winter) and OVOCs (34% in autumn and 25% in winter) made larger contributions in autumn and winter. Photolysis of O3 (36%–47%) presented the major ROX source during all three seasons. The second largest ROx source was HONO photolysis (25%) in summer compared to HCHO photolysis in autumn (20%) and winter (21%). Besides, photolysis of other OVOCs was another important primary source of ROx radicals with average contributions of 14%, 13% and 20% for the summer, autumn and winter cases, respectively. Overall, the present study evaluates the oxidizing capacity of the rural atmosphere of South China and elucidates the varying characteristics of photochemical processes in different air masses.
Δ
-fatty acid dehydrogenase (FAD2) is the essential enzyme responsible for catalyzing the formation of linoleic acid from oleic acid. CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology has been an essential tool ...for molecular breeding in soybeans. To evaluate the most suitable type of gene editing in soybean fatty acid synthesis metabolism, this study selected five crucial enzyme genes of the soybean
gene family-
,
,
,
, and
-and created a CRISPR/Cas9-mediated single gene editing vector system. The results of Sanger sequencing showed that 72 transformed plants positive for T
generation were obtained using
-mediated transformation, of which 43 were correctly edited plants, with the highest editing efficiency of 88% for
. The phenotypic analysis revealed that the oleic acid content of the progeny of
gene-edited plants had a higher increase of 91.49% when compared to the control JN18, and the rest of the gene-edited plants in order were
,
,
, and
. The analysis of gene editing type has indicated that base deletions greater than 2bp were the predominant editing type in all editing events. This study provides ideas for the optimization of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology and the development of new tools for precise base editing in the future.
Surgical resection remains a critical treatment option for many patients with primary and secondary hepatic neoplasms. Extended hepatectomy (eHx) may be required for some patients with large tumors, ...which may cause liver failure and death. Partial hepatectomy (pHx) and eHx mouse models were constructed, liver tissues were sampled at 18, 36, and 72 h posthepatectomy. Transcriptome and metabolome analyses were employed to explore the different potential mechanisms in regeneration and injury between pHx and eHx. The results showed that eHx was associated with more severe liver injury and lower survival rates than pHx. Transcriptomics data showed there were 1842, 2129, and 1277 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in eHx and 962, 1305, and 732 DEGs in pHx at 18, 36, and 72 h posthepatectomy, respectively, compared with the those in the sham groups. Compared with pHx, the number of DEGs in the eHx group reached a maximum of 230 at 18 h after surgery and decreased sequentially to 87 and 43 at 36 and 72 h. Metabolomics analysis identified a total of 1399 metabolites, and 48 significant differentially produced metabolites (DPMs) were screened between eHx and pHx. Combined analysis of DEGs and DPMs indicated that cholesterol metabolism and insulin resistance may be two important pathways for liver regeneration and mouse survival postextended hepatectomy. Our results showed the global influence of pHx and eHx on the transcriptome and metabolome in mouse liver, and revealed cholesterol metabolism and insulin resistance pathways might be involved in regeneration post-pHx and -eHx.
In this paper, we propose a distributed gradient algorithm for received signal strength based target localization using only quantized data. The Maximum Likelihood of the Quantized RSS is derived and ...Particle Swarm Optimization is used to provide an initial estimate for the gradient algorithm. A practical quantization threshold designer is presented for RSS data. To derive a distributed algorithm using only the quantized signal, the local estimate at each node is also quantized. The RSS measurements and the local estimate at each sensor node are quantized in different ways. By using a quantization elimination scheme, a quantized distributed gradient method is proposed. In the distributed algorithm, the quantization noise in the local estimate is gradually eliminated with each iteration. Section 5 shows that the performance of the centralized algorithm can reach the Cramer Rao Lower Bound. The proposed distributed algorithm using a small number of bits can achieve the performance of the distributed gradient algorithm using unquantized data.
•The quantized distributed gradient method is applied for target localization.•Particle swarm optimization is used to provide an initial estimate.•A quantization error elimination scheme reduces communication cost.•A quantization method for RSS measurements is presented.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most lethal diseases due to its high faculty of invasiveness and metastasis. Activity-dependent neuroprotective protein (ADNP) has been regarded as an ...oncogene in bladder cancer and ovarian cancer. However, the role of ADNP in the regulation of tumor immune response, development, and treatment resistance in HCC remains unknown and is worth exploring.
The correlation between ADNP and prognosis, immune cell infiltration, immune checkpoints, chemokines, tumor mutation burden, microsatellite instability, and genomic mutation of pan-cancer cohorts in The Cancer Genome Atlas was analyzed. ADNP expression in HCC cell lines, HCC and the adjacent normal tissues was measured by western blotting and immunochemistry. Nomogram was constructed to predict the survival of patients with HCC based on the ADNP expression and significant clinical characteristics. The potential biological functions and impacts on radiotherapy of ADNP in HCC cell lines were verified by vitro experiments.
ADNP was upregulated in most cancers and patients with elevated ADNP expression were related to poor survival in several types of cancers including HCC. Functional enrichment analysis showed ADNP participated in the pathways correlated with coagulation cascades and DNA double strand break repair. Further, ADNP exhibited a negative correlation with the immune score, stromal score, estimated score, and chemokines, and a positive correlation with cancer-associated fibroblasts, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, neutrophils, regulatory T cells, and endothelial cells. Immunochemistry and western blotting results demonstrated ADNP was up-regulated in HCC. Vitro experiments verified that suppressing the ADNP expression significantly inhibited the proliferation, invasion and migration and elevated the radiosensitivity via decreasing DNA damage repair in HCC.
ADNP might play an oncogene and immunosuppression role in tumor immune infiltration and response, thus influencing the prognosis. Its downregulation could attenuate the proliferation, invasion, migration, radioresistance of HCC. Our results indicated the potential of ADNP as a promising biomarker to predict the survival of HCC patients, providing a theoretical basis for novel integrative strategies.
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-coding RNAs of more than 200 nucleotides. To date, the roles of lncRNAs in soybean fatty acid synthesis have not been fully studied. Here, the low-linolenic ...acid mutant 'MT72' and the wild-type control 'JN18' were used as materials. The lncRNAs in young pods at 30 and 40 days (d) after flowering were systematically identified and analyzed using transcriptome sequencing technology combined with bioinformatics tools. A total of 39,324 lncRNAs and 561 differentially expressed lncRNAs were identified. A lncRNAs-miRNAs-protein-coding genes (mRNAs) network was constructed, and 46 lncRNAs, 46 miRNAs and 137 mRNAs were found to be correlated. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis of 12 targeted mRNAs in the competing endogenous RNA network showed that these lncRNAs may be involved in the biological processes of fatty acid transport, lipid synthesis and cell division. Finally, the expression levels of differentially expressed lncRNAs, miRNAs and mRNAs were verified using qRT-PCR. The expression patterns of most genes were consistent with the sequencing results. In conclusion, new information was provided for the study of fatty acid synthesis by lncRNAs in young soybean pods.
Osteoarthritis (OA) is associated with cardiovascular disease and represents a persistent economic and physical burden on patients in the United States. This study evaluated the mediating effect of ...dietary live microbe intake on the association between cardiovascular health based on Life's Essential 8 (LE8) scores and osteoarthritis (OA) in adults.
This cross-sectional study included data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1999-2019 (from patients aged ≥20 years). LE8 scores (0-100) were measured according to the American Heart Association definition and categorized as low (0-49), moderate (50-79), or high (80-100). OA disease status was assessed using self-reported data from patients. The relationships were evaluated using multivariate logistic and restricted cubic spline models. Mediation analysis was used to evaluate the mediating effect of dietary live microbe intake on the association between LE8 and OA risk.
The study included 23,213 participants aged ≥20 years. After adjusting for latent confounders, higher LE8 scores were found to be associated with a lower incidence of OA. The odds ratios (with 95% confidence intervals) for low, moderate, and high OA risk were 0.81 (0.69, 0.96) and 0.55 (0.44, 0.69), respectively; a non-linear dose-response relationship was observed (
-nonlinear = 0.012). Health behavior and health factor scores showed a similar pattern of correlation with OA risk. Low live microbe intake mediated the association between LE8, health behavior, and health factor scores with OA risk and did not appear to reduce OA risk.
Our findings suggest that although higher LE8 scores reduce the risk of developing OA, low live microbe intake may reduce the protective effect of higher scores. It is, therefore, essential to emphasize adherence to a lifestyle that confers high LE8 scores. Individuals should also be advised to reduce the intake of foods with low live microbe content.
Human activities increase significantly over Antarctic ice shelves. However, they are constantly faced with danger posed by the harsh environment. For decision-making, it is a prerequisite to have ...the macro-scale suitability information about human activity site selection. Here, we define a new index, the human activity suitability (HAS) index, to quantitatively analyze the locational suitability of human activity sites over Antarctic ice shelves. Two multi-criteria decision analysis methods (AHP + Entropy, TOPSIS) and three machine learning methods (support vector machine, random forest and logistic regression) are tested to develop HAS maps. Nine conditioning factors about ice surface features, ice shelf stability, meteorology and topography are generated as input parameters. The accuracy of the proposed models is evaluated using metrics such as the area under curve (AUC-ROC), root mean square error, overall accuracy and kappa index. The results indicate that the Random Forest performs best. The HAS map exhibits great heterogeneity driven by the synergistic influence of multiple factors. Areas in low HAS classes are concentrated at Crosson, Brunt, Thwaites and the edge of some ice shelves, implying the complex environment in these regions. The findings can provide a new insight for forecasting the potential human footprint and support sustainability research in Antarctica.
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