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•Industrial waste lignosulfonate is used to prepare high valued carbon materials.•LS/ZnC2O4 composite is fabricated in ethanol/water solution without any toxic material.•PLC is ...prepared by Gas-exfoliation and In-situ templating carbonization technique.•PLC with rational pore distribution, large surface area, and excellent conductivity.•PLC supercapacitor shows great electrochemical performances in energy storage.
Two-dimensional porous carbon materials are very promising for energy storage/conversion due to their unique microstructure, reasonable pore structure and excellent electrochemical properties. A green and facile in-situ carbonization technique is innovated to prepare a unique porous lignin-derived carbon quasi-nanosheets (PLC) with rational pore distribution, large surface area, and excellent conductivity. The lignosulfonate/zinc oxalate composite was firstly self-assembled by hydrophobic bond of the amphiphilic structure in lignosulfonate using ethanol/water solvent without the need to use any toxic material, followed by co-pyrolysis at a high temperature with gas-exfoliation and in-situ templating of zinc oxalate. The resulting PLC exhibits a very high specific capacitance of 320 F/g at 1.0 A/g and long cycling stability (remains 93.5% after 10,000 cycles at 5.0 A/g). In addition, when assembling into symmetric supercapacitors in PVA/KOH gel electrolytes, PLC also shows a high specific capacitance of 274 F/g at 0.5 A/g with excellent rate capability and a high specific energy density (9.75 W h/kg at 6157.9 W/kg). These excellent electrochemical performances indicate that the as-prepared PLC should hold great promise for the energy storage devices, opening a new path for the preparation of advanced carbon electrode material and high-value-added utilization of biomass.
Rare sugars have recently attracted much attention because of their potential applications in the food, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical industries. A systematic strategy for enzymatic production of ...rare sugars, named Izumoring, was developed >10years ago. The strategy consists of aldose-ketose isomerization, ketose C-3 epimerization, and monosaccharide oxidation-reduction. Recent development of the Izumoring strategy is reviewed herein, especially the genetic approaches to the improvement of rare sugar-producing enzymes and the applications of target-oriented bioconversion. In addition, novel non-Izumoring enzymatic approaches are also summarized, including enzymatic condensation, phosphorylation-dephosphorylation cascade reaction, aldose epimerization, ulosonic acid decarboxylation, and biosynthesis of rare disaccharides.
Supercapacitors (SCs) have experienced a significant increase in research activity and commercialization during the past few decades. As the primary and most important electrode active material for ...commercial SCs, porous carbon is produced at an industrial‐scale through traditional carbonization‐activation strategies. Nevertheless, commercial porous carbon materials have some disadvantages such as high production cost, corrosion of equipment, and emission of toxic gases and byproduct pollutants during production. In recent years, huge efforts have been made to develop novel synthesis strategies for porous carbon materials. This review focuses on the pore formation mechanisms in traditional carbonization‐activation methods, emerging activation methods, template methods, self‐template methods, and novel emerging methods for the synthesis of porous carbons for SCs. Strategies developed so far for the synthesis of porous carbon materials are summarized. The mechanisms and recent advances for each strategy are reviewed. Furthermore, future directions and synthesis strategies for porous carbons are proposed.
The synthesis strategies of porous carbon for supercapacitor (SC) applications, including traditional methods and novel emerging methods developed in recent years, are reviewed in this article. This review proposes promising future directions and synthesis strategies for porous carbons used in SC applications.
Gene expression and regulation in eukaryotes is controlled by orchestrated binding of regulatory proteins, including both activators and repressors, to promoters and other cis-regulatory DNA ...elements. An increasing number of plant genomes have been sequenced; however, a similar effort to the ENCODE project, which aimed to identify all functional elements in the human genome, has yet to be initiated in plants. Here we report genome-wide high-resolution mapping of DNase I hypersensitive (DH) sites in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We identified 38,290 and 41,193 DH sites in leaf and flower tissues, respectively. The DH sites were depleted of bulk nucleosomes and were tightly associated with RNA polymerase II binding sites. Approximately 90% of the binding sites of two well-characterized MADS domain transcription factors, APETALA1 and SEPALLATA3, were covered by the DH sites. We demonstrate that protein binding footprints within a specific genomic region can be revealed using the DH site data sets in combination with known or putative protein binding motifs and gene expression data sets. Thus, genome-wide DH site mapping will be an important tool for systematic identification of all cis-regulatory DNA elements in plants.
Digital health technologies (ie, the integration of digital technology and health information) aim to increase the efficiency of health care delivery; they are rapidly adapting to health care ...contexts to provide improved medical services for citizens. However, contrary to expectations, their rapid adoption appears to have led to health inequities, with differences in health conditions or inequality in the distribution of health care resources among different populations.
This scoping review aims to identify and describe the inequities of health care services brought about by the adoption of digital health technologies. The factors influencing such inequities, as well as the corresponding countermeasures to ensure health equity among different groups of citizens, were also studied.
Primary studies and literature, including articles and reviews, published in English between 1990 and 2020 were retrieved using appropriate search strategies across the following three electronic databases: Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus. Data management was performed by two authors (RY and WZ) using Thomson Endnote (Clarivate Analytics, Inc), by systematically screening and identifying eligible articles for this study. Any conflicts of opinion were resolved through discussions with the corresponding author. A qualitative descriptive synthesis was performed to determine the outcomes of this scoping review.
A total of 2325 studies were collected during the search process, of which 41 (1.76%) papers were identified for further analysis. The quantity of literature increased until 2016, with a peak in 2020. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Norway ranked among the top 3 countries for publication output. Health inequities caused by the adoption of digital health technologies in health care services can be reflected in the following two dimensions: the inability of citizens to obtain and adopt technology and the different disease outcomes found among citizens under technical intervention measures. The factors that influenced inequities included age, race, region, economy, and education level, together with health conditions and eHealth literacy. Finally, action can be taken to alleviate inequities in the future by government agencies and medical institutions (eg, establishing national health insurance), digital health technology providers (eg, designing high-quality tools), and health care service recipients (eg, developing skills to access digital technologies).
The application of digital health technologies in health care services has caused inequities to some extent. However, existing research has certain limitations. The findings provide a comprehensive starting point for future research, allowing for further investigation into how digital health technologies may influence the unequal distribution of health care services. The interaction between individual subjective factors as well as social support and influencing factors should be included in future studies. Specifically, access to and availability of digital health technologies for socially disadvantaged groups should be of paramount importance.
Asthma is one of the most prevalent and costly chronic conditions in the United States, which cannot be cured. However, accurate and timely surveillance data could allow for timely and targeted ...interventions at the community or individual level. Current national asthma disease surveillance systems can have data availability lags of up to two weeks. Rapid progress has been made in gathering nontraditional, digital information to perform disease surveillance. We introduce a novel method of using multiple data sources for predicting the number of asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits in a specific area. Twitter data, Google search interests, and environmental sensor data were collected for this purpose. Our preliminary findings show that our model can predict the number of asthma ED visits based on near-real-time environmental and social media data with approximately 70% precision. The results can be helpful for public health surveillance, ED preparedness, and targeted patient interventions.
Enhancers are important regulators of gene expression in eukaryotes. Enhancers function independently of their distance and orientation to the promoters of target genes. Thus, enhancers have been ...difficult to identify. Only a few enhancers, especially distant intergenic enhancers, have been identified in plants. We developed an enhancer prediction system based exclusively on the DNase I hypersensitive sites (DHSs) in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. A set of 10,044 DHSs located in intergenic regions, which are away from any gene promoters, were predicted to be putative enhancers. We examined the functions of 14 predicted enhancers using the β-glucuronidase gene reporter. Ten of the 14 (71%) candidates were validated by the reporter assay. We also designed 10 constructs using intergenic sequences that are not associated with DHSs, and none of these constructs showed enhancer activities in reporter assays. In addition, the tissue specificity of the putative enhancers can be precisely predicted based on DNase I hypersensitivity data sets developed from different plant tissues. These results suggest that the open chromatin signature-based enhancer prediction system developed in Arabidopsis may serve as a universal system for enhancer identification in plants.
Highlights
History and benefits of zinc ion hybrid capacitors are introduced.
Carbon materials with different dimensions are developed for the cathodes.
Relationship between carbon structures and ...capacitive performances are discussed.
Current collectors and separators are firstly showcased and summarized.
Zinc ion hybrid capacitors (ZIHCs), which integrate the features of the high power of supercapacitors and the high energy of zinc ion batteries, are promising competitors in future electrochemical energy storage applications. Carbon-based materials are deemed the competitive candidates for cathodes of ZIHC due to their cost-effectiveness, high electronic conductivity, chemical inertness, controllable surface states, and tunable pore architectures. In recent years, great research efforts have been devoted to further improving the energy density and cycling stability of ZIHCs. Reasonable modification and optimization of carbon-based materials offer a remedy for these challenges. In this review, the structural design, and electrochemical properties of carbon-based cathode materials with different dimensions, as well as the selection of compatible, robust current collectors and separators for ZIHCs are discussed. The challenges and prospects of ZIHCs are showcased to guide the innovative development of carbon-based cathode materials and the development of novel ZIHCs.
Growing evidence indicates that transposons or transposable elements (TEs)-derived accessible chromatin regions (ACRs) play essential roles in multiple biological processes by interacting with ...trans-acting factors. However, the function of TE-derived ACRs in the regulation of gene expression in the rice genome has not been well characterized. In this study, we examined the chromatin dynamics in six types of rice tissues and found that ~8% of ACRs were derived from TEs and exhibited distinct levels of accessibility and conservation as compared to those without TEs. TEs exhibited a TE subtype-dependent impact on ACR formation, which can be mediated by changes in the underlying DNA methylation levels. Moreover, we found that tissue-specific TE-derived ACRs might function in the tissue development through the modulation of nearby gene expression. Interestingly, many genes in domestication sweeps were found to overlap with TE-derived ACRs, suggesting their potential functions in the rice domestication. In addition, we found that the expression divergence of 1070 duplicate gene pairs were associated with TE-derived ACRs and had distinct distributions of TEs and ACRs around the transcription start sites (TSSs), which may experience different selection pressures. Thus, our study provides some insights into the biological implications of TE-derived ACRs in the rice genome. Our results imply that these ACRs are likely involved in the regulation of tissue development, rice domestication and functional divergence of duplicated genes.
Conductive 2D metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have merits beyond traditional MOFs for electrochemical applications, but reports on using MOFs as electrodes for electrochemical microsupercapacitors ...(MSCs) are practically non‐existent. In this work, a Ni‐catecholate‐based MOF (Ni‐CAT MOF) having good conductivity and exhibiting redox chemistry in the positive and negative voltage windows is developed. A novel process is developed to selectively grow the conductive Ni‐CAT MOF on 3D laser scribed graphene (LSG). The LSG with its superior wettability serves as a functional matrix‐current collector for the hybridization of conductive Ni‐CAT MOF nanocrystals. Impressively, MSCs fabricated using the hybrid LSG/Ni‐CAT MOF show significant improvement compared with MOF‐free LSG electrodes. Specifically, the LSG/Ni‐CAT MOF electrodes can deliver MSCs with a wide operating voltage (1.4 V), high areal capacitance (15.2 mF cm−2), energy density (4.1 µWh cm−2), power density (7 mW cm−2), good rate performance, and decent cycling stability. This work opens up an avenue for developing electrochemical microsupercapacitors using conductive MOF electrodes.
An electrochemical microsupercapacitor with high areal capacitances and power density is fabricated based on laser‐scribed 3D graphene and conductive Ni‐catecholate metal–organic framework (MOF) electrodes. This work shows promising potential of conductive MOF for miniature energy storage devices.
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