As the core microorganism of wine making, Saccharomyces cerevisiae encounter low pH stress at the beginning of fermentation. Effect of initial pH (4.50, 3.00, 2.75, 2.50) on growth and fermentation ...performance of 3 S. cerevisiae strains Freddo, BH8, Nº.7303, different tolerance at low pH, chosen from 12 strains, was studied. The values of yeast growth (OD600, colony forming units, cell dry weight), fermentation efficiency (accumulated mass loss, change of total sugar concentration), and fermentation products (ethanol, glycerol, acetic acid, and l‐succinic acid) at different pH stress were measured. The results showed that the initial pH of must was a vital factor influencing yeast growth and alcoholic fermentation. Among the 3 strains, strain Freddo and BH8 were more tolerant than Nº.7303, so they were affected slighter than the latter. Among the 4 pH values, all the 3 strains showed adaptation even at pH 2.50; pH 2.75 and 2.50 had more vital effect on yeast growth and fermentation products in contrast with pH 4.50 and 3.00. In general, low initial pH showed the properties of prolonging yeast lag phase, affecting accumulated mass loss, changing the consumption rate of total sugar, increasing final content of acetic acid and glycerol, and decreasing final content of ethanol and l‐ succinic acid, except some special cases. Based on this study, the effect of low pH on wine products would be better understood and the tolerance mechanism of low pH of S. cerevisiae could be better explored in future.
Objectives
To develop a new Chinese medicine (CM)-based drug and to evaluate its safety and effect for suppressing acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in COVID-19 patients.
Methods
A putative ...ARDS-suppressing drug Keguan-1 was first developed and then evaluated by a randomized, controlled two-arm trial. The two arms of the trial consist of a control therapy (alpha interferon inhalation, 50 µg twice daily; and lopinavir/ritonavir, 400 and 100 mg twice daily, respectively) and a testing therapy (control therapy plus Keguan-1 19.4 g twice daily) by random number table at 1:1 ratio with 24 cases each group. After 2-week treatment, adverse events, time to fever resolution, ARDS development, and lung injury on newly diagnosed COVID-19 patients were assessed.
Results
An analysis of the data from the first 30 participants showed that the control arm and the testing arm did not exhibit any significant differences in terms of adverse events. Based on this result, the study was expanded to include a total of 48 participants (24 cases each arm). The results show that compared with the control arm, the testing arm exhibited a significant improvement in time to fever resolution (
P
=0.035), and a significant reduction in the development of ARDS (
P
=0.048).
Conclusions
Keguan-1-based integrative therapy was safe and superior to the standard therapy in suppressing the development of ARDS in COVID-19 patients. (Trial registration No. NCT 04251871 at
www.clinicaltrials.gov
)
Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC) is a common malignant tumor in the world, especially in China. As a member of the inhibitor of differentiation(Id) family, Id4 has been reported to function ...in many cancer types, but relatively little is known about its role in HCC. The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential relationship between Id4 and HCC development and the underlying mechanism involving the function of Id4 in HCC.Methods: We used quantitative real?time polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting to examine the RNA and protein expression of Id4. In addition, we used Cell Counting Kit?8 assay and colony formation assay to identify the function of Id4 in the regulation of cell proliferation in human HCC.Results: We found that the expression of Id4 protein was up?regulated in tumor tissues from HCC patients. Over?expression of Id4 promoted HCC cell proliferation, clonogenicity in vitro, and tumorigenicity in vivo. Id4 knockdown experiments showed that silencing Id4 blocked the proliferation and colony formation ability of HCC cells in vitro. Furthermore, overexpression of CCAAT/enhancer?binding protein β inhibited Id4 expression in HCC cells.Conclusion: Id4 may be developed as a potent therapeutic agent for the treatment of HCC, but more details about the underlying mechanisms of action are needed.
Rice (Oryza sauva) takes up arsenite mainly through the silicic acid transport pathway. Understanding the uptake and sequestration of arsenic (As) into the rice plant is important for developing ...strategies to reduce As concentration in rice grain. In this study, the cellular and subcellular distributions of As and silicon (Si) in rice roots were investigated using high-pressure freezing, high-resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry, and transmission electron microscopy. Rice plants, both the Isil mutant lacking the Si/arsenite efflux transporter Lsi2 and its wild-type cultivar, with or without an iron plaque, were treated with arsenate or arsenite. The formation of iron plaque on the root surface resulted in strong accumulation of As and phosphorous on the epidermis. The mutant showed stronger As accumulation in the endodermal vacuoles, where the Lsi2 transporter is located in the plasma membranes, than the wild-type line. As also accumulated in the vacuoles of some xylem parenchyma cells and in some pericycle cells, particularly in the wild-type mature root zone. Vacuolar accumulation of As is associated with sulfur, suggesting that As may be stored as arsenite-phytochelatin complexes. Si was localized in the cell walls of the endodermal cells with little apparent effect of the Lsi2 mutation on its distribution. This study reveals the vacuolar sequestration of As in rice roots and contrasting patterns of As and Si subcellular localization, despite both being transported across the plasma membranes by the same transporters.
A flexible and stable optical fiber sensor based on the Sagnac loop is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the measurement of salinity and temperature, simultaneously. The sensing unit ...consists of a tapered polarization maintaining fiber (tPMF) and a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) connected in series in the Sagnac loop. The temperature response comes from the high birefringence of PMF inside Sagnac loop, and the salinity response is enabled by the high-order modes excited in the tapered area of PMF. Besides, the FBG is for temperature compensation. We have succeeded in implementing dual-parameter measurements with the sensitivities of 0.356 nm/‰ for salinity and 0.616 nm/°C for temperature, respectively. The designed sensor has the potential for long-term monitoring of real ocean states.
Archived samples from the Park Grass Experiment, established in 1856, were analysed to determine the impacts of long-term phosphate fertiliser applications on arsenic concentrations in soil and ...herbage. In plots receiving 35 kg P ha−1 annually (+P), topsoil As concentrations almost doubled from an initial value of ∼10 mg kg−1 during 1888–1947 and remained stable thereafter. The phosphate fertilisers used before 1948 contained 401–1575 mg As kg−1, compared to 1.6–20.3 mg As kg−1 in the later samples. Herbage samples from the +P plots collected during 1888–1947 contained significantly more As than those from the −P plots, but later samples did not differ significantly. Mass-balance calculations show that the increase in soil As can be explained by the As input from P fertiliser applications before 1948. The results demonstrate that the P fertilisers used on the Park Grass Experiment before 1948 caused substantial As contamination of the soil.
•Archived samples from the Park Grass Experiment (>150 years) were analysed.•Soil As concentration almost doubled during 1888–1947 in the +phosphate plots.•Phosphate fertilisers used before 1948 contained high concentrations of As.•Historically phosphate fertilisers could be an important source of As contamination.
Long-term phosphate applications before 1948 caused arsenic contamination in the soil of the Park Grass Experiment.
Batch adsorption experiments were carried out for the removal of ciprofloxacin from aqueous solution using modified coal fly ash as adsorbent. The effects of various parameters such as contact time, ...initial solution concentration and temperature on the adsorption system were investigated. The optimum contact time was found to be 100
min. The isotherm adsorption data fit well with the Langmuir model, and the kinetic data fit well with the pseudo-second order and the intra-particle diffusion model. Intra-particle diffusion analysis demonstrates that ciprofloxacin diffuses quickly among the particles at the beginning of the adsorption process, and then the diffusion slows down and stabilizes. Thermodynamic parameters such as
ΔG,
ΔH and
ΔS were also calculated. The negative Gibbs free energy change and the positive enthalpy change indicated the spontaneous and endothermic nature of the adsorption, and the positive entropy change indicated that the adsorption process was aided by increased randomness.
► We have carried out the batch adsorption experiments for ciprofloxacin removal from aqueous solution using MCFA. ► The effects of various parameters on the adsorption system were investigated. ► The isotherm data fit well with the Langmuir model, and the kinetic data fit well with the pseudo-second order and intra-particle diffusion model. ► The negative ΔG and the positive ΔH indicated the spontaneous and endothermic nature of the adsorption.
Surgical interaction recognition (SIR) plays a crucial role in navigation decision support for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) or robot-assisted MIS. Currently, the research in SIR is at a ...coarse-grained level and barely considers the surgical interaction dependencies unrelated to endoscopic images. This work proposes a fine-grained SIR method named SIRNet aiming at predicting surgical interaction triplets. In the proposed SIRNet, a multi-head self-attention mechanism learns the relations among surgical interaction triplets without defining them before the training process, while a multi-head cross-attention mechanism learns the relationships between the endoscopic images and each triplet. The bipartite matching loss, which considers the permutation and combination of instruments, verbs, and targets, is adopted to make appropriate learning and prediction for each component in the surgical interaction triplet. Moreover, a weight attention module is designed to weigh the importance of each predicted surgical interaction triplet and each component in triplet when predicting final valid surgical interaction triplets. The experimental results show the proposed method improves the performance of fine-grained SIR. In addition, experiments also present the effectiveness of each module. The code is available at https://github.com/cynerelee/SIRNet https://github.com/cynerelee/SIRNet .
Earth's surface temperature will continue to rise for another 20 to 30 years even with the strongest carbon emission reduction currently considered. The associated changes in rainfall patterns can ...result in an increased flood risk worldwide. We compute the required increase in flood protection to keep high-end fluvial flood risk at present levels. The analysis is carried out worldwide for subnational administrative units. Most of the United States, Central Europe, and Northeast and West Africa, as well as large parts of India and Indonesia, require the strongest adaptation effort. More than half of the United States needs to at least double their protection within the next two decades. Thus, the need for adaptation to increased river flood is a global problem affecting industrialized regions as much as developing countries.
The current T-stub specimen of welded beam-to-column connections in steel structures was improved by adding clamping ends at both sides for convenience of fatigue tests. Uniaxial fatigue tests of the ...T-stub specimens were conducted. The fatigue properties and failure characteristics of the T-stub specimens were summarized and compared with those of two other standard welded joint configurations. Based on finite element analysis, various fatigue assessment approaches were used to predict the fatigue life of the specimens and the assessment results were compared with the test results. Previously developed unified design curves suitable to high-cycle and low-cycle fatigue assessment of standard welded joint configurations were extended to welded joints in beam-to-column connections. The results show that accurate experimental results can be obtained using the improved T-stub specimens with clamping ends; Under cyclic loading, the welded joint in beam-to-column connections has satisfying energy dissipation capacity, but the fatigue strength is relatively poor; the unified design curves are well applicable to the fatigue life assessment and design of welded beam-to-column connections in steel structures.
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