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Motivation: Bulked segregant analysis combined with next generation sequencing has proven to be a simple and efficient approach for fast mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTLs). However, how to estimate the proportion of phenotypic variance explained by a QTL (or termed QTL heritability) in such pooled QTL mapping is an unsolved problem. Results: In this paper, we propose a method called PQHE to estimate QTL heritability using pooled sequencing data obtained under different experimental designs. Simulation studies indicated that our method is correct and feasible. Four practical examples from rice and yeast are demonstrated, each representing a different situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the pollution characteristics of water soluble ions in PM2.5 and PM10 under severe haze days, both PM2.510 samples were collected in a city of northeast China under severe haze days during October 20-22, 2013. Nine water-soluble ions in PM and PM10 including F-, CL-, NO3-, SO42-, Na+, NH4+, K+, Mg2+ and Ca2+ were analyzed. The results showed that the concentrations of all water-soluble ions mass concentration in night were higher than those in day time, with a ratio of 1.68 for PM2.5 in haze days. The concentrations of SO42-, NO3- and NH4+ were higher and their percentage in PM2.5 were 11.03%, 8.3% and 7.39% in haze days, the same results in PM10 were obtained. The percentages of K+ and Ca2+ in haze and non-haze periods were similar. Based on the ratio of different ions, the pollution from stationary sources were higher than that from mobile sources in haze days, this showed that meteorological factors had greater influences. In comparison with the data of water soluble ions during October and November of 2009, the concentrations from mobile sources were on the rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Given the limited access to breast cancer (BC) screening, the authors developed and validated a mobile phone-artificial intelligence-based infrared thermography (AI-IRT) system for BC screening., Materials and Methods: This large prospective clinical trial assessed the diagnostic performance of the AI-IRT system. The authors constructed two datasets and two models, performed internal and external validation, and compared the diagnostic accuracy of the AI models and clinicians. Dataset A included 2100 patients recruited from 19 medical centres in nine regions of China. Dataset B was used for independent external validation and included 102 patients recruited from Langfang People's Hospital., Results: The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the binary model for identifying low-risk and intermediate/high-risk patients was 0.9487 (95% CI: 0.9231-0.9744) internally and 0.9120 (95% CI: 0.8460-0.9790) externally. The accuracy of the binary model was higher than that of human readers (0.8627 vs. 0.8088, respectively). In addition, the binary model was better than the multinomial model and used different diagnostic thresholds based on BC risk to achieve specific goals., Conclusions: The accuracy of AI-IRT was high across populations with different demographic characteristics and less reliant on manual interpretations, demonstrating that this model can improve pre-clinical screening and increase screening rates., (Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

Thermal radiation effects can greatly degrade the image quality of uncooled infrared focal plane array detection systems. In this paper, we propose a thermal radiation effect correction network based on intra-block pyramid cross-scale feature extraction and fusion. First, an intra-block pyramid residual attention module is introduced to obtain fine-grained features from long-range IR images by extracting cross-scale local features within the residual block. Second, we propose a cross-scale gated fusion module to efficiently integrate the shallow and abstract features at multiple scales of the encoder and decoder through gated linear units. Finally, to ensure accurate correction of thermal radiation effects, we add double-loss constraints in the spatial-frequency domain and construct a single-input, multi-output network with multiple supervised constraints. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art correction methods in terms of both visual quality and quantitative evaluation metrics.

For the effective degradation of tetracycline (TC), a facilely prepared magnetic CuFe 2 O 4 /g-C 3 N 4 (CFO/g) photocatalyst was successfully constructed. The structure, morphology, composition, optical, and magnetic properties of CFO/g were characterized. CFO/g demonstrated excellent photo-Fenton performance of TC in the presence of high-Cl - , NO 3 - , HCO 3 - , HPO 4 2- , SO 4 2- and humic acid. Ten cycles of experiments with the removal rate of TC only decreasing by 2.8% confirmed the stability and high activity of CFO/g. The dissolved concentrations of Fe and Cu ions were 0.013 and 0.009 mg L -1 , respectively. Its excellent magnetic properties made CFO/g easier to be recycled than traditional catalysts. ·OH and O 2 · - were proposed to be the main active species in the photo-Fenton system. The CFO/g heterojunction enhanced the separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs and visible light absorption range. Furthermore, the identification of intermediates suggested that TC degradation was classified into two pathways, and the most critical and rapid degradation was achieved within the first 30 min. The TC and its intermediates did not significantly inhibit the growth activity of Escherichia coli. This research provided a promising application of magnetic photocatalysts in wastewater treatment of pharmaceuticals and personal care products., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A near-infrared (NIR) light-driven NaYF 4 :Yb/Er-TiO 2 -Ti 3 C 2 (NYF-TiO 2 -Ti 3 C 2 ) heterostructure-based photoelectrochemical (PEC) biosensing platform was constructed for highly sensitive d-serine (d-ser) detection. Accurate d-ser detection depends on the model biocatalyst, d-amino acid oxidase (DAAO), which converts d-ser into hydroxypyruvate and an equimolar concentration of hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) via an enzymatic reaction. The TiO 2 -Ti 3 C 2 semiconductor and NaYF 4 :Yb/Er optical transducer formed a Schottky junction that provided an irreversible channel for electron transfer. Infrared light was converted into absorbable multiemission light, thereby effectively increasing light absorption. Simultaneously, the generated H 2 O 2 rapidly scavenged photogenerated holes to separate electron-hole pairs, which amplified the photocurrent signal. Under optimal conditions, the NIR light-driven PEC biosensor exhibited an excellent PEC performance for d-ser detection, with a wide linear range of 2-1650 μmol L -1 and detection limit as low as 0.286 μmol L -1 . Importantly, high detection reproducibility and accuracy were achieved using this strategy for analyzing human serum and rat cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) specimens. The admirable applicability of the NYF-TiO 2 -Ti 3 C 2 -based PEC biosensor for detecting d-ser may lead to further opportunities for detecting other disease-related biomarkers.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) wastewater is characterized by high organic content, unstable water quality and quantity and low biodegradability. In this paper, the hydrolytic acidification reactor-aerobic moving bed biofilm (MBBR) process was used to degrade TCM wastewater. Besides, a small pilot study was conducted. The appropriate operating parameters: hydraulic retention time (HRT) of the hydrolytic reactor was 16 h, HRT of MBBR was 30 h, dissolved oxygen of MBBR was 6 mg/L, sludge return ratio of MBBR was 100%. The hydrolytic reactor was started for 25 days. MBBR was run in series with the hydrolytic reactor after 24 days of separate operation. The start-up of the composite reactor was completed after another 26 days. The average removal efficiencies of chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen were 92% and 70%. The hydrolytic reactor was effective in decomposing macromolecules and MBBR had a strong ability to degrade pollutants through the excitation-emission-matrix spectra. The evolution pattern of the dominant bacterial genera and the surface morphology of sludge were studied by scanning electron microscopy and high-throughput sequencing analysis. It could be seen that the surface morphology of the biological filler was suitable for the growth and reproduction of microorganisms., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.)

Deep sequencing-based bulked segregant analysis (BSA-seq) has become a popular approach for quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping in recent years. Effective statistical methods for BSA-seq have been developed, but how to design a suitable experiment for BSA-seq remains unclear. In this paper, we show in theory how the major experimental factors (including population size, pool proportion, pool balance, and generation) and the intrinsic factors of a QTL (including heritability and degree of dominance) affect the power of QTL detection and the precision of QTL mapping in BSA-seq. Increasing population size can improve the power and precision, depending on the QTL heritability. The best proportion of each pool in the population is around 0.25. So, 0.25 is generally applicable in BSA-seq. Small pool proportion can greatly reduce the power and precision. Imbalance of pool pair in size also causes decrease of the power and precision. Additive effect is more important than dominance effect for QTL mapping. Increasing the generation of filial population produced by selfing can significantly increase the power and precision, especially from F2 to F3. These findings enable researchers to optimize the experimental design for BSA-seq. A web-based program named BSA-seq Design Tool is available at http://124.71.74.135/BSA-seqDesignTool/ and https://github.com/huanglikun/BSA-seqDesignTool., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America.)

The sludge resource utilization and the high value-added development are environmentally friendly means for sludge treatment. With its rich organic substances and metals content, sludge can replace activated carbon and become a widely used carbon-based material, such as sludge-based activated carbon (SBAC). Meanwhile, as a heterogeneous catalyst, sludge-based catalyst (SBC) can solve the requirements of traditional Fenton catalysts for pH, metal ion leaching, and catalyst recycling. In this paper, combining the properties of SBAC/SBCs, the characteristics of the three methods of activation, support, and hydrothermal preparation of SBAC/SBCs are reviewed. In general, it is necessary to select an appropriate preparation method based on pollutants and environmental treatment goals. Furthermore, compared with other catalysts, SBC heterogeneous oxidation has obvious advantages in refractory organic pollutants. And the reaction mechanism usually involves SO 4 · - , ·OH, O 2 · - , and 1 O 2 processes. Finally, some possible directions for future research involving environmentally friendly SBAC/SBCs are proposed., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

In recent years, there have been many studies on treating pollutants with ultraviolet-activated persulfate (UV/PDS) system. In this paper, the biochemical treatment effluent of landfill leachate from garbage incineration power plant was treated. The effect of treating landfill leachate with UV/PDS system in the low-pressure external device and medium-pressure built-in device was compared; it was concluded that in the latter device, the photon quantity increased, the energy loss decreased, and the probability of generating free radicals in the reaction between photons and S 2 O 8 2- increased, which result the treatment efficiency of this system was higher. In addition, the leachate was treated by combining the activation method of spinel composite (CuO-MgAl 2 O 4 ) with UV activation method, called CuO-MgAl 2 O 4 /UV/PDS. The experimental data showed that the processing effect of segmented dosing PDS process was higher than that of one-time addition process. Under the same conditions, the removal rates of CODcr were 83.10% and 19.76%, respectively. One of the reasons for this result may be that excessive PDS in CuO-MgAl 2 O 4 /PDS system of the latter process inhibited the treatment effect. This paper analyzes the efficiency of UV/PDS system, as well as CuO-MgAl 2 O 4 /UV/PDS combination process which were used to treat landfill leachate under different conditions; the results showed that the medium-pressure built-in device and segmented-dosing process could get better treatment effect., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Antibody arrays have been widely applied in both basic research and clinical studies. Data analysis, archiving, and sharing of resulting data are very important for exploring and expanding the power of antibody microarray studies. The protein microarray database (PMD) has provided standards tailored for the management of protein microarray data and constructed an automated pipeline for array data analysis. In this chapter, we will describe the framework design, platform construction, and analysis tool integration of the PMD.

Goldfish have been subjected to over 1,000 y of intensive domestication and selective breeding. In this report, we describe a high-quality goldfish genome (2n = 100), anchoring 95.75% of contigs into 50 pseudochromosomes. Comparative genomics enabled us to disentangle the two subgenomes that resulted from an ancient hybridization event. Resequencing 185 representative goldfish variants and 16 wild crucian carp revealed the origin of goldfish and identified genomic regions that have been shaped by selective sweeps linked to its domestication. Our comprehensive collection of goldfish varieties enabled us to associate genetic variations with a number of well-known anatomical features, including features that distinguish traditional goldfish clades. Additionally, we identified a tyrosine-protein kinase receptor as a candidate causal gene for the first well-known case of Mendelian inheritance in goldfish-the transparent mutant. The goldfish genome and diversity data offer unique resources to make goldfish a promising model for functional genomics, as well as domestication., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.

An aerobic moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) was applied to treat landfill leachate generated from a domestic waste incineration plant. Pollutant removal efficiency of this reactor under stable operating condition was studied. The biomass, bacteria species, and microbial metabolism in this reactor were investigated. These results showed that the average removal efficiency of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen in the aerobic MBBR achieved 64% and 97% in the optimum conditions, respectively. The three-dimensional fluorescence spectrum revealed that the content of soluble microbial byproducts from extracellular polymeric substances extraction in suspended sludge was much higher than that on biofilm, and the types of pollutants were various in different regions of the reactor. It also indicated that the MBBR system had a stable, rich and regular microorganism community, including large amounts of nitrifying bacteria and denitrifying bacteria. Scanning electron microscopy suggested that biofilm attached to the packing provided a good anoxic-aerobic micro environment system to achieve a high metabolic activity, which favored COD and ammonia removal.

The uncontrolled release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and the adverse health effects on the public have been of increasing concern. In this study, a lab-scale bioreactor was prepared to analyze the mass distribution of three aromatic (benzene, toluene, and xylenes) and four chlorinated VOCs (chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, trichloroethylene, and tetrachloroethylene) among the air, water and sludge phases in wastewater treatment processes. The VOC distribution through a full-scale WWTP in northern China was further investigated with respect to the effects of seasonal temperature variations and treatment technologies, followed by the cancer risk assessment using a steady-state Gaussian plume model (Industrial Source Complex) to simulate the atmospheric behaviors of the VOCs emitted from the WWTP. It was found that three aromatic hydrocarbons, notably benzene, were more readily released from the wastewater into the atmosphere, whereas the chlorinated compounds except chloroform were mainly present in the water phase through the treatment processes. The primary clarifier was the technology releasing high levels of VOCs into the atmosphere from the wastewater. The extents of volatilization or biodegradation, two important mechanisms to remove VOCs from wastewater, appeared to be determined by the physicochemical characteristics of the compounds, as the influence of treatment technologies (e.g., aeration) and seasonal temperature variations was rather limited. More importantly, the people living in the areas even more than 4 km away from the WWTP were still potentially exposed to cancer risks exceeding the regulatory threshold limit. The findings described the complex nature of VOC emissions from WWTPs and quantitatively indicated that the associated health impacts on the public near the WWTPs could be severely underestimated, whereas their treatment efficiencies by wastewater treatment technologies were overestimated. Instead of fully controlling the VOC release from WWTPs, the identification and abatement of important VOC species with regard to the atmospheric emission and health concerns is one possible alternative approach to effectively minimize the environmental and public health impacts by VOCs released from this particular source.