Search

From around the end of the First World War to the mid-1960s, as the voices of the exploited and oppressed black groups were drowned out by white supremacist ideas, black people generally suffered from racial discrimination, and the stereotypes brought about by social essentialism impact of impressions. The construction of identities of marginalized black groups becomes a matter of concern. For Toni Morrison’s novel “Sula”, the existing research has obtained the image analysis of the characters in “Sula”, the symbolic meaning in the novel, the construction of character identity, and the embodiment of traditional culture in “Sula”. However, few studies have combined essentialism and identity construction and Sula’s and Shadracket’s analyses. Therefore, this thesis explores the embodiment of essentialism in “Sula”, as well as Sula and Shadrack’s resistance to essentialism and self-identity construction and combines theoretical analysis and textual analysis. Sula used her unique and heterogeneous behavior to break through the shackles of social essentialism on black women. In contrast to most black women, she constructed her self-identity in a different way from most black women, which can be better understood using Plato’s “cave theory”. Shadrack created “World Suicide Day” to resist the uncertainty of death and the prejudice brought by social essentialism and used Sula as a “mirror” to re-construct his identity, which can be used in Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory to explain.

The X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) allows the analysis of small weakly diffracting protein crystals, but has required very many crystals to obtain good data. Here we use an XFEL to determine the room temperature atomic structure for the smallest cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus polyhedra yet characterized, which we failed to solve at a synchrotron. These protein microcrystals, roughly a micron across, accrue within infected cells. We use a new physical model for XFEL diffraction, which better estimates the experimental signal, delivering a high-resolution XFEL structure (1.75 Å), using fewer crystals than previously required for this resolution. The crystal lattice and protein core are conserved compared with a polyhedrin with less than 10% sequence identity. We explain how the conserved biological phenotype, the crystal lattice, is maintained in the face of extreme environmental challenge and massive evolutionary divergence. Our improved methods should open up more challenging biological samples to XFEL analysis.

The gut microbiota is a complex community of microorganisms inhabiting the intestinal tract, which plays a vital role in human health. It is intricately involved in the metabolism, and it also affects diverse physiological processes. The gut–lung axis is a bidirectional pathway between the gastrointestinal tract and the lungs. Recent research has shown that the gut microbiome plays a crucial role in immune response regulation in the lungs and the development of lung diseases. In this review, we present the interrelated factors concerning gut microbiota and the associated metabolites in pulmonary hypertension (PH), a lethal disease characterized by elevated pulmonary vascular pressure and resistance. Our research team explored the role of gut‐microbiota‐derived metabolites in cardiovascular diseases and established the correlation between metabolites such as putrescine, succinate, trimethylamine N‐oxide (TMAO), and N, N, N‐trimethyl‐5‐aminovaleric acid with the diseases. Furthermore, we found that specific metabolites, such as TMAO and betaine, have significant clinical value in PH, suggesting their potential as biomarkers in disease management. In detailing the interplay between the gut microbiota, their metabolites, and PH, we underscored the potential therapeutic approaches modulating this microbiota. Ultimately, we endeavor to alleviate the substantial socioeconomic burden associated with this disease. This review presents a unique exploratory analysis of the link between gut microbiota and PH, intending to propel further investigations in the gut–lung axis. Highlights: The significant development in gut microbiota has brought an unprecedented paradigm for pulmonary hypertension (PH) management in recent years, which has delighted researchers and clinicians in precise disease control.The gut–lung axis is the bidirectional interaction between the gut and lung, which occurs through circulation, the nervous system, and other physiological processes, ultimately affecting the health of both the gut and the lung.We provided a comprehensive landscape of gut microbiota and its associated metabolites in PH, emphasizing the interplay between microorganisms and hosts in modulating PH.With the rapid development of technologies, including metagenomic and metabolomics on gut microbiota, the association of microorganisms and the human body will be untangled eventually, which will bring the dawn for disease cure followed by prognosis improvement among patients with PH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of the storage state of frozen meat, especially meat frozen–thawed several times, has always been important for food safety inspections. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is widely applied to detect the freshness and quality of meat or meat products. This study investigated the feasibility of the low-cost HSI system, combined with the chemometrics method, to classify beef cuts among fresh (F), frozen–stored (F–S), frozen–thawed three times (F–T–3) and frozen–thawed five times (F–T–5). A compact, low-cost HSI system was designed and calibrated for beef sample measurement. The classification model was developed for meat analysis with a method to distinguish fat and muscle, a CARS algorithm to extract the optimal wavelength subset and three classifiers to identify each beef cut among different freezing processes. The results demonstrated that classification models based on feature variables extracted from differentiated tissue spectra achieved better performances, with ACCs of 92.75% for PLS-DA, 97.83% for SVM and 95.03% for BP-ANN. A visualization map was proposed to provide detailed information about the changes in freshness of beef cuts after freeze–thawing. Furthermore, this study demonstrated the potential of implementing a reasonably priced HSI system in the food industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integration of hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA into the human genome is recognized as an oncogenic factor and a barrier to hepatitis B cure. In the study, biopsy liver tissues were collected from adolescents and young adults with acute HBV infection younger than or equal to 35 years of age and from HBV‐infected infant patients younger than or equal to 6 months of age. A high‐throughput sequencing method was used to detect HBV DNA integration. Totally, 12 adolescents, young adults, and 6 infants were included. Among the 12 patients with acute HBV infection, immunohistochemical staining of intrahepatic hepatitis B surface antigen for all displayed negative results, and no HBV DNA integrants in the hepatocyte DNA were confirmed. All infant patients had elevated levels of alanine aminotransferase and high levels of serum HBV DNA. Numerous gene sites of hepatocyte DNA were integrated by HBV DNA for each infant patient, ranging from 120 to 430 integration sites. The fragile histidine triad gene was the high‐frequency integrated site in the intragenic region for infant patients. In conclusion, hepatocyte DNA is integrated by HBV DNA in babies with active hepatitis B but seems seldom affected among adolescents and young adults with acute HBV infection. Infantile hepatitis B should be taken seriously considering abundant HBV DNA integration events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blast furnace ironmaking process monitoring is an important and challenging task. Due to the influence of hot blast stove switching and large fluctuations in the quality of raw materials, the measurements of ironmaking processes show obvious non‐stationary characteristics, and in addition, the observed data are also characterized by time‐series dynamic and non‐Gaussian characteristics. In this paper, a dynamic stationary subspace analysis method based on the Gaussian mixture model (DSSA–GMM) is proposed to address the difficulties in blast furnace ironmaking process monitoring. The time‐series dynamic relationship of the data is conducted by introducing a sliding time window. The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to deal with the non‐Gaussian characteristics of the data, and the parameters of the GMMs are estimated using the expectation–maximization algorithm. The stationary projection matrix is obtained by optimizing the Kullback–Leibler (K–L) divergence between GMMs of different periods to realize the stationary subspace separation. Finally, the convex hull of the stationary subspace is established for fault detection, thus realizing the monitoring for non‐stationary and non‐Gaussian dynamic processes. The effectiveness of the DSSA–GMM method is verified by a numerical simulation and a dataset collected from an actual blast furnace ironmaking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]