Search

The complex pore throat characteristics are significant factors that control the properties of tight sandstone reservoirs. Due to the strong heterogeneity of the pore structure in tight reservoirs, it is difficult to characterize the pore structure by single methods. To determine the pore throat, core, casting thin sections, micrographs from scanning electron microscopy, rate-controlled mercury injection, and high-pressure mercury injection were performed in member 2 of Xujiahe Formation of Yingshan gasfield, Sichuan, China. The pore throat characteristics were quantitatively characterized, and the distribution of pore throat at different scales and its controlling effect on reservoir physical properties were discussed. The results show that there are mainly residual intergranular pores, intergranular dissolved pores, ingranular dissolved pores, intergranular pores, and micro-fractures in the second member of the Xujiahe Formation tight sandstone reservoir. The distribution range of pore throat is 0.018–10 μm, and the radius of pore throat is less than 1 μm. The ranges of pore radius were between 100 and 200 μm, the peak value ranges from 160 to 180 μm, and the pore throat radius ranges from 0.1 to 0.6 μm. With the increase of permeability, the distribution range of throat radius becomes wider, and the single peak throat radius becomes larger, showing the characteristic of right skew. The large throat of the sandy conglomerate reservoir has an obvious control effect on permeability, but little influence on porosity. The contribution rate of nano-sized pore throat to permeability is small, ranging from 3.29 to 34.67%. The contribution rate of porosity was 48.86–94.28%. Therefore, pore throat characteristics are used to select high-quality reservoirs, which can guide oil and gas exploration and development of tight sandstone reservoirs.

Background: P-element induced wimpy testis (PIWI)-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are the most mysterious class of small non-coding RNAs. They limit gene expression in gonads and sequence diversity. Dysregulated piRNAs can led to all kinds of cancers. Recently, piRNAs were postulated to be potentially useful biomarkers for tumor diagnosis and prognosis. However, there lack a systematic review of prognostic and diagnostic piRNAs in neoplasms. The study aimed to decipher the relationships between piRNAs expression, diagnostic and prognostic outcome in tumors. Methods: This study systematically searched Google Scholar, MEDLINE, Scopus, PubMed, Embase, ScienceDirect, Ovid-Medline, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, WanFang and SinoMed databases for relevant articles published before July 13, 2022. The study is registered in PROSPERO (CRD42020208717). Results: Thirty relevant studies were included in the meta-analysis: 19 on diagnosis and 23 on prognosis. The pooled adds ratio, 95% confidence intervals (Cl) and hazard ratios (HR) of the studies were used to investigate the clinical parameters and overall survival (OS) of cancer patients. The area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity was 0.82, 79%, and 77% in tumors, respectively. Though abnormally expressed piRNAs were associated with poor and unfavorable impacts on the OS time of cancer patients (HR=1.00, 95% Cl: 1.00-1.00, P

Based on a self-terminating gate recess etching technique, we successfully fabricated a high-breakdown-voltage and high-threshold-voltage normally-off SiN/AlN/GaN-on-Si metal-insulator-semiconductor-field-effect-transistor (MIS-FET) with optimized PEALD-AlN (plasma-enhance-atomic-layer-deposition) protection layer and in situ NH3 pre-treatment. Compared with thermal-ALD-AlN, the PEALD-AlN protection layer could form a lower interface state density with the GaN channel. Moreover, the in situ NH3 pre-treatment performed in the PEALD system prior to PEALD-AlN deposition could further improve the interface quality. Using in situ NH3 pre-treatment and a PEALD-AlN protection layer, the fabricated SiN/AlN/GaN-on-Si MIS-FET exhibits a high-threshold-voltage of 2.60 V at I D of 1 μA mm−1 (6.57 V by linear extrapolation) and a high-breakdown-voltage of 1775 V.

Internal tandem duplication (ITD) of FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 (FLT3-ITD) constitutes an independent indicator of poor prognosis in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). AML with FLT3-ITD usually presents with poor treatment outcomes, high recurrence rate and short overall survival. Currently, polymerase chain reaction and capillary electrophoresis are widely adopted for the clinical detection of FLT3-ITD, whereas the length and mutation frequency of ITD are evaluated using fragment analysis. With the development of sequencing technology and the high incidence of FLT3-ITD mutations, a multitude of bioinformatics tools and pipelines have been developed to detect FLT3-ITD using next-generation sequencing data. However, systematic comparison and evaluation of the methods or software have not been performed. In this study, we provided a comprehensive review of the principles, functionality and limitations of the existing methods for detecting FLT3-ITD. We further compared the qualitative and quantitative detection capabilities of six representative tools using simulated and biological data. Our results will provide practical guidance for researchers and clinicians to select the appropriate FLT3-ITD detection tools and highlight the direction of future developments in this field. Availability: A Docker image with several programs pre-installed is available at https://github.com/niu-lab/docker-flt3-itd to facilitate the application of FLT3-ITD detection tools.

Motivation: Microsatellite instability (MSI) is a promising biomarker for cancer prognosis and chemosensitivity. Techniques are rapidly evolving for the detection of MSI from tumor-normal paired or tumor-only sequencing data. However, tumor tissues are often insufficient, unavailable, or otherwise difficult to procure. Increasing clinical evidence indicates the enormous potential of plasma circulating cell-free DNA (cfNDA) technology as a noninvasive MSI detection approach. Results: We developed MSIsensor-ct, a bioinformatics tool based on a machine learning protocol, dedicated to detecting MSI status using cfDNA sequencing data with a potential stable MSIscore threshold of 20%. Evaluation of MSIsensor-ct on independent testing datasets with various levels of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and sequencing depth showed 100% accuracy within the limit of detection (LOD) of 0.05% ctDNA content. MSIsensor-ct requires only BAM files as input, rendering it user-friendly and readily integrated into next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis pipelines. Availability: MSIsensor-ct is freely available at https://github.com/niu-lab/MSIsensor-ct. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Briefings in Bioinformatics online.

Developing cost-effective and high-efficiency electrocatalysts toward alkaline oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is crucial for water splitting. Amorphous bimetallic NiFe-based (oxy)hydroxides have excellent OER activity under alkaline media, but their poorly electrical conductivity impedes the further improvement of their catalytic performance. Herein, a bimetallic NiFe-based heterostructure electrocatalyst that is composed of amorphous NiFe(OH)x and crystalline pyrite (Ni, Fe)Se2 nanosheet arrays is designed and constructed. The catalyst exhibits an outstanding OER performance, only requiring low overpotentials of 180, 220, and 230 mV at the current density of 10, 100, and 300 mA cm-2 and a low Tafel slope of 42 mV dec-1 in 1 m KOH, which is among the state-of-the-art OER catalysts. Based on the experimental and theoretical results, the electronic coupling at the interface that leads to the increased electrical conductivity and the optimized adsorption free energies of the oxygen-contained intermediates plays a crucial role in enhancing the OER activities. This work focusing on improving the OER performance via engineering amorphous-crystalline bimetallic heterostructure may provide some inspiration for reasonably designing advanced electrocatalysts.

We previously reported the importance of the serum response factor (SRF) cofactor myocardin in controlling muscle gene expression as well as the fundamental role for the inflammatory transcription factor NF-κB in governing cellular fate. Inactivation of myocardin has been implicated in malignant tumor growth. However, the underlying mechanism of myocardin regulation of cellular growth remains unclear. Here we show that NF-κB(p65) represses myocardin activation of cardiac and smooth muscle genes in a CArG-box-dependent manner. Consistent with their functional interaction, p65 directly interacts with myocardin and inhibits the formation of the myocardin/SRF/CArG ternary complex in vitro and in vivo . Conversely, myocardin decreases p65-mediated target gene activation by interfering with p65 DNA binding and abrogates LPS-induced TNF-α expression. Importantly, myocardin inhibits cellular proliferation by interfering with NF-κB-dependent cell-cycle regulation. Cumulatively, these findings identify a function for myocardin as an SRF-independent transcriptional repressor and cell-cycle regulator and provide a molecular mechanism by which interaction between NF-κB and myocardin plays a central role in modulating cellular proliferation and differentiation.