Search

Abstract CF2-containing compounds hold significant potential in drug discovery, organic synthesis, and materials science. However, synthesizing various CF2-containing building blocks from a single compound remains challenging. Here, we present a Cu-catalyzed, switchable defluoroborylation and hydrodefluorination of trifluoromethylated alkynes, yielding four types of CF2-containing compounds. The chemo- and regio-selective sp2/sp3 1,2-diborylation and sp2 monoborylation of 1-(trifluoromethyl)alkynes are controlled by adjusting the solvent and ligand quantity. Additionally, altering the base allows selective generation of gem-difluoroalkenes or difluoromethylalkenes. Notably, our method prevents over-defluorination of the CF3 group on unsaturated C-C bonds during nucleophilic additions, preserving the pharmaceutically valuable CF2 group. Experimental data and density functional theory (DFT) calculations elucidate the regioselectivities of Cu-Bpin addition and the regulatory role of the ligand in selective deborylation processes.

Abstract Background The deep sea represents the largest marine ecosystem, driving global-scale biogeochemical cycles. Microorganisms are the most abundant biological entities and play a vital role in the cycling of organic matter in such ecosystems. The primary food source for abyssal biota is the sedimentation of particulate organic polymers. However, our knowledge of the specific biopolymers available to deep-sea microbes remains largely incomplete. One crucial rate-limiting step in organic matter cycling is the depolymerization of particulate organic polymers facilitated by extracellular enzymes (EEs). Therefore, the investigation of active EEs and the microbes responsible for their production is a top priority to better understand the key nutrient sources for deep-sea microbes. Results In this study, we conducted analyses of extracellular enzymatic activities (EEAs), metagenomics, and metatranscriptomics from seawater samples of 50–9305 m from the Mariana Trench. While a diverse array of microbial groups was identified throughout the water column, only a few exhibited high levels of transcriptional activities. Notably, microbial populations actively transcribing EE genes involved in biopolymer processing in the abyssopelagic (4700 m) and hadopelagic zones (9305 m) were primarily associated with the class Actinobacteria. These microbes actively transcribed genes coding for enzymes such as cutinase, laccase, and xyloglucanase which are capable of degrading phytoplankton polysaccharides as well as GH23 peptidoglycan lyases and M23 peptidases which have the capacity to break down peptidoglycan. Consequently, corresponding enzyme activities including glycosidases, esterase, and peptidases can be detected in the deep ocean. Furthermore, cell-specific EEAs increased at 9305 m compared to 4700 m, indicating extracellular enzymes play a more significant role in nutrient cycling in the deeper regions of the Mariana Trench. Conclusions Transcriptomic analyses have shed light on the predominant microbial population actively participating in organic matter cycling in the deep-sea environment of the Mariana Trench. The categories of active EEs suggest that the complex phytoplankton polysaccharides (e.g., cutin, lignin, and hemicellulose) and microbial peptidoglycans serve as the primary nutrient sources available to deep-sea microbes. The high cell-specific EEA observed in the hadal zone underscores the robust polymer-degrading capacities of hadal microbes even in the face of the challenging conditions they encounter in this extreme environment. These findings provide valuable new insights into the sources of nutrition, the key microbes, and the EEs crucial for biopolymer degradation in the deep seawater of the Mariana Trench. Video Abstract

Abstract Background Malformations of cortical development (MCD) are a group of congenital disorders characterized by structural abnormalities in the brain cortex. The clinical manifestations include refractory epilepsy, mental retardation, and cognitive impairment. Genetic factors play a key role in the etiology of MCD. Currently, there is no curative treatment for MCD. Phenotypes such as epilepsy and cerebral palsy cannot be observed in the fetus. Therefore, the diagnosis of MCD is typically based on fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, or genetic testing. The recent advances in neuroimaging have enabled the in‐utero diagnosis of MCD using fetal ultrasound or MRI. Methods The present study retrospectively reviewed 32 cases of fetal MCD diagnosed by ultrasound or MRI. Then, the chromosome karyotype analysis, single nucleotide polymorphism array or copy number variation sequencing, and whole‐exome sequencing (WES) findings were presented. Results Pathogenic copy number variants (CNVs) or single‐nucleotide variants (SNVs) were detected in 22 fetuses (three pathogenic CNVs [9.4%, 3/32] and 19 SNVs [59.4%, 19/32]), corresponding to a total detection rate of 68.8% (22/32). Conclusion The results suggest that genetic testing, especially WES, should be performed for fetal MCD, in order to evaluate the outcomes and prognosis, and predict the risk of recurrence in future pregnancies.

Rapid and accurate identification and timely protection of crop disease is of great importance for ensuring crop yields. Aiming at the problems of large model parameters of existing crop disease recognition methods and low recognition accuracy in the complex background of the field, we propose a lightweight crop leaf disease recognition model based on improved ShuffleNetV2. First, the repetition number and the number of output channels of the basic module of the ShuffleNetV2 model are redesigned to reduce the model parameters to make the model more lightweight while ensuring the accuracy of the model. Second, the residual structure is introduced in the basic feature extraction module to solve the gradient vanishing problem and enable the model to learn more complex feature representations. Then, parallel paths were added to the mechanism of the efficient channel attention (ECA) module, and the weights of different paths were adaptively updated by learnable parameters, and then the efficient dual channel attention (EDCA) module was proposed, which was embedded into the ShuffleNetV2 to improve the cross-channel interaction capability of the model. Finally, a multi-scale shallow feature extraction module and a multi-scale deep feature extraction module were introduced to improve the model’s ability to extract lesions at different scales. Based on the above improvements, a lightweight crop leaf disease recognition model REM-ShuffleNetV2 was proposed. Experiments results show that the accuracy and F1 score of the REM-ShuffleNetV2 model on the self-constructed field crop leaf disease dataset are 96.72% and 96.62%, which are 3.88% and 4.37% higher than that of the ShuffleNetV2 model; and the number of model parameters is 4.40M, which is 9.65% less than that of the original model. Compared with classic networks such as DenseNet121, EfficientNet, and MobileNetV3, the REM-ShuffleNetV2 model not only has higher recognition accuracy but also has fewer model parameters. The REM-ShuffleNetV2 model proposed in this study can achieve accurate identification of crop leaf disease in complex field backgrounds, and the model is small, which is convenient to deploy to the mobile end, and provides a reference for intelligent diagnosis of crop leaf disease.

ObjectiveTo investigate the level of screen time and gross motor movement level and the correlation between them in left-behind children aged 3 to 6 years old in China.MethodsA randomized whole-group sampling method was used to study 817 left-behind children aged 3-6 years in 15 kindergartens in Xiangcheng city, Henan province. The third version of the Test of Gross Motor Development (TGMD-3) was used to test the children's gross motor movement level, and the screen time questionnaire was used to test the children's screen time level. The relationship between the two and the indicators was explored using Pearson's two-sided correlation and multilevel regression.ResultsThe average daily screen time of left-behind children aged 3-6 years old increased with age, and the reporting rate of >2 h/d ranged from 22.43% to 33.73%; gross motor movement of left-behind children aged 3-6 years old increased with age, with significant differences between age (pConclusionThere is a correlation between screen time and gross motor movement development in children aged 3-6 years old left behind, and the gross motor movement ability of children aged 3-6 years old can be developed by reducing screen time and increasing physical activity.

Androgen receptor (AR) signaling is essential in prostate cancer treatment. For many years, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) has been primarily applied to manage advanced prostate cancer. However, most individuals with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) administered ADT alone are at risk of developing metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) in less than two years. New approaches employing novel AR inhibitors (ARi) as intensified upfront systemic treatment in mHSPC have recently demonstrated substantial benefits in delaying disease progression and prolonging overall survival. Administration of novel ARi has become the new standard of care in mHSPC. The new landscape simultaneously makes treatment choice more challenging. This review provides comprehensive data on molecular structure, pharmaceutical properties, and efficacy and safety profiles reported by pivotal clinical trials. We also discuss future directions with ongoing Phase III trials of novel ARi in mHSPC. Considering these biological and clinical insights, this review aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of differences in the development and applications of novel ARi for mHSPC, which may be helpful in designing strategies for first-line treatment choices.

The degradation of high molecular weight organic matter (HMWOM) is a core process of oceanic carbon cycle, which is determined by the activity of microbial communities harboring hundreds of different species. Illustrating the active microbes and their interactions during HMWOM processing can provide key information for revealing the relationship between community composition and its ecological functions. In this study, the genomic and transcriptional responses of microbial communities to the availability of alginate, an abundant HMWOM in coastal ecosystem, were elucidated. The main degraders transcribing alginate lyase (Aly) genes came from genera Alteromonas, Psychrosphaera and Colwellia. Meanwhile, some strains, mainly from the Rhodobacteraceae family, did not transcribe Aly gene but could utilize monosaccharides to grow. The co-culture experiment showed that the activity of Aly-producing strain could promote the growth of Aly-non-producing strain when alginate was the sole carbon source. Interestingly, this interaction did not reduce the alginate degradation rate, possibly due to the easily degradable nature of alginate. This study can improve our understanding of the relationship between microbial community activity and alginate metabolism function as well as further manipulation of microbial community structure for alginate processing.

Although there are several treatments available for gastric cancer (GC), the prognosis of the disease is still poor due to many factors, such as late diagnosis and tumor heterogeneity. To identify potential therapeutic targets, bioinformatics techniques and clinical sample validation were employed and prostate transmembrane protein androgen induced 1 (PMEPA1) was selected for further study. In the present study, we found that elevated PMEPA1 expression correlates with a worse prognosis and weaker anti-tumor immunity in GC patients. Moreover, our study showed that PMEPA1 not only influences cell proliferation, clone formation, invasion, and migration in vitro, but also plays an important role in GC progression in vivo. Mechanically, PMEPA1 exerts its oncogenic effects through activating the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. Therefore, PMEPA1 is a potential target for treating GC effectively.

Objective To evaluate the clinical value of ultra-wide-field scanning laser ophthalmology(UWF-SLO) in tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC)-associated retinal astrocytic hamartoma (RAH) by comparing the detection rate of RAH lesions between UWF-SLO and traditional color fundus photography (CFP). Methods The clinical data of patients with established TSC-associated RAH diagnosis by the Department of Internal Medicine and Ophthalmology of Peking Union Medical College Hospital from October 2018 to March 2021 were retrospectively reviewed. The detection rate of TSC-associated RAH lesions between 9-fixation-point CFP and UWF-SLO was compared with fundoscopic recordings as the reference standard. The factors that may affect the detection of lesions were analyzed. Results A total of 24 patients with TSC-associated RAH were included in this study. UWF-SLO (composed pseudocolor dual-channel images) performed better than 9-fixation-point CFP in the identification of TSC-associated RAH lesions[98.6%(138/140)vs. 65.7%(92/140), P < 0.001], especially for RAH lesions located in the mid and far peripheral retina (P < 0.001). In UWF-SLO, red-channel (633 nm) images showed significantly lower detection rate than green-channel (532 nm) [52.1% (73/140) vs. 98.6% (138/140), P < 0.001] and composed dual-channel images[52.1%(73/140) vs. 98.6%(138/140), P < 0.001]. Undetected RAH lesions in red-channel UWF-SLO images were all type 1 RAH, and the lession thickness was significantly higher in the detected group than that in the undetected group [(527.3±134.7)μm vs. (389.7±76.6)μm, P < 0.001], while the location and retinal involving depth of type 1 RAH were not significantly different(P=0.812, P=1.000). Conclusions Compared to CFP, UWF-SLO may be associated with higher detection rate of TSC-associated RAH and could be applied to the evaluation of TSC-associated RAH.

Background: Industrial production is increasingly reliant upon recombinant microorganisms across sectors. Therefore, it is of great importance for long-term operational viability that care be taken in optimizing the preparation of operationally key organisms. In electrotransformations, low-frequency electric field pulses increase yeast cell viability but decreases their transmembrane of recombinant DNA vectors. Herein, we investigated the optimal parameters for transforming pGAPZαA-CecMd3cs into Pichia pastoris GS115 and obtaining the efficient production of recombinant cells of interest. Results: For an initial experiment, we utilized a single-factor experimental design to perform the electroporation and measure the vector transformation efficiency in triplicate, identified three out of five voltages (250–350 V), pulse durations (9–17 ms), and pulse frequencies (1–5 pulses) as candidate values for further analysis. Based on this data, we obtained the optimal value for each parameter by utilizing Box–Behnken of response surface methodology statistical modelling. We found that under a fixed voltage, the primary factors affecting electrotransformation efficiency were pulse duration and frequency. Furthermore, we identified synergistic interactions between pulse length and voltage and between pulse length and frequency. Conclusions: The optimal parameters for electroporation are 275 V and 3 pulses of a 15-ms duration. We bioinformatically determined the optimal transformation parameters.How to cite: Zhang C, Du J, Tang X, et al. Electrotransformation optimization of plasmid pGAPZαA - CecMd3cs into Pichia pastoris GS115 with response surface methodology. Electron J Biotechnol 2022;61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejbt.2022.11.002

Seamounts are important components of seafloor topography and have a significant influence on the biogeographic distribution of marine microorganisms. However, current studies on the biogeographic distribution patterns of microorganisms in the ocean around seamounts are still inadequate. This study investigated the bacterial and archaeal communities present in the water column at various depths around the Kocebu and M5 seamounts located in the western Pacific Ocean using 16S rRNA gene high-throughput sequencing. The analyses showed that microbial communities had different alpha diversities and species compositions in samples from the same depth, and disruption of vertical stratification of microbes was observed in deep water layers at both seamounts. The stochastic processes dominated the microbial community assembly around two seamounts, for the Kocebu Seamount, drift accounted for 34.99% and 64.85% in the bacterial and archaeal community assembly processes, respectively; while the corresponding values for the M5 Seamount were 14.07% and 58.65%. Despite the low explanatory power of environmental variables for microbial communities, dissolved inorganic nitrogen was the most significant factor influencing the microbial community structure in seawater around seamounts. Overall, our results revealed that the presence of Kocebu and M5 seamounts enhance the vertical mixing of microbial communities in the surrounding seawater, and stochastic processes dominate microbial community assembly. Considering the numerous seamounts in the global ocean, the impacts of seamounts on marine ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles may have been underestimated.

IntroductionSepsis is a common but serious disease in intensive care units, which may induce multiple organ dysfunctions such as liver injury. Previous studies have demonstrated that gamma delta (γδ) T cells play a protective role in sepsis. However, the function and mechanism of γδ T cells in sepsis-induced liver injury have not been fully elucidated. IL-17A-producing γδ T cells are a newly identified cell subtype.MethodsWe utilized IL-17A-deficient mice to investigate the role of IL-17A-producing γδ T cells in sepsis using the cecum ligation and puncture (CLP) model.ResultsOur findings suggested that these cells were the major source of IL-17A and protected against sepsis-induced liver injury. Flow cytometry analysis revealed that these γδ T cells expressed Vγ4 TCR and migrated into liver from peripheral post CLP, in a CCR6-dependent manner. When CLP mice were treated with anti-CCR6 antibody to block CCR6-CCL20 axis, the recruitment of Vγ4+ γδ T cells was abolished, indicating a CCR6-dependent manner of migration. Interestingly, pseudo germ-free CLP mice treated with antibiotics showed that hepatic IL-17A+ γδ T cells were regulated by gut commensal microbes. E. coli alone were able to restore the protective effect in pseudo germ-free mice by rescuing hepatic IL-17A+ γδ T cell population.ConclusionOur research has shown that Vγ4+ IL-17A+ γδ T cells infiltrating into the liver play a crucial role in protecting against sepsis-induced liver injury. This protection was contingent upon the recruitment of CCR6 and regulated by gut commensal microbes.

Purpose: We evaluated the association between ambient particulate matter (PM) exposure and eosinophilic chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP), and predicted the CRSwNP recurrence risk using machine learning algorithms. Methods: In total, 1,086 patients with CRSwNP were recruited from nine hospitals in China during 2014–2019. The average annual concentrations of ambient PMs before surgery were assessed using satellite-based daily concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 for a 1 × 1-km2 area. Linear regression and logistic regression models were used to evaluate the associations of PM exposure with eosinophilia and risks of eosinophilic CRSwNPs. In addition, mediation effect analysis was used to validate the interrelationships of the aforementioned factors. Finally, machine learning algorithms were used to predict the recurrence risks of CRSwNPs. Results: There was a significantly increased risk of eosinophilic CRSwNPs with each 10 μg/m3 increase in PMs, with odds ratios (ORs) of 1.039 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.007–1.073) for PM10 and 1.058 (95% CI = 1.007– 1.112) for PM2.5. Eosinophils had a significant mediation effect, which accounted for 52% and 35% of the relationships of CRSwNP recurrence with PM10 and PM2.5, respectively. Finally, we developed a naïve Bayesian model to predict the risk of CRSwNP recurrence based on PM exposure, inflammatory data, and patients’ demographic factors. Conclusions: Increased PM exposure is associated with an increased risk of eosinophilic CRSwNP in China. Therefore, patients with eosinophilic CRSwNP should reduce PM exposure to mitigate its harmful impacts.

Lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases contribute to microbial degradation of chitin, but how the resulting oxidized chitooligosaccharides are utilized by microbes is unclear. Here, the authors describe a complete pathway for oxidative chitin utilization in marine bacteria.

The metabolic adaptation of Loktanella salsilacus strains to cold involves an increase of enzymes involved in the TCA cycle and preferential use of glucose rather than sucrose at low temperature, providing insights into how Roseobacter adapts in polar regions.

Vision and Language Navigation (VLN) is a task in which an agent needs to understand natural language instructions to reach the target location in a real-scene environment. To improve the model ability of long-horizon planning, emerging research focuses on extending the models with different types of memory structures, mainly including topological maps or a hidden state vector. However, the fixed-length hidden state vector is often insufficient to capture long-term temporal context. In comparison, topological maps have been shown to be beneficial for many robotic navigation tasks. Therefore, we focus on building a feasible and effective topological map representation and using it to improve the navigation performance and the generalization across seen and unseen environments. This paper presents a S elf-organizing Memory based on Adaptive Resonance Theory (SMART) module for incremental topological mapping and a framework for utilizing the SMART module to guide navigation. Based on fusion adaptive resonance theory networks, the SMART module can extract salient scenes from historical observations and build a topological map of the environmental layout. It provides a compact spatial representation and supports the discovery of novel shortcuts through inferences while being explainable in terms of cognitive science. Furthermore, given a language instruction and on top of the topological map, we propose a vision–language alignment framework for navigational decision-making. Notably, the framework utilizes three off-the-shelf pre-trained models to perform landmark extraction, node–landmark matching, and low-level controlling, without any fine-tuning on human-annotated datasets. We validate our approach using the Habitat simulator on VLN-CE tasks, which provides a photo-realistic environment for the embodied agent in continuous action space. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable performance to the supervised baseline.

Geostatistics data in regions always have highly spatial heterogeneous, yet the regional features of the data itself cannot be ignored. In this paper, a novel latent Bayesian spatial model is proposed, which incorporates the spatial dependence of different subjects and the spatial random effects to further analysis the influence of spatial effect. The model is verified to be compatible with the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) framework and is fitted using INLA and stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE). The posterior marginal distribution of parameters is estimated with high precision. Additionally, a practical application of the model is presented using tuberculosis (TB) incidence data in China from 2015 to 2019. The results show that the fitting accuracy of our model is higher than the general Bayesian spatial model using INLA-SPDE.

Objective To explore the effect of wearing bandage contact lenses(BCL) on the clinical symptoms and quality of life of patients after small incision lenticule extraction (SMILE). Methods Patients with myopic or myopic astigmatism who underwent SMILE in Peking Union Medical College Hospital from Januaryto May 2019 were collected. According to the postoperative treatment methods, they were divided into the study group and the control group. The study group wore BCL immediately after SMILE, while the control group wore transparent eye patches routinely. BLC or the transparent eye patch was removed on the first day after surgery. The severity and duration of postoperative pain, photophobia, tearing, blurred vision and other clinical symptoms, the impact of pain on quality of life, postoperative uncorrected visual acuity, non-contact intraocular pressure, spherical equivalent, overall surgical satisfaction were compared between the two groups. Meanwhile, BCL adverse reactions was recorded. Results Severity scores of pain [0.2(0, 1.1) vs. 1.1(0.5, 2.1), P=0.007] and photophobia [1.0(0, 2.0) vs. 2.0(0.8, 2.3), P=0.032] as well as the duration of pain [0(0, 1.0) h vs. 2.0(0, 6.3) h, P=0.014] and photophobia [0(0, 1.0) h vs. 2.0(0, 4.3) h, P=0.006] at 24 h after surgery were significantly lower in the study group than those in the control group. There were no significant differences in the severity scores and duration of tears and blurred vision at 24 h postoperatively between the two groups(all P > 0.05). At 24 h after SMILE, the effects of pain on activity, sleep and the relationship with others were lower in the study group than those in the control group(all P < 0.05). At 7 d postoperatively, the score of overall satisfaction to the surgery of the study group was not significantly different from that of the control group[10.0(9.0, 10.0) vs. 10.0(9.0, 10.0), P=0.617]. There were no significant differences in postoperative uncorrected visual acuity, non-contact intraocular pressure, and spherical equivalent on days 1, 2, and 7 days after SMILE between the two groups (all P > 0.05). BCL related adverse effects (bulbar conjunctival hyperemia) occurred in two patients. The symptoms gradually improved after BCL removal, and the postoperative uncorrected visual acuity recovered to the best-corrected preoperative visual acuity at 7 d after surgery. Conclusions The application of BCL after SMILE can reduce the degree and duration of postoperative pain and photophobia, and improve the postoperative quality of life to a certain extent.

BackgroundThe pathogenesis of urolithiasis remains unclear, making the development of medications for treatment and prevention stagnant. Randall’s plaques (RPs) begin as interstitial calcium phosphate crystal deposits, grow outward and breach the renal papillary surface, acting as attachment for CaOx stones. Since matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) can degrade all components of extracellular matrix (ECM), they might participate in the breach of RPs. Besides, MMPs can modulate the immune response and inflammation, which were confirmed to be involved in urolithiasis. We aimed to investigate the role of MMPs in the development of RPs and stone formation.MethodsThe public dataset GSE73680 was mined to identify differentially expressed MMPs (DEMMPs) between normal tissues and RPs. WGCNA and three machine learning algorithms were performed to screen the hub DEMMPs. In vitro experiments were conducted for validation. Afterwards, RPs samples were classified into clusters based on the hub DEMMPs expression. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between clusters were identified and functional enrichment analysis and GSEA were applied to explore the biological role of DEGs. Moreover, the immune infiltration levels between clusters were evaluated by CIBERSORT and ssGSEA.ResultsFive DEMMPs, including MMP1, MMP3, MMP9, MMP10, and MMP12, were identified between normal tissues and RPs, and all of them were elevated in RPs. Based on WGCNA and three machine learning algorithms, all of five DEMMPs were regarded as hub DEMMPs. In vitro validation found the expression of hub DEMMPs also increased in renal tubular epithelial cells under lithogenic environment. RPs samples were divided into two clusters and cluster A exhibited higher expression of hub DEMMPs compared to cluster B. Functional enrichment analysis and GSEA found DEGs were enriched in immune-related functions and pathways. Moreover, increased infiltration of M1 macrophages and enhanced levels of inflammation were observed in cluster A by immune infiltration analysis.ConclusionWe assumed that MMPs might participate in RPs and stone formation through ECM degradation and macrophages-mediated immune response and inflammation. Our findings offer a novel perspective on the role of MMPs in immunity and urolithiasis for the first time, and provide potential biomarkers to develop targets for treatment and prevention.

BackgroundReasonable and accurate forecasting of outpatient visits helps hospital managers optimize the allocation of medical resources, facilitates fine hospital management, and is of great significance in improving hospital efficiency and treatment capacity.MethodsBased on conjunctivitis outpatient data from the First Affiliated Hospital of Xinjiang Medical University Ophthalmology from 2017/1/1 to 2019/12/31, this paper built and evaluated Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models for outpatient visits prediction.ResultsIn predicting the number of conjunctivitis visits over the next 31 days, the LSTM model had a root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.86 and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.39, the GRU model has an RMSE of 2.60 and an MAE of 1.99.ConclusionsThe GRU method can better predict trends in hospital outpatient flow over time, thus providing decision support for medical staff and outpatient management.

In recent years, the large-scale construction of subways has caused more and more serious dynamic stray current interference on buried oil and gas pipelines nearby.Effective protection of buried pipelines is necessary to reduce the risk of pipeline corrosion.Because the dynamic fluctuation of subway stray current brings difficulties to the actual test and design of protection scheme, there is still a lack of effective protection design methods under the interference of subway dynamic stray current.In this paper, a buried natural gas pipeline interfered by subway stray current was taken as the research object, and the protection design method based on the field drainage test was explored.Firstly, arranging monitoring points in the interfered pipe section, carrying out detailed 24 h continuous monitoring of dynamic DC interference parameters at multiple interfered locations, and finally analyzing the inflow and outflow laws of subway stray current in the interfered pipe section based on the analysis of monitoring data.On this basis, on-site drainage tests at different locations were carried out, and the subway stray current protection scheme for the interfered pipe section was determined based on on-site tests and related calculations.After the implementation of the scheme, the effect was tested and evaluated, results showed that the expected protection effect was achieved.This work could provide reference for the design of protection scheme for buried pipelines under subway stray current interference.

China has the largest apple-growing area and fresh fruit production in the world; however, water shortages and low fertilizer utilization rates have restricted agricultural development. It is a major challenge to obtain scientific and reasonable irrigation and fertilization systems for young apple trees in semi-arid regions of northern China. A 2-year field bucket experiment with four irrigation levels of W1 (75–90% Fs, where Fs is the field water holding capacity), W2 (65–80% Fs), W3 (55–70% Fs), and W4 (45–60% Fs), and three fertilizer levels of F1 (27-9-9 g N-P2O5-K2O), F2 (18-9-9 g N-P2O5-K2O), and F3 (9-9-9 g N-P2O5-K2O) was conducted in 2019 and 2020, so as to explore the effects of different water and fertilizer treatments on the growth and physiological characteristics of young apple trees. The results showed that the plant growth, leaf area, and dry matter of young apple trees at each growing period reached maximum values under F1W2, and they showed a positive linear relationship with relative chlorophyll content (SPAD), net photosynthetic rate (Pn), transpiration rate (Tr), stomatal conductance (Gs), water consumption, and water use efficiency (WUE). With the growth of young apple trees, water-fertilizer coupling could significantly increase the leaf SPAD of young apple trees. Pn, Tr, and Gs reached the maximum value under F1W1, and although they decreased under F1W2, the water use efficiency increased by 2.3–25.7% and 4.0–23.8% under F1W2 compared with other treatments in two years, respectively. The water consumption of young apple trees increased with the increase of irrigation and fertilizer, and both dry matter and water productivity reached the maximum value under F1W2, which increased by 0.8%, 14.6% in 2019, and 0.6%, 11.1% in 2020 compared with F1W1, while water consumption decreased by 12.2% and 9.4% in both years. In conclusion, F1W2 treatment (soil moisture was controlled at 65–80% of field water holding capacity, and N-P2O5-K2O was controlled at 27-9-9 g) was the best coupling mode of water and fertilizer for young apple trees in semi-arid areas of northern China.

In the present paper, the dislocation-precipitate interaction in the Inconel 718 superalloy is studied by means of molecular dynamics simulation. The atomistic model composed of the ellipsoidal Ni3Nb precipitate (γ″ phase) and the Ni matrix is constructed, and tensile tests on the composite Ni3Nb@Ni system along different loading directions are simulated. The dislocation propagation behaviors in the precipitate interior and at the surface of the precipitate are characterized. The results indicate that the dislocation shearing and bypassing simultaneously occur during plastic deformation. The contact position of the dislocation on the surface of the precipitate could affect the penetration depth of the dislocation. The maximum obstacle size, allowing for the dislocation shearing on the slip planes, is found to be close to 20 nm. The investigation of anisotropic plastic deformation behavior shows that the composite system under the loading direction along the major axis of the precipitate experiences stronger shear strain localizations than that with the loading direction along the minor axis of the precipitate. The precipitate size effect is quantified, indicating that the larger the precipitate, the lower the elastic limit of the flow stress of the composite system. The dislocation accumulations in the precipitate are also examined with the dislocation densities given on specific slip systems. These findings provide atomistic insights into the mechanical behavior of nickel-based superalloys with nano-precipitates.