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In this work, we developed a rapid and high-sensitivity method for simultaneous analyses of fatty alcohols, fatty aldehydes, and sterols by combining the optimized derivatization reaction with electrospray ionization-ion mobility-mass spectrometry (ESI-IM-MS). Pyridine and thionyl chloride were used as derivatization reagents as they were easily removed after the derivatization reaction and could generate permanently charged tags on different functional groups including hydroxyls and aldehydes. Through this one-step derivatization reaction, the sensitivity of detection for fatty alcohols, fatty aldehydes, and sterols was significantly increased. Moreover, the introduction of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS), offering an additional resolution power, ensured more sensitive and accurate detection of derivative products without increasing analytical time. Being connected with high-performance liquid chromatography, more than 15 kinds of compounds were analyzed within 4 min. Relative quantification using peak intensity ratios between d 0-/d 5-labeled ions were subsequently applied for analyzing these 15 kinds of compounds in human thyroid carcinoma and para-carcinoma tissues. The results showed significant differences in content of some analytes between these two kinds of tissues (p < 0.05). The correlations between most of the analytes in thyroid carcinoma tissues are better than the correlations in para-carcinoma tissues.

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We analyze the uncertainties induced by different definitions of the momentum fraction z in the application of gluon to heavy quarkonium fragmentation function. We numerically calculate the initial g → J/ψ fragmentation functions by using the non-covariant definitions of z with finite gluon momentum and find that these fragmentation functions have strong dependence on the gluon momentum k. As | k| → ∞, these fragmentation functions approach to the fragmentation function in the light-cone definition. Our numerical results show that large uncertainties remains while the non-covariant definitions of z are employed in the application of the fragmentation functions. We present for the first time the polarized gluon to J/ψ fragmentation functions, which are fitted by the scheme exploited in this work.

Edge computing provides physical resources closer to end users, becoming a good complement to cloud computing.With the rapid development of container technology and microservice architecture, container orchestration has become a hot issue. However, the container-based microservice scheduling problem in edge computing is still urgent to be solved. In this paper, we first formulate the containerbased microservice scheduling as a multi-objective optimization problem, aiming to optimize network latency among microservices, reliability of microservice applications and load balancing of the cluster. We further propose a latency, reliability and load balancing aware scheduling (LRLBAS) algorithm to determine the container-based microservice deployment in edge computing. Our proposed algorithm is based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). In addition, we give a handling strategy to separate the fitness function from constraints, so that each particle has two fitness values. In the proposed algorithm, a new particle comparison criterion is introduced and a certain proportion of infeasible particles are reserved adaptively. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm compared with other related algorithms.

Enteroendocrine (EE) cells are the most abundant hormone-producing cells in humans and are critical regulators of energy homeostasis and gastrointestinal function. Challenges in converting human intestinal stem cells (ISCs) into functional EE cells, ex vivo, have limited progress in elucidating their role in disease pathogenesis and in harnessing their therapeutic potential. To address this, we employed small molecule targeting of the endocannabinoid receptor signaling pathway, JNK, and FOXO1, known to mediate endodermal development and/or hormone production, together with directed differentiation of human ISCs from the duodenum and rectum. We observed marked induction of EE cell differentiation and gut-derived expression and secretion of SST, 5HT, GIP, CCK, GLP-1 and PYY upon treatment with various combinations of three small molecules: rimonabant, SP600125 and AS1842856. Robust differentiation strategies capable of driving human EE cell differentiation is a critical step towards understanding these essential cells and the development of cell-based therapeutics.

To facilitate early-stage life-cycle techno-economic modeling of emerging technologies, here we identify scaling relations between unit price and sales quantity for a variety of chemical products of three categories -metal salts, organic compounds, and solvents. We collect price quotations for lab-scale and bulk purchases of chemicals from both U.S. and Chinese suppliers. We apply a log-log linear regression model to estimate the price discount effect. Using the median discount factor of each category, one can infer bulk prices of products for which only lab-scale prices are available. We conduct out-of-sample tests showing that most of the price proxies deviate from their actual reference prices by a factor less than ten. We also apply the bootstrap method to determine if a sample median discount factor should be accepted for price approximation. We find that appropriate discount factors for metal salts and for solvents are both -0.56, while that for organic compounds is -0.67 and is less representative due to greater extent of product heterogeneity within this category.