Dalian Polytechnic University

Y Artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with promising machine learning (ML) techniques well known from computer science is broadly affecting many aspects of various fields including science and technology, industry, and even our day-to-day life. The ML techniques have been developed to analyze high-throughput data with a view to obtaining useful insights, categorizing, predicting, and making evidence-based decisions in novel ways, which will promote the growth of novel applications and fuel the sustainable booming of AI. This paper undertakes a comprehensive survey on the development and application of AI in different aspects of fundamental sciences, including information science, mathematics, medical science, materials science, geoscience, life science, physics, and chemistry. The challenges that each discipline of science meets, and the potentials of AI techniques to handle these challenges, are discussed in detail. Moreover, we shed light on new research trends entailing the integration of AI into each scientific discipline. The aim of this paper is to provide a broad research guideline on fundamental sciences with potential infusion of AI, to help motivate researchers to deeply understand the state-of-the-art applications of AI-based fundamental sciences, and thereby to help promote the continuous development of these fundamental sciences.

Obesity is a major global health problem determined by heredity and environment, and its incidence is increasing yearly. In recent years, increasing evidence linking obesity to the gut microbiota has been reported. Gut microbiota management has become a new method of obesity treatment. However, the complex interactions among genetics, environment, the gut microbiota, and obesity remain poorly understood. In this review, we summarize the characteristics of the gut microbiota in obesity, the mechanism of obesity induced by the gut microbiota, and the influence of genetic and environmental factors on the gut microbiota and obesity to provide support for understanding the complex relationship between obesity and microbiota. At the same time, the prospect of obesity research related to the gut microbiota is proposed.

Triacylglycerols are among the most attractive alternative raw materials for biofuel development. Current oil plant-based technologies are limited in terms of triacylglycerol production capacity and rate. These limitations may be circumvented by biotransformation of carbohydrates into lipids; however, our understanding of microbial oleaginicity remains limited. Here we present the results of a multi-omic analysis of Rhodosporidium toruloides, a robust triacylglycerol-producing fungus. The assembly of genome and transcriptome sequencing data reveals a genome of 20.2 Mb containing 8,171 protein-coding genes, the majority of which have multiple introns. Genes including a novel fatty acid synthase are predicted to participate in metabolic pathways absent in non-oleaginous yeasts. Transcriptomic and proteomic data suggest that lipid accumulation under nitrogen-limited conditions correlates with the induction of lipogenesis, nitrogenous compound recycling, macromolecule metabolism and autophagy. The multi-omic map of R. toruloides therefore provides a valuable resource for efforts to rationally engineer lipid-production pathways. The ability of oleaginous fungi to produce lipids for biofuels remains untapped, in part due to a lack of genetic information required to engineer industrial strains. Zhuet al. present the genome of R. toruloides, and identify transcriptomic and proteomic changes associated with lipid production.

Conventional metal–organic framework (MOF) powders have periodic micro/mesoporous crystalline architectures tuned by their three-dimensional coordination of metal nodes and organic linkers. To add practical macroscopic shapeability and extrinsic hierarchical porosity, fibrous MOF aerogels were produced by synthesizing MOF crystals on the template of TEMPO-cellulose nanofibrils. Cellulose nanofibrils not only offered extrinsic porosities and mechanical flexibility for the resultant MOF aerogels, but also shifted the balance of nucleation and growth for synthesizing smaller MOF crystals, and further decreased their aggregation possibilities. Thanks to their excellent shapeability, hierarchical porosity up to 99%, and low density below 0.1 g/cm3, these MOF aerogels could make the most of their pores and accessible surface areas for higher adsorption capacity and rapid adsorption kinetics of different molecules, in sharp contrast to conventional MOF powders. Thus, this scalable and low-cost production pathway is able to convert MOF powders into a shapeable and flexible form and thereby extend their applications in more broad fields, for example, adapting a conventional filtration setup.

Lignin is a primary component of lignocellulosic biomass and an underutilized feedstock in the growing pulping and biofuel industries. Currently, over 50 million tons of industrial lignin are produced annually from pulping and bioethanol processes in the world. Around 95 % of industrial lignin is burned as fuel in heat and power plants due to its complicated, destructive, and condensed structures hindering direct industrial utilization, while the remaining 5 % of lignin is used for potential applications, such as additives, binders, dispersants, and surfactants, through modification. Meanwhile, different biorefinery processes also produce a considerable amount of lignin with various structural features and properties. The development of technologies for its structural characterization is currently desirable for lignin valorization, which will improve the techno-economics of applications of lignins in industries.

Selective oxidation of alcohols is a fundamental and significant transformation for the large-scale production of fine chemicals, UV and visible light driven photocatalytic systems for alcohol oxidation have been developed, however, the long wavelength near infrared (NIR) and infrared (IR) light have not yet fully utilized by the present photocatalytic systems. Herein, we reported carbon quantum dots (CQDs) can function as an effective near infrared (NIR) light driven photocatalyst for the selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol to benzaldehyde. Based on the NIR light driven photo-induced electron transfer property and its photocatalytic activity for H2O2 decomposition, this metal-free catalyst could realize the transformation from benzyl alcohol to benzaldehyde with high selectivity (100%) and conversion (92%) under NIR light irradiation. HO˙ is the main active oxygen specie in benzyl alcohol selective oxidative reaction confirmed by terephthalic acid photoluminescence probing assay (TA-PL), selecting toluene as the substrate. Such metal-free photocatalytic system also selectively converts other alcohol substrates to their corresponding aldehydes with high conversion, demonstrating a potential application of accessing traditional alcohol oxidation chemistry.

With the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, the available options for treating bacterial infections have become very limited, and the search for a novel general antibacterial therapy has received much greater attention. Quorum quenching can be used to control disease in a quorum sensing system by triggering the pathogenic phenotype. The interference with the quorum sensing system by the quorum quenching enzyme is a potential strategy for replacing traditional antibiotics because the quorum quenching strategy does not aim to kill the pathogen or limit cell growth but to shut down the expression of the pathogenic gene. Quorum quenching enzymes have been identified in quorum sensing and non-quorum sensing microbes, including lactonase, acylase, oxidoreductase and paraoxonase. Lactonase is widely conserved in a range of bacterial species and has variable substrate spectra. The existence of quorum quenching enzymes in the quorum sensing microbes can attenuate their quorum sensing, leading to blocking unnecessary gene expression and pathogenic phenotypes. In this review, we discuss the physiological function of quorum quenching enzymes in bacterial infection and elucidate the enzymatic protection in quorum sensing systems for host diseases and their application in resistance against microbial diseases.

With the incessant fluctuations in oil prices and increasing stress from environmental pollution, renewed attention is being paid to the microbial production of biofuels from renewable sources. As a gasoline substitute, butanol has advantages over traditional fuel ethanol in terms of energy density and hygroscopicity. A variety of cheap substrates have been successfully applied in the production of biobutanol, highlighting the commercial potential of biobutanol development. In this review, in order to better understand the process of acetone-butanol-ethanol production, traditional clostridia fermentation is discussed. Sporulation is probably induced by solvent formation, and the molecular mechanism leading to the initiation of sporulation and solventogenesis is also investigated. Different strategies are employed in the metabolic engineering of clostridia that aim to enhancing solvent production, improve selectivity for butanol production, and increase the tolerance of clostridia to solvents. However, it will be hard to make breakthroughs in the metabolic engineering of clostridia for butanol production without gaining a deeper understanding of the genetic background of clostridia and developing more efficient genetic tools for clostridia. Therefore, increasing attention has been paid to the metabolic engineering of E. coli for butanol production. The importation and expression of a non-clostridial butanol-producing pathway in E. coli is probably the most promising strategy for butanol biosynthesis. Due to the lower butanol titers in the fermentation broth, simultaneous fermentation and product removal techniques have been developed to reduce the cost of butanol recovery. Gas stripping is the best technique for butanol recovery found so far.

Compressible and elastic carbon aerogels (CECAs) hold great promise for applications in wearable electronics and electronic skins. MXenes, as new two-dimensional materials with extraordinary properties, are promising materials for piezoresistive sensors. However, the lack of sufficient interaction among MXene nanosheets makes it difficult to employ them to fabricate CECAs. Herein, a lightweight CECA is fabricated by using bacterial cellulose fiber as a nanobinder to connect MXene (Ti3C2) nanosheets into continuous and wave-shaped lamellae. The lamellae are highly flexible and elastic, and the oriented alignment of these lamellae results in a CECA with super compressibility and elasticity. Its ultrahigh structural stability can withstand an extremely high strain of 99% for more than 100 cycles and long-term compression at 50% strain for at least 100 000 cycles. Furthermore, it has a high sensitivity that demonstrates not only an ultrahigh linearity but also a broad working pressure range (0–10 kPa). In particular, the CECA has a high linear sensitivity in almost the entire workable strain range (0–95%). In addition, it has very low detection limits for tiny strain and pressure. These features enable the CECA-based sensor to be a flexible wearable device to monitor both subtle and large biosignals of the human body.

This review summarizes the recent advances in fabrication strategies and versatile applications of lignin-derived biodegradable film materials from the viewpoint of sustainable development.

Food-derived bioactive peptides, as potential ingredients in health-promoting functional foods targeting diet-related chronic diseases, have attracted increasing attention because of their high biological activities, low toxicity, and easy of metabolism in human body. However, conventional methods for analyzing the bioactive peptides are not only expensive but also time-consuming; these drawbacks limited detailed studies and rapid development of bioactive peptides. Emerging bioinformatics approaches may overcome these problems to enable bioactive peptide research. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of research progress in the bioinformatics methods used for identifying, characterizing, elaborating bioactive mechanisms of, and producing food-derived bioactive peptides, and also to present an effective workflow. The workflow has been integrated in silico and traditional methods to predict, validate, and modify bioactive peptides.

Hydrothermal synthesis of carbon quantum dots (CQDs) from biomass is a green and sustainable route for CQDs applications in various fields. However, one of the major problems is the low CQDs yield because the traditional hydrothermal treatment would produce large amounts of hydrochar byproduct. In this work, we present a novel, facile, and effective method for large-scale synthesis of CQDs from biomass-derived carbon including hydrochar and carbonized biomass through mild oxidation (NaOH/H2O2 solution). An ultrahigh CQDs yield of 76.9 wt % can be obtained, which is much higher than those obtained from traditional hydrothermal and strong acid oxidation processes. Furthermore, the CQDs have excellent quantum yield (QY) that is higher than (or comparable to) those from other methods. In addition, the CQDs have uniform size (∼2.4 nm) and their surface states can be regulated to significantly improve the QY by adjusting the concentration of oxidants. The CQDs displayed excellent sensitivity for Pb2+ detection along with good linear correlation ranging from 1.3 to 106.7 μM. These advantages, together with low cost, sustainability, and green process, make this approach have great potential in the synthesis and applications of CQDs in large scale.

Elucidating the structural characteristics and changes of lignin during biorefining is considerably important for lignin valorization. To examine the structural transformations of lignin under deep eutectic solvent (DES) pretreatments, the double enzymatic lignin (DEL) isolated from Eucalyptus was pretreated with DES (ChCl/lactic acid, 1:10) under the conditions of 60–140 °C for 6 h. The structural transformations of lignin during the DES pretreatment have been investigated by quantitative 13C NMR, two-dimensional-heteronuclear single quantum correlation (2D-HSQC) NMR, 31P NMR, gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) techniques and the lignin degradation products recovered after DES pretreatment have been analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) technique. NMR results demonstrated that the dissociation of aryl ether linkage (i.e., β–O–4) is dominant during the DES pretreatment, which is in line with the increased content of phenolic hydroxyl in these lignins. In addition, the decreased aliphatic hydroxyl groups suggested that the acylation or dehydration of aliphatic hydroxyl groups occurred as the pretreatment temperature elevated. Based on the results observed, possible pathways for chemical transformations of lignin were proposed. Furthermore, it was found that DES pretreatment also resulted in a homogeneous lignin morphology, facilitating the formation of lignin nanoparticles. In short, unmasking the lignin chemistry during the DES pretreatment will facilitate the optimization of the pretreatment process and production of homogeneous nanosized lignin particles with preferable chemical reactivity from parent lignin in the current biorefinery process.

The beneficial microorganisms in food are diverse and complex in structure. These beneficial microorganisms can produce different and unique flavors in the process of food fermentation. The unique flavor of these fermented foods is mainly produced by different raw and auxiliary materials, fermentation technology, and the accumulation of flavor substances by dominant microorganisms during fermentation. The succession and metabolic accumulation of microbial flora significantly impacts the distinctive flavor of fermented foods. The investigation of the role of microbial flora changes in the production of flavor substances during fermentation can reveal the potential connection between microbial flora succession and the formation of key flavor compounds. This paper reviewed the evolution of microbial flora structure as food fermented and the key volatile compounds that contribute to flavor in the food system and their potential relationship. Further, it was a certain guiding significance for food industrial production.

The raw trajectories contain large amounts of redundant data that bring challenges to storage, transmission and processing. Trajectory compression algorithms can reduce the number of positioning points while minimizing the loss of information. This paper proposes a heading maintaining oriented trajectory compression algorithm, which takes into account both position information and direction information. By setting an angle threshold, the algorithm can achieve a more accurate approximation of trajectories than traditional position-preserving trajectory compression algorithms. The experimental results show that the algorithm can ensure certain effect on the direction information and is more flexible.

State of health (SOH) monitoring and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction are the key to ensuring the safe use of lithium-ion batteries. However, the commonly used models are inefficient in predicting accuracy and do not have the ability to capture local regeneration of battery cells. In this paper, a temporal convolutional network (TCN) based SOH monitoring model framework of lithium-ion batteries is proposed. Causal convolution and dilated convolution techniques are used in the model to improve the ability of the model to capture local capacity regeneration, thus improving the overall prediction accuracy of the model. Residual connection and dropout technologies are used to improve the training speed of the model and avoid overfitting in deep network. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) technology is used to denoise the offline data in RUL prediction, so as to avoid RUL prediction errors caused by local regeneration. The proposed model is verified on two kinds of datasets and the results show that it has the ability to capture local regeneration phenomena in Lithium-ion batteries. Compared with the commonly used models, it has higher accuracy and stronger robustness in SOH monitoring and RUL prediction.

As a skeleton component of plants, lignin is an organic macromolecule polymer that can be regenerated and naturally degraded. Annually, plant growth produces about 150 billion tons of lignin. In industrial processes such as paper and biomass-refining industry, large amounts of lignin are formed as by-products. Most of technical lignins are directly combusted to obtain heat, which not only is a waste of organic matter but also leads to environmental pollution and other issues. Interestingly, lignin can be used as slow-release carriers and coating materials for fertilizers due to its excellent slow release properties as well as chelating and other functionalities. Preparation of lignin-based slow/controlled release fertilizers can be achieved by sustainable chemical (ammoxidation, Mannich reaction, and other chemical modifications), coating (without or with chemical modification), and chelation modifications. This Review systematically summarizes the methods, mechanisms, and application of the above methods for preparing lignin-based slow/controlled release fertilizers. Although the evaluation standards and methods of lignin-based slow/controlled release fertilizers are not perfect, it is believed that more and more scholars will pay more attention to them to accelerate the development and application of lignin-based slow/controlled release fertilizers, so as to improve their relevant standards. In short, there is an urgent need to improve the preparation process of lignin-based slow/controlled release fertilizers and application as lignin-based slow/controlled release fertilizers to production practice as soon as possible.

The chemical transformations of lignin in an acidic DES system.

The iron-chromium redox flow battery (ICRFB) is considered the first true RFB and utilizes low-cost, abundant iron and chromium chlorides as redox-active materials, making it one of the most cost-effective energy storage systems. ICRFBs were pioneered and studied extensively by NASA and Mitsui in Japan in the 1970-1980s, and extensive studies on ICRFBs have been carried out over the past few decades. In addition, ICRFB is considered to be one of the most promising directions for cost-effective and large-scale energy storage applications, as its cost can theoretically be lower than that of zinc-bromine and all-vanadium RFBs, giving it the potential for large-scale promotion. With the resolution of problems such as hydrogen evolution and electrolyte intermixing, the ICRFB technology is moving out of the laboratory and striving for greater power and more stable industrialization requirements. This Review summarizes the history, development, and research status of key components (carbon-based electrode, electrolyte, and membranes) in the ICRFB system, aiming to give a brief guide to researchers who are involved in the related subject.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has spread around the world at an unprecedented rate. In the present study, 4 marine sulfated polysaccharides were screened for their inhibitory activity against SARS-CoV-2, including sea cucumber sulfated polysaccharide (SCSP), fucoidan from brown algae, iota-carrageenan from red algae, and chondroitin sulfate C from sharks (CS). Of them, SCSP, fucoidan, and carrageenan showed significant antiviral activities at concentrations of 3.90-500 μg mL-1. SCSP exhibited the strongest inhibitory activity with IC50 of 9.10 μg mL-1. Furthermore, a test using pseudotype virus with S glycoprotein confirmed that SCSP could bind to the S glycoprotein to prevent SARS-CoV-2 host cell entry. The three antiviral polysaccharides could be employed to treat and prevent COVID-19.