Establishing a non-hydrostatic global atmospheric modeling system at 3-km horizontal resolution with aerosol feedbacks on the Sunway supercomputer of China.

During the era of global warming and highly urbanized development, extreme and high impact weather as well as air pollution incidents influence everyday life and might even cause the incalculable loss of life and property. Despite the vast development of atmospheric models, there still exist substantial numerical forecast biases objectively. To accurately predict extreme weather, severe air pollution, and abrupt climate change, numerical atmospheric model requires not only to simulate meteorology and atmospheric compositions simultaneously involving many sophisticated physical and chemical processes but also at high spatiotemporal resolution. Global integrated atmospheric simulation at spatial resolutions of a few kilometers remains challenging due to its intensive computational and input/output (I/O) requirement. Through multi-dimension-parallelism structuring, aggressive and finer-grained optimizing, manual vectorizing, and parallelized I/O fragmenting, an integrated Atmospheric Model Across Scales (iAMAS) was established on the new Sunway supercomputer platform to significantly increase the computational efficiency and reduce the I/O cost. The global 3-km atmospheric simulation for meteorology with online integrated aerosol feedbacks with iAMAS was scaled to 39,000,000 processor cores and achieved the speed of 0.82 simulation day per hour (SDPH) with routine I/O, which enabled us to perform 5-day global weather forecast at 3-km horizontal resolution with online natural aerosol impacts. The results demonstrate the promising future that the increasing of spatial resolution to a few kilometers with online integrated aerosol feedbacks may significantly improve the global weather forecast.

[Effects of basic orange II on proliferation and differentiation of limb bud cells in rat embryos].

OBJECTIVE: To explore the effects of basic orange II on proliferation and differentiation of limb bud cells. METHODS: Limb bud cell were separated from SD rat embryo at 13-day gestational age, limb bud cell were exposed to basic orange II at concentrations of 0.0, 12.5, 25.0, 50.0, 100.0, 200, 0 and 400.0 mg/L in the culture medium. The effect of basic orange II on limb bud cell proliferation was detected by Cell Counting Kit-8, the effect of basic orange II on limb bud cell differentiation was assessed by Alcian Blue 8GX. RESULTS: With the increasing of basic orange II concentration, the proliferation and differentiation of embryo limb bud cells were poorer and poorer in vitro, and there was the dose-effect relationship. The pID50 and dLD50 of basic orange II on limb bud cells were 240.6 mg/L and 69.3 mg/L respectively. The inhibition of basic orange II on cell differentiation might exceed that on cell proliferation. CONCLUSIONS: Basic orange II could inhibit proliferation and differentiation of embryo limb bud cells. It might be a potential developmental toxic substance in rat embryo.

Development of a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay for rapid and specific detection of common genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Here, we developed a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay for 11 common transgenic target DNA in GMOs. Six sets of LAMP primer candidates for each target were designed and their specificity, sensitivity, and reproductivity were evaluated. With the optimized LAMP primers, this LAMP assay was simply run within 45-60 min to detect all these targets in GMOs tested. The sensitivity, specificity, and reproductivity of the LAMP assay were further analyzed in comparison with those of Real-Time PCR. In consistent with real-time PCR, detection of 0.5% GMOs in equivalent background DNA was possible using this LAMP assay for all targets. In comparison with real-time PCR, the LAMP assay showed the same results with simple instruments. Hence, the LAMP assay developed can provide a rapid and simple approach for routine screening as well as specific events detection of many GMOs.

[Determination of 12 steroid hormone residues in pig tissues by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry combining with library search].

A method was developed for the simultaneous determination and identification of 12 steroid hormone residues in pig tissues, including stanolone, aldosterone, boldenone, danazol, metandienone, methyltestosterone, nadrolone, norethindrone, progesterone, stanozolol, testosterone and testosterone propionate, using liquid chromatography-tandem triple-quadrupole linear ion trap mass spectrometry(LC-MS/MS). Homogenized pig tissue samples were purified with a Waters MCX solid phase extraction column after enzymatic hydrolysis by beta-glucuronidase, then separated on a Venusil MP C18 column (100 mm x 2, 1 mm, 3 microm) using gradient elution with the mobile phases of acetonitrile and water with 0.1% (v/v) formic acid. A multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) as survey scan and an enhanced product ion (EPI) scan as dependent scan were performed in an information dependent acquisition (IDA) experiment. The compound identification was carried out by library search with a newly developed MS/MS library based on EPI spectra at three different collision energies in positive mode. The results showed that the limits of detection (LODs, S/N = 3) were in the range of 0.2 - 0.5 microg/kg for the steroid hormones, and with a good linearity (r > 0.99) ranged from 0.5 to 100.0 microg/L. The average recoveries (n = 6) of the 12 steroid hormones spiked in pig tissue samples at 5.0 microg/kg ranged from 72.0% to 98.1% with the relative standard deviations (RSDs) between 3.1% and 12.5%. The method was applied for the qualitative and quantitative determination of steroid hormone residues in pig tissues with sensitive and accurate characteristics.