Emergence of novel tigecycline resistance gene tet(X5) variant in multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter indicus of swine farming environments.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are emerging all the time, but the continued emergence of novel resistance genes and genetic structures is even more alarming. Tigecycline is currently the important last barrier in the treatment of multidrug-resistant (MDR) infections. tet(X), a resistance gene to tigecycline, is the most prevalent and constantly emerging novel variants. In this research, we characterized two MDR Acinetobacter indicus strains to tigecycline that were identified and analyzed by antimicrobial susceptibility testing, conjugation transfer, whole genome sequencing (WGS) and bioinformatics analysis, and gene function analysis. The results showed that three tet(X) variants were carried in BDT201, including tet(X6) on the chromosome, tet(X3) on the plasmid pBDT201-2, and a novel tet(X5) variant adjacent to the ISAba1 elements on the plasmid pBDT201-3. The novel Tet(X5) variant showed 98.7% amino acid identity with Tet(X5) and was named Tet(X5.4). By expressing tet(X5.4) gene, the tigecycline minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values for Escherichia coli JM109 increased 32- fold (from 0.13 to 4 mg/L). BDT2076 contained tigecycline and carbapenems resistance genes, such as tet(X3), blaOXA-58, blaNDM-3, and blaCARB-2. The continuous emergence of MDR bacteria and resistance genes is a global environmental health issue that can not be ignored and therefore needs to pay more urgent attention to it.

Thermal Conductivity of 3C/4H-SiC Nanowires by Molecular Dynamics Simulation.

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a promising material for thermoelectric power generation. The characterization of thermal transport properties is essential to understanding their applications in thermoelectric devices. The existence of stacking faults, which originate from the "wrong" stacking sequences of Si-C bilayers, is a general feature of SiC. However, the effects of stacking faults on the thermal properties of SiC are not well understood. In this study, we evaluated the accuracy of Tersoff, MEAM, and GW potentials in describing the thermal transport of SiC. Additionally, the thermal conductivity of 3C/4H-SiC nanowires was investigated using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations (NEMD). Our results show that thermal conductivity exhibits an increase and then saturation as the total lengths of the 3C/4H-SiC nanowires vary from 23.9 nm to 95.6 nm, showing the size effect of molecular dynamics simulations of the thermal conductivity. There is a minimum thermal conductivity, as a function of uniform period length, of the 3C/4H-SiC nanowires. However, the thermal conductivities of nanowires weakly depend on the gradient period lengths and the ratio of 3C/4H. Additionally, the thermal conductivity of 3C/4H-SiC nanowires decreases continuously from compressive strain to tensile strain. The reduction in thermal conductivity suggests that 3C/4H-SiC nanowires have potential applications in advanced thermoelectric devices. Our study provides insights into the thermal transport properties of SiC nanowires and can guide the development of SiC-based thermoelectric materials.

Superhardness in nanotwinned boron carbide: a molecular dynamics study.

Boron carbide ceramics are often considered ideal materials for lightweight bulletproof armor, but their anomalous brittle failure at hypervelocity impact limits their use. Recent experiments have reported that nanotwins are ubiquitous in boron carbide and that nanotwinned samples are harder than the twin-free boron carbide, but although the strengthening effect of nanotwins on metals and alloys is well-established, their role in boron carbide ceramics is not well understood. In this study, we used classical molecular dynamics simulations to investigate how nanoscale twins affect the mechanical properties of boron carbide ceramics. Our classical molecular dynamics results show that introducing nanotwins in boron carbide can increase the shear strength limit by 19.72%, reduce the number of amorphized atoms, and narrow the width of the amorphous shear band. Under indentation load, nanotwins can also increase the compressive shear strength limit of boron carbide by 15.97% and change the crystal formation direction and region of the amorphous shear band. These findings suggest that twin boundaries can hinder the expansion of the amorphous shear band and provide a new design idea for improving the impact resistance of boron carbide ceramics and avoiding their abnormal brittle failure.

Thermal transport across the CoSb3-graphene interface.

CoSb3 shows intrinsically excellent electric transport performance but high thermal conductivity, resulting in low thermoelectric performance. The use of graphene to form heterogeneous interfaces shows great potential for significantly lessening the lattice thermal conductivity (κL) in CoSb3-based composites. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are carried out in the present work to study the interfacial thermal conductance across the CoSb3-graphene interface in the temperature range of 300 K to 800 K. The interfacial thermal conductance exhibits irregular fluctuations with temperature and CoSb3 length. Furthermore, we explored the effect of graphene layers on the interfacial heat transport of the CoSb3-graphene system. The results demonstrate that graphene layers affect the interfacial thermal conductance due to the suppression of heat flux in multilayer graphene across the c-axis. The phonon density of states (PDOS) of the CoSb3-graphene system reveals a decreased low-frequency vibration mode at 0-7 THz and an enhanced high-frequency vibration mode compared with those of CoSb3, indicating that thermal transport can be effectively suppressed by the addition of graphene.

Molecular dynamics simulation of phonon thermal transport in nanotwinned diamond with a new optimized Tersoff potential.

The inaccuracy of the most widely used potentials in calculating the phonon transport of sp3 carbon materials hinders the use of molecular dynamics simulations for revealing the underlying mechanism of phonon transport in diamond and related materials. Here, we introduce an optimized Tersoff potential by optimizing the parameters to fit the experimentally determined phonon dispersion in diamond along the high-symmetry directions. Molecular dynamics simulations are performed using this new potential to investigate the phonon thermal transport in flawless and nanotwinned diamond. The simulation results show that while the phonon lifetimes of nanotwinned diamond are slightly lower than those of the flawless one, the phonon group velocities of nanotwinned diamond are obviously lower than those of diamond. The present results indicate that the twin boundaries in diamond are ineffective in scattering the phonons and the lower thermal conductivity of the nanotwinned diamond mainly originates from the lower group velocities due to its reduced structural rigidity.