Nanjing University

About: Nanjing University is a education organization based out in Nanjing, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Adsorption. The organization has 85961 authors who have published 105504 publications receiving 2289036 citations. The organization is also known as: NJU & Nanking University.

Long-term renal survival and related risk factors in patients with IgA nephropathy: results from a cohort of 1155 cases in a Chinese adult population

Abstract: Background. We sought to identify the long-term renal survival rate and related risk factors of progression to renal failure in Chinese adult patients with IgA nephropathy (IgAN) and to quantify the effects of proteinuria during the follow-up on outcome in patients with IgAN. Methods. Patients with biopsy-proven primary IgAN in the Nanjing Glomerulonephritis Registry were studied. Renal survival and the relationships between clinical parameters and renal outcomes were assessed. Results. One thousand one hundred and fifty-five patients were enrolled in this study. The 10-, 15- and 20-year cumulative renal survival rates, calculated by Kaplan–Meier method, were 83, 74 and 64%, respectively. At the time of biopsy, proteinuria >1.0 g/day [hazard ratio (HR) 3.2, P 1.0 g/day were associated with a 9.4-fold risk than patients with TA-P <1.0 g/day (P < 0.001) and 46.5-fold risk than those with TA-P <0.5 g/day (P < 0.001). Moreover, patients who achieved TA-P <0.5 g/day benefit much more than those with TA-P between 0.5 and 1.0 g/day (HR 13.1, P < 0.001). Conclusions. Thirty-six percent of Chinese adult patients with IgAN progress to end stage renal disease within 20 years. Five clinical features—higher proteinuria, hypertension, impaired renal function, hypoproteinemia and hyperuricemia—are independent predictors of an unfavorable renal outcome. The basic goal of anti-proteinuric therapy for Chinese patients is to lower proteinuria <1.0 g/day and the optimal goal is to lower proteinuria to <0.5 g/day.

Generalized energy-based fragmentation approach for computing the ground-state energies and properties of large molecules.

Abstract: We present a generalized energy-based fragmentation (GEBF) approach for approximately predicting the ground-state energies and molecular properties of large molecules, especially those charged and polar molecules. In this approach, the total energy (or properties) of a large molecule can be approximately obtained from energy (or properties) calculations on various small subsystems, each of which is constructed to contain a certain fragment and its local surroundings within a given distance. In the quantum chemistry calculation of a given subsystem, those distant atoms (outside this subsystem) are modeled as background point charges at the corresponding nuclear centers. This treatment allows long-range electrostatic interaction and polarization effects between distant fragments to be taken into account approximately, which are very important for polar and charged molecules. We also propose a new fragmentation scheme for constructing subsystems. Our test calculations at the Hartree-Fock and second-order Moller-Plesser perturbation theory levels demonstrate that the approach could yield satisfactory ground-state energies, the dipole moments, and static polarizabilities for polar and charged molecules such as water clusters and proteins.

Review on photocatalytic and electrocatalytic artificial nitrogen fixation for ammonia synthesis at mild conditions: Advances, challenges and perspectives

Abstract: The ammonia synthesis from nitrogen and water under ambient conditions is one of the most inviting but challenging reaction routes. Although nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere and the ammonia synthesis reaction is exothermic on the thermodynamics, the conversion of N2 to ammonia is actually hard to proceed owing to the chemical inertness and stability of N2 molecules. In industry, ammonia synthesis is carried out by the Haber-Bosch process under harsh conditions (300–500 °C, 20–30 MPa) associated with the requirement of substantial energy input and the enormous emission of greenhouse gases (e.g., CO2). Recently, a growing number of studies on photo(electro)catalytic and electrocatalytic nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR) in aqueous solution have attracted extensive attention, which holds great promise for nitrogen fixation under room temperature and atmospheric pressure. However, the very low efficiency and ambiguous mechanism still remain as the major hurdles for the development of photochemical and electrochemical NRR systems. Here we provide an overview of the latest progresses, remaining challenges and future prospects in photocatalytic and electrocatalytic nitrogen fixation. Moreover, this review offers a helpful guidance for the reasonable design of photocatalysts and electrocatalysts towards NRR by combining theory predictions and experiment results. We hope this review can stimulate more research interests in the relatively understudied but highly promising research field of NRR.

Information-agnostic flow scheduling for commodity data centers

Abstract: Many existing data center network (DCN) flow scheduling schemes minimize flow completion times (FCT) based on prior knowledge of flows and custom switch functions, making them superior in performance but hard to use in practice. By contrast, we seek to minimize FCT with no prior knowledge and existing commodity switch hardware. To this end, we present PIAS, a DCN flow scheduling mechanism that aims to minimize FCT by mimicking Shortest Job First (SJF) on the premise that flow size is not known a priori. At its heart, PIAS leverages multiple priority queues available in existing commodity switches to implement a Multiple Level Feedback Queue (MLFQ), in which a PIAS flow is gradually demoted from higher-priority queues to lower-priority queues based on the number of bytes it has sent. As a result, short flows are likely to be finished in the first few high-priority queues and thus be prioritized over long flows in general, which enables PIAS to emulate SJF without knowing flow sizes beforehand. We have implemented a PIAS prototype and evaluated PIAS through both testbed experiments and ns- 2 simulations. We show that PIAS is readily deployable with commodity switches and backward compatible with legacy TCP/IP stacks. Our evaluation results show that PIAS significantly outperforms existing information-agnostic schemes. For example, it reduces FCT by up to 50% and 40% over DCTCP [11] and L2DCT [27] respectively; and it only has a 4.9% performance gap to an ideal information-aware scheme, pFabric [13], for short flows under a production DCN workload.