Substantial heterogeneity exists within cervical cancer that is generally infected by human papillomavirus (HPV). However, the most common histological subtype of cervical cancer, cervical squamous cell carcinoma (CSCC), is poorly characterized regarding the association between its heterogeneity and HPV oncoprotein expression. We filtered out 138 CSCC samples with infection of HPV16 only as the first step; then we compressed HPV16 E6/E7 expression as HPV pca and correlated HPV pca with the immunological profiling of CSCC based on supervised clustering to discover subtypes and to characterize the differences between subgroups in terms of the HPV pca level, pathway activity, epigenetic dysregulation, somatic mutation frequencies, and likelihood of responding to chemo/immunotherapies. Supervised clustering of immune signatures revealed two HPV16 subtypes (namely, HPV16-IMM and HPV16-KRT) that correlated with HPV pca and clinical outcomes. HPV16-KRT is characterized by elevated expression of genes in keratinization, biological oxidation, and Wnt signaling, whereas HPV16-IMM has a strong immune response and mesenchymal features. HPV16-IMM exhibited much more epigenetic silencing and significant mutation at FBXW7, while MUC4 and PIK3CA were mutated frequently for HPV16-KRT. We also imputed that HPV16-IMM is much more sensitive to chemo/immunotherapy than is HPV16-KRT. Our characterization tightly links the expression of HPV16 E6/E7 with biological and clinical outcomes of CSCC, providing valuable molecular-level information that points to decoding heterogeneity. Together, these results shed light on stratifications of CSCC infected by HPV16 and shall help to guide personalized management and treatment of patients.

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The utilization of geothermal energy through ground buried heat exchanger to provide heat source for buildings has become extremely attractive recent years in China and all over the world. As a key parameter that governs the prediction of the system performance, the effective thermal conductivity of the ground significantly affects the heat transfer process between buried pipes and surrounding rock-soil. This paper conducts a review on the methods of determining the effective thermal conductivities of different rock-soil types composed by various substances proposed in recent years. Based on the analysis of theoretical methods and experimental approaches applied to different rock-soil conditions and other relevant parameters such as the porosity, water content and material construction, etc., the applicabilities of various methods have been justified. According to the deficiencies of basic models, the improved models take into account the effects of the temperature, saturation degree, detailed structure of rock-soil and other parameters to improve the accuracy of prediction value. For certain types of rock-soil, the experimental approaches can provide more accurate results but are expensive and time consuming, which have sometimes been used to improve the accuracy or verify the results of improved model in the appropriate range of porosity and saturation degree for certain types of rocks. The concluding remarks would contribute to the estimation of the heat transfer performance of the buried heat exchanger during the prediction process.

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