Engineered pavements cover a large fraction of cities and offer significant potential for urban heat island mitigation. Though rapidly increasing research efforts have been devoted to the study of pavement materials, thermal interactions between buildings and the ambient environment are mostly neglected. In this study, numerical models featuring a realistic representation of building-environment thermal interactions, were applied to quantify the effect of pavements on the urban thermal environment at multiple scales. It was found that performance of pavements inside the canyon was largely determined by the canyon geometry. In a high-density residential area, modifying pavements had insignificant effect on the wall temperature and building energy consumption. At a regional scale, various pavement types were also found to have a limited cooling effect on land surface temperature and 2-m air temperature for metropolitan Phoenix. In the context of global climate change, the effect of pavement was evaluated in terms of the equivalent CO2 emission. Equivalent CO2 emission offset by reflective pavements in urban canyons was only about 13.9e46.6% of that without building canopies, depending on the canyon geometry. This study revealed the importance of building-environment thermal interactions in determining thermal conditions inside the urban canopy.
coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has been responsible for significant social and economic
disruption, prompting an urgent search for therapeutic solutions. The spike protein of the virus
has been examined as an immunogenic target because of its role in viral binding and fusion
necessary for infection of host cells. Previous studies have identified a recombinant protein
(denoted as S1) that has been shown to potentially induce a neutralizing antibody response by
mimicking the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. We have produced the S1 in plants
using agroinfiltration, a plant transformation technique whereby plasmid-containing
Agrobacterium tumefaciens is injected into Nicotiana benthamiana plants, resulting in transfer of
the desired gene from bacteria to plant cells. S1 was expressed to high levels within 5 days of
infiltration, and Western blot analysis showed recognition of the S1 by an anti-S1 antibody.
ELISA results exhibited increased binding activity to anti-S1 with increasing concentrations of
S1, indicating their specific interaction. This ongoing study will demonstrate the potential of a
plant-produced S1 as a vaccine, therapeutic, and diagnostic tool against COVID-19 that is not
only effective, but also cost-efficient and scalable in comparison to conventional mammalian cell
culture production methods.