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The metabolic disorder of the wound microenvironment can lead to a series of serious symptoms, especially chronic wounds, which result in significant pain in patients. At present, there is no effective and widely used wound dressing. Therefore, it is important to develop new multifunctional wound dressings. Hydrogel is an ideal wound dressing for medical nursing because of its abilities to absorb exudate and maintain wound wetting, its excellent biocompatibility, and its ability to provide a moist environment for wound repair. Because of these features, hydrogel overcomes the shortcomings of traditional dressings. Therefore, hydrogel has high medical value and is widely studied. In this study, a biodegradable hydrogel based on polysaccharide was synthesized and used as a wound dressing. The swelling degree and degradability of hydrogel were characterized as the characteristics of the wound dressing. The results showed that the prepared hydrogel was degraded with trypsin and in the soil environment. Furthermore, the wound dressing can effectively inhibit the bacterial environment, promote the deposition of the collagen structure of the wound tissue, and accelerate the healing of the wound. The proposed hydrogel has value in practical medical nursing application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) play a significant regulatory role during skeletal muscle development. To identify circRNAs during postnatal skeletal muscle development in chickens, we constructed 12 cDNA libraries from breast muscle tissues of Chinese Gushi chickens at 6, 14, 22, and 30 weeks and performed RNA sequencing. In total, 2112 circRNAs were identified, and among them 79.92% were derived from exons. CircRNAs are distributed on all chromosomes of chickens, especially chromosomes 1–9 and Z. Bioinformatics analysis showed that each circRNA had an average of 38 miRNA binding sites, 61.32% of which have internal ribosomal entry site (IRES) elements. Furthermore, in total 543 differentially expressed circRNAs (DE-circRNAs) were identified. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that DE-circRNAs source genes are engaged in biological processes and muscle development-related pathways; for example, cell differentiation, sarcomere, and myofibril formation, mTOR signaling pathway, and TGF-β signaling pathway, etc. We also established a competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) regulatory network associated with skeletal muscle development. The results in this report indicate that circRNAs can mediate the development of chicken skeletal muscle by means of a complex ceRNA network among circRNAs, miRNAs, genes, and pathways. The findings of this study might help increase the number of known circRNAs in skeletal muscle tissue and offer a worthwhile resource to further investigate the function of circRNAs in chicken skeletal muscle development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical dynamic stress (σcri) and accumulative plastic strain (εp) are primary indicators regarding the dynamic stability of unbound granular materials (UGMs). This study aims to seek an effective method to evaluate the dynamic stability of UGMs used in railway subgrades. First, the dynamic characteristics of an UGM used in railway subgrade bed construction were investigated by performing a series of large-scale cyclic triaxial tests, with the results showing that εp versus cycle number (N) curves can be categorized into stable, failure, and critical patterns. Grey relational analyses were then established, where the analyzed results demonstrated that the εp–N curve pattern and final accumulative plastic strain (εs) of the stable curves are strongly correlated with the moisture content (w), confining pressure (σ3), and dynamic deviator stress (σd). The analyzed grey relational grades distributed in a narrow range of 0.72 to 0.81, indicating that w, σ3, and σd have similar degrees of importance on determining the εp–N curve patterns and the values of εs of the UGM. Finally, a data processing method using a back-propagation (BP) neural network is introduced to analyze the test data, and an empirical approach is developed to evaluate the σcri (considering the effects of σ3 and w) and εs (considering the effects of σ3, w, and σd) of the UGM. The analyzed results illustrated that the developed method can effectively reflect the linear/non-linear relationships of σcri and εs with respect to σ3 and/or σd. The σcri approximately increases linearly with increasing σ3, and a simple empirical formula is proposed for the σcri. In addition, εs and its variation rate increase non-linearly with increasing σd but decrease non-linearly as σ3 increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our previous studies showed that microRNA-15a (miR-15a) was closely related to intramuscular fat (IMF) deposition in chickens; however, its regulatory mechanism remains unclear. Here, we evaluated the expression characteristics of miR-15a and its relationship with the expression of acetyl-CoA acyltransferase 1 (ACAA1), acyl-CoA oxidase 1 (ACOX1) and sterol carrier protein 2 (SCP2) by qPCR analysis in Gushi chicken breast muscle at 6, 14, 22, and 30 weeks old, where we performed transfection tests of miR-15a mimics in intramuscular preadipocytes and verified the target gene of miR-15a in chicken fibroblasts (DF1). The miR-15a expression level at 30 weeks increased 13.5, 4.5, and 2.7-fold compared with the expression levels at 6, 14, and 22 weeks, respectively. After 6 days of induction, miR-15a over-expression significantly promoted intramuscular adipogenic differentiation and increased cholesterol and triglyceride accumulation in adipocytes. Meanwhile, 48 h after transfection with miR-15a mimics, the expression levels of ACAA1, ACOX1 and SCP2 genes decreased by 56.52%, 31.18% and 37.14% at the mRNA level in intramuscular preadipocytes. In addition, the co-transfection of miR-15a mimics and ACAA1, ACOX1 and SCP2 3′UTR (untranslated region) dual-luciferase vector significantly inhibited dual-luciferase activity in DF1 cells. Taken together, our data demonstrate that miR-15a can reduce fatty acid oxidation by targeting ACAA1, ACOX1, and SCP2, which subsequently indirectly promotes the differentiation of chicken intramuscular preadipocytes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]