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Continued demand for polyolefins can be met by recycling plastic materials back to their constituent monomers, ethylene and propylene, via thermal cracking in a pyrolysis reactor. During pyrolysis, saturated polyolefin chains break carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds, yielding a distribution of alkanes, alkenes, aromatic chemicals, light gases, and solid char residue at temperatures varying from 400-800 °C. To design a pyrolysis reactor that optimizes the chemistry for maximum yield of light olefins, a detailed description of the chemical mechanisms and associated kinetics is required. To that end, the reaction kinetics of isothermal films of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) have been measured by the method of ‘Pulse-Heated Analysis of Solid Reactions,’ or PHASR, which allows for quantification of intrinsic kinetics via isothermal reaction-controlled experimental conditions. The evolution of LDPE films from 20 milliseconds to 2.0 seconds for five temperatures (550, 575, 600, 625, and 650 °C) was characterized by measurement of the yield of chromatography-detectable compounds (

Recent studies have shown that autophagy plays an important role in gynecologic tumors, and ubiquitin modification of autophagy regulatory components is essential to regulate autophagic flux. In this study, we found that the ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2C (UBE2C) affects endometrial cancer cell apoptosis and proliferation by inhibiting autophagy. Electron microscopy observation of cell ultrastructure and experimental biochemical analysis showed that endometrial cancer cells with UBE2C expression knocked down display typical autophagic characteristics. Cells were cotreated with the autophagy pharmacologic inhibitors chloroquine and/or bafilomycin A1, and mRFP-GFP-LC3 assays were performed to monitor autophagic flux and determine whether UBE2C suppresses the autophagy program. Investigation of the corresponding mechanism by which UBE2C inhibits autophagy revealed that UBE2C induces K48-linked SIRT1 ubiquitination and promotes ubiquitination-dependent degradation of SIRT1, subsequently reducing H4K16 deacetylation levels and epigenetically inhibiting the expression of autophagy-related genes. The results of cell counting kit-8, Hoechst staining, and immunofluorescence assays further indicated that deletion of the autophagy-related gene BECN1 significantly attenuates UBE2C knockdown–induced cell apoptosis. Moreover, overexpression of UBE2C promoted tumor growth in the xenograft mice model. While, the introduction of rapamycin, an agonist of autophagy, successfully reversed tumor growth and apoptosis inhibition mediated by UBE2C overexpression in vitro and in vivo. Taken together, our results suggested that UBE2C-mediated ubiquitination and degradation of SIRT1 contribute to the malignant progression of endometrial cancer through epigenetic inhibition of autophagy. Implications: Our study highlights the tumorigenic role and regulatory mechanism of UBE2C in endometrial cancer; UBE2C inhibits endometrial cancer cell apoptosis through autophagy-related mechanisms and our findings provide new insights into the treatment of endometrial cancer.

Intestinal organoid may serve as an alternative model for toxicity testing. However, the linkage between specific morphological alterations in organoids and chemical-induced toxicity has yet to be defined. Here, we generated C57BL/6 mouse intestinal organoids and conducted a morphology-based analysis on chemical-induced toxicity. Alterations in morphology were characterized by large spheroids, hyperplastic organoids, small spheroids, and protrusion-loss organoids, which responded in a concentration-dependent manner to the treatment of four metal(loid)s including cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), hexavalent chromium (Cr-VI), and inorganic trivalent arsenic (iAs-III). Notably, alterations in organoid morphology characterized by abnormal morphology rate were correlated with specific intestinal toxic effects, including reduction in cell viability and differentiation, induction of apoptosis, dysfunction of mucus production, and damage to epithelial barrier upon repeated administration. The benchmark dose (BMDL(10)) values of morphological alterations (0.007–0.195 μM) were lower than those of conventional bioassays (0.010–0.907 μM). We also established that the morphologic features of organoids upon Cd, Pb, Cr-VI, or iAs-III treatment were metal specific, and mediated by Wnt, bone morphogenetic protein, apoptosis induction, and Notch signaling pathways, respectively. Collectively, these findings provide novel insights into the relevance of morphological alterations in organoids to specific toxic endpoints and identify specific morphological alterations as potential indicators of enterotoxicity.

In this paper, we propose a GraphBit method to learn unsupervised deep binary descriptors for efficient image representation. Conventional binary representation learning methods directly quantize each element according to the threshold without considering the quantization ambiguousness. The elements near the boundary dubbed as ambiguous bits fail to collect effective information for reliable binarization and are sensitive to noise that causes reversed bits. Since the ambiguous bits receive additional instruction from the graph for reliable binarization. Moreover, we further present a differentiable search method (GraphBit+) that mines the bitwise interaction in continuous space, so that the heavy search cost caused by the training difficulties in reinforcement learning is significantly reduced. Since the GraphBit and GraphBit+ methods learn fixed bitwise interaction which is suboptimal for various input, the inaccurate instruction from the fixed bitwise interaction cannot effectively decrease the ambiguousness of binary descriptors. To address this, we further propose the unsupervised binary descriptor learning method via dynamic bitwise interaction mining (D-GraphBit), where a graph convolutional network called GraphMiner reasons the optimal bitwise interaction for each input sample. Extensive experimental results datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The research focus of supercapacitors is the composition and structural design of electrode materials.

New cationic mono- and AIE tetra-nuclear Ir(iii) complex-porphyrin conjugates and the corresponding carrier-free NP PSs by self-assembly methods without any auxiliary reagents, [TPP-Ir]+ NPs and [TPP-4Ir]4+ NPs, are obtained for highly efficient PDT.

Genetic predisposition and disruption of host gut microbiota and immune system can result in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Here, we show that miRNA-149-5p (miR-149-5p) and miRNA-149-3p (miR-149-3p) play crucial roles in IBD. Mice lacking miR-149-3p were considerably more susceptible to dextran sulfate sodium (DSS)-induced colitis than wild-type (WT) mice, accompanied by more serious inflammatory symptoms and increased gene expression of certain inflammatory cytokines. Both miR-149-5p and miR-149-3p suppressed colon inflammatory response

The plant grows within the transportation of water and nutrients, including radial and longitudinal, but bamboo only exists pits inthe radial, so it plays anirreplaceable role at this moment. This study aims at giving rise to further understanding of the biological functions of pits in bamboo.Light microscopy (LM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were applied to investigate the structure and connections of bamboo pits. The results show that the arrangement of pits is significantly different, including alternate,scalariform and opposite arrangements. The presence or absence of the bordered on different cells is also displayed distinctively, these characteristicsextremely affect thetransportation of water and nutrients in bamboo.

Albumin is derived from plasma and it is the most abundant protein in plasma, which is an ideal material for the preparation of nanoparticles because of its good biocompatibility, noncytotoxicity, nonimmunogenicity, biodegradability, and so on. Besides, albumin can enhance the targeting of drugs, reduce the toxicity of free drugs, and enhance the water solubility of hydrophobic drugs, etc. Drug delivery systems based on albumin nanoparticles are widely used in the medical field. At present, the main methods of preparing albumin nanoparticles are desolvation, self-assembly, thermal gelation, spray-drying, double emulsification, emulsification, Nab-technology, pH coacervation, and so on. Due to the differences of principle and preparation conditions, these methods show different advantages and disadvantages. This review systematically summarizes the latest research progress of albumin nanoparticles about its methods of preparation in past five years, and it also introduces the latest applications in cancer therapy, existing difficulties. Thus, this review can fill the two gaps that few articles focus comprehensively on the application of albumin nanoparticles in tumor therapy and no article clearly points out the difficulties faced in current research of albumin nanoparticles.

There is evidence showing both heterozygous HTRA1 and homozygous HTRA1 mutations as causal for familial cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD). The clinical and neuroimaging signs of heterozygous HTRA1-related CSVD can mimic cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL). We aimed to characterize the genotypic and phenotypic features of HTRA1-related CSVD, and we compared the features of heterozygous HTRA1-related CSVD and CADASIL.We carried out genetic sequencing in a series of unrelated patients with suspected familial CSVD from China. Clinical and imaging characteristics of heterozygous HTRA1-related CSVD and CADASIL were compared.We identified nine heterozygous HTRA1 mutations and one homozygous HTRA1 mutation, seven of which are novel. Compared with CADASIL, patients with heterozygous HTRA1-related CSVD had a higher proportion of spine disorders and a lower proportion of white matter hyperintensities involving the anterior temporal lobe (p lt; 0.001).This study shows that most HTRA1-related CSVD patients in China carry heterozygous HTRA1 mutations. The specific extra-neurological features and neuroimaging features reveal informative differences between heterozygous HTRA1-related CSVD and CADASIL. We expand the mutational spectrum of HTRA1.

Taking ischemic and bleeding risks into consideration, insufficient data exist on dual antiplatelet therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention in elderly Chinese patients with coronary artery disease.We aimed to investigate the effectiveness and safety of ticagrelor in comparison with clopidogrel on a background of aspirin for elderly Chinese patients with coronary artery disease 12 months after percutaneous coronary intervention.A single-center retrospective cohort study was conducted. Selected from patients with coronary artery disease aged ≥ 75 years from January 2010 to July 2019, 908 eligible subjects receiving dual antiplatelet therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention for up to 12 months were consecutively enrolled in the study. The included patients received ticagrelor in combination with aspirin (n = 264) or clopidogrel in combination with aspirin (n = 644). Effectiveness endpoints were evaluated by the major adverse cardiovascular events, encompassing all-cause death, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and clinically driven revascularization. The safety endpoints were recorded as the incidence of Bleeding Academic Research Consortium bleeding.The patients who were treated with ticagrelor were slightly younger than those who were treated with clopidogrel (79.1 ± 3.7 vs 80.7 ± 4.5 years, p0.01). The ticagrelor cohort contained a higher percentage of patients undergoing a prior percutaneous coronary intervention (37.9% vs 24.5%, p0.01), and a lower percentage of smokers (19.3% vs 27.2%, p0.05), compared with the clopidogrel cohort. The levels of glucose, total cholesterol, and low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol in the ticagrelor group were higher while the level of triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol were lower (p0.05) than those in the clopidogrel group. Left main percutaneous coronary intervention was performed more frequently among the ticagrelor-treated patients (23.5% vs 9.3%, p0.01), while patients in the clopidogrel group underwent more left circumflex percutaneous coronary intervention (34.3% vs 23.1%, p0.01). We found that ticagrelor was associated with a lower incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events than clopidogrel using the inverse probability of treatment weighting model (odds ratio, 0.493; 95% confidence interval 0.356-0.684). There was no difference in terms of the risk of Bleeding Academic Research Consortium bleeding between the two groups (p0.05).Ticagrelor was associated with a lower incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events than clopidogrel at 12 months in elderly Chinese patients with coronary artery disease, without a significant increase of Bleeding Academic Research Consortium bleeding events.

Background Mutations in colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R) are known to cause adult-onset leukoencephalopathy with axonal spheroids and pigmented glia (ALSP), which has been recently demonstrated as a primary microgliopathy characterized by cognitive impairment. Although the molecular mechanism underlying CSF1R-mediated microgliopathy remains unclear, therapeutic strategies have generally targeted modulation of microglial function. In particular, the microglial inhibitor, minocycline, has been shown to attenuate learning and memory deficits in several neurodegenerative diseases. The objectives of this study were to investigate the pathogenic mechanisms underlying ALSP and to explore the therapeutic effects of minocycline in an in vivo model of ALSP. We hypothesized that inhibiting microglial activation via minocycline could reverse the behavior and pathological defects in ALSP model mice. Methods We generated a Csf1r haploinsufficiency mouse model of ALSP using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing and conducted electrophysiological recordings of long-term potentiation (LTP) and behavioral tests to validate the recapitulation of clinical ALSP characteristics in 8- to 11-month-old mice. RNA-sequencing was used to explore enriched gene expression in the molecular pathogenesis of ALSP. Microglial activation was assessed by immunofluorescent detection of Iba1 and CD68 in brain sections of male ALSP mice and pro-inflammatory activation and phagocytosis were assessed in Csf1r+/− microglia. Therapeutic effects were assessed by behavioral tests, histological analysis, and morphological examination after four weeks of intraperitoneal injection with minocycline or vehicle control in Csf1r+/− mice and wild-type control littermates. Results We found that synaptic function was reduced in LTP recordings of neurons in the hippocampal CA1 region, while behavioral tests showed impaired spatial and cognitive memory specifically in male Csf1r+/− mice. Increased activation, pro-inflammatory cytokine production, and enhanced phagocytic capacity were also observed in Csf1r+/− microglia. Treatment with minocycline could suppress the activation of Csf1r+/− microglia both in vitro and in vivo. Notably, the behavioral and pathological deficits in Csf1r+/− mice were partially rescued by minocycline administration, potentially due to inhibition of microglial inflammation and phagocytosis in Csf1r+/− mice. Conclusions Our study shows that CSF1R deficiency results in aberrant microglial activation, characterized by a pro-inflammatory phenotype and enhanced phagocytosis of myelin. Our results also indicate that microglial inhibition by minocycline can ameliorate behavioral impairment and ALSP pathogenesis in CSF1R-deficient male mice, suggesting a potential therapeutic target for CSF1R-related leukoencephalopathy. Collectively, these data support that minocycline confers protective effects against CSF1R-related microgliopathy in male ALSP model mice.

Convective available potential energy (CAPE), a metric associated with severe weather, is expected to increase with warming, but we have lacked a framework that describes its changes in the populated midlatitudes. In the tropics, theory suggests mean CAPE should rise following the Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) relationship at ~6%/K. In the heterogeneous midlatitudes, where the mean change is less relevant, we show that CAPE changes are larger and can be well-described by a simple framework based on moist static energy (MSE) surplus, which is robust across climate states. This effect is highly general and holds across both high-resolution nudged regional simulations and free-running global climate models. The simplicity of this framework means that complex distributional changes in future CAPE can be well-captured by a simple scaling of present-day data using only three parameters.

Introduction: Maintenance therapy aimed to strengthen the first-line chemotherapy and improve quality of life is needed for gastric cancer(GC). Currently, many clinical studies have confirmed the important role of fluoropyrimidine in the maintenance stage. Our team has created patented prescriptions “Fuzheng jiedu Quyu Method” recipe(FJQR), which was considered as an adjuvant therapeutic scheme(reduce toxicity and increase the efficacy of chemotherapy). This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of FJQR combined with fluoropyrimidine as a maintenance treatment in HER-2 negative GC patients. Methods: We performed the analysis of 129 patients with HER-2 negative GC who entered the maintenance stage in our hospital and Tianjin Cancer Hospital between January 2018 and December 2020. Out of the 129 eligible patients, 64 were categorized into the maintenance treatment group with FJQR+fluoropyrimidine, and 65 patients were assigned to the control group if they received fluoropyrimidine alone. Capecitabine was orally 1000mg/m2, Qd, half an hour after meals, and FGQR was 15g Bid after capecitabine. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival (PFS). The secondary endpoints were overall survival(OS), overall remission rate(ORR), quality of Life (QOL), TCM syndrome and safety. Results: The mPFS in the treatment group was significantly prolonged compared with the control group (6.3 vs. 5.0 months, P=0.03), while the mOS was not substantially improved (11.4 vs. 10.5 months, P=0.38). Gastrointestinal symptoms and pain became better in the treatment group. The number of distant metastatic organs, first-line chemotherapy cycles, and lymph node metastasis were independent risk predictors for PFS. Blood stasis syndrome may be the protective factor. In terms of safety, treatment-related adverse events(AEs) in the treatment group were relatively lighter, and the incidence of grade III-IV AEs could be significantly reduced. Conclusion: FJQR and fluoropyrimidine have synergistic effects as maintenance treatment in HER-2 negative GC, with good efficacy and safety.

Ferroptosis is a form of programmed cell death with important biological functions in the progression of various diseases, and targeting ferroptosis is a new tumor treatment strategy. Studies have shown that sodium butyrate plays a tumor-suppressing role in the progression of various tumors, however, the mechanism of NaBu in endometrial cancer is unclear. Cell viability, clone formation, proliferation, migration, invasion abilities and cell cycle distribution were assessed by CCK8 assay, Clone formation ability assay, EdU incorporation, Transwell chambers and flow cytometry. The level of ferroptosis was assayed by the levels of ROS and lipid peroxidation, the ratio of GSH/GSSG and the morphology of mitochondria. Molecular mechanisms were explored by metabolome, transcriptome, RNA-pulldown and mass spectrometry. The in-vivo mechanism was validated using subcutaneous xenograft model. In this study, NaBu was identified to inhibit the progression of endometrial cancer in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, RBM3 has a binding relationship with SLC7A11 mRNA. NaBu indirectly downregulates the expression of SLC7A11 by promoting the expression of RBM3, thereby promoting ferroptosis in endometrial cancer cells. In conclusion, Sodium butyrate can promote the expression of RBM3 and indirectly downregulate the expression of SLC7A11 to stimulate ferroptosis, which may be a promising cancer treatment strategy.

Assisting humans in collaborative tasks is a promising application for robots, however effective assistance remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a method for providing intuitive robotic assistance based on learning from human natural limb coordination. To encode coupling between multiple-limb motions, we use a novel interval type-2 (IT2) polynomial fuzzy inference for modeling trajectory adaptation. The associated polynomial coefficients are estimated using a modified recursive least-square with a dynamic forgetting factor. We propose to employ a Gaussian process to produce robust human motion predictions, and thus address the uncertainty and measurement noise of the system caused by interactive environments. Experimental results on two types of interaction tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, which achieves high accuracy in predicting assistive limb motion and enables humans to perform bimanual tasks using only one limb.

Automatic seizure detection from electroencephalography (EEG) based on deep learning has been significantly improved. However, existing works have not adequately excavate the spatial-temporal information between EEG channels. Besides, most works mainly focus on patient-specific scenarios while cross-patient seizure detection is more challenging and meaningful. Regarding the above problems, we propose a hybrid attention network (HAN) for automatic seizure detection. Specifically, the graph attention network (GAT) extracts spatial features at the front end, and Transformer gets time features as the back end. HAN leverages the attention mechanism and fully extracts the spatial-temporal correlation of EEG signals. The focal loss function is introduced to HAN to deal with the imbalance of the dataset accompanied by seizure detection based on EEG. Both patient-specific and patient-independent experiments are carried out on the public CHB-MIT database. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of HAN in both experimental settings.

N-glycosylation, an important post-translational modification of proteins in all eukaryotes, has been clearly shown to be involved in numerous diseases in mammalian systems. In contrast, little is known regarding the role of protein N-glycosylation in plant defensive responses to pathogen infection. We identified, for the first time, glycoproteins related to systemic acquired resistance (SAR) in an Arabidopsis thaliana model, using a glycoproteomics platform based on high-resolution mass spectrometry. 407 glycosylation sites corresponding to 378 glycopeptides and 273 unique glycoproteins were identified. 65 significantly changed glycoproteins with 80 N-glycosylation sites were detected in systemic leaves of SAR-induced plants, including numerous GDSL-like lipases, thioglucoside glucohydrolases, kinases, and glycosidases. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that significantly changed glycoproteins were involved mainly in N-glycan biosynthesis and degradation, phenylpropanoid biosynthesis, cutin and wax biosynthesis, and plant-pathogen interactions. Comparative analysis of glycoproteomics and proteomics data indicated that glycoproteomics analysis is an efficient method for screening proteins associated with SAR. The present findings clarify glycosylation status and sites of A. thaliana proteins, and will facilitate further research on roles of glycoproteins in SAR induction.

In this paper, we propose a binarized neural network learning method (BiDet) for efficient object detection. Conventional network binarization methods directly quantize the weights and activations in one-stage or two-stage detectors with constrained representational capacity, so that the information redundancy in the networks causes numerous false positives and degrades the performance significantly. On the contrary, our BiDet fully utilizes the representational capacity of the binary neural networks by redundancy removal, through which the detection precision is enhanced with alleviated false positives. Specifically, we generalize the information bottleneck (IB) principle to object detection, where the amount of information in the high-level feature maps is constrained and the mutual information between the feature maps and object detection is maximized. Meanwhile, we learn sparse object priors so that the posteriors are concentrated on informative detection prediction with false positive elimination. Since BiDet employs a fixed IB trade-off to balance the total and relative information contained in the high-level feature maps, the information compression leads to ineffective utilization of the network capacity or insufficient redundancy removal for input in different complexity. To address this, we further present binary neural networks with automatic information compression (AutoBiDet) to automatically adjust the IB trade-off for each input according to the complexity. Moreover, we further propose the class-aware sparse object priors by assigning different sparsity to objects in various classes, so that the false positives are alleviated more effectively without recall decrease. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets show that our BiDet and AutoBiDet outperform the state-of-the-art binarized object detectors by a sizable margin.

In recent years, using semiconductor photocatalysts for antibiotic contaminant degradation under visible light has become a hot topic. Herein, a novel and ingenious cadmium-doped graphite phase carbon nitride (Cd-g-C