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The plastic waste crisis is among humanity's most urgent challenges. However, widespread adoption of sustainable plastics is hindered by their often inadequate processing characteristics and performance. Here, we introduce a bio-inspired strategy for the modification of a representative high molar mass, biodegradable aliphatic polyester that helps overcome these limitations and remains effective at molar masses far greater than the entanglement molar mass. We use co-assembly of oligopeptide-based polymer end groups and a low molar mass additive to create a hierarchical structure characterized by regularly spaced nanofibrils interconnected by entangled polymer segments. The modified materials show a rubbery plateau at temperatures above their melting point, associated with strongly increased melt strength, extraordinary melt extensibility, improved dimensional stability, and accelerated crystallization. These thermomechanical property changes open up otherwise inaccessible processing routes and offer considerable scope for improving solid-state properties, thereby addressing typical shortcomings of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics., Competing Interests: Competing interests: While working on this project, S.H. was employed by Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, which also partly funded the research project. Additionally, H.F., D.G., C.J.G.P., O.O., and S.H. are inventors on the two related patent applications WO2020229594 and WO2019096365., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Small-angle-scattering tensor tomography is a technique for studying anisotropic nanostructures of millimetre-sized samples in a volume-resolved manner. It requires the acquisition of data through repeated tomographic rotations about an axis which is subjected to a series of tilts. The tilt that can be achieved with a typical setup is geometrically constrained, which leads to limits in the set of directions from which the different parts of the reciprocal space map can be probed. Here, we characterize the impact of this limitation on reconstructions in terms of the missing wedge problem of tomography, by treating the problem of tensor tomography as the reconstruction of a three-dimensional field of functions on the unit sphere, represented by a grid of Gaussian radial basis functions. We then devise an acquisition scheme to obtain complete data by remounting the sample, which we apply to a sample of human trabecular bone. Performing tensor tomographic reconstructions of limited data sets as well as the complete data set, we further investigate and validate the missing wedge problem by investigating reconstruction errors due to data incompleteness across both real and reciprocal space. Finally, we carry out an analysis of orientations and derived scalar quantities, to quantify the impact of this missing wedge problem on a typical tensor tomographic analysis. We conclude that the effects of data incompleteness are consistent with the predicted impact of the missing wedge problem, and that the impact on tensor tomographic analysis is appreciable but limited, especially if precautions are taken. In particular, there is only limited impact on the means and relative anisotropies of the reconstructed reciprocal space maps., (open access.)

For vulvar cancers, radiotherapy is targeting cancer cells, but also affects the host immune system. As this may affect treatment outcome, in this prospective study, we characterized the individual T cell immune milieu induced by surgery and adjuvant radio +/- chemotherapy (aRT) systemically in the blood of vulvar cancer patients and found increased frequencies of Interleukin (IL)-17-producing CD4 + and CD8 + T cells after aRT while frequencies of Th1 and perforin-producing CD8 + killer cells were strongly diminished. Phenotypic characterization revealed enhanced expression of the ectonucleotidase CD39 on Th17 and Tc17 cells as well as CD8 + perforin + cells after aRT. Furthermore, the aRT cohort exhibited increased proportions of Programmed Cell Death Protein (PD-1) expressing cells among Th1 and CD8 + perforin + cells, but not among Th17 and Tc17 cells. High post-therapeutic levels of Th17 and Tc17 cells and low proportions of Th1 and CD8 + perforin + cells expressing PD-1 was associated with reduced recurrence free survival on follow-up. In conclusion, our study defines individual therapy-induced changes in the cellular immune milieu of patients and their association with cancer relapse. Our results may help to explain differences in the individual courses of disease of vulvar cancer patients and suggest PD-1 and IL-17 as targets for immunotherapy in vulvar cancer., (© 2023 The Authors. International Journal of Cancer published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of UICC.)

Parkinson's disease (PD) emerges as a complex, multifactorial disease. While there is increasing evidence that dysregulated T cells play a central role in PD pathogenesis, elucidation of the pathomechanical changes in related signaling is still in its beginnings. We employed time-resolved RNA expression upon the activation of peripheral CD4+ T cells to track and functionally relate changes on cellular signaling in representative cases of patients at different stages of PD. While only few miRNAs showed time-course related expression changes in PD, we identified groups of genes with significantly altered expression for each different time window. Towards a further understanding of the functional consequences, we highlighted pathways with decreased or increased activity in PD, including the most prominent altered IL-17 pathway. Flow cytometric analyses showed not only an increased prevalence of Th17 cells but also a specific subtype of IL-17 producing γδ-T cells, indicating a previously unknown role in PD pathogenesis., (© 2023. The Author(s).)