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Uncontrolled hemorrhage accounts for a significant proportion of annual mortality worldwide. The development of bioinspired hemostatic composites can effectively reduce hemorrhage and related deaths. This work aims to develop an efficient hemostatic agent by incorporating tissue factor (TF) integrated liposomes and collagen, which are capable of augmenting different inherent hemostatic mechanisms, into hemostasis-stimulating alginate matrix. The composite of TF, collagen and alginate (TCA) was made into hydrogel beads with a diameter range of 2.5-3.5 mm, followed by electron microscopy, infrared spectroscopy, rheological, and swelling characterization to confirm its composition and hydrogel nature. When the TCA beads were introduced into simulated body fluid, a controlled release of the loaded TF-liposomes was observed, which also accelerated with the increase of temperature, obtaining intact free proteoliposomes as demonstrated by fluorescence measurement. It is further seen that TCA beads induced the coagulation of whole rabbit blood in about 4.5 min, as compared to ~14.4 min for the control with only recalcified blood. The lipidated TF, collagen and alginate in TCA beads showed a positive synergistic effect on coagulation, while among them a decreasing procoagulant effect was observed. Finally, we demonstrated by a live/dead cell assay that TCA particles had undetectable cytotoxicity. Thus, the TCA hydrogel macrobeads may offer a potential platform for the development of potent hemostatic agents.

Our previous genome-wide association study revealed that a SNP, ASGA0040372, located upstream of glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase 3 (GPAT3), is related to growth traits in Duroc pigs. In this study, we aimed to extensively investigate the genetic variation of GPAT3 and to further verify the contribution of ASGA0040372 to growth traits and its effect on promoter activity. Our data, obtained based on gene cloning and rapid amplification of cDNA ends experiments, showed that there are 14 exons and three alternative splicing variants. Five SNPs were detected, including ASGA0040372 and four novel SNPs. Furthermore, the five SNPs obtained were used to confirm their genetic effects on pig growth by an association study in a Duroc pig population. The results indicated that three SNPs (ASGA0040372, RS331766122 and RS346215414) are highly associated with average daily gain or days to 100 kg traits (P-value < 0.05). Subsequent analysis suggested that the promoter region of GPAT3 gene, from -950 to -500 bp, exhibited the highest activity. We also observed that ASGA0040372 (A/G) alleles have significantly different effects on promoter transcriptional activities, which leads to differential expression of GPAT3. Taken together, we conclude that the GPAT3 gene is associated with pig growth and that ASGA0040372 influences promoter activity of GPAT3 in pig.