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A highly efficient continuous oil/water separation process is proposed where both superhydrophobic/superoleophilic oil-removing and superhydrophilic/underwater superoleophobic water-removing stainless steel meshes are installed at the bottom of the same container to construct a dual-channeled separator, in which agitation is applied to avoid the stratification of oil/water mixtures. Continuous oil/water separation is easily realized by this dual-channeled separator. Stainless steel meshes above 300-mesh afford separation efficiency higher than 99.5% for oils lighter than water such as gasoline, hexane, and heptane and oils heavier than water like carbon tetrachloride in a wide range of ratio of oil to water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrin subunit beta-like 1 (ITGBL1), a member of the epidermal growth factor (EGF)-like protein family, encodes a beta integrin-related protein that is mainly associated with the development of specific tumours and immune-related signalling pathways. This work aimed to explore the possibility that ITGBL1 functions as a novel target gene for immunotherapy and could be a cancer prognostic molecule. The mRNA data for ITGBL1 were obtained from the public databases The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). Using GEPIA, the differential expression of ITGBL1 in different tumour stages was identified. Cancer prognostic correlations were explored using Kaplan–Meier survival analysis and forest plots. A combination of Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA), TIMER2.0 and the R package was applied to analyse the ITGBL1-enriched related pathways. The NCI-60 drug database was examined using CellMinerTM. Cytological experiments were conducted to confirm ITGBL1's impact on cancer cells. Our research has shown that ITGBL1 is differentially expressed in 26 cancers, and high ITGBL1 expression predicts a poorer survival prognosis in some specific cancers. Additionally, we found that ITGBL1 is enriched in immune-related pathways, which are closely linked to immunomodulatory molecules, immune-infiltrating cells, and immunomodulatory factors. The results of tumor mutational burden (TMB) and microsatellite instability (MSI) also indicate that the expression of ITGBL1 is beneficial for improving tumor immunotherapy efficacy. Furthermore, a number of antitumor agents associated with ITGBL1 expression have been identified. Finally, knockdown of ITGBL1 restricts the ability of gastric and colorectal cancer cells to proliferate and migrate. Our study demonstrates that ITGBL1 can be utilized to accurately prognosticate cancer and has opened up new avenues for the investigation of tumor immune mechanisms and the development of more efficacious immunotherapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, autoencoder (AE)-based anomaly detection approaches for hyperspectral images (HSIs) have been extensively proposed; however, the reconstruction accuracy is susceptible to the anomalies and noises. Moreover, these AE-based anomaly detectors simply compress each pixel into a hidden-layer with a lower dimension and then reconstruct it, which does not consider the spatial properties among pixels. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a background reconstruction framework via a 3D-transformer (3DTR) network for anomaly detection in HSIs. The experimental results on both synthetic and real hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed 3DTR network is able to effectively detect most of the anomalies by comprehensively considering the spatial correlations among pixels and the spectral similarity among spectral bands of HSIs. In addition, the proposed method exhibits fewer false alarms than both traditional and state-of-the-art (including model-based and AE-based) anomaly detectors owing to the adopted pre-detection procedure and the proposed novel patch-generation method in this paper. Moreover, two ablation experiments adequately verified the effectiveness of each component in the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protein kinesin family member 26B (KIF26B) is aberrantly expressed in various cancers. However, its particular role and association with tumor immune infiltration in colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) remain unclear. All original data were downloaded directly from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), UCSC Xena, and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases and processed with R 3.6.3. KIF26B expression was analyzed using Oncomine, TIMER, TCGA, GEO databases, and our clinical specimens. KIF26B expression at the protein level was explored with Human Protein Atlas (HPA) database. The upstream miRNAs and lncRNAs were predicted by StarBase and validated using RT-qPCR. Correlation of KIF26B expression with the expression of immune-related or immune checkpoint genes and GSEA analysis of KIF26B-related genes were investigated via R software. Relationship of KIF26B expression with immune biomarkers or tumor immune infiltration levels was studied through GEPIA2 and TIMER databases. KIF26B was upregulated, and its overexpression was closely related to overall survival (OS), disease-specific survival (DSS), progression-free interval (PFI), T stage, N stage, and CEA levels in COAD. MIR4435-2HG/hsa-miR−500a−3p/KIF26B axis was identified as the promising regulatory pathway of KIF26B. KIF26B expression was positively correlated with immune-related genes, tumor immune infiltration, and biomarker genes of immune cells in COAD, and KIF26B-related genes were significantly enriched in macrophage activation-related pathways. Expression of immune checkpoint genes, including PDCD1, CD274, and CTLA4, was also closely related to KIF26B expression. Our results clarified that ncRNA-based increased KIF26B expression was associated with a worse prognosis and high tumor immune infiltration in COAD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation outperforms orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing in high-mobility scenarios through better channel estimation. Current superimposed pilot (SP)-based channel estimation improves the spectral efficiency (SE) when compared to that of the traditional embedded pilot (EP) method. However, it requires an additional non-superimposed EP delay-Doppler frame to estimate the delay-Doppler taps for the following SP-aided frames. To handle this problem, we propose a channel estimation method with high SE, which superimposes the perfect binary array (PBA) on data symbols as the pilot. Utilizing the perfect autocorrelation of PBA, channel estimation is performed based on a linear search to find the correlation peaks, which include both delay-Doppler tap information and complex channel gain in the same superimposed PBA frame. Furthermore, the optimal power ratio of the PBA is then derived by maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) to optimize the SE of the proposed system. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a similar channel estimation performance to the existing EP method while significantly improving the SE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a challenging issue for men's health worldwide due to its uncontrolled proliferation and high metastatic potential. Increasing evidence has supported plant extracts and natural plant derivatives as promising antitumor therapy with less toxic side effects. Yuanhuacine is an active component isolated from Daphne genkwa and can effectively suppress the tumorigenesis of several cancers. However, its role in PCa remains unclear. In this study, yuanhuacine dose‐dependently inhibited the proliferation and induced apoptosis of PCa cells. Moreover, yuanhuacine also restrained the invasion and migration of PCa cells. Mechanically, yuanhuacine decreased the ubiquitination and degradation of p53 protein, and ultimately increased p53 levels, which was regulated by inhibiting the phosphorylation and total protein levels of mouse double minute 2 (MDM2). Moreover, elevation of MDM2 reversed the suppressive efficacy of yuanhuacine in PCa cell viability, invasion, and migration. The network pharmacologic and bioinformatics analysis confirmed that MDM2 might be a common target of D. genkwa and LINC00665. Furthermore, yuanhuacine inhibited LINC00665 expression. Upregulation of LINC00665 reversed yuanhuacine‐mediated inhibition in MDM2 protein expression and suppressed p53 levels by enhancing its ubiquitination in yuanhuacine‐treated cells. Importantly, the inhibitory effects of yuanhuacine on cell viability and metastatic potential were offset after LINC00665 elevation. Together, the current findings highlight that yuanhuacine may possess tumor‐suppressive efficacy by inhibiting LINC00665‐mediated MDM2/p53 ubiquitination signaling. Therefore, this study indicates that yuanhuacine may be a promising candidate for the treatment of PCa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) progression can be predicted by abnormalities in the tubulointerstitial lining, and their treatment may be useful for preventing the disease. DKD is a progressive disease that contributes to renal tubular cell death, but its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Ferroptosis is a novel term linked to lipid hydroperoxidation, and it plays an important role in the pathogenesis of DKD. Overexpression of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX2), an enzyme of the proximal tubule, causes cellular redox damage in DKD. It remains unknown whether COX2 exacerbates tubular damage by accelerating ferroptosis in the kidneys of diabetic mice. HK-2 cells cultured in high glucose exhibited ferroptosis, which was inhibited by ferroptosis inhibitors. Additionally, alterations in the sensors of ferroptosis metabolism, such as glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4) activity, lipid hydroperoxidation, reduced glutathione (GSH) levels and changes in mitochondrial morphology, were observed in high glucose-cultured HK-2 cells. Diabetic mice manifested tubular injury and deranged renal physiological indices, which were mitigated by ferrostatin-1 (Fer-1). Importantly, these perturbations were ameliorated by downregulating COX2. In addition, the increased COX2 was observed to be elevated in the daibetic kindney. To explore the relevance of COX2 to ferroptosis, HK-2 cells that knocked down from COX2 exhibited decreased ferroptosis sensitivity under high glucose conditions. In RSL-3-treated HK-2 cells, ferroptosis was improved by downregulating COX2 by treatment with aspirin, which was confirmed in high glucose-cultured HK-2 cells. Furthermore, the ferroptosis changes were also suppressed by decreasing COX2 in diabetic mice treated with aspirin, which retarded DKD progression. In conclusion, our results demonstrated that ferroptosis in renal tubular cells contributes to DKD development and that diabetes-related ferroptosis was inhibited through the downregulation of COX2 by aspirin, thus retarding the progression of DKD. Our findings support a renoprotective mechanism by which aspirin inhibits COX2 activation, identify COX2 as a potential target of ferroptosis, and establish that ferroptosis in renal tubular cells is an integral process in the pathogenesis of DKD regulated by COX2 expression profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2D layered materials with low crystal symmetries exhibit unique anisotropic physical properties. Here the systematic studies on the optical modulation effects of such anisotropic 2D materials to isotropic 2D materials in their stacked van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures are reported. By applying angle‐resolved polarization spectroscopic characterizations on the MoS2/ZrS3 vdW heterostructure, periodic intensity variations of the Raman scattering and photoluminescence (PL) emission modes of monolayer MoS2 are observed, which are closely correlated to the anisotropic optical properties of the underlying ZrS3 layers. Such anisotropic optical modulation effects can be identified with the thickness of ZrS3 reduced to few layers (≈6 nm), and are attributed to the strong birefringence and dichroism effects in ZrS3 that cause reflection difference between its crystal axis, thus modulating the Raman/PL intensities of MoS2 via Fabry–Pérot interference effect. Furthermore, the polarized photocurrent response of the heterostructure is also demonstrated, where its major contribution originates from MoS2. This work develops a new methodology to tune the light–matter interactions and properties of isotropic 2D materials by the combination with anisotropic 2D materials, which substantially broadens the application of low symmetry layered materials in polarization sensitive optoelectronic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]