Search

In prosimian galagos, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is subdivided into a number of functional domains where long-train intracortical microstimulation evoked different types of complex movements. Here, we placed anatomical tracers in multiple locations of PPC to reveal the origins and targets of thalamic connections of four PPC domains for different types of hindlimb, forelimb, or face movements. Thalamic connections of all four domains included nuclei of the motor thalamus, ventral anterior and ventral lateral nuclei, as well as parts of the sensory thalamus, the anterior pulvinar, posterior and ventral posterior superior nuclei, consistent with the sensorimotor functions of PPC domains. PPC domains also projected to the thalamic reticular nucleus in a somatotopic pattern. Quantitative differences in the distributions of labeled neurons in thalamic nuclei suggested that connectional patterns of these domains differed from each other.

Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs) have attracted much attention due to their high energy density and theoretical specific capacity. However, the "shuttle effect" of polysulfides limits their application. Herein, we propose a postsynthetic modification (PSM) strategy to synthesize a fibrous carborane-tailored covalent organic framework (PMCB-COF). Benefiting from its amphiphilicity, strong adsorption ability, high specific surface area, and accessible Li

Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs) have been considered as one of the most promising energy storage systems because of their high theoretical energy density. However, the "shuttle effect" caused by polysulfide results in poor cycling stability and low electrochemical properties, which strongly impedes the practical application of LSBs. Herein, a kind of amphiphilic carborane-based covalent organic framework (CB-COF) is synthesized and treated as nano-trappers for polysulfide. The microporous CB-COFs show high-temperature resistance and excellent chemical stability. Both experimental results and theoretical calculation indicate the strong adsorption ability of CB-COF for polysulfides. Such an ability makes CB-COF a candidate separator material for LSBs, which efficiently suppresses the "shuttle effect," leading to a high-rate capacity (314 mA h g

Hydrogels constructed from natural sources have received increased attention recently, including applications in biomedical fields. They are protein or polysaccharide cross-linked scaffolds that display water retention and are able to recognize host cargos. Their excellent biocompatibility does not always combine with high mechanical strength (up to 136 kPa) and thermostability, making them less useful in biomedical applications. This paper reports biocompatible gelatin hydrogels, double cross-linked via imine and Diels-Alder (DA) dynamic covalent frameworks. They showed integrated advantages of adjustable and durable mechanical strength, good thermal stability, biocompatibility for promoting cell growth and reasonable degradable rate. These hydrogels possess remarkable self-healing property, acid/alkali resistance at 65 °C and good integrity in organic solvents at 130 °C, holding great potential for biomedical applications in the areas such as cartilage regeneration, articular reconstruction or soft robotics.

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers have potential applications in medical imaging and distributed sensing, for which the integrated NV magnetometer array is needed. However, the microwave (MW) drive module limits the development of the compact NV magnetometer system and array. In this paper, wireless MW is applied to two NV magnetometer systems (Sensor I and Sensor II) innovatively. We verified that the magnetic-field sensitivity was approximately equal to 77.1 nT•Hz−1/2 and 44.6 nT•Hz−1/2 for Sensor I and Sensor II, respectively, when the distance between the transmitting and receiving antennas was 1 m. This method can be extended to the NV magnetometer array. The receiving antenna and power amplifier are integrated into the NV magnetometer array system for miniaturization. This expands the utility of NV magnetometers in sensing and medical imaging. Furthermore, we achieved remote heart sound records with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 5.93 dB and 4.68 dB for Sensor I and Sensor II, respectively, by applying the principle of NV-based demodulator to the system. This would further extend the advantages of the wireless MW in the NV magnetometer. The NV magnetometer could receive the frequency point carrying heart sound signal to reach up to 16, which can avoid the interference of the 2.4 GHz frequency band of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in complex environments.

Sustainable tourism development has attracted attention worldwide. A system-based perspective and an interdisciplinary approach are indispensable for evaluating tourism sustainability. The aim of this study is to propose an emergy analysis framework for the Kanas tourism area in Xinjiang, China, by combining emergy accounting and emergetic ternary diagrams. Data from field surveys and literature analysis were used for the sustainability assessment of the Kanas tourism system. The results show the following: (1) the emergy utilization is not efficient according to the indicators of the social subsystem. (2) The emergy investment ratio, net emergy yield ratio, and emergy exchange ratio of tourism, three indicators belonging to the economic subsystem, indicate that the tourism economy in the study area has low efficiency from different perspectives. (3) The environmental loading ratio of tourism indicates that the environmental pressure on the tourism system is low. However, the values of the emergy yield of waste and the ratio of waste emergy to total renewable resources show that tourism waste adversely affects tourism sustainability due to the growing number of tourists. The results of the emergy sustainability indicator of tourism and the emergy indicator of sustainable development of tourism demonstrate that sustainable development may not be possible in the long run due to the low level of economic and social efficiency, although sustainability was achieved for a certain period. (4) The emergetic ternary diagrams of the indicators visualize the increasing ecological pressure and decreasing sustainability of the system, revealing that Kanas should focus on long-term sustainable development based on the sensitivity lines of renewable resources. Finally, suggestions were provided based on the conclusions.

Capsaicin (Cap) is a promising bioactive compound having many health-promoting benefits. However, it is difficult to be applied in food due to its poor aqueous solubility, low stability and bioavailability. Besides, its strong spicy taste and irritation to the gastrointestinal tract further limit the application of Cap in food. To solve this problem, Cap was loaded into a self-assembled nanocarrier formed by partial hydrolysis of α-lactalbumin (α-lac). The Cap was successfully loaded into the 21.2 nm micelles with a loading capacity of 123.4 ± 6.1 mg g

As extracellular matrix (ECM) mimetic materials, hydrogels have been widely used for broad biomedical applications. However, with so many physical or chemical cues in the matrix that regulate cell behaviors or functions, it remains challenging to design a customizable hydrogel with the desired properties on demand. In the current study, we aim to establish a circular-patterned hydrogel model with gradient stiffness for screening the most favorable ECM environment for specific cells or certain application purposes. First, six types of hydrogels with a wide stiffness range of 1.2-28.9 kPa were prepared by dynamic covalent cross-linking between gelatin derivatives and oxidized hyaluronic acid. Taking advantage of their instantaneous self-healing property from dynamic chemistry, the hydrogels were further spliced into one whole piece of circular-patterned hydrogel. When rabbit bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells were seeded in the center, the influences of matrix stiffness on the regulation of stem cell adhesion, migration, and differentiation were directly observed and compared under one visual field. In addition, these hydrogels all possessed good biocompatibility, degradability, and injectability, showing great potential for tissue-engineering-related applications.

Diabetes mellitus is a long-term chronic disease characterized by abnormal high level blood glucose (BG). An artificial closed-loop system that mimics pancreatic β-cells and releases insulin on demand has potential to improve the therapeutic efficiency of diabetes. Herein, a lectin Concanavalin A modified oxidized starch nanogel was designed to regulate glucose dynamically according to different glucose concentrations. The nanogels were formed by double cross-linking the Concanavalin A and glucose units on oxidized starch via specific binding and amide bonds to achieve the high drug loading and glucose responsiveness. The results showed that oxidized starch nanogels prolonged the half-life of antidiabetic peptide drug exenatide and released it in response to high BG concentrations. It could absorb BG at a high level and maintain glucose homeostasis. Besides, the oxidized starch nanogels performed well in recovering regular BG level from hyperglycemia state and maintaining in euglycemia state that fitted in a biological rhythm. In addition, the nanogels showed high biocompatibility in vivo and could improve plasma half-life and therapeutic efficacy of exenatide. Overall, the nanogels protected peptide drugs from degradation in plasma as a glucose-responsive platform showing a high potential for peptide drugs delivery and antidiabetic therapy.

Curcumin (Cur) and Melittin (Mel) are two natural extracts that have been shown anti-tumor effects. However, their applications are limited due to poor oral bioavailability and the lack of tumor-targeting property. Here, we developed a novel nanocomposite that enabled the co-delivery of Cur and Mel, which consists of α-lactalbumin protein nanotubes (NTs), positively charged N,N,N-trimethyl chitosan (TMC), and a tumor-targeting cyclic peptide iRGD. The results showed that NTs/Cur-TMC-Mel-iRGD incorporated the advantages of each component, for instance, effective compounds loading by NTs, improved cellular uptake by TMC, prolonged accumulation in tumors by iRGD as well as synergistic anti-tumor effects of Cur and Mel. In the tumor-bearing mice, NTs/Cur-TMC-Mel-iRGD treatment remarkably induced cancer cell apoptosis while inhibiting cell proliferation, leading to suppressed tumor growth. Besides, no obvious adverse effects were observed in the blood physiology and tissue histology. Overall, our study provided an effective strategy for co-delivering Cur and Mel, which has a potential for translational clinical research aiming to treat solid tumors.

In this paper, we implement integrated magnetic flux concentrators (MFCs) combined with a multi-frequency modulation method to achieve high-magnetic-detection sensitivity using a nuclear spin on the solid nuclear spin in diamonds. First, we excited the nuclear spin in diamonds using a continuous-wave technique, and a linewidth of 1.37 MHz and frequency resolution of 79 Hz were successfully obtained, which is reduced by one order of the linewidth, and increased by 56 times in frequency resolution compared to that excited by an electron spin. The integrated high-permeability MFC was designed to magnify the magnetic field near the diamond, with a magnification of 9.63 times. Then, the multi-frequency modulation technique was used to fully excite the hyperfine energy level of Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centers along the four axes on the diamond with MFC, and magnetic detection sensitivity of 250pT/Hz1/2 was realized. These techniques should allow designing an integrated NV magnetometer with high sensitivity in a small volume.

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), such as heparin, heparan sulfate and chondroitin sulfate, are playing important roles in various biological processes. Due to the laborious work of organic or enzymatic total synthesis of GAGs, different approaches, including glycopolymers, dendrimers, etc., have been developed to mimic the structures and bioactivities of GAGs, but the syntheses can still be difficult. In the current study, a new format of GAG mimetic structure, supramolecularly assembled polymers, have been easily prepared by mixing fluorenylmethoxycarbonyl-diphenylalanine (Fmoc-FF) and sulfated glyco-modified fluorenylmethoxy derivatives (FGS and FG3S). The self-assembly behavior of these polymers into different structural formats of nanoparticles, nanofibers and macroscopic hydrogels upon adjusted concentrations and composite ratios have been detailed studied. The nanofibers modified with highly sulfated glycol groups (FG3S/Fmoc-FF) showed strong promotion effect for cell proliferation, which efficiency was even similar to that of natural heparin, higher than nanoparticles or non-/low-sulfated glyco-modified nanofibers. Moreover, the supramolecular polymers were further made into hydrogels that capable of 3D cell culture. This study provided a novel and efficient approach for GAG mimicking, showing great potential for tissue engineering related applications.

As a persistent pollutant, microplastics (MPs) have been reported to induce sperm quantity decrease in mice. However, the related mechanism remains obscure. Therefore, this study is intended to explore the effects of polystyrene microplastics (PS-MPs) on male reproduction and its related mechanism of blood-testis barrier (BTB) impairment. Thirty-two adult male Wistar rats were divided randomly into four groups fed with PS-MPs for 90 days at doses of 0 mg/day (control group), 0.015 mg/day, 0.15 mg/day, and 1.5 mg/day, respectively. The present results have shown that PS-MP exposure led to the damage of seminiferous tubule, resulted in apoptosis of spermatogenic cells, and decreased the motility and concentration of sperm, while the abnormality of sperm was elevated. Meanwhile, PS-MPs could induce oxidative stress and activate the p38 MAPK pathway and thus deplete the nuclear factor erythroid-2 related factor 2 (Nrf2). Noteworthily, PS-MPs led to the BTB-related protein expression decrease. All these results demonstrated that PS-MP exposure may lead to the destruction of BTB integrity and the apoptosis of spermatogenic cells through the activation of the MAPK-Nrf2 pathway. The current study provided novelty evidence for elucidating the effects of PS-MPs on male reproductive toxicity and its potential mechanism.

In this paper, an adaptive filtering minimum entropy detector (AF-MED) method is proposed, which is an improvement on the minimum entropy detector (MED) method. The improvement can be divided into two parts. Firstly, in view of the low detection rate of the MED method in the case of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), an adaptive filtering technology is added, which can accurately and dynamically determine the frequency range of the magnetic field according to the moving speed of the magnetic target, and effectively restrain the influence of environmental noise on the magnetic field. Compared with the MED method, the detection rate is increased by 48%. Secondly, using the kernel density estimation method to calculate the probability density value, the advantage is that there is no need to make any predictions or assumptions about the target, which makes the method more convenient to achieve. Furthermore, in this study, numerous simulations and experiments were performed, and the cell averaging constant false alarm rate detector was used to calculate the detection rate. The average value of detection rates of AF-MED, MED and the orthogonal basis function (OBF) are about 69%, 21% and 43% respectively when SNR is low (SNR from −25 dB to −50 dB). The results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method over the MED and the OBF.

Hepatocellular carcinoma is a malignance that remains difficult to cure. Immunotherapy has shown its potential application in a variety of refractory malignancies. Due to the complexity of immune microenvironment of hepatocellular carcinoma, the efficacy of immunotherapy for hepatocellular carcinoma is not as effective as expected. Expression data of hepatocellular carcinoma from the TCGA and ICGC databases were used for classification and verification of hepatocellular carcinoma subtypes. The immune-related functions and pathways were identified via gene set enrichment analysis, while the sections denoting the subsets of the immune cells were estimated using the CIBERSORT algorithm. Immunity low (Immunity_L), immunity medium (Immunity_M), and immunity high (Immunity_H) were specified as the three immune-related subtypes of hepatocellular carcinoma. The quantity of stromal and immune cells was the most substantial in Immunity_H, compared to the other subtypes. Interestingly, the proportion of M0 macrophages decreased from Immunity_L to Immunity_H, while the proportion of CD8 T cells increased. Furthermore, the HLA genes expression levels, as well as those of six immune checkpoint genes were substantially lower in Immunity_L than in Immunity_H. Functional analysis was performed for 1512 differentially expressed genes between Immunity_L and Immunity_H. Finally, the PPI network was constructed with 118 nodes. The highest connectivity degree nodes were B2M, HLA-DRA, and HLA-DRB1. The above results were verified in ICGC-JP and ICGC-FR databases with a consistent trend. In this study, we divided hepatocellular carcinoma into three subtypes and explored the immune-related characteristics of these subtypes. These results may provide new insights for immunotherapy of hepatocellular carcinoma.

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is widely used in object detection pipelines for removing duplicated bounding boxes. The inconsistency between the confidence for NMS and the real localization confidence seriously affects detection performance. Prior works propose to predict Intersection-over-Union (IoU) between bounding boxes and corresponding ground-truths to improve NMS, while accurately predicting IoU is still a challenging problem. We argue that the complex definition of IoU and feature misalignment make it difficult to predict IoU accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel Decoupled IoU Regression (DIR) model to handle these problems. The proposed DIR decouples the traditional localization confidence metric IoU into two new metrics, Purity and Integrity. Purity reflects the proportion of the object area in the detected bounding box, and Integrity refers to the completeness of the detected object area. Separately predicting Purity and Integrity can divide the complex mapping between the bounding box and its IoU into two clearer mappings and model them independently. In addition, a simple but effective feature realignment approach is also introduced to make the IoU regressor work in a hindsight manner, which can make the target mapping more stable. The proposed DIR can be conveniently integrated with existing two-stage detectors and significantly improve their performance. Through a simple implementation of DIR with HTC, we obtain 51.3% AP on MS COCO benchmark, which outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art., ACMMM 2021 Poster

The amphiphilic proteins can be used as building blocks (BBs) forming various self-assemblies. Understanding their self-assembly mechanism is important for designing novel nanomaterials. Herein, the BBs dimers were first prepared from carboxyl-abundant enzymolyzed α-lactalbumin (α-lac) at 50 °C. Then the unidentate coordination of Ca

Fe-Mn/TiO2 catalysts were prepared through the wet impregnation process to selective catalytic reduction of NO by NH3 at low temperature, and series of experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of key precursors on their SCR performance. Ferric nitrate, ferrous sulfate, and ferrous chloride were chosen as Fe precursors while manganese nitrate, manganese acetate, and manganese chloride as Mn precursors. These precursors had been commonly used to prepare Fe-Mn/TiO2 catalysts by numerous researchers. The results showed that there were distinct differences in NO conversion efficiencies at low temperature of catalysts prepared with different precursors. Catalysts prepared with ferric nitrate and manganese nitrate precursors exhibited the best catalytic performance at low temperature, while three kinds of catalysts prepared with manganese chloride precursors exhibited significantly low catalytic activity. All catalysts were characterized by XRD, SEM, H2-TPR, NH3-TPD, and XPS. The results indicated that when the catalysts were prepared with manganese nitrate or manganese acetate as precursors, Mn4+ contents and Oβ/(Oβ + Oα) ratios decreased in an order of ferric nitrate > ferrous sulfate > ferrous chloride, which was consistent with the change of catalytic activities of the corresponding catalysts at low temperature. It can be found that the excellent catalytic performance of Fe(A)-Mn(a)/TiO2 was ascribed to high redox property and enrichment of Mn4+species and surface chemical labile oxygen groups.

To determine if dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) parameters reflect histological grade of soft tissue sarcoma (STS) The medical records of 50 patients diagnosed with pathologically confirmed STS were retrospectively reviewed. Each STS was assessed with conventional contrast-enhanced MRI and DCE-MRI using a 3.0-T MRI system. The conventional MRI characteristics of low-grade (grade 1) and high-grade (grade 2 and grade 3) tumors were analyzed. Semi-quantitative parameters, including iAUC and TTP, and quantitative parameters, including Ktrans, Kep, and Ve, were derived from DCE-MRI. The diagnostic performances and optimal thresholds of various combinations of DCE-MRI parameters for predicting histological grades of STS were investigated using receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves. On conventional MRI, high-grade STSs were significantly larger (≥ 5 cm) and more likely to show a heterogeneous signal intensity on T2WI (> 75%), peritumoral hyperintensity on T2WI, or tumor necrosis (> 50%) compared with low-grade STS. On DCE-MRI, iAUC, TTP, Ktrans, and Kep were significant predictors of STS histological grade. Ktrans had a high diagnostic value for differentiating between high-grade and low-grade STSs. The combination of iAUC, TTP, and Ktrans yielded a higher AUC value (0.841) than the other models. High-grade STSs were usually larger than low-grade STSs, had unclear boundaries, a heterogeneous signal intensity on T2-weighted image (T2WI), and extensive necrosis. On DCE-MRI, iAUC, TTP, Ktrans, and Kep could differentiate between high-grade and low-grade STSs. The combination of iAUC, TTP, and Ktrans had a high diagnostic performance for differentiating between STS histological grades.