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Francisella tularensis causes a serious and often fatal infection, tularemia. We compared the efficacy of moxifloxacin formulated as free drug vs disulfide snap-top mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) in a mouse model of pneumonic tularemia. We found that MSN-formulated moxifloxacin was more effective than free drug and that the intramuscular and subcutaneous routes were markedly more effective than the intravenous route. Measurement of tissue silica levels and fluorescent flow cytometry assessment of colocalization of MSNs with infected cells revealed that the enhanced efficacy of MSNs and the intramuscular route of delivery was not due to better delivery of MSNs to infected tissues or cells. However, moxifloxacin blood levels demonstrated that the nanoparticle formulation and intramuscular route provided the longest half-life and longest time above the minimal inhibitory concentration. Thus, improved pharmacokinetics are responsible for the greater efficacy of nanoparticle formulation and intramuscular delivery compared with free drug and intravenous delivery.

Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most deadly gynecologic malignancy on account of its late stage at diagnosis and frequency of drug resistant recurrences. Novel therapies to overcome these barriers are urgently needed. TWIST is a developmental transcription factor reactivated in cancers and linked to angiogenesis, metastasis, cancer stem cell phenotype, and drug resistance, making it a promising therapeutic target. In this work, we demonstrate the efficacy of TWIST siRNA (siTWIST) and two nanoparticle delivery platforms to reverse chemoresistance in EOC models. Polyamidoamine dendrimers and mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) carried siTWIST into target cells and led to sustained TWIST knockdown in vitro. Mice treated with cisplatin plus MSN-siTWIST exhibited lower tumor burden than mice treated with cisplatin alone, with most of the effect coming from reduction in disseminated tumors. This platform has potential application for overcoming the clinical challenges of metastasis and chemoresistance in EOC and other TWIST overexpressing cancers.

The current study investigated the relationship between COVID-19 prevention burnout and emotional symptoms (depression and anxiety) among 1,837 Chinese college students and the underlying mechanisms. Results from moderated mediation analysis revealed that the association between COVID-19 prevention burnout and emotional symptoms was mediated by psychological inflexibility (β = 0.20, 95%CI = [0.10, 0.19]). Also, COVID-19 prevention burnout's direct and indirect effects on emotional symptoms were more substantial for students with high susceptibility to emotional contagion than those with low susceptibility. These findings contribute to understanding how COVID-19 prevention burnout relates to emotional symptoms and provide a new perspective for interventions promoting students' psychological flexibility, particularly those with higher susceptibility to emotional contagion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is a highly contagious and pathogenic infectious disease caused by the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV). It manifests as reproductive disorders in sows and respiratory disorders in piglets. PRRSV infects swine herds with symptoms such as abortions, stillbirths, and mummified fetuses in gestating sows. Piglets mainly experience abdominal respiration and respiratory symptoms. To date, the prevention of PRRS relies primarily on vaccination and the implementation of various preventive and control measures. Swine deaths caused by PRRS have resulted in significant economic losses to the pig industry worldwide. Non-structural protein 10 (NSP10) has helicase and adenosine triphosphatase (ATPase) activities that unwind DNA and RNA and play important roles in viral replication and transcription. Hence, it can be potentially used to develop novel reagents for the detection of PPRSV. This article reviews genetic variations, interaction with viral and host proteins, effects on PRRSV replication, immunomodulation, apoptosis, and viral virulence of NSP10, with the aim of providing a theoretical basis for the prevention and control of PRRS and drug development in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Degraded images often suffer from low contrast, color deviations, and blurring details, which significantly affect the performance of detectors. Many previous works have attempted to obtain high-quality images based on human perception using image enhancement algorithms. However, these enhancement algorithms usually suppress the performance of degraded object detection. In this paper, we propose a task-oriented image enhancement network (TIENet) to directly improve degraded object detection's performance by enhancing the degraded images. Unlike common human perception-based image-to-image methods, TIENet is a zero-reference enhancement network, which obtains a detection-favorable structure image that is added to the original degraded image. In addition, this paper presents a fast Fourier transform-based structure loss for the enhancement task. With the new loss, our TIENet enables the structure image obtained to enhance more useful detection-favorable structural information and suppress irrelevant information. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations on underwater (URPC2020) and foggy (RTTS) datasets show that our proposed framework can achieve 0.5–1.6% AP absolute improvements on classic detectors, including Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, FCOS, ATSS, PAA, and TOOD. Besides, our method also generalizes well to the PASCAL VOC dataset, which can achieve 0.2–0.7% gains. We expect this study can draw more attention to high-level task-oriented degraded image enhancement. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/BIGWangYuDong/lqit/tree/main/configs/detection/tienet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the recently discovered superconductivity in Sr-doped nickelate oxides NdNiO2 reduced from NdNiO3 in experiments, we predict a Mott multiferroic BiNiO2 that may be obtained from BiNiO3. There is a ferroelectric structural transition for BiNiO2 from the nonpolar phase to the polar phase with the P4mm space group, which is driven by the lone pair on Bi. The lowest energy ground-state for polar BiNiO2 is a Hubbard Mott insulator with the G-type antiferromagnetic spin configurations. The replacement of Nd by Bi serves as a connecting link between a parent compound of high-temperature superconductor and a Mott multiferroic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monolayer 2D lateral heterostructures with high interface qualities and well‐defined structures are particularly promising in novel electronic and optoelectronic applications. However, the photoelectric responses are still very low, and the working and modulating mechanisms urgently need exploration. Here, a lateral monolayer heterojunction of WS2‐WSe2 is successfully prepared with an atomically sharp interface and a band alignment of type‐II structure. Intriguingly, this heterojunction photodetector (PD) achieves outstanding characteristics of photocurrent generation in both photovoltaic and photoconductive modes with responsivities (Rs) of 60.2/3.0 A W−1, detectivities (D*s) of 1.81/0.98 × 1012 Jones, and response times of 32.2/28.5 and 39.5/32.1 ms, respectively. Moreover, all‐inorganic CsPbBr3 quantum dots are introduced to substantially promote the photoelectric responses. Because of the favorable band alignment and large absorption of the CsPbBr3, and efficient carrier transfer, the Rs and D*s are substantially improved to 1307/141.3 A W−1 and 1.16/2.94 × 1013 Jones, respectively, with fantastic external quantum efficiencies of 3.59/0.388 × 105% and also shortened response times of 12.5/13.2 and 17.4/15.8 ms. In addition, the ambient stability is remarkably enhanced. This study demonstrates that the combination of 2D lateral heterojunction with all‐inorganic perovskite may bring up promising opportunities for developing high‐performance PDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]