The biodegradable micelles, self-assembled by a reductive poly(β-hydroxyl amine), possess pH and redox dual-responsiveness for intracellular doxorubicin delivery.
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•A kind of cationic ...polymer is prepared by an effective amine-epoxy polymerization.•RPHA polymer contains many hydroxyl groups, disulfide linkages and tertiary amines.•RPHA micelles present the pH and redox dual-responsiveness in solutions.•These biocompatible micelles possess controllable drug release behaviors.•DOX-loaded micelles show a high cellular proliferation inhibition to cancel cells.
Development of multi-responsive biodegradable micellar drug delivery systems for targeted cancer chemotherapy remains a major challenge. Here we demonstrate a kind of pH and reduction dual-responsive cationic polymer via an effective amine–epoxy polymerization, which could self-assemble into the biodegradable micelles in an aqueous solution. On account of the tumor cells or tissues possessing low pH values and high concentrations of reductive agents, these micelles exhibited the specific tumor target ability and maximal drug-release controllability inside tumor cells upon changes in physical and chemical environments, but presented excellent stability at physiological conditions. CCK-8 assay showed that these DOX-loaded micelles had a similar cytotoxicity for MCF-7 tumor cells as the free DOX molecules while blank micelles were low toxic to the cells. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) observation revealed that the drug-loaded micelles were quickly internalized by endosomes to effectively restrain the cancer cell growth. These results indicated these biodegradable micelles could be the novel and efficient dual-responsive nanocarriers to improve the drug delivery and enhance the antitumor efficacy.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Biometric signal based human-computer interface (HCI) has attracted increasing attention due to its wide application in healthcare, entertainment, neurocomputing, and so on. In recent years, deep ...learning-based approaches have made great progress on biometric signal processing. However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches still suffer from model degradation across subjects or sessions. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation approach for biometric signal-based HCI via causal representation learning. Specifically, three kinds of interventions on biometric signals (i.e., subjects, sessions, and trials) can be selected to generalize deep models across the selected intervention. In the proposed approach, a generative model is trained for producing intervened features that are subsequently used for learning transferable and causal relations with three modes. Experiments on the EEG-based emotion recognition task and sEMG-based gesture recognition task are conducted to confirm the superiority of our approach. An improvement of +0.21% on the task of inter-subject EEG-based emotion recognition is achieved using our approach. Besides, on the task of inter-session sEMG-based gesture recognition, our approach achieves improvements of +1.47%, +3.36%, +1.71%, and +1.01% on sEMG datasets including CSL-HDEMG, CapgMyo DB-b, 3DC, and Ninapro DB6, respectively. The proposed approach also works on the task of inter-trial sEMG-based gesture recognition and an average improvement of +0.66% on Ninapro databases is achieved. These experimental results show the superiority of the proposed approach compared with the SOTA unsupervised domain adaptation methods on HCIs based on biometric signal.
Reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) objects from images has attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications in computer vision and robotic tasks. Despite the promising progress of ...recent deep learning–based approaches, which directly reconstruct the full 3D shape without considering the conceptual knowledge of the object categories, existing models have limited usage and usually create unrealistic shapes. 3D objects have multiple forms of representation, such as 3D volume, conceptual knowledge, and so on. In this work, we show that the conceptual knowledge for a category of objects, which represents objects as prototype volumes and is structured by graph, can enhance the 3D reconstruction pipeline. We propose a novel multimodal framework that explicitly combines graph-based conceptual knowledge with deep neural networks for 3D shape reconstruction from a single RGB image. Our approach represents conceptual knowledge of a specific category as a structure-based knowledge graph. Specifically, conceptual knowledge acts as visual priors and spatial relationships to assist the 3D reconstruction framework to create realistic 3D shapes with enhanced details. Our 3D reconstruction framework takes an image as input. It first predicts the conceptual knowledge of the object in the image, then generates a 3D object based on the input image and the predicted conceptual knowledge. The generated 3D object satisfies the following requirements: (1) it is consistent with the predicted graph in concept, and (2) consistent with the input image in geometry. Extensive experiments on public datasets (i.e., ShapeNet, Pix3D, and Pascal3D+) with 13 object categories show that (1) our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, (2) our prototype volume-based conceptual knowledge representation is more effective, and (3) our pipeline-agnostic approach can enhance the reconstruction quality of various 3D shape reconstruction pipelines.
Inspired by the autolysis of shaggy mane, we developed a self-degradable hydrogel as a medical adhesive for skin wounds. The rapid gelation and self-degradation of the hydrogel were achieved
via
the ...Michael addition and subsequent hydrolysis of the addition product.
In vivo
experiments further showed that the hydrogel adhesive was efficiently applied for skin wound repair.
A self-degradable hydrogel was developed as a medical adhesive for skin wounds. The rapid gelation and self-degradation of the hydrogel were achieved
via
the Michael addition and subsequent hydrolysis of the addition product.
Aquaporin (AQP) reconstituted biomimetic membranes can potentially be applied in water treatment applications due to the outstanding water permeability and selectivity of AQP. The AQP-embedded mixed ...matrix membrane was previously obtained using a multilayer polyelectrolyte adsorption method. However, the amount of proteoliposomes embedded in the membrane was lower than expected. In this work, we adopted a magnetic-aided approach to enhance the capacity of AQP-embedded membranes and to maximize the AQP potential for filtration applications. Magnetic nanoparticles were encapsulated inside the proteoliposomes and a magnet was used to accelerate the precipitation and adsorption of these magnetic liposomes onto the membrane matrix. Results from confocal laser scanning microscopy confirm the liposome coverage on the membrane surface was largely improved using this approach. The embedded AQPs facilitate the membrane capability for water transport in the forward osmosis process by enhancing the water flux up to 70%. However, minor defects may still exist in the membrane, which requires further improvements in the membrane structure to minimize the salt reverse flux.
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IJS, KILJ, NUK, UL, UM, UPUK
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•The flow maldistribution in modified spiral wound module is demonstrated.•At equal volumetric velocity, modified spiral wound module has higher flux.•Flow maldistribution decreases ...the flux significantly.•The impact of flow maldistribution is more dominant under high flux conditions.•The impact of flow maldistribution is minimal on fouling at low fluxes.
Progresses on development of forward osmosis (FO) membrane should be accompanied with development of acceptable FO modules. Most flat-sheet FO membranes are assembled into the modified spiral wound module by introduction of an internal baffle which results in a U-shape flow path that allows flow uneven-distribution. This study assesses the flow uneven-distribution and its impact on a U-shape flow path and compares it with a straight flow path (I-shape), like the one in the plate-and-frame module. The flow distribution was visualized through the salt tracing test, dye tracing, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and particle image velocimetry (PIV). The performance of a bench-scale module of I-shape and U-shape was then assessed. Results from all visualization methods demonstrate large spatial flow variations in the U-shape flow path. However, it does not really affect the overall flux. The U-shape flow path benefits over the Ishape when operated at equal volumetric velocities. The I-shape path only shows higher fluxes by 21 % and 3 % when operated under equal cross flow velocities under active layer facing feed solution and active layer facing draw solution modes, respectively. The low fluxes in the U-shape flow path occur in the dead-zones. The flux variations in the U-shape flow path does not significantly affect the short-term membrane fouling but is expected to be more intense in the larger modules. A simple approach to combat flow uneven-distribution via inclusion of internal baffle can reduce uneven-distribution of flow.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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► The incorporation of Histidine-tagged AquaporinZ in a lipid bilayer is investigated with Langmuir–Blodgett technology for the first time. ► Detergent removal in the ...Langmuir–Blodgett system is studied. ► AquaporinZ and detergent interaction during protein insertion is elaborated and a protein incorporation mechanism is proposed.
In this work, a new approach of incorporating transmembrane protein AquaporinZ (AqpZ) into a lipid bilayer has been developed with the aid of the Langmuir–Blodgett technique. The binary-lipid monolayer for AqpZ incorporation is composed of (1) gel-phase lipids resistant to detergent dissolution and (2) nickel-chelating lipids that can attach the histidine-tagged AqpZ from the subphase. Upon removal of subphase detergent with BioBeads, the incorporation is achieved by transferring the AqpZ-associated binary-lipid monolayer onto a preformed pure binary-lipid monolayer using the Langmuir–Schaefer deposition method. AFM images show an indication of AqpZ incorporation in the bilayer. Furthermore, it is also shown that BioBeads can remove a significant amount of detergent in the subphase and lipid film integrity is restored after detergent removal. The detergent removal rate is correlated to BioBeads amount and subphase circulation. The new approach of AqpZ reconstitution revealed in this work could potentially be applied in biomimetic membrane formation for water purification applications.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
The migration technology of virtual machine has received extensive attention in load balancing. In this paper, we purpose an optimized control strategy which combines multi-strategy mechanism with ...the prediction mechanism. According to the weighted average of the CPU, memory, I/O and network bandwidth utilization, we divide the hosts into four status domains. The hosts within different load status domain adopt different migration strategy, which considers migration timing, migration candidate VM and migration destination. Through this strategy, it reduces the number of the overloaded hosts, avoids instantaneous peak problem caused by the migration of virtual machines, solves the imbalance problem and the high-cost problem in tradition scheduling algorithm of migration. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy is able to reduce the migration times and improve system performance.
