Blautia is a genus of anaerobic bacteria with probiotic characteristics that occur widely in the feces and intestines of mammals. Based on phenotypic and phylogenetic analyses, some species in the ...genera Clostridium and Ruminococcus have been reclassified as Blautia, so to date, there are 20 new species with valid published names in this genus. An extensive body of research has recently focused on the probiotic effects of this genus, such as biological transformation and its ability to regulate host health and alleviate metabolic syndrome. This article reviews the origin and biological characteristics of Blautia and the factors that affect its abundance and discusses its role in host health, thus laying a theoretical foundation for the development of new functional microorganisms with probiotic properties.
In this study, we investigate the underlying origin of the high performance of PM6:Y6 organic solar cells. Employing transient optoelectronic and photoemission spectroscopies, we find that this blend ...exhibits greatly suppressed charge trapping into electronic intra-bandgap tail states compared to other polymer/non-fullerene acceptor solar cells, attributed to lower energetic disorder. The presence of tail states is a key source of energetic loss in most organic solar cells, as charge carriers relax into these states, reducing the quasi-Fermi level splitting and therefore device
V
OC
. DFT and Raman analyses indicate this suppression of tail state energetics disorder could be associated with a higher degree of conformational rigidity and uniformity for the Y6 acceptor. We attribute the origin of such conformational rigidity and uniformity of Y6 to the presence of the two alkyl side chains on the outer core that restricts end-group rotation by acting as a conformation locker. The resultant enhanced carrier dynamics and suppressed charge carrier trapping are proposed to be a key factor behind the high performance of this blend. Low energetic disorder is suggested to be a key factor enabling reasonably efficient charge generation in this low energy offset system. In the absence of either energetic disorder or a significant electronic energy offset, it is argued that charge separation in this system is primarily entropy driven. Nevertheless, photocurrent generation is still limited by slow hole transfer from Y6 to PM6, suggesting pathways for further efficiency improvement.
In this study, we investigate the underlying origin of the high performance of PM6:Y6 organic solar cells.
Cerebral ischemia induces massive mitochondrial damage. These damaged mitochondria are cleared, thus attenuating brain injury, by mitophagy. Here, we identified the involvement of BNIP3L/NIX in ...cerebral ischemia-reperfusion (I-R)-induced mitophagy. Bnip3l knockout (bnip3l
−/−
) impaired mitophagy and aggravated cerebral I-R injury in mice, which can be rescued by BNIP3L overexpression. The rescuing effects of BNIP3L overexpression can be observed in park2
−/−
mice, which showed mitophagy deficiency after I-R. Interestingly, bnip3l and park2 double-knockout mice showed a synergistic mitophagy deficiency with I-R treatment, which further highlighted the roles of BNIP3L-mediated mitophagy as being independent from PARK2. Further experiments indicated that phosphorylation of BNIP3L serine 81 is critical for BNIP3L-mediated mitophagy. Nonphosphorylatable mutant BNIP3L
S81A
failed to counteract both mitophagy impairment and neuroprotective effects in bnip3l
−/−
mice. Our findings offer insights into mitochondrial quality control in ischemic stroke and bring forth the concept that BNIP3L could be a potential therapeutic target for ischemic stroke, beyond its accepted role in reticulocyte maturation.
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BFBNIB, GIS, IJS, KISLJ, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
Stable perovskites with ionic salts
Ionic liquids have been shown to stabilize organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells with metal oxide carrier-transport layers, but they are incompatible with more ...readily processible organic analogs. Lin
et al.
found that an ionic solid, a piperidinium salt, enhanced the efficiency of positive-intrinsic-negative layered perovskite solar cells with organic electron and hole extraction layers. Aggressive aging testing showed that this additive retarded segregation into impurity phases and pinhole formation in the perovskite layer.
Science
, this issue p.
96
An ionic compound additive improved perovskite solar cell longevity by inhibiting the generation of degradation products.
Longevity has been a long-standing concern for hybrid perovskite photovoltaics. We demonstrate high-resilience positive-intrinsic-negative perovskite solar cells by incorporating a piperidinium-based ionic compound into the formamidinium-cesium lead-trihalide perovskite absorber. With the bandgap tuned to be well suited for perovskite-on-silicon tandem cells, this piperidinium additive enhances the open-circuit voltage and cell efficiency. This additive also retards compositional segregation into impurity phases and pinhole formation in the perovskite absorber layer during aggressive aging. Under full-spectrum simulated sunlight in ambient atmosphere, our unencapsulated and encapsulated cells retain 80 and 95% of their peak and post-burn-in efficiencies for 1010 and 1200 hours at 60° and 85°C, respectively. Our analysis reveals detailed degradation routes that contribute to the failure of aged cells.
Therapies that targeted PD-1 have shown remarkable rates of durable clinical responses in patients with various tumor types. However, the extent and knowledge of pulmonary toxicities associated with ...PD-1 blockade, mainly manifested as pneumonitis, remains obscure. In this study, a total of 6360 subjects from 16 phase II/III clinical trials were pooled for meta-analysis to evaluate the overall incidence and risk of PD-1 inhibitors-related pneumonitis in cancer patients. The incidence of pneumonitis during anti-PD-1 immunotherapy was 2.92% (95%CI: 2.18-3.90%) for all-grade and 1.53% (95%CI: 1.15-2.04%) for high-grade pneumonitis. Compared with routine chemotherapy, PD-1 inhibitors were associated with a significant increased risk of pneumonitis. Moreover, among the types of tumor treated with PD-1 inhibitors, the melanoma patients have the lowest incidence of pneumonitis, while the non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients have the highest. Furthermore, no significant differences were detected in the incidences of all- and high-grade pneumonitis between high-dose and low-dose groups of PD-1 inhibitors. In conclusion, PD-1 inhibitors were probably associated with an increased risk of pneumonitis in a dose-independent manner, compared with routine chemotherapeutic agents. The frequency and severity of treatment-mediated pneumonitis was quite different in patients with various tumor types.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Photovoltaic cells are attracting significant interest for harvesting indoor light for low power consumption wireless electronics such as those required for smart homes and offices, and the ...rapidly-growing Internet of Things. Here, we explore the potential of solution processable, small molecule photovoltaic cells as indoor power sources. By optimizing the solvent vapour annealing (SVA) time for the photovoltaic layer, a balance between its crystallization and phase separation is obtained, resulting in a record power conversion efficiency (PCE) of over 28% under fluorescent lamps of 1000 lux, generating a maximum power density of 78.2 μW cm
−2
(>10% PCE under AM1.5G). This high indoor performance surpasses that of silicon based photovoltaic cells, and is similar to that of gallium arsenide photovoltaic cells. Besides, the ratios of the voltage at the maximum power point (MPP) to the open circuit voltage are similar from indoor lighting to one sun conditions, which is unique and allows a less power consuming method to track the MPP for a broad range of light intensities (potentially attractive for wearable photovoltaics). New insight into the effect of SVA on the indoor and one sun performance is provided using advanced optoelectronic characterization techniques, which show that the mobility-lifetime products as a function of charge carrier density can be correlated well with the performance at different light levels. Our results suggest that organic photovoltaic cells could be promising as indoor power sources for self-sustainable electronics.
Organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells using BTR:PC
71
BM show promising power conversion efficiency of >28% under 1000 lux generating 78.2 μW cm
−2
, outperforming Si based PV cells and comparable to GaAs PV cells. This result suggests that OPV cells have excellent potential for indoor applications.
Occult HBV infection (OBI) is a specific form of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and has the possibility of developing into hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in adults. This study aimed to estimate ...the global prevalence of occult HBV infection in children and adolescents.
We systematically searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and Cochrane databases for relevant studies on the prevalence of OBI in children and adolescents. Meta-analysis was performed using STATA 16 software.
Fifty studies were included. The overall prevalence of OBI in children and adolescents was 7.5% (95% CI: 0.050–0.103). In different risk populations, OBI prevalence was remarkably high in the HIV-infected population (24.2%, 95% CI: 0.000–0.788). The OBI prevalence was 0.8% (95% CI:0.000–0.029) in the healthy population, 3.8% (95% CI:0.012–0.074) in the general population, and 6.4% (95% CI: 0.021–0.124) in children born to HBsAg-positive mothers. Based on different serological profiles, the prevalence of OBI in HBsAg-negative and anti-HBc-positive patients was 6.6% (95% CI: 0.016–0.136), 3.0% (95% CI: 0.009–0.059) in HBsAg-negative and anti-HBc-negative patients, 4.6% (95% CI: 0.015–0.088) in HBsAg-negative and anti-HBs-positive patients, and 3.7% (95% CI: 0.001–0.102) in HBsAg-negative and anti-HBs-negative patients.
Despite HBV vaccination and hepatitis B immunoglobulin (HBIG), OBI is common in children and adolescents in high-risk groups.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Few‐shot learning is to distinguish novel concepts with few annotated data, which has attracted much attention due to its requirement of limited training data for target classes. Recent few‐shot ...learning methods usually pretrain a feature extractor with images from the base set to boost the performance of few‐shot tasks and classify novel categories in this prior feature space. However, it is difficult for the pretrained feature extractor to extract accurate representations for novel categories, resulting in large amounts of overlapping areas between new classes. To address these issues, the prior feature space with a triplet network to learn a more discriminative space is refined, where features belonging to same class are pulled together and that from different classes are pushed apart. Specifically, the authors first follow recent paradigm of pretraining to obtain a prior feature space. Then, a triplet network with contrastive learning is trained to project the features from this space into a low‐dimensional one. The main difference lies in that the authors’ model is based on Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) and the triplet network with hallucinated features is finetuned from it to make them generalise well to novel categories. Finally, the authors conduct classification tasks in the finetuned space. The authors’ intuition is that the overlapping areas in novel categories can be separated by finetuning the triplet network pretrained on base set with contrastive learning. Experimental results on four few‐shot benchmarks show that it significantly outperforms the baseline methods, improves around 1.09% ∼ 13.09% than the best results in each dataset on both 1‐ and 5‐shot tasks.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
We analyse organic solar cells with four different photoactive blends exhibiting differing dependencies of short-circuit current upon photoactive layer thickness. These blends and devices are ...analysed by transient optoelectronic techniques of carrier kinetics and densities, air photoemission spectroscopy of material energetics, Kelvin probe measurements of work function, Mott-Schottky analyses of apparent doping density and by device modelling. We conclude that, for the device series studied, the photocurrent loss with thick active layers is primarily associated with the accumulation of photo-generated charge carriers in intra-bandgap tail states. This charge accumulation screens the device internal electrical field, preventing efficient charge collection. Purification of one studied donor polymer is observed to reduce tail state distribution and density and increase the maximal photoactive thickness for efficient operation. Our work suggests that selecting organic photoactive layers with a narrow distribution of tail states is a key requirement for the fabrication of efficient, high photocurrent, thick organic solar cells.
Mitophagy is a highly conserved cellular process that maintains the mitochondrial quantity by eliminating dysfunctional or superfluous mitochondria through autophagy machinery. The mitochondrial ...outer membrane protein BNIP3L/Nix serves as a mitophagy receptor by recognizing autophagosomes. BNIP3L is initially known to clear the mitochondria during the development of reticulocytes. Recent studies indicated it also engages in a variety of physiological and pathological processes. In this review, we provide an overview of how BNIP3L induces mitophagy and discuss the biological functions of BNIP3L and its regulation at the molecular level. We further discuss current evidence indicating the involvement of BNIP3L-mediated mitophagy in human disease, particularly in cancer and neurological disorders.
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