Compared with traditional tumor therapy strategies, hydrogel as a drug reservoir system can realize on-demand drug release and deep tissue penetration ability. It also exhibits great tumor-site ...retention to enhance the permeability and retention effect of tumor treatment. This can significantly overcome the drug's resistance and severe side effects. Inorganic/organic composite hydrogel has attracted wide attention due to its combined effects, enhancing therapeutic effects against various kinds of tumors. In situ injectable hydrogel can securely restrict the drugs in the lesion sites without leakage and guarantee better biosafety. Moreover, hydrogel possesses interconnected macropores which can provide enough space for nutrient transport, cellular activity, and cell–cell interactions. Thermal therapy is an effective strategy for tumor therapy due to its minimal invasiveness and high selectivity. Because the location temperature can be precisely controlled and helps avoid the risks of destroying the body's immune system and ablate normal cells, thermal therapy exhibits significant treatment outcomes. Nonetheless, when the cellular temperature reaches approximately 43 °C, it causes long-term cell inactivation. Based on these merits, thermosensitive hydrogel formulation with adaptive functions shows excellent efficacy, unlimited tissue penetration capacity, and few deleterious side effects. Furthermore, the thermosensitive hydrogel has unique physical properties under the external stimuli, which is the ideal drug delivery system for on-demand release in tumor treatment. This article will review the state of the thermosensitive hydrogel in clinic application for cancer therapy.
Secret sharing is a conventional technique for realizing secure communications in information networks, where a dealer distributes to n players a secret, which can only be decoded through the ...cooperation of k (n/2<k≤n) players. In recent years, quantum resources have been employed to enhance security of secret sharing, which has been named quantum secret sharing (QSS). A multipartite bound entanglement (BE) state of an optical field, due to its special entanglement features, can be used in quantum networks to improve security and flexibility of communication. We design and experimentally demonstrate a QSS protocol, where the dealer modulates a secret on a four-partite BE state and then distributes the submodes of the BE state to four spatially separated players. The presented QSS scheme has the capability to protect secrets from eavesdropping and dishonest players, because a nonlocal and deterministic BE state is shared among four authorized players.
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Quantum teleportation has been developed to simultaneously realize the Hertz rate and the 64-km distance through fiber channels, which is essential to real-world application of quantum network.
Acetyl-CoA is a fundamental metabolite for all life on Earth, and is also a key starting point for the biosynthesis of a variety of industrial chemicals and natural products. Here we design and ...construct a Synthetic Acetyl-CoA (SACA) pathway by repurposing glycolaldehyde synthase and acetyl-phosphate synthase. First, we design and engineer glycolaldehyde synthase to improve catalytic activity more than 70-fold, to condense two molecules of formaldehyde into one glycolaldehyde. Second, we repurpose a phosphoketolase to convert glycolaldehyde into acetyl-phosphate. We demonstrated the feasibility of the SACA pathway in vitro, achieving a carbon yield ~50%, and confirmed the SACA pathway by
C-labeled metabolites. Finally, the SACA pathway was verified by cell growth using glycolaldehyde, formaldehyde and methanol as supplemental carbon source. The SACA pathway is proved to be the shortest, ATP-independent, carbon-conserving and oxygen-insensitive pathway for acetyl-CoA biosynthesis, opening possibilities for producing acetyl-CoA-derived chemicals from one-carbon resources in the future.
Crystallization behavior of polylactic acid (PLA) under CO2 is meaningful due to its effect on foaming behavior during CO2 foaming, while present studies mainly concentrated on overall ...crystallization behavior. In this study, the effect of CO2 on nucleation and spherulite growth of PLA crystals was in situ investigated separately. During saturation, sorption of CO2 in PLA diluted the molecular chain density, thus increasing molecular chain mobility and weakening the interchain interaction, which reduced the amount of crystal nuclei in PLA. On the other hand, the spherulite growth rate reduced at high temperature and increased at low temperature attributed to the enhanced chain mobility under CO2. Thus, overall crystallization was controlled by the spherulite growth rate at low temperature and crystalline nucleation at high temperature under CO2. Besides, CO2 restricted lamella branching, resulting in an increased lamella thickness and z axis size. Current results revealed the effect of tunable molecular chain mobility and the interchain interaction adjusted by CO2 on nucleation and spherulite growth of PLA.
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High-performance quantum memory for quantized states of light is a prerequisite building block of quantum information technology. Despite great progresses of optical quantum memories based on ...interactions of light and atoms, physical features of these memories still cannot satisfy requirements for applications in practical quantum information systems, since all of them suffer from trade-off between memory efficiency and excess noise. Here, we report a high-performance cavity-enhanced electromagnetically-induced-transparency memory with warm atomic cell in which a scheme of optimizing the spatial and temporal modes based on the time-reversal approach is applied. The memory efficiency up to 67 ± 1% is directly measured and a noise level close to quantum noise limit is simultaneously reached. It has been experimentally demonstrated that the average fidelities for a set of input coherent states with different phases and amplitudes within a Gaussian distribution have exceeded the classical benchmark fidelities. Thus the realized quantum memory platform has been capable of preserving quantized optical states, and is ready to be applied in quantum information systems, such as distributed quantum logic gates and quantum-enhanced atomic magnetometry.
It is crucial for the physical realization of quantum information networks to first establish entanglement among multiple space-separated quantum memories and then, at a user-controlled moment, to ...transfer the stored entanglement to quantum channels for distribution and conveyance of information. Here we present an experimental demonstration on generation, storage, and transfer of deterministic quantum entanglement among three spatially separated atomic ensembles. The off-line prepared multipartite entanglement of optical modes is mapped into three distant atomic ensembles to establish entanglement of atomic spin waves via electromagnetically induced transparency light-matter interaction. Then the stored atomic entanglement is transferred into a tripartite quadrature entangled state of light, which is space-separated and can be dynamically allocated to three quantum channels for conveying quantum information. The existence of entanglement among three released optical modes verifies that the system has the capacity to preserve multipartite entanglement. The presented protocol can be directly extended to larger quantum networks with more nodes.Continuous-variable encoding is a promising approach for quantum information and communication networks. Here, the authors show how to map entanglement from three spatial optical modes to three separated atomic samples via electromagnetically induced transparency, releasing it later on demand.
Protein rational design has become more and more popular for protein engineering with the advantage of biological big-data. In this study, we described a method of rational design that is able to ...identify desired mutants by analyzing the coevolution of protein sequence. We employed this approach to evolve an archaeal isopentenyl phosphate kinase that can convert dimethylallyl alcohol (DMA) into precursor of isoprenoids. By designing 9 point mutations, we improved the catalytic activities of IPK about 8-fold in vitro. After introducing the optimal mutant of IPK into engineered E. coli strain for β-carotenoids production, we found that β-carotenoids production exhibited 97% increase over the starting strain. The process of enzyme optimization presented here could be used to improve the catalytic activities of other enzymes.
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Long-lived and high-fidelity memory for a photonic polarization qubit (PPQ) is crucial for constructing quantum networks. We present a millisecond storage system based on electromagnetically induced ...transparency, in which a moderate magnetic field is applied on a cold-atom cloud to lift Zeeman degeneracy and, thus, the PPQ states are stored as two magnetic-field-insensitive spin waves. Especially, the influence of magnetic-field-sensitive spin waves on the storage performances is almost totally avoided. The measured average fidelities of the polarization states are 98.6% at 200 μs and 78.4% at 4.5 ms, respectively.
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Entangled states of light including low-loss optical fiber transmission and atomic resonance frequencies are essential resources for future quantum information networks. We present the experimental ...achievement on the three-color entanglement generation at 852, 1550, and 1440 nm wavelengths for optical continuous variables. The entanglement generation system consists of two cascaded nondegenerated optical parametric oscillators (NOPOs). The flexible selectivity of nonlinear crystals in the two NOPOs and the tunable property of NOPO provide large freedom for the frequency selection of three entangled optical beams. The presented system will hopefully be developed as a practical entangled source to be used in quantum-information networks with atomic storage units and long fiber transmission lines.
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