Repair techniques for short-distance peripheral nerve defects, including adjacent joint flexion to reduce the distance between the nerve stump defects, ＂nerve splint＂ suturing, and nerve sle eve ...connection, have some disadvantages. Therefore, we designed a repair technique involving intraoperative tension-free application of a nerve elongator and obtained good outcomes in the repair of short-distance peripheral nerve defects in a previous animal study. The present study compared the clinical outcomes between the use of this nerve elongator and performance of the conventional method in the repair of short-distance transection injuries in human elbows. The 3-, 6-, and 12-month postoperative follow-up results demonstrated that early neurological function recovery was better in the nerve elongation group than in the conventional group, but no signif- icant difference in long-term neurological function recovery was detected between the two gro ups. In the nerve elongation group, the nerves were sutured without tension, and the duration of postoperative immobilization of the elbow was decreased. Elbow function rehabilitation was significantly better in the nerve elongation group than in the control group. Moreover, there were no security risks. The results of this study confirm that the use of this nerve elongator for repair of short-distance peripheral nerve defects is safe and effective.
The complete mitochondrial （mt） genome of the plant bug, Apolygus lucorum, an important cotton pest, has been sequenced and annotated in this study. The entire circular genome is 14 768 bp in size ...and represents the smallest in presently known heteropteran mt genomes. The mt genome is encoding for two ribosomal RNA （rRNA） genes, 22 transfer RNA （tRNA） genes, 13 protein coding genes and a control region, and the order, content, codon usage and base organization show similarity to a great extent to the hypothetical ancestral model. All protein coding genes use standard initiation codons ATN. Conventional stop codons TAA and TAG have been assigned to the most protein coding genes; however, COIII, ND4 and ND5 genes show incomplete terminator signal （T）. All tRNA genes possess the typical clover leaf structure, but the dihydrouridine arm of tRNAser（A6N） only forms a simple loop. Secondary structure models of rRNA genes are generally in accordance with the former models, although some differences exist in certain parts. Three intergenic spacers have never been found in sequenced mt genomes of Heteroptera. The phylogenetic study based on protein coding genes is largely congruent with previous phylogenetic work. Both Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood analyses highly support the sister relationship ofA. lucorum and Lygus lineolaris, and Miridae presents a sister position to Anthocoridae.
An approach to inspecting massive numbers of moving seeds was studied based on the techniques of dynamic inspection and machine vision. A progressive scanning CCD camera with external trigger ...function was used for real-time capture of dynamic images of seeds. The methods based on R channel of RGB （Red, Green and Blue） and region-dependent segmentation were adopted to reduce the data size of image processing and improve the efficiency of seeds inspection. All the seeds were sorted into four grades according to their morphological characteristics, such as surface area, perimeter, major axis, minor axis, circularity and eccentricity. The detection experiments indicated that the eligible ratio of the classifications was about 81.90 % by this real-time inspection system.
Wastewater discharged from chemical oxygen demand（COD） testing instrument was generally difficult to treat due to its high content of heavy metals and very low pH. In this study, a kind of ...cysteine-functionalized magnetic nanoparticles（MNPs-Cys） was synthesized and used to treat the wastewater. The synthesized MNPs-Cys as the adsorbent for heavy metal removal from aqueous solutions were systematically investigated. The adsorption dynamic process fit the Langmuir isotherms well with a maximum adsorption capacity of 76.92 mg/g for Cu（Ⅱ）. The adsorbent could be easily regenerated by 0.1 mol/L HNO3, which exhibited a high adsorption performance within 10 cycles. This adsorbent, combined with a developed pretreatment approach, could make Cr（Ⅲ）, Hg（Ⅱ） and Ag（Ⅰ） in the wastewater discharged from COD testing instrument effectively removed and the removal efficiency is more than 99%. This work gave a new insight into the design and synthesis of high-performance materials for treating wastewater with heavy metals.
Aim： To investigate the effect of the growth arrest- and DNA damage-inducible Gadd45a gene on the radiosensitivity of human tongue squamous cell carcinoma cell line to ionizing radiation （IR）. ...Methods： Short interfering ribonucleic acid （si-RNA） targeting Gadd45a or an irrelevant mRNA （nonsense si-RNA） was chemically synthesized. The constructed si-RNAs were transfected into Tca8113 cells and Gadd45a expression was determined using quantitative real-time PCR and Western-blot. After 24-h exposure to IR at a dose rate of 4 Gy/min, apoptosis of Tca8113 cells was detected using flow cytometry, and radiosensitivity was measured using MTT assays. Results： IR apparently increased the expression of Gadd45a at mRNA and protein levels in Tca8113 cells. The effect was efficiently inhibited by transfection with Gadd45a si-RNA （P〈0.01）. Furthermore, silencing Gadd45a gene significantly increased cell viability and decreased the percentage of apoptotic cells during irradiation, which indicated that IR-induced Gadd45a over-expression could increase the radiosensitivity of Tca8113 cells. Conclusion： These results indicated that targeting Gadd45a may have important therapeutic implications in sensitizing Tca8113 cells tolR.
The fabrication of transparent, conductive, and uniform silver nanowire films using the scalable rod-coating technique is described in this study. Properties of the transparent conductive thin films ...are investigated, as well as the approaches to improve the performance of transparent silver nanowire electrodes. It is found that silver nanowires are oxidized during the coating process. Incubation in hydrogen chloride (HCl) vapor can eliminate oxidized surface, and consequently, reduce largely the resistivity of silver nanowire thin films. After HCl treatment, 175 Ω/sq and approximately 75% transmittance are achieved. The sheet resistivity drops remarkably with the rise of the film thickness or with the decrease of transparency. The thin film electrodes also demonstrated excellent flexible stability, showing < 2% resistance change after over 100 bending cycles.
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