Go for gold: As‐prepared insulin–Au nanoclusters (NCs) show intense red fluorescence, excellent biocompatibility, and preservation of natural insulin bioactivity in lowering the blood‐glucose level. ...Their versatility in applications is demonstrated by fluorescence imaging, X‐ray computed tomography, and insulin–inhibitor interactions (see picture; IDE=insulin‐degrading enzyme).
Abstract
The mammalian gut harbors a complex and dynamic microbial ecosystem: the microbiota. While emerging studies support that microbiota regulates brain function with a few molecular cues ...suggested, the overall biochemical landscape of the “microbiota-gut-brain axis” remains largely unclear. Here we use high-coverage metabolomics to comparatively profile feces, blood sera, and cerebral cortical brain tissues of germ-free C57BL/6 mice and their age-matched conventionally raised counterparts. Results revealed for all three matrices metabolomic signatures owing to microbiota, yielding hundreds of identified metabolites including 533 altered for feces, 231 for sera, and 58 for brain with numerous significantly enriched pathways involving aromatic amino acids and neurotransmitters. Multicompartmental comparative analyses single out microbiota-derived metabolites potentially implicated in interorgan transport and the gut-brain axis, as exemplified by indoxyl sulfate and trimethylamine-
N
-oxide. Gender-specific characteristics of these landscapes are discussed. Our findings may be valuable for future research probing microbial influences on host metabolism and gut-brain communication.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by cognitive inflexibility and social deficits. Probiotics have been demonstrated to play a promising role in managing the severity of ASD. However, ...there are no effective probiotics for clinical use. Identifying new probiotic strains for ameliorating ASD is therefore essential. Using the maternal immune activation (MIA)-based offspring ASD-like mouse model, a probiotic-based intervention strategy was examined in female mice. The gut commensal microbe Parabacteroides goldsteinii MTS01, which was previously demonstrated to exert multiple beneficial effects on chronic inflammation-related-diseases, was evaluated. Prenatal lipopolysaccharide (LPS) exposure induced leaky gut-related inflammatory phenotypes in the colon, increased LPS activity in sera, and induced autistic-like behaviors in offspring mice. By contrast, P. goldsteinii MTS01 treatment significantly reduced intestinal and systemic inflammation and ameliorated disease development. Transcriptomic analyses of MIA offspring indicated that in the intestine, P. goldsteinii MTS01 enhanced neuropeptide-related signaling and suppressed aberrant cell proliferation and inflammatory responses. In the hippocampus, P. goldsteinii MTS01 increased ribosomal/mitochondrial and antioxidant activities and decreased glutamate receptor signaling. Together, significant ameliorative effects of P. goldsteinii MTS01 on ASD relevant behaviors in MIA offspring were identified. Therefore, P. goldsteinii MTS01 could be developed as a next-generation probiotic for ameliorating ASD.
Abstract
Automated relation extraction (RE) from biomedical literature is critical for many downstream text mining applications in both research and real-world settings. However, most existing ...benchmarking datasets for biomedical RE only focus on relations of a single type (e.g. protein–protein interactions) at the sentence level, greatly limiting the development of RE systems in biomedicine. In this work, we first review commonly used named entity recognition (NER) and RE datasets. Then, we present a first-of-its-kind biomedical relation extraction dataset (BioRED) with multiple entity types (e.g. gene/protein, disease, chemical) and relation pairs (e.g. gene–disease; chemical–chemical) at the document level, on a set of 600 PubMed abstracts. Furthermore, we label each relation as describing either a novel finding or previously known background knowledge, enabling automated algorithms to differentiate between novel and background information. We assess the utility of BioRED by benchmarking several existing state-of-the-art methods, including Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based models, on the NER and RE tasks. Our results show that while existing approaches can reach high performance on the NER task (F-score of 89.3%), there is much room for improvement for the RE task, especially when extracting novel relations (F-score of 47.7%). Our experiments also demonstrate that such a rich dataset can successfully facilitate the development of more accurate, efficient and robust RE systems for biomedicine.
Availability: The BioRED dataset and annotation guidelines are freely available at https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/lu/BioRED/.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The antiferromagnet (AFM) and ferromagnet (FM) interface is a unique branch of magnetics of broad scientific interest. AFMs play an important role in spin‐orbit torque devices based on their ability ...to generate spin‐polarized current and exchange bias when combined with FMs. In this study, an interesting spin‐orbit torque (SOT) ratchet involving the exchange spring effect in an IrMn/CoFeB bilayer device with perpendicular anisotropy and exchange bias is developed. The combined use of electrical and spectroscopic analysis reveals that the exchange spring in IrMn/CoFeB bilayer yields unidirectional anisotropy, resulting in a collinear/orthogonal AFM/FM spin configuration at the interface upon switching CoFeB magnetization upward/downward. The ratcheting characteristics resulting from unidirectional anisotropy manifest in SOT switching. In this process, magnetization against the exchange spring features digital‐like switching with a sharp transition, whereas the reverse function is characteristic of analog switching with a gradual transition tail. The dual digital‐analog characteristics of the IrMn/CoFeB bilayer may be of benefit in neuromorphic and memory applications.
A spin‐orbit torque ratchet is discovered in an anti‐ferromagnet (IrMn)/ferromagnet (CoFeB) bilayer device with exchange bias. An exchange spring effect is found to be responsible for the unidirectional anisotropy of CoFeB, which supports the multilevel cell feature for neuromorphic applications. This finding opens a new avenue for the advanced spin‐orbit torque (SOT) technology.
CuZn antisite defects have been regarded as the efficiency limiting factor of kesterite solar cells because they cause band tailing and loss of open circuit voltage (VOC). To suppress CuZn antisite ...defects, Ag-alloyed (Ag,Cu)2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (ACZTSSe) kesterite has been proposed. Although efficiency enhancement is realized by a limited amount of Ag addition (Ag/(Ag + Cu) ≤ 20%), the antisite defects may not be completely eliminated by the small amount of Ag. Further enhancement by using a high Ag content (Ag/(Ag + Cu) ≥ 20%) has not been achieved yet. In this work, the effects of Ag on the phase stability, crystal structure, defect properties and device performance are investigated. Experimental results demonstrate that the optimized formation temperature of kesterite is reduced with increasing Ag content. We demonstrate that Ag2ZnSn(S,Se)4 is ordered kesterite and CuZn antisite defects are effectively eliminated as 35% of Cu is replaced by Ag in ACZTSSe. To further increase the efficiency of the high Ag-content kesterite, 1 at% Na addition to the precursor is critical to passivate the interface as well as grain boundaries and increase the carrier concentration. An efficiency of 10% for ACZTSSe solar cells is reported with Ag/(Ag + Cu) = 35% at a processing temperature as low as 470 °C through an environment-friendly chemical spray pyrolysis process using aqueous solution. This study demonstrates the feasibility of controlling antisite defects and band-gap engineering by a larger amount of Ag substitution in the kesterite system to solve the VOC deficit problem.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CO-V-2), was first reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, China has now rapidly spread over 50 ...countries. For the prevention and control of infection, Taiwan Centers for Disease Control initiated testing of SARS-CoV-2 on January 24th 2020 for persons suspected with this disease. Until February 28th, 43 flu-like symptomatic patients were screened in China Medical University Hospital.
Two patients were confirmed positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection by rRT-PCR as COVID-19 patients A and B. Causative pathogens for included patients were detected using FilmArray™ Respiratory Panel. We retrospectively analyzed the clinical presentations, laboratory data, radiologic findings, and travel and exposure contact histories, of the COVID-19 patients in comparison to those with other respiratory infections.
Through contact with Taiwan No. 19 case patient on 27th January, COVID-19 patients A and B were infected. Both patients had no identified comorbidities and developed mild illness with temporal fever, persistent cough, and lung interstitial infiltrates. Owing to the persistence of positive SARS-CoV-2 in respiratory specimen, the two COVID-19 patients are still in the isolation rooms despite recovery until 10th of March. The results of FilmArrayTM Respiratory Panel revealed 22 of the 41 non-COVID-19 patients were infected by particular pathogens. In general, seasonal respiratory pathogens are more prevalent than SARS-CoV-2 in symptomatic patients in non- COVID-19 endemic area during the flu season. Since all patients shared similar clinical and laboratory findings, expanded surveillance of detailed exposure history for suspected patients and application of rapid detection tools are highly recommended.
To investigate the incidence and risk factors of hepatitis B virus (HBV) reactivation in HBV surface antigen (HBsAg)
/ HBV core antibody (HBcAb)
patients who underwent rituximab (RTX) therapy for ...rheumatoid arthritis (RA). From January 2000 through December 2017, a total of 134 RA patients with various HBV serostatuses who received RTX at Dalin Tzu Chi Hospital were screened. Finally, 50 HBsAg
/HBcAb
patients were enrolled in this retrospective study. Baseline characteristics, comedications, and the occurrence of HBV reactivation were recorded. Four HBsAg
/HBcAb
RA patients (8%; 4/50) experienced HBV reactivation after treatment with RTX. Hepatitis flare-up occurred in 2 of these 4 patients, with a fatal outcome in one. HBV reactivation occurred approximately 1-4 years after the first dose of RTX and 0.5-1.5 years after the last one. In HBsAg
/HBcAb
patients, HBV reactivation was significantly more common in those who were HBV surface antibody (HBsAb)
at baseline than in those who were HBsAb
(30% vs 4%; p = 0.02). A history of adalimumab use was associated with HBV reactivation (100% vs 39%; p = 0.02). A moderate risk of HBV reactivation was observed in HBsAg
/HBcAb
RA patients receiving RTX therapy. The reactivation may induce acute hepatitis and even death. To reduce the risk of HBV reactivation, regular monitoring of liver function is insufficient; monitoring of viral load and HBsAg or prophylaxis with antiviral therapy should be considered.
Women with unilateral breast cancer are at an increased risk for the development of contralateral breast cancers. We hypothesis that combined breast MRI would detect more contralateral synchronous ...breast cancer than conventional imaging alone, and resulted in less contralateral metachronous breast cancer during follow-up.
We retrospectively collected two groups of breast cancer patients diagnosed from 2009 to 2013 for evaluating the effectiveness and value of adding pre-operative breast MRI to conventional breast images (mammography and sonography) for detection of contralateral synchronous breast cancer. The new metachronous contralateral breast cancer diagnosed during follow-up was prospectively evaluated and compared.
Group A (n = 733) comprised patients who underwent conventional preoperative imaging and group B (n = 735) combined with MRI were enrolled and compared. Seventy (9.5%) of the group B patients were found to have contralateral lesions detected by breast MRI, and 65.7% of these lesions only visible with MRI. The positive predictive value of breast MRI detected contralateral lesions was 48.8%. With the addition of breast MRI to conventional imaging studies, more surgical excisions were performed in contralateral breasts (6% (44/735) versus 1.4% (10/733), P< 0.01), more synchronous contralateral breast cancer detected (2.9% (21/735) versus 1.1% (8/733), P = 0.02), and resulted in numerical less (2.2% (16/714) versus 3% (22/725), p = 0.3) metachronous contralateral breast cancer during a mean follow-up of 102 months.
Our study provides useful estimates of the pre-operative breast MRI for the increased detection of contralateral synchronous breast cancer and less subsequent contralateral metachronous breast cancer.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Metal halide perovskites having three-dimensional crystal structures are being applied successfully in various optoelectronic applications. To address their most challenging issues-instability and ...toxicity-without losing efficiency, lower-dimensional perovskites appear to be promising alternatives. Recently, two-dimensional (2D) perovskite solar cells have been developed exhibiting excellent photostability and moisture-stability, together with moderate device efficiency. This review summarizes the photophysical properties and operating mechanisms of 2D perovskites as well as recent advances in their applications in solar cell devices. Also presented is an agenda for the next-stage development of stable perovskite materials for solar cell applications, highlighting the issues of stability and toxicity that require further study to ensure commercialization.
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