A dual-excitation uniform eddy current probe, composed of two excitation coils placed tangentially and one detection coil placed horizontally, is developed to solve the difficulties of detection rate ...and direction recognition of crack defect. Firstly, a probe simulation model is established using COMSOL Multiphysics, and the differences of eddy current distribution between the dual-excitation probe and the traditional probe are investigated. Then, the influence of the distance between excitation coils on sensitivity and the test capability for crack defects with different depths and directions are investigated. Besides, the sensitivity of the dual-excitation probe is compared to that of the traditional probe made of the same coils. Finally, a physical probe and an experimental system are developed, and the performance of the dual-excitation probe is tested. The experimental results show that the probe developed in this paper exhibits a slightly higher sensitivity than the traditional probe for crack defects with different depths in the range of 0.5 mm-4.0 mm; the measurement accuracy of crack length is about 3.0 mm and can avoid missing detection of crack defects with different directions. In testing, the detection signal can be compensated to achieve precision measurement by identifying the angle of crack defects. This dual-excitation uniform eddy current probe can be used for precise quantification and direction identification of crack defect in eddy current testing.
Research has shown that nano-copper (nano-Cu) can cause damage to the spleen and immune system yet their mechanisms of cytotoxicity are poorly understood. Our aim is to explore the potential ...immunotoxicity in the spleen of rats after nano-Cu exposure. The results of hematologic parameters, lymphocyte subsets, immunoglobulins, and histopathology indicated that copper obviously changed the immune function of the spleen. The levels of antioxidants (SOD, CAT, GSH-Px), oxidants (iNOS, NO, MDA), and anti-oxidative signalling pathway of Nrf2 (Nrf2 and HO-1) were strongly induced by nano-Cu. The expression of mRNA and protein of pro-/anti-inflammatory (IFN-γ, TNF-α, MIP-1α, MCP-1, MIF, IL-1/-2/-4/-6) cytokines were increased by nano-Cu. The expression of regulatory signal pathways, MAPKs and PI3-K/Akt were activated, which might be involved in the inflammatory responses and immunomodulatory processes of sub-acute nano-Cu exposure. The immune function of the spleen was repressed by nano-Cu induced oxidative stress and inflammation.
Irrational application of chemical fertilizers causes soil nutrient imbalance, reduced microbial diversity, soil diseases, and other soil quality problems and is one of the main sources of non-point ...pollution. The application of microbial inoculant (MI) can improve the soil environment and crop growth to reduce problems caused by irrational application of chemical fertilizers. Field experiments were carried out in high-phosphorus soils to study the effects of the addition of various MIs combined with chemical fertilizers on soil properties, wheat growth, and soil microbial composition and structure. The MIs consisted of one fungal agent:
Trichoderma
compound agent (TC) and five bacterial agents, namely soil remediation agent (SR), anti-repeat microbial agent (AM), microbial agent (MA), plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PG), and biological fertilizer agent (BF). The wheat yield increased by 15.2–33.4% with the addition of MIs, and PG with
Bacillus subtilis
as the core microorganism had the most obvious effect on increasing the production (
p
< 0.05). For the entire growth period of wheat, all MIs applied significantly increased the available nitrogen (AN) (
p
< 0.05) but did not significantly affect the available phosphorus (AP). BF has the best effect on increasing AN in the soil. The 16S rRNA sequencing results indicated that the dominant phyla of soil bacteria were Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria, and Verrucomicrobia. The addition of MIs increased the relative abundance of Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi and decreased Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes. The diversity of soil bacterial community (Chao1) was significantly higher in the soil added with TC than that added with BF (
p
< 0.05). All bacterial agents significantly enriched various genera (
p
< 0.05), while the fungal agent (TC) did not enrich the genera significantly. pH and AN, but not TP, were closely related to the dominant bacteria phylum in high-P soil. The application of MIs improved AN in soil, increased the wheat yield, and changed the relative abundance of the soil dominant phylum, and these changes were closely related to the type of MIs. The results provide a scientific basis for rational use of different types of MIs in high-P soil.
Hydrate slurry transport technology has become a focal point among worldwide researches, due to its high economic efficiency. However, the mechanism and law of hydrate growth kinetics in flow systems ...were still unclear, especially in high water-cut oil-water systems with hydrate promoters. On this basis, this paper conducted a series of growth kinetic experiments using a high-pressure transparent sapphire cell, and investigated systematically several influencing factors (such as initial pressure, the concentration of emulsifier, hydrate promoter, and the concentration of hydrate promoter) of growth kinetics, and obtained the quantitative relationship between these factors and gas consumption as well as the hydrate growth rate (gas consumption rate). It could be seen from the analysis of these influencing factors that the presence of hydrate promoters can promote hydrate nucleation rapidly and shorten the hydrate induction time, as compared with the (diesel oil + water) system. The concentration of emulsifier is positively correlated with the induction period of hydrate formation, whether it was sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) or
l
-leucine (
l
-l) systems. The SDS and
l
-l system could significantly improve the formation kinetics of methane hydrate in the emulsion system, while tetrabutylammonium bromide (TBAB) and polysorbate 80 (Tween80) significantly inhibited the nucleation and growth of methane hydrate in the emulsion. The kinetic curves of hydrate formation showed a trend of first increasing and then gradually decreasing, with the increase of SDS concentrations. However, the hydrate formation kinetics tended to increase gradually and reach equilibrium in the
l
-l system, with an increase in the concentration of
l
-l.
The gas consumption was the highest in both systems (0.5% Span20 +0.05% SDS) and (0.5% Span20 + 0.5%
l
-l), indicating that the two systems had a faster hydrate formation rate.
Infections have been considered to play a critical role in the pathogenesis of IgA nephropathy (IgAN) because synpharyngitic hematuria is a common feature in IgAN. However, how infections participate ...in this process is still debated. More recent studies have also revealed that the alteration of the gut microbiome exerts a profound effect on host immune responses, contributing to the etiology or progression of autoimmunity. Considering IgA as the first line of defense against bacterial and viral antigens, this review evaluates the relationships among intestinal infections, gut microbiome, and IgA for a better understanding of the pathogenesis of IgAN. Moreover, as a prototype of IgA immunity, we provide detailed clarification of IgAN pathogenesis to shed light on other diseases in which IgA plays a role. Finally, we discuss potential therapies focusing on microbes and mucosal immune responses in IgAN.
Mercury is a highly toxic and non-essential element that is found in every corner of the globe. The small amount of mercury produced by various pathways eventually enters freshwater and marine ...ecosystems, circulating through the food chain (especially fish) and causing various environmental problems in aspects including plants, animals, and human. There are several traditional quantitative methods developed for mercury ions (II) analysis in water samples. However, due to the complexity of the detection process, high cost and strong technical expertise, it is difficult to detect mercury ions in real-time. Therefore, in recent years, a large number of researchers have developed small-molecule fluorescent probes for Hg ions detection. Fluorimetry has the advantages of convenient detection, short response time, high sensitivity and good selectivity. This review summarized the small-molecule fluorescent probes for mercuric ion detection developed in recent years according to the chemical structural classification, compared their performances and elaborated the mechanism. We hope that the review will help the researches for the designs of metal ions fluorescent probes and their applications with certain reference value.
Pseudorabies virus (PRV) is a pathogen of swine resulting in devastating disease and economic losses worldwide. Resveratrol (Res) exhibits inhibitory activity against a wide range of viruses. Despite ...these important advances, the molecular mechanism(s) by which Res exerts its broad biological effects have not yet been elucidated. In this paper, the antiviral activity of Res against PRV and its mechanism of action were investigated. The results showed that Res potently inhibited PRV replication in a dose-dependent manner, with a 50% inhibition concentration of 17.17 μM. The inhibition of virus multiplication in the presence of Res was not attributed to direct inactivation or inhibition of viral entry into the host cells but to the inhibition of viral multiplication in host cells. Further studies demonstrated that Res is a potent inhibitor of both NF-κB activation and NF-κB-dependent gene expression through its ability to inhibit IκB kinase activity, which is the key regulator in NF-κB activation. Thus, the inhibitory effect of Res on PRV-induced cell death and gene expression may be due to its ability to inhibit the degradation of IκB kinase. These results provided a new alternative control measure for PRV infection and new insights into the antiviral mechanism of Res.
The Mayfly Algorithm (MA) is a widely used metaheuristic algorithm characterized by a simple structure with simple parameters. However, MA may have problems such as poor global search ability and ...tend to fall into local optima. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a chaos-based mayfly algorithm with opposition-based learning and Levy flight (COLMA) to boost the global search and local exploitation performance. In COLMA, we first introduced tent chaos to optimize the initialization process of the mayfly population, as random initialization processes may result in low diversity of the mayfly population. In addition, the gravity coefficient has been replaced with an adaptive gravity coefficient to balance the global search ability and local exploitation ability during the iterative process of the algorithm. In the process of updating the position of the male mayfly population, an opposition-based learning strategy based on an iterative chaotic map with infinite collapses is adopted to prevent the male mayfly population from falling into local optima. At the same time, in order to solve the problem of small search range of female mayfly population, Levy flight strategy was introduced to replace random walk strategy. Finally, an offspring optimization strategy was proposed to increase the probability of the offspring mayfly population approaching the optimal solution. To verify the effectiveness and superiority of COLMA and the adopted strategy, experiments were conducted on the classical benchmark functions, CEC 2017 benchmark suite and CEC 2020 real-world constraint optimization problems, and the results were statistically tested using the Wilcoxon signed rank test and Friedman test. The analysis results show that the proposed COLMA has statistical validity and reliability and has great advantages compared with MA, variant MA in terms of optimization accuracy, stability and convergence speed.
In this paper, 3 kinds of hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents were screened out for gold recovery due to their low viscosity, which were constructed by ionic liquids: N3333Br, N4444Br and N8881Br and ...N-hexanoic acid. Anion exchange mechanism during the extraction process was proposed through the combination of UV–vis and FT-IR. Subsequently, the extraction behaviors under different conditions, such as: salinity (NaCl/NaBr), acidity and Au(III) concentration were investigated and discussed. N8881-Br-acid showed the best extraction ability: it showed the 96.8% extraction efficiency on 1 mM Au(III) solution, compared with N4444-Br-acid (around 93% on 0.6 mM) and N3333-Br-acid (around 91% on 0.6 mM). Besides that, the N8881-Br-acid showed the better salinity resistance among 3 DESs. The extracted Au(III) in the DESs phase was easily and completely stripped by applying 1 mL 0.1 g/mL NaBH4, and each extraction ability maintained after 5 turns of extraction cycle experiments. Since the excellent behaviors showed in the multi-metal selective extraction and extraction cycle experiments, the N8881-Br-acid was regarded as the most potential system for gold recovery from HCl medium. Furthermore, its operating conditions combination: operating temperature and vibration time were optimized to 19 °C and 13 min by applying response surface methodology (RSM). Under optimized conditions combination and given A/O = 1:1, the complete extraction procedure only needs two theoretical stages with a tiny amount (~5%) of Au(III) left, which is indicated by drawing Mccabe-Thiele diagram.
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•3 hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents were screened out for gold recovery.•Results showed that N8881-Br-acid showed the best gold recover and separation abilities among 3 DESs.•NaBH4 was adopted to easily recover Au(III) from DES phases, keeping the extraction ability of 3 DESs constant.•Two theoretical counter-current stages were enough for N8881-Br-acid to amolstly extract Au(III).
Let-7a is a small non-coding RNA that has been found to take part in cell proliferation and apoptosis. The hippo-YAP1 axis, known as a tumour suppressor pathway, also plays an important role in cell ...proliferation and apoptosis. YAP1, TAZ, and phospho-YAP1 play key roles in actions of the hippo-YAP1 axis. Adenomyosis (ADS) is a proliferative disease leading to a large uterus in patients with prolonged illness. Abnormal proliferation of smooth muscle cells (SMCs) in the uterine endometrial-myometrial junctional zone (JZ) is an important reason for developing ADS. This study aimed to explore the expression levels of let-7a and components of the hippo-YAP1 axis in SMCs in the uterine endometrial-myometrial JZ in ADS and to explore the roles of let-7a and the hippo-YAP1 axis of JZ SMC proliferation and apoptosis in ADS.
We collected JZ tissues for the primary culture of SMCs from 25 women diagnosed with ADS and 27 women without ADS. We used quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and western blotting to measure the mRNA and protein expression levels of let-7a, YAP1, TAZ, and phospho-YAP1 in ADS JZ SMCs. A CCK-8 assay and flow cytometry analysis of apoptosis were utilized to test the proliferation and apoptosis of JZ SMCs. The let-7a overexpression lentiviral vector GV280 was used to increase the expression level of let-7a. We added verteporfin to block the phosphorylation of components of the hippo-YAP1 axis.
We found that the let-7a level was decreased, while the YAP1 and TAZ levels were increased in ADS JZ SMCs. Upregulated let-7a affected the expression levels of components of the hippo-YAP1 axis, accelerated apoptosis, and inhibited proliferation in JZ SMCs. Furthermore, accumulated YAP1 led to increasing proliferation of JZ SMCs after verteporfin treatment to block the phosphorylation of components of the hippo-YAP1 axis. If components of the hippo-YAP1 axis were unphosphorylated, upregulated let-7a could not inhibit the proliferation of ADS JZ SMCs. Upregulated let-7a could not activate the hippo-YAP1 axis in verteporfin treatment.
Our findings suggest that the let-7a and hippo-YAP1 axis may act as important regulators of JZ SMCs proliferation, and upregulated let-7a may be an effective method to treat ADS.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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