Pyroptosis is a novel proinflammatory programmed cell death process. This study was designed to investigate the functional mechanisms of long noncoding RNA growth arrest‐specific transcript 5 (lncRNA ...GAS5) on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)‐induced human bronchial epithelial cell (HBEC) pyroptosis. LPS was used to induce pyroptosis in HBECs, followed by the detection of the expression of GAS5, forkhead box O3 (FOXO3), and nuclear factor E2‐related factor 2/heme oxygenase 1 (Nrf2/HO‐1) signaling pathway‐related factors. Cell viability was evaluated using CCK‐8 assay, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release was assessed by LDH assay kit and caspase‐1 activity by flow cytometry. Furthermore, expression of NOD‐like receptor family pyrin domain containing 3 and pyroptosis‐related proteins was evaluated using Western blot analysis, while enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay was used to determine the levels of inflammatory factors. The interaction between GAS5 and FOXO3 was confirmed using bioinformatic prediction, RNA immunoprecipitation assay, RNA pull‐down, and dual‐luciferase reporter gene assay. Treatment of HBECs with LPS upregulated the expression of GAS5 and FOXO3, resulting in the inactivation of the Nrf2/HO‐1 signaling pathway. On the other hand, inhibition of both GAS5 and FOXO3 promoted cell viability, reduced LDH release, pyroptosis, and inflammatory response in LPS‐induced HBECs. Furthermore, FOXO3 could interact with GAS5, while FOXO3 overexpression reversed the inhibitory effect of GAS5 knockdown on cell pyroptosis. Thus, mechanistically, inhibition of FOXO3 activates the Nrf2/HO‐1 pathway to suppress LPS‐induced pyroptosis in HBECs. This study revealed that GAS5 knockdown attenuates FOXO3 expression thereby activating the Nrf2/HO‐1 pathway to inhibit LPS‐induced pyroptosis in HBECs. These findings may contribute to identifying novel targets that inhibit pyroptosis in HBECs.
Hemobilia is a rare biliary complication of liver transplantation.The predominant cause of hemobilia is iatrogenic,and it is often associated with traumatic operations,such as percutaneous liver ...intervention,endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography,cholecystectomy,biliary tract surgery,and liver transplantation.Percutaneous transhepatic cholangiography and liver biopsy are two major causes of hemobilia in liver transplant recipients.Hemobilia may also be caused by coagulation defects.It can form intracholedochal hematomas,causing obstructive jaundice.Herein we describe a patient with an intracholedochal hematoma resulting in significant obstructive jaundice after liver transplantation for fulminant hepatic failure.Previous studies have shown that percutaneous transhepatic manipulation is a major cause of hemobilia after liver transplantation,but in our case,percutaneous transhepatic intervention was used to relieve the biliary obstruction and dissolve the biliary clot,with a good outcome.
Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a serious traumatic disease of the central nervous system, which can give rise to the loss of motor and sensory function. Due to its complex pathological mechanism, the ...treatment of this disease still faces a huge challenge. Hydrogels with good biocompatibility and biodegradability can well imitate the extracellular matrix in the microenvironment of spinal cord. Hydrogels have been regarded as promising SCI repair material in recent years and continuous studies have confirmed that hydrogel-based therapy can effectively eliminate inflammation and promote spinal cord repair and regeneration to improve SCI. In this review, hydrogel-based multimodal therapeutic strategies to repair SCI are provided, and a combination of hydrogel scaffolds and other therapeutic modalities are discussed, with particular emphasis on the repair mechanism of SCI.
Arrhythmia is one of the common cardiovascular diseases. Nowadays, many methods identify arrhythmias from electrocardiograms (ECGs) by computer-aided systems. However, computer-aided systems could ...not identify arrhythmias effectively due to various the morphological change of abnormal ECG data. This paper proposes a deep method to classify ECG samples. Firstly, ECG features are extracted through continuous wavelet transform. Then, our method realizes the arrhythmia classification based on the new lightweight context transform blocks. The block is proposed by improving the linear content transform block by squeeze-and-excitation network and linear transformation. Finally, the proposed method is validated on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a high accuracy on arrhythmia classification.
The demand on the highly efficient and low-cost cathodic electrocatalysts for commercialization of fuel cells is rapidly increasing. One smart route for obtaining these ideal electrocatalysts is ...extracting active carbon materials from natural and cheap biomass waste. Here, we prepared a novel nitrogen self-doped porous graphitic carbon nanosheets (NPGCNs-NaCl) derived from a nitrogen-rich pruning of Lycium barbarum L. using NaCl crystal as intercalation agent. The as-obtained NPGCNs-NaCl possessed porous structure, large surface area, increased content of nitrogen and high graphitic carbon, and thus making it with high electrocatalytic activity for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). Most importantly, significantly enhanced stability and tolerance against methanol were observed compared with commercial Pt/C catalyst in alkaline solution. This work is believed to open a new avenue for manufacturing advanced and low-cost ORR electrocatalysts in fuel cells from biomass waste.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common arrhythmias, associated with high morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs, and it places a significant burden on both individuals and society. ...Anti-arrhythmic drugs are the most commonly used strategy for treating AF. However, drug therapy faces challenges because of its limited efficacy and potential side effects. Catheter ablation is widely used as an alternative treatment for AF. Nevertheless, because the mechanism of AF is not fully understood, the recurrence rate after ablation remains high. In addition, the outcomes of ablation can vary significantly between medical institutions and patients, especially for persistent AF. Therefore, the issue of which ablation strategy is optimal is still far from settled. Computational modeling has the advantages of repeatable operation, low cost, freedom from risk, and complete control, and is a useful tool for not only predicting the results of different ablation strategies on the same model but also finding optimal personalized ablation targets for clinical reference and even guidance. This review summarizes three-dimensional computational modeling simulations of catheter ablation for AF, from the early-stage attempts such as Maze III or circumferential pulmonary vein isolation to the latest advances based on personalized substrate-guided ablation. Finally, we summarize current developments and challenges and provide our perspectives and suggestions for future directions.
Microwave dielectric ceramics with the composition of MgZr1+xNb2O8+2x were prepared by a solid-state reaction route. XRD patterns revealed that the samples consist of monoclinic MgZrNb2O8 and ZrO2, ...and the content of ZrO2 phase increased with increasing x values. The microwave dielectric properties of samples, such as dielectric constant, Q×f value and temperature coefficient of resonant frequency have been investigated as a function of composition. It showed that the dielectric properties can be improved with the increase of x values. When x=0.32, the temperature coefficient of resonant frequency of MgZr1+xNb2O8+2x ceramic can be adjusted to a near-zero value of 1.4 ppm/°C, the dielectric constant and Q×f values are 28.03 and 68,600GHz, respectively. These results indicate that MgZr1.32Nb2O8.64 ceramic can be a suitable candidate in microwave dielectric components.
Background: Ventricular tachycardia (VT) is a life-threatening heart condition commonly seen in patients with myocardial infarction (MI). Although personalized computational modeling has been used to ...understand VT and its treatment noninvasively, this approach can be computationally intensive and time consuming. Therefore, finding a balance between mesh size and computational efficiency is important. This study aimed to find an optimal mesh resolution that minimizes the need for computational resources while maintaining numerical accuracy and to investigate the effect of mesh resolution variation on the simulation results. Methods: We constructed ventricular models from contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging data from six patients with MI. We created seven different models for each patient, with average edge lengths ranging from 315 to 645 µm using commercial software, Mimics. Programmed electrical stimulation was used to assess VT inducibility from 19 sites in each heart model. Results: The simulation results in the slab model with adaptive tetrahedral mesh (same as in the patient-specific model) showed that the absolute and relative differences in conduction velocity (CV) were 6.1 cm/s and 7.8% between average mesh sizes of 142 and 600 µm, respectively. However, the simulation results in the six patient-specific models showed that average mesh sizes with 350 µm yielded over 85% accuracy for clinically relevant VT. Although average mesh sizes of 417 and 478 µm could also achieve approximately 80% accuracy for clinically relevant VT, the percentage of incorrectly predicted VTs increases. When conductivity was modified to match the CV in the model with the finest mesh size, the overall ratio of positively predicted VT increased. Conclusions: The proposed personalized heart model could achieve an optimal balance between simulation time and VT prediction accuracy when discretized with adaptive tetrahedral meshes with an average edge length about 350 µm.
We demonstrate the preparation and electrochemical behavior of Pt/IrO
2
Nb
2
O
5
–rGO composite for oxygen reduction reaction, in which IrO
2
Nb
2
O
5
–rGO is firstly synthesized by one-pot ...hydrothermal process, and Pt is then supported on it through microwave-assisted polyol process. It is found that Nano-scaled Pt/IrO
2
Nb
2
O
5
hybrid particles (ca. 6.3 nm) are well dispersed throughout the rGO sheets. Doping Ir into Nb
2
O
5
and incorporation of rGO helps improve the catalytic performance. The kinetic current density of Pt/IrO
2
Nb
2
O
5
–rGO is 8.4 times higher than Pt/Nb
2
O
5
catalyst. The special Pt/IrO
2
Nb
2
O
5
–rGO structure with interactions helps enhance the stability of Pt NPs.
Graphic Abstract
An improved Pt/IrO
2
Nb
2
O
5
–rGO electrocatalyst is synthesized, and it shows that doping Ir into Nb
2
O
5
and incorporation of rGO helps improve the catalytic performance.
The Xi’an Proton Application Facility (XiPAF) is dedicated to simulations of environments containing space radiation. The facility consists of a 7 MeV linac injector followed by a compact 200 MeV ...synchrotron. The project was officially launched in 2014. After six years of construction, the commissioning of the synchrotron began in early 2020. Several rounds of beam commissioning have yielded an extracted beam energy from 10 to 200 MeV, with the number of protons exceeding 5 × 1010 in each cycle at different energies. This study presents the latest results from beam commissioning at XiPAF.
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