The nanostructured BiVO4 photoanodes were prepared by electrospinning and were further characterized by XRD, SEM, and XPS, confirming the bulk and surface modification of the electrodes attained by W ...addition. The role of surface states (SS) during water oxidation for the as-prepared photoanodes was investigated by using electrochemical, photoelectrochemical, and impedance spectroscopy measurements. An optimum 2% doping is observed in voltammetric measurements with the highest photocurrent density at 1.23 VRHE under back side illumination. It has been found that a high PEC performance requires an optimum ratio of density of surface states (N SS) with respect to the charge donor density (N d), to give both good conductivity and enough surface reactive sites. The optimum doping (2%) shows the highest N d and SS concentration, which leads to the high film conductivity and reactive sites. The reason for SS acting as reaction sites (i-SS) is suggested to be the reversible redox process of V5+/V4+ in semiconductor bulk to form water oxidation intermediates through the electron trapping process. Otherwise, the irreversible surface reductive reaction of VO2 + to VO2+ though the electron trapping process raises the surface recombination. W doping does have an effect on the surface properties of the BiVO4 electrode. It can tune the electron trapping process to obtain a high concentration of i-SS and less surface recombination. This work gives a further understanding for the enhancement of PEC performance caused by W doping in the field of charge transfer at the semiconductor/electrolyte interface.
A Fe-N impregnated carbon in a hybrid with in-situ grown graphene from hierarchical porous carbon has been obtained for high-performance oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalysis. This hybrid ...material combines the desirable characteristics for the ORR, including Fe-N active sites, high surface area, good electron conductivity, and hierarchical channels for mass diffusion. As a result, this catalyst exhibits a very positive reaction onset potential (−0.05 V vs. Ag/AgCl), a high ORR current density, and a complete four-electron ORR pathway, which are even better than a commercial 20% Pt/C catalyst. We further reveal the synergistic ORR enhancement from the controlled Fe-N impregnation in the doped carbon-graphene hybrid.
A hierarchical porous Fe-N impregnated carbon-graphite has been obtained, which carries outstanding ORR catalytic capability even better than the state-of-the-art Pt/C catalyst in an alkaline electrolyte. The excellent performance of this hybrid material can be attributed to the Fe-N active sites, high surface area, good electron conductivity, and hierarchical channels for facile mass diffusion. Display omitted
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This study demonstrated high-efficient dye adsorption for wastewater using MoS2-glue sponge as an easy-separative and regenerative adsorbent. Flower-like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) ...nanopowders with rich polar edge sites were firstly synthesized by a facile one-pot hydrothermal method. Chemical and morphological features of MoS2 nanoflowers were then examined by XRD, XPS, SEM and TEM. Afterwards, different concentrations of the MoS2-glue sponges with easy separability were successfully fabricated by a convenient two-step dip-coating method. The adsorption performance was estimated by the removal of Rhodamine B (RhB) dyes. The results proved that the maximum adsorption capacity of MoS2-glue sponge was 127.39 mg RhB/g product in 60 min. The RhB uptake behaviors can be well described by the Sips isotherm model and pseudo-second-order kinetic model, indicating a multilayer and chemical adsorption process. The adsorption mechanism proposed that the zwitterionic RhB molecules in aqueous solution would aggregate on the surface of negative charged MoS2 in a head-to-tail way through electrostatic interaction. Furthermore, RhB dyes could desorb easily from MoS2-glue sponges when changing the polarity of solvent and the reusability experiment showed that the MoS2-3% glue sponge could be reused for 15 times with above 85.8% of the adsorption capacity retained. Thus, the novel MoS2-glue sponge is considered as a competitive adsorbent for treatment of dyestuff waste water.
LncRNA-PACERR plays critical role in the polarization of tissue-associated macrophages (TAMs). In this study, we found the function and molecular mechanism of PACERR in TAMs to regulate pancreatic ...ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) progression.
We used qPCR to analyse the expression of PACERR in TAMs and M1-tissue-resident macrophages (M1-NTRMs) which were isolated from 46 PDAC tissues. The function of PACERR on macrophages polarization and PDAC proliferation, migration and invasion were confirmed through in vivo and in vitro assays. The molecular mechanism of PACERR was discussed via fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), RNA pull-down, ChIP-qPCR, RIP-qPCR and luciferase assays.
LncRNA-PACERR was high expression in TAMs and associated with poor prognosis in PDAC patients. Our finding validated that LncRNA-PACERR increased the number of M2-polarized cells and facilized cell proliferation, invasion and migration in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, LncRNA-PACERR activate KLF12/p-AKT/c-myc pathway by binding to miR-671-3p. And LncRNA-PACERR which bound to IGF2BP2 acts as an m6A-dependent manner to enhance the stability of KLF12 and c-myc in cytoplasm. In addition, the promoter of LncRNA-PACERR was a target of KLF12 and LncRNA-PACERR recruited EP300 to increase the acetylation of histone by interacting with KLF12 in nucleus.
This study found that LncRNA-PACERR functions as key regulator of TAMs in PDAC microenvironment and revealed the novel mechanisms in cytoplasm and in nucleus.
Despite the significant advances in preparing carbon-metal oxide composite electrodes, strategies for seamless interconnecting of these two materials without using binders are still scarce. Herein we ...design a novel method for in situ synthesis of porous 2D-layered carbon–metal oxide composite electrode. Firstly, 2D-layered Ni-Co mixed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are deposited directly on nickel foam by anodic electrodeposition. Subsequent pyrolysis and activation procedure lead to the formation of carbon–metal oxides composite electrodes. Even with an ultrahigh mass loading of 13.4mgcm−2, the as-prepared electrodes exhibit a superior rate performance of 93% (from 1 to 20mAcm−2), high capacitance (2098mFcm−2 at a current density of 1mAcm−2), low resistance and excellent cycling stability, making them promising candidates for practical supercapacitor application. As a proof of concept, several MOF derived electrodes with different metal sources have also been prepared successfully via the same route, demonstrating the versatility of the proposed method for the preparation of binder-free carbon–metal oxide composite electrodes for electrochemical devices.
A novel 2D carbon−metal oxide composite electrode was prepared by four steps and demonstrated as promising binder-free electrode materials for supercapacitors with ultrahigh rate performance of 93% (from 1 to 20mAcm−2) and high mass loading (13.4mgcm−2). Moreover, this new general strategy is also expected to facilitate the synthesis of carbon–metal oxide composite electrodes for other electrochemical devices. Display omitted
•Facile synthesis of 2D-Co-Ni mixed MOFs by electrodeposition.•In-situ growth of metal oxide anchored carbon matrix on Ni foam.•The achieved 2D-CMO electrode exhibits excellent rate performance with high mass loading.•This approach is expected to be a universal strategy for in-situ growth of metal oxide anchored carbon matrix electrodes.
Mammary stem/progenitor cells (MaSCs) maintain self-renewal of the mammary epithelium during puberty and pregnancy. DNA methylation provides a potential epigenetic mechanism for maintaining cellular ...memory during self-renewal. Although DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs) are dispensable for embryonic stem cell maintenance, their role in maintaining MaSCs and cancer stem cells (CSCs) in constantly replenishing mammary epithelium is unclear. Here we show that DNMT1 is indispensable for MaSC maintenance. Furthermore, we find that DNMT1 expression is elevated in mammary tumours, and mammary gland-specific DNMT1 deletion protects mice from mammary tumorigenesis by limiting the CSC pool. Through genome-scale methylation studies, we identify ISL1 as a direct DNMT1 target, hypermethylated and downregulated in mammary tumours and CSCs. DNMT inhibition or ISL1 expression in breast cancer cells limits CSC population. Altogether, our studies uncover an essential role for DNMT1 in MaSC and CSC maintenance and identify DNMT1-ISL1 axis as a potential therapeutic target for breast cancer treatment.
Increasing evidence showed that circular RNAs (circRNAs) play critical roles in tumorigenesis. However, the roles and underlying mechanisms of circRNAs in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) ...remain unclear. In the present study, we identified a novel circRNA circPCNXL2, which was significantly upregulated in ccRCC by circular RNA microarray. Further analysis revealed that circPCNXL2 was significantly increased and correlated with poor overall survival of ccRCC patients. Function assays revealed that circPCNXL2 knockdown reduced RCC cells proliferation, invasion in vitro, and decreased tumor growth in vivo. In mechanism study, we showed that circPCNXL2 could be bind to miR-153 as a miRNA sponge to regulate ZEB2 expression in RCC progression. In addition, our data reported that the effects of circPCNXL2 inhibition on RCC cells proliferation and invasion could be abolished by miR-153 inhibitors. Altogether, we demonstrated that circPCNXL2 could regulate RCC cells proliferation and invasion by miR-153/ZEB2 axis, suggesting circPCNXL2 might serve as a potential therapeutic target for ccRCC treatment.
This study aims to investigate the effect of the pretreatment of S-ketamine on postoperative depression (POD) for breast cancer patients with mild/moderate depression.
The present randomized, ...double-blinded controlled trial included 303 breast cancer patients with mild/moderate depression from June 2017 to June 2018. All patients were randomly divided into three groups: (1) control group, patients treated with normal saline; (2) racemic ketamine group, patients treated with racemic ketamine; (3) S-ketamine group, patients treated with S-ketamine. Operation time, blood loss and hospital stay and complications were recorded. The Visual Analog Scale (VAS) score was recorded, and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAMD-17) scores, serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) were measured at three days, one week, one month and three months after surgery.
No significant difference was found in operation time, bleeding volume and complication rate. In both groups, the VAS scores at one day and three days after surgery were significantly lower. The HAMD-17 scores were significantly lower, and the serum levels of both BDNF and 5-HT were remarkably higher at three days, one week and one month after surgery. Meanwhile, the HAMD-17 scores were remarkably lower, while the serum levels of BDNF and 5-HT were remarkably higher in the S-ketamine group. The BDNF and 5-HT levels were negatively correlated with the HAMD-17 score.
S-ketamine is more effective for reducing POD for breast cancer patients.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
Medical image segmentation from noisy labels is an important task since obtaining high‐quality annotations is extremely difficult and expensive. There are a lot of approaches proposed for ...such task. However, some issues like the overfitting on noisy annotations, the limited learning of boundary features, and no consideration of the corrupted local pixels are still not solved. Therefore, a novel approach named uncertainty‐aware iterative learning (UaIL) is proposed for medical image segmentation with noisy labels. UaIL iteratively and jointly trains two deep networks using the original images and their argumented ones through a joint loss function including softened label loss, hard label loss and consistency loss, which encourages UaIL to produce segmentations that are robust to the perturbations in arbitrary semantic space. The uncertainty of labels is estimated based on the predictions in iterative learning, then the original labels are refined, which improves the learning of boundary features in segmentation. To avoid overfitting, a stopping strategy is designed based on the dice coefficient in iterative learning. Experiments on two public datasets verify the effectiveness of UaIL under different levels of annotation noise. Especially, when there are serious noises in the labels, the dice achieved by UaIL is 1.43% to 15.03% higher than the competing approaches on the two public datasets. The UaIL is further verified on a private dataset, which shows its ability of applying in the real application with noisy labels.
Achieving high performance room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) with a clearly understood mechanism is highly desired. In this work, efficient RTP materials with a delayed emission quantum yield of ...50% were synthesized through loading thiophenes into the matrix of inorganic boric acid (BA). The RTP mechanisms were clarified through structural, photophysical, and theoretical studies of RTP materials produced by loading a series of thiophenes into a BA matrix. Our study demonstrated the critical role of molecular interactions between BA and thiophenes. Covalent bonds have strengthened the hydrogen bonds to modulate the photophysical properties of thiophenes, which reduced the energy gap between the singlet and triplet states. The RTP color and emission lifetime could be well-tuned by substituting the chemical groups on the skeleton of thiophenes, which endowed their applications with information encryption. These results opened a door for designing efficient RTP materials for various applications as well as a clear mechanism for studying the host–guest systems.
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