Chemical modifications are a specific and efficient way to regulate the function of biological macromolecules. Among them, RNA molecules exhibit a variety of modifications that play important ...regulatory roles in various biological processes. More than 170 modifications have been identified in RNA molecules, among which the most common internal modifications include N6-methyladenine (m
6
A), n1-methyladenosine (m
1
A), 5-methylcytosine (m
5
C), and 7-methylguanine nucleotide (m
7
G). The most widely affected RNA modification is m
6
A, whose writers, readers, and erasers all have regulatory effects on RNA localization, splicing, translation, and degradation. These functions, in turn, affect RNA functionality and disease development. RNA modifications, especially m
6
A, play a unique role in renal cell carcinoma disease. In this manuscript, we will focus on the biological roles of m6A in renal diseases such as acute kidney injury, chronic kidney disease, lupus nephritis, diabetic kidney disease, and renal cancer.
Introduction
Compared with traditional fundus examination techniques, ultra-widefield fundus (UWF) images provide 200° panoramic images of the retina, which allows better detection of peripheral ...retinal lesions. The advent of UWF provides effective solutions only for detection but still lacks efficient diagnostic capabilities. This study proposed a retinal lesion detection model to automatically locate and identify six relatively typical and high-incidence peripheral retinal lesions from UWF images which will enable early screening and rapid diagnosis.
Methods
A total of 24,602 augmented ultra-widefield fundus images with labels corresponding to 6 peripheral retinal lesions and normal manifestation labelled by 5 ophthalmologists were included in this study. An object detection model named You Only Look Once X (YOLOX) was modified and trained to locate and classify the six peripheral retinal lesions including rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD), retinal breaks (RB), white without pressure (WWOP), cystic retinal tuft (CRT), lattice degeneration (LD), and paving-stone degeneration (PSD). We applied coordinate attention block and generalized intersection over union (GIOU) loss to YOLOX and evaluated it for accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision,
F
1 score, and average precision (AP). This model was able to show the exact location and saliency map of the retinal lesions detected by the model thus contributing to efficient screening and diagnosis.
Results
The model reached an average accuracy of 96.64%, sensitivity of 87.97%, specificity of 98.04%, precision of 87.01%,
F
1 score of 87.39%, and mAP of 86.03% on test dataset 1 including 248 UWF images and reached an average accuracy of 95.04%, sensitivity of 83.90%, specificity of 96.70%, precision of 78.73%,
F
1 score of 81.96%, and mAP of 80.59% on external test dataset 2 including 586 UWF images, showing this system performs well in distinguishing the six peripheral retinal lesions.
Conclusion
Focusing on peripheral retinal lesions, this work proposed a deep learning model, which automatically recognized multiple peripheral retinal lesions from UWF images and localized exact positions of lesions. Therefore, it has certain potential for early screening and intelligent diagnosis of peripheral retinal lesions.
Glaucoma valves (GVs) play an essential role in treating glaucoma. However, fibrosis after implantation has limited their long-term success in clinical applications. In this study, we aimed to ...develop a comprehensive surface-engineering strategy to improve the biocompatibility of GVs by constructing a microenvironment-regulated and dual-hydrophilic antifouling coating on a GV material (silicone rubber, SR). The coating was based on a superhydrophilic polydopamine (SPD) coating with good short-range superhydrophilicity and antifouling abilities. In addition, SPD coatings contain many phenolic hydroxyl groups that can effectively resist oxidative stress and the inflammatory microenvironment. Furthermore, based on its in situ photocatalytic free-radical polymerization properties, the SPD coating polymerized poly 2-methylacryloxyethylphosphocholine, providing an additional long-range hydrophilic and antifouling effect. The in vitro test results showed that the microenvironment-regulated and dual-hydrophilic coatings had anti-protein contamination, anti-oxidation, anti-inflammation, and anti-fiber proliferation capabilities. The in vivo test results indicated that this coating substantially reduced the fiber encapsulation formation of the SR material by inhibiting inflammation and fibrosis. This design strategy for dual hydrophilic coatings with microenvironmental regulation can provide a valuable reference for the surface engineering design of novel medical implantable devices.
Superhydrophilic polydopamine (SPD) coatings were prepared on silicone rubber (SR) by a two-electron oxidation method. Introduction of pMPC to SPD surface using photocatalytic radical polymerization to obtain a dual-hydrophilic coating. The dual-hydrophilic coating effectively modulates the oxidative and inflammatory microenvironment. This coating significantly reduced protein contamination and adhesion of inflammatory cells and fibroblasts in vitro. The coating-modified SR inhibits inflammatory and fibrosis responses in vivo, promising to serve the glaucoma valves.
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Nasolacrimal duct obstruction due to infection, inflammation, or excessive fibroblast proliferation may result in persistent tearing, intraocular inflammation, or even blindness. In this study, ...surface engineering techniques are applied to nasolacrimal duct stents for the first time. Based on the functioning of marine mussels, "one-pot" and "stepwise" methods were employed to construct a novel multifunctional superhydrophilic PDA/RAP coating using dopamine and rapamycin. Micron-sized rapamycin crystals combined with nano-sized polydopamine particles form a micro-nano topographical structure. Therefore, acting synergistically with
in situ
-generated hydrophilic groups (amino, carboxyl, and phenolic hydroxyl), they impart excellent and long-lasting superhydrophilicity to the nasolacrimal duct stent. The PDA/RAP coating effectively maintained the stability of the initial microenvironment during stent implantation by inhibiting the onset of acute inflammation and infection during the early stages of implantation. Meanwhile, the rapamycin crystals, supported by the superhydrophilic platform, exhibited a sustained-release capability that helped them to better exert their anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and anti-fibroblast proliferative properties, ensuring conducive conditions for the rapid repair of nasolacrimal duct epithelial cells, verified by a series of experiments. In conclusion, the PDA/RAP hydrophilic coating has anti-inflammatory, antifibrotic, antibacterial, and antithrombotic properties, offering a new strategy to address restenosis following clinical nasolacrimal duct stent implantation.
A new kind of superhydrophilic drug-carrying coating was synthesized from dopamine and rapamycin to prevent nasolacrimal duct from obstructing through anti-inflammation, anti-infection and anti-fibrosis regulation. This research provides a versatile surface bioengineering strategy.
The increasingly open market in China has ushered significant changes in the Chinese agricultural sector. Most existing research indicates that land transfer improves technical efficiency. However, ...this study finds that from the perspective of land cost, land transfer will have a negative impact on technical efficiency in China. With the development of agricultural moderate-scale operation, land cost continues to rise. From 2009 to 2016, land transfer price in Jiangsu Province rose from 3412.5 CNY/hm2 to 11,866.5 CNY/hm2, accounting for 38.1% of the total production cost. These are high prices, even at the international level. A further empirical test shows that land cost has an inverted “U” shape effect on the technical efficiency of wheat production. In other words, when the land cost for two growing seasons exceeds 3514.35 CNY/hm2 or the land cost for the wheat growing season is above 1665.45 CNY/hm2, increasing the land cost will further reduce the competitiveness of the wheat industry. To develop Chinese agriculture, it is necessary to internalize and market land cost through land contract cooperation and land custody. It is also possible to consider establishing a land-transfer insurance system and promote the sustainable development of land transfer.
In this study, a hybrid liquid cold plate design containing Z-type parallel cooling channel and PCM/aluminum foam composite, in conjunction with a novel delayed cooling strategy, is proposed to ...provide a compact, lightweight, and energy efficient solution for battery thermal management systems (BTMSs). A total of nine different cold plate designs, including one baseline cold plate without PCM composite and eight hybrid cold plates containing PCM composite, are analyzed systematically to demonstrate the superior cooling performance of the proposed cooling design. Specifically, the average temperature of battery surface and total power consumption performance of each design are analyzed and compared at a battery discharging rate of 1C under both continuous and delayed cooling schemes. Subsequently, two selected designs with superior cooling performance as well as the baseline cold plate are further investigated to discuss the effectiveness of hybrid liquid cold plates for cooling batteries at high discharge rates. The results show that the optimum hybrid cold plate design, which only weighs half of the baseline cold plate, can provide more than 50% reduction in the total pumping power while achieving the same cooling performance (i.e., with the average battery temperature controlled within 40 °C) compared with the baseline cold plate at battery discharging rates of 1C, 2C and 3C. These results can potentially provide important guidance to the design of advanced cooling systems for lithium-ion batteries.
•A compact and lightweight battery thermal management system is proposed.•A delayed cooling strategy is proposed and analyzed.•Cooling performances were compared between different designs numerically.•Optimum cooling system allows >50% reduction in power consumption and weight.
The Chinese food system has expanded its focus from aiming to solve food problems to tackling current health and environmental issues. The Chinese diet has increased in quantity and improved in ...safety, but there is still room for improvement in terms of health and sustainability. This study used Chinese dietary data provided by the Global Diet Database to analyze the changes in China’s dietary structure from 1990 to 2018 and highlight differences in urban and rural areas and across education levels. Findings show that the intake of food and beverage, macronutrients, and micronutrients in urban areas is higher than in rural areas. The difference in food and beverage intake between urban and rural areas is significant. The dietary gap between urban and rural areas has gradually widened. The difference in food and beverage and macronutrient intake across education levels is significant, but the difference in micronutrient intake is not significant. The gap in dietary structure across educational levels is relatively stable. These results indicate that the dietary structures of different groups in China are uncoordinated. We propose policies covering agricultural production, supply chain infrastructure, public institutions, education, and public awareness to build a sustainable food system with a healthy dietary pattern.
•DRF values of SDOF systems under a total of 4716 natural ground motions.•Sensitivity of various factors to mean DRF evaluated by the Spearman's rho.•Improved DRF models for different response ...spectra through nonlinear regression.•Improved DRF models with reasonable expression form and strong robustness.
The rationality and reliability of the damping reduction factor are of great significance to the seismic design of building structures. However, the values of damping reduction factor predicted by the existing models have great dispersions, which are mainly related to the regression model and the considered influencing factors. Based on the linear time history analysis of a single-degree-of-freedom system under 4716 ground motions, the influence degrees of the damping ratio, the natural vibration period, the ratio between the ground predominant period and the natural vibration period, the earthquake magnitude, the rupture distance, the site type (the average shear wave velocity in the top 30 m of soil), the significant duration, and the peak ground velocity to acceleration ratio (PGV/PGA) on the damping reduction factor are evaluated by the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. After that, improved damping reduction factor models are respectively proposed for different response spectra, in which only the damping ratio and the natural vibration period are considered as variables. Through the comparison with the existing damping reduction factor models and the robustness test under different natural ground motions, the improved damping reduction factor models are proved to have a reasonable expression form and strong robustness, which can accurately predict the damping reduction factors for different response spectra.
•Effect of five design parameters is evaluated quantitatively using Sobol sensitivity analysis.•BP Neural network is used to establish a perdition relationship between parameters and ...objectives.•Multi-objective optimization considering entropy generation minimization is studied.•The power consumption is reduced by over 67% without scarifying thermal performance.•Heat flux beyond 1000 W/cm2 is dissipated with a pumping power of 0.236 W.
Manifold microchannel (MMC) heat sink has been widely employed as an efficient scheme for high heat flux cooling of electronic devices. The parametric optimization design of the MMC heat sink is the key factor that directly determines the thermal management performance. In this study, Sobol global sensitivity analysis is firstly applied to quantitatively evaluate the effects of four geometric design parameters and inlet volume flow rate on the MMC heat sink performance. A multi-objective optimization method combining space filling method, Back-Propagation Neural Network and NSGA-II is then established to minimum the thermal resistance, total pumping power and total entropy generation of MMC heat sink, in which TOPSIS method based on entropy weight is developed to select the best compromise solution from the Pareto-optimal solutions. Finally, the overall performance among different optimal solutions is compared to identify the effectiveness of the optimization results. The results show that the obtained optimum design parameters can provide more than 67% reduction in power consumption without scarifying thermal performance compared with the MMC heat sink published in the journal “Nature” by Erp et al. in 2020. In addition, the best compromise solution can be recommended as selectable for designer because it shows the best performance, which can boost the heat flux beyond 1000 W/cm2 with pumping power consumption 0.236 W. These results are of great significance to the design of advanced MMC heat sink for cooling electronic devices.
The Chinese food system has expanded its focus from aiming to solve food problems to tackling current health and environmental issues. The Chinese diet has increased in quantity and improved in ...safety, but there is still room for improvement in terms of health and sustainability. This study used Chinese dietary data provided by the Global Diet Database to analyze the changes in China’s dietary structure from 1990 to 2018 and highlight differences in urban and rural areas and across education levels. Findings show that the intake of food and beverage, macronutrients, and micronutrients in urban areas is higher than in rural areas. The difference in food and beverage intake between urban and rural areas is significant. The dietary gap between urban and rural areas has gradually widened. The difference in food and beverage and macronutrient intake across education levels is significant, but the difference in micronutrient intake is not significant. The gap in dietary structure across educational levels is relatively stable. These results indicate that the dietary structures of different groups in China are uncoordinated. We propose policies covering agricultural production, supply chain infrastructure, public institutions, education, and public awareness to build a sustainable food system with a healthy dietary pattern.
