Ag3PO4 nanoparticles are often considered to be a fascinating and efficient visible photocatalyst because of its high quantum efficiency and excellent activity of O2 generation from water oxidation. ...However, the photo-corroded phenomenon and stability during the photocatalytic process reduce the photocatalytic activity. To overcome these disadvantages, strategies of combining Ag3PO4 with two-dimensional materials have been put forward to improve its stability and photocatalytic properties under visible-light irradiation. In this work, a novel Z-scheme Ag3PO4/graphdiyne/g-C3N4 nanocomposite was constructed via a simple electrostatic and π-π stacking interaction for the first time. Significantly, such Z-scheme nanostructures show highly oxygen evolution, and 753.1 μmol g−1 h−1 of O2 was produced with Ag3PO4/graphdiyne/g-C3N4, which was 12.2 times higher than that of Ag3PO4 nanoparticles. Graphdiyne with π-conjugated structure of sp- and sp2-hybridized carbon atoms, can not only act as conductive electron mediator bridges to collect photogenerated electrons and boost the O2 evolution kinetics, but also used as a promising substrate for stabilizing Ag3PO4 in the composite.
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A cell line expressing the CD2v protein of ASFV was generated. The efficient expression of CD2v protein was determined by immunofluorescence and Western blotting. The CD2v protein was Ni-affinity ...purified from the supernatant of cell cultures. The CD2v-expressing cells showed properties of hemadsorption, and the secreted CD2v protein exhibited hemagglutinating activity. The antigenicity and immunoprotection ability of CD2v were evaluated by immunizing pigs alone, combined with a cell-line-expressed p30 protein or triple combined with p30 and K205R protein. Immunized pigs were challenged with the highly virulent ASFV strain HLJ/18. Virus challenge results showed that CD2v immunization alone could provide partial protection at the early infection stage. Protein p30 did not show synergistic protection effects in immunization combined with CD2v. Interestingly, immunization with the triple combination of CD2V, p30 and K205R reversed the protection effect. The viremia onset time was delayed, and one pig out of three recovered after the challenge. The pig recovered from ASFV clinical symptoms, the rectal temperature returned to normal levels and the viremia was cleared. The mechanism of this protection effect warrants further investigation.
In this paper, we characterize that the boundedness, compactness and spectral structure of dual Toeplitz operators acting on the orthogonal complement of the harmonic Bergman space. This generalizes ...the corresponding results for dual Toeplitz operators on the orthogonal complement of the Bergman space due to Stroethoff and Zheng’s paper
Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.
,
354
, 2495–2520 (2002).
Nitroreductases (NRs) are bacterial enzymes that reduce nitro-containing compounds. We have previously reported that NR of intestinal bacteria is a key factor promoting berberine (BBR) intestinal ...absorption. We show here that feeding hamsters with high fat diet (HFD) caused an increase in blood lipids and NR activity in the intestine. The elevation of fecal NR by HFD was due to the increase in either the fraction of NR-producing bacteria or their activity in the intestine. When given orally, BBR bioavailability in the HFD-fed hamsters was higher than that in those fed with normal chow (by +72%, *
<0.05). BBR (100 mg/kg/day, orally) decreased blood lipids in the HFD-fed hamsters (**
<0.01) but not in those fed with normal diet. Clinical studies indicated that patients with hyperlipidemia had higher fecal NR activity than that in the healthy individuals (**
<0.01). Similarly, after oral administration, the blood level of BBR in hyperlipidemic patients was higher than that in healthy individuals (*
<0.05). Correlation analysis revealed a positive relationship between blood BBR and fecal NR activity (
=0.703). Thus, the fecal NR activity might serve as a biomarker in the personalized treatment of hyperlipidemia using BBR.
Background
To evaluate effectiveness of concurrent radiotherapy in esophageal cancer patient treated with neoadjuvant therapy.
Methods
The data of 1026 consecutive esophageal squamous cell carcinoma ...(ESCC) patients who underwent minimally invasive esophagectomy (MIE) were retrospectively collected. The main inclusion criteria were patients with locally advanced (cT2-4N0-3M0) ESCC who underwent neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (NCRT) or neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NCT) followed by MIE, and divided into two groups according to different neoadjuvant strategies. Propensity score matching was performed to improve the comparability between the two groups.
Results
After exclusion and matching, 141 patients were enrolled retrospectively: 92 received NCT, and 49 received NCRT. No difference in clinicopathologic characteristics or incidence of adverse events between groups. A shorter operation time (215.7 ± 35.5 min) (
p
< 0.001), less blood loss (111.2 ± 67.7 ml) (
p
= 0.0007) and a greater number of lymph nodes retrieved (33.8 ± 11.7) (
p
= 0.002) were observed in NCT group than in NCRT group. The incidence of postoperative complications was similar between groups. Although patients in NCRT group had better pathological complete response (16, 32.7%) (
p
= 0.0026) and ypT0N0 (10, 20.4%) (
p
= 0.0002) rates, there was no significant difference in 5-year progression-free survival (
p
= 0.1378) or disease-specific survival (
p
= 0.1258) between groups.
Conclusions
Compared with NCRT, NCT has certain advantages in that it can simplify the surgical procedure and decrease the surgical technique required without compromising the surgical oncological outcomes and long-term survival of patients.
Abstract
Trimethylamine-
N
-oxide (TMAO) derived from the gut microbiota is an atherogenic metabolite. This study investigates whether or not berberine (BBR) could reduce TMAO production in the gut ...microbiota and treat atherosclerosis. Effects of BBR on TMAO production in the gut microbiota, as well as on plaque development in atherosclerosis were investigated in the culture of animal intestinal bacterial, HFD-fed animals and atherosclerotic patients, respectively. We found that oral BBR in animals lowers TMAO biosynthesis in intestine through interacting with the enzyme/co-enzyme of choline-trimethylamine lyase (CutC) and flavin-containing monooxygenase (FMO) in the gut microbiota. This action was performed by BBR’s metabolite dihydroberberine (a reductive BBR by nitroreductase in the gut microbiota), via a vitamine-like effect down-regulating Choline-TMA-TMAO production pathway. Oral BBR decreased TMAO production in animal intestine, lowered blood TMAO and interrupted plaque formation in blood vessels in the HFD-fed hamsters. Moreover, 21 patients with atherosclerosis exhibited the average decrease of plaque score by 3.2% after oral BBR (0.5 g, bid) for 4 months (*
P
< 0.05,
n
= 21); whereas the plaque score in patients treated with rosuvastatin plus aspirin, or clopidogrel sulfate or ticagrelor (4 months,
n
= 12) increased by 1.9%. TMA and TMAO in patients decreased by 38 and 29% in faeces (*
P
< 0.05; *
P
< 0.05), and 37 and 35% in plasma (***
P
< 0.001; *
P
< 0.05), after 4 months on BBR. BBR might treat atherosclerotic plaque at least partially through decreasing TMAO in a mode of action similar to that of vitamins.
Human activity recognition (HAR) has been a very popular field in both real practice and theoretical research. Over the years, a number of many-vs-one Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models have been ...proposed for the sensor-based HAR problem. However, how to utilize sequence outputs of them to improve the HAR performance has not been studied seriously. To solve this problem, we present a novel loss function named harmonic loss, which is utilized to improve the overall classification performance of HAR based on baseline LSTM networks. First, label replication method is presented to duplicate true labels at each sequence step in many-vs-one LSTM networks, thus each sequence step can generate a local error and a local output. Then, considering the importance of different local errors and inspired by the Ebbinghaus memory curve, the harmonic loss is proposed to give unequal weights to different local errors based on harmonic series equation. Additionally, to improve the overall classification performance of HAR, integrated methods are utilized to exploit the sequence outputs of LSTM models based on harmonic loss and ensemble learning strategy. Finally, based on the LSTM model construction and hyper-parameter setting, extensive experiments are conducted. A series of experimental results demonstrate that our harmonic loss significantly achieves higher macro-F1 and accuracy than strong baselines on two public HAR benchmarks. Compared with previous state-of-art methods, our proposed methods can achieve competitive classification performance.
Prevention of African swine fever, a disease caused by African swine fever virus (ASFV), requires maintenance of high biosecurity standards, which principally relies on disinfection. Finding the ...perfect disinfectant against ASFV is difficult because of the lack of relevant data. Therefore, we aimed to find the most effective disinfectant and to optimise its concentration as well as contact time to confirm the viricidal effect against ASFV in vitro. We evaluated the viricidal activity of three concentrations each of six common disinfectants against ASFV using immersion disinfection assay (IDA) and spray disinfection assay (SDA); the concentrations of these disinfectants at which complete viral inactivation occurred were almost same as the manufacturer-recommended concentrations, but the exposure times for viral inactivation are different. The following disinfectants (assay: concentration, exposure time) showed complete inactivation: iodine and acid mixed solution (IDA/SDA: 0.5%, 10 min); compound potassium peroxymonosulfate (IDA: 0.25%, 30 min; SDA: 0.25%, 60 min); citric acid (IDA: 0.25%, 60 min; SDA: 0.5%, 60 min); sodium dichloroisocyanurate (IDA: 0.125%, 60 min; SDA: 0.25%, 60 min); and glutaral ang deciquam (IDA/SDA: 0.2%, 60 min); and deciquam (IDA/SDA: 0.5%, 60 min). However, in the presence of organic material contamination, disinfectants did not show a marked inactivation effect. Therefore, disinfection procedures should be performed in two steps: thorough mechanical cleaning followed by application of disinfectant. In conclusion, all the tested disinfectants can inactivate ASFV; these can be used as alternative disinfectants to enhance biosecurity.
•ED was used to separate magnesium and lithium in brine with high Mg2+/Li+ ratio.•The ED system could reduce the Mg2+/Li+ ratio and concentrate lithium in the brine.•The highest ESEC was 0.27kWh/mol ...when the applied voltage was 6V.•The Mg2+/Li+ ratio of artificial brine could be decreased from 60 to 7 within 2h.
An electrodialysis (ED) system equipped with monovalent selective permeability ion exchange membrane was used to investigate the separation of magnesium and lithium in salt lake brines. Some objective functions including separation coefficient of magnesium and lithium (FMgLi), recovery ratio of lithium (RLi) and current efficiency (η), were applied to explore the effect of the applied voltage, the linear flow velocities, the Mg2+/Li+ ratio and pH on the process of extracting lithium. The results showed that the increase of applied voltage could improve the separation coefficient and the recovery ratio of lithium, but energy consumption would also rise; with the increase of feed linear velocity, the separation coefficient had a rising trend, but too large linear velocity would lead to increasing energy consumption and reducing current efficiency. When the Mg2+/Li+ ratio was in the range of 5–92, ED technology showed higher separation efficiency. Linear flow velocities of concentrating and desalting compartments (1.9–7.6cm/s) showed positive correlation with the migration of the ions. According to the comprehensive analysis of the experimental results, the optimal operation conditions of the ED device are as follows: the applied voltage (5V), concentration of electrolyte solution (5wt% Na2SO4) and the linear velocities of desalting/concentrating/electrolyte (6.2, 6.2 and 3.8cm/s). When the brine with Mg2+/Li+ ratio of 60 was treated by the ED for 2h under this condition, the separation coefficient was 12.48. And the recovery ratio of Li+, current efficiency and the Mg2+/Li+ ratio of concentrate was 72.46wt%, 8.68wt% and 7, respectively. The concentrate, which could be considered as a bittern with lower Mg2+/Li+ ratio (<8), will be easy to be treated in the subsequent process.
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