Photocatalytic reduction of CO2 into energy-rich carbon compounds has attracted increasing attention. However, it is still a challenge to selectively and effectively convert CO2 to a desirable ...reaction product. Herein, we report a design of a synergistic photocatalyst for selective reduction of CO2 to CO by using a covalent organic framework bearing single Ni sites (Ni-TpBpy), in which electrons transfer from photosensitizer to Ni sites for CO production by the activated CO2 reduction under visible-light irradiation. Ni-TpBpy exhibits an excellent activity, giving a 4057 μmol g–1 of CO in a 5 h reaction with a 96% selectivity over H2 evolution. More importantly, when the CO2 partial pressure was reduced to 0.1 atm, 76% selectivity for CO production is still obtained. Theoretical calculations and experimental results suggest that the promising catalytic activity and selectivity are ascribed to synergistic effects of single Ni catalytic sites and TpBpy, in which the TpBpy not only serves as a host for CO2 molecules and Ni catalytic sites but also facilitates the activation of CO2 and inhibits the competitive H2 evolution.
Global energy demand and environmental concerns have stimulated increasing efforts to produce carbon-neutral fuels directly from renewable resources. Microbially derived aliphatic hydrocarbons, the ...petroleum-replica fuels, have emerged as promising alternatives to meet this goal. However, engineering metabolic pathways with high productivity and yield requires dynamic redistribution of cellular resources and optimal control of pathway expression. Here we report a genetically encoded metabolic switch that enables dynamic regulation of fatty acids (FA) biosynthesis in Escherichia coli . The engineered strains were able to dynamically compensate the critical enzymes involved in the supply and consumption of malonyl-CoA and efficiently redirect carbon flux toward FA biosynthesis. Implementation of this metabolic control resulted in an oscillatory malonyl-CoA pattern and a balanced metabolism between cell growth and product formation, yielding 15.7- and 2.1-fold improvement in FA titer compared with the wild-type strain and the strain carrying the uncontrolled metabolic pathway. This study provides a new paradigm in metabolic engineering to control and optimize metabolic pathways facilitating the high-yield production of other malonyl-CoA–derived compounds.
Segmenting medical images is a necessary prerequisite for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Among various medical image segmentation tasks, U-Net-based variants have been widely used in liver ...tumor segmentation tasks. In view of the highly variable shape and size of tumors, in order to improve the accuracy of segmentation, this paper proposes a U-Net-based hybrid variable structure-RDCTrans U-Net for liver tumor segmentation in computed tomography (CT) examinations. We design a backbone network dominated by ResNeXt50 and supplemented by dilated convolution to increase the network depth, expand the perceptual field, and improve the efficiency of feature extraction without increasing the parameters. At the same time, Transformer is introduced in down-sampling to increase the network's overall perception and global understanding of the image and to improve the accuracy of liver tumor segmentation. The method proposed in this paper tests the segmentation performance of liver tumors on the LiTS (Liver Tumor Segmentation) dataset. It obtained 89.22% mIoU and 98.91% Acc, for liver and tumor segmentation. The proposed model also achieved 93.38% Dice and 89.87% Dice, respectively. Compared with the original U-Net and the U-Net model that introduces dense connection, attention mechanism, and Transformer, respectively, the method proposed in this paper achieves SOTA (state of art) results.
In previous studies of marine debris or microplastics (<5 mm), various types of semi-synthetic celluloses (e.g. rayon) are ubiquitous in some field investigations. However, it is hard to distinguish ...semi-synthetic and natural celluloses clearly even using the spectroscopic method. In this study, 8 semi-synthetic and 4 natural celluloses were employed as the test materials to simulate the environmentally relevant samples. Our results showed that these original commercial products exhibited obvious physical (e.g., color) and chemical (e.g., spectra) changes after UV weathering and agent (H2O2 and KOH) digestion treatments. The changes of 4 characteristic bands (1735, 1425/1419, 1105, 1060–1053/1030–1027 cm−1) were evaluated. We found that the band at 1105 cm−1 which is assigned to the CO antisymmetric in plane stretching band only existed in natural fibers even after the weathering and digestion treatments. The mixture of semi-synthetic and natural fibers from the real field samples was also easily distinguished using the characteristic band at 1105 cm−1. Our results suggest that the characteristic band at 1105 cm−1 could be an ideal reference to distinguish natural and semi-synthetic fibers in field microplastic investigations. We also proposed a practical method to enhance the library of polymer spectra and improve the accuracy of semi-synthetic microplastic identification.
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•Commercial products exhibited obvious changes after weathering and digestion.•The band at 1105 cm−1 only existed in natural fibers even after treatments.•The band at 1105 cm−1 provided a reference to differentiate semi-synthetic fibers.•The enhanced library of polymer spectra was also proposed.
MT1 has been demonstrated to be an essential stress protein in maintaining physiological balance and regulating immune homeostasis. While the immunological involvement of MT1 in central nervous ...system disorders and cancer has been extensively investigated, mounting evidence suggests that MT1 has a broader role in inflammatory diseases and can shape innate and adaptive immunity. In this review, we will first summarize the biological features of MT1 and the regulators that influence MT1 expression, emphasizing metal, inflammation, and immunosuppressive factors. We will then focus on the immunoregulatory function of MT1 on diverse immune cells and the signaling pathways regulated by MT1. Finally, we will discuss recent advances in our knowledge of the biological role of MT1 in several inflammatory diseases to develop novel therapeutic strategies.
Regulatory T (Treg) cells induce an immunosuppressive microenvironment that is a major obstacle for successful tumor immunotherapy. Dissecting the regulatory mechanisms between energy metabolism and ...functionality in Treg cells will provide insight toward developing novel immunotherapies against cancer. Here we report that human naturally occurring and tumor-associated Treg cells exhibit distinct metabolic profiles with selectivity for glucose metabolism compared with effector T cells. Treg-mediated accelerated glucose consumption induces cellular senescence and suppression of responder T cells through cross-talk. TLR8 signaling selectively inhibits glucose uptake and glycolysis in human Treg cells, resulting in reversal of Treg suppression. Importantly, TLR8 signaling-mediated reprogramming of glucose metabolism and function in human Treg cells can enhance anti-tumor immunity in vivo in a melanoma adoptive transfer T cell therapy model. Our studies identify mechanistic links between innate signaling and metabolic regulation of human Treg suppression, which may be used as a strategy to advance tumor immunotherapy.
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•Human Tregs exhibit distinct metabolic profiles compared with effector T cells•Activated Tregs uniquely accelerate glucose consumption for their suppression•TLR8 signaling selectively inhibits glucose uptake and glycolysis in human Tregs•TLR8-mediated reprogramming of Treg glucose metabolism enhances anti-tumor immunity
Treg-mediated immunosuppression is a significant obstacle for tumor immunotherapy. Li et al. show that human Treg cells heighten glucose consumption and subsequently trigger cellular senescence and suppression of effector T cells. With TLR8 signaling, they selectively inhibit glucose uptake and glycolysis in human Treg cells, resulting in Treg function reversal and enhanced anti-tumor immunity.
Abstract
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have emerged as important regulators of osteoarthritis (OA), but the biological roles and clinical significance of most lncRNAs in OA are not fully understood. ...Microarray analysis was performed to identify differentially expressed lncRNAs, mRNAs, and miRNAs between normal and osteoarthritic cartilage. We found that AC008440.5 (abbreviated AC008), as well as AQP1 and ANKH, were highly expressed in osteoarthritic cartilage, whereas miR-328-3p was expressed at a low level in osteoarthritic cartilage. Functional assays showed that ectopic expression of AC008, AQP1, and ANKH significantly decreased chondrocyte viability and promoted chondrocyte apoptosis and extracellular matrix (ECM) degradation, whereas knockdown of AC008, AQP1, and ANKH resulted in the opposite effects. Moreover, miR-328-3p overexpression increased chondrocyte viability and attenuated chondrocyte apoptosis and ECM degradation, whereas inhibition of miR-328-3p resulted in the opposite effects. Bioinformatics analysis, RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP), and luciferase assays revealed that AC008 functioned as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) to regulate miR-328-3p, which specifically targeted the AQP1 and ANKH genes. In addition, miR-328-3p significantly ameliorated MIA-induced OA, whereas AC008 accelerated OA progression in vivo. Furthermore, fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO)-mediated N6-methyladenosine demethylation downregulated AC008 transcription, while lower FTO expression led to upregulation of AC008 transcription in OA. In conclusion, our data reveal that AC008 plays a critical role in OA pathogenesis via the miR-328-3p
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AQP1/ANKH pathway, suggesting that AC008 may be a potential therapeutic target for OA.
Adsorption of 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene (TCB), 2,4,6-trichlorophenol (TCP), 2-naphthol and naphthalene (NAPH) on graphene (G) and graphene oxide (GO) was investigated using a batch equilibration method ...and micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. All adsorption isotherms of four aromatics on G and GO were nonlinear, indicating that except for hydrophobic interaction, some specific interactions were involved in adsorption. For G, four aromatics had similar adsorption capacity at pH 5.0 in despite of their different chemical properties. A series of pH-dependent experimental results showed that 2-naphthol had higher adsorption capacity on G at alkaline pH than that at acidic pH. Theoretical calculation ascribed this to higher π-electron density of anionic 2-naphthol than that of neutral 2-naphthol, which facilitated the π–π interaction formation with G. For GO, the adsorption affinity of four aromatics increased in the order: NAPH<TCB<TCP<2-naphthol. FTIR results revealed that TCB, TCP and 2-naphthol were adsorbed on G mainly via π–π interaction. In contrast, high adsorption of TCP and 2-naphthol on GO was attributed to the formation of H-bonding between hydroxyl groups of TCP and 2-naphthol and O-containing functional groups on GO.
Subpixel translation estimation using phase correlation is a fundamental task for numerous applications in the remote sensing community. The major drawback of the existing subpixel phase correlation ...methods lies in their sensitivity to corruption, including aliasing and noise, as well as the poor performance in the case of practical remote sensing data. This paper presents a novel subpixel phase correlation method using singular value decomposition (SVD) and the unified random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. In the proposed method, SVD theoretically converts the translation estimation problem to one dimensions for simplicity and efficiency, and the unified RANSAC algorithm acts as a robust estimator for the line fitting, in this case for the high accuracy, stability, and robustness. The proposed method integrates the advantages of Hoge's method and the RANSAC algorithm and avoids the corresponding shortfalls of the original phase correlation method based only on SVD. A pixel-to-pixel dense matching scheme on the basis of the proposed method is also developed for practical image registration. Experiments with both simulated and real data were carried out to test the proposed method. In the simulated case, the comparative results estimated from the generated synthetic image pairs indicate that the proposed method outperforms the other existing methods in the presence of both aliasing and noise, in both accuracy and robustness. Moreover, the pixel locking effect that commonly occurs in subpixel matching was also investigated. The degree of pixel locking effect was found to be significantly weakened by the proposed method, as compared with the original Hoge's method. In the real data case, experiments using different bands of ZY-3 multispectral sensor-corrected images demonstrate the promising performance and feasibility of the proposed method, which is able to identify seams of the image stitching between sub-charge-coupled device units.
Defining the suppressive mechanisms used by regulatory T (Treg) cells is critical for the development of effective strategies for treating tumors and chronic infections. The molecular processes that ...occur in responder T cells that are suppressed by Treg cells are unclear. Here we show that human Treg cells initiate DNA damage in effector T cells caused by metabolic competition during cross-talk, resulting in senescence and functional changes that are molecularly distinct from anergy and exhaustion. ERK1/2 and p38 signaling cooperate with STAT1 and STAT3 to control Treg-induced effector T-cell senescence. Human Treg-induced T-cell senescence can be prevented via inhibition of the DNA damage response and/or STAT signaling in T-cell adoptive transfer mouse models. These studies identify molecular mechanisms of human Treg cell suppression and indicate that targeting Treg-induced T-cell senescence is a checkpoint for immunotherapy against cancer and other diseases associated with Treg cells.
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