Substituting hydrazine oxidation reaction for oxygen evolution reaction can result in greatly reduced energy consumption for hydrogen production, however, the mechanism and the electrochemical ...utilization rate of hydrazine oxidation reaction remain ambiguous. Herein, a bimetallic and hetero-structured phosphide catalyst has been fabricated to catalyze both hydrazine oxidation and hydrogen evolution reactions, and a new reaction path of nitrogen-nitrogen single bond breakage has been proposed and confirmed in hydrazine oxidation reaction. The high electro-catalytic performance is attributed to the instantaneous recovery of metal phosphide active site by hydrazine and the lowered energy barrier, which enable the constructed electrolyzer using bimetallic phosphide catalyst at both sides to reach 500 mA cm
for hydrogen production at 0.498 V, and offer an enhanced hydrazine electrochemical utilization rate of 93%. Such an electrolyzer can be powered by a bimetallic phosphide anode-equipped direct hydrazine fuel cell, achieving self-powered hydrogen production at a rate of 19.6 mol h
m
.
Background
Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a serious psychiatric disorder. Metabolite disturbance is an important pathogenic factor in schizophrenic patients. In this study, we aim to identify plasma lipid ...and amino acid biomarkers for SCZ using targeted metabolomics.
Methods
Plasma from 76 SCZ patients and 50 matched controls were analyzed using the LC/MS‐based multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) metabolomics approach. A total of 182 targeted metabolites, including 22 amino acids and 160 lipids or lipid‐related metabolites were observed. We used binary logistic regression analysis to determine whether the lipid and amino acid biomarkers could discriminate SCZ patients from controls. The area under the curve (AUC) from receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was conducted to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the biomarkers panel.
Results
We identified 19 significantly differentially expressed metabolites between the SCZ patients and the controls (false discovery rate < 0.05), including one amino acid and 18 lipids or lipid‐related metabolites. The binary logistic regression‐selected panel showed good diagnostic performance in the drug‐naïve group (AUC = 0.936) and all SCZ patients (AUC = 0.948), especially in the drug‐treated group (AUC = 0.963).
Conclusions
Plasma lipids and amino acids showed significant dysregulation in SCZ, which could effectively discriminate SCZ patients from controls. The LC/MS/MS‐based approach provides reliable data for the objective diagnosis of SCZ.
The Cre-loxP recombination system is the most widely used technology for in vivo tracing of stem or progenitor cell lineages. The precision of this genetic system largely depends on the specificity ...of Cre recombinase expression in targeted stem or progenitor cells. However, Cre expression in nontargeted cell types can complicate the interpretation of lineage-tracing studies and has caused controversy in many previous studies. Here we describe a new genetic lineage tracing system that incorporates the Dre-rox recombination system to enhance the precision of conventional Cre-loxP-mediated lineage tracing. The Dre-rox system permits rigorous control of Cre-loxP recombination in lineage tracing, effectively circumventing potential uncertainty of the cell-type specificity of Cre expression. Using this new system we investigated two topics of recent debates-the contribution of c-Kit
cardiac stem cells to cardiomyocytes in the heart and the contribution of Sox9
hepatic progenitor cells to hepatocytes in the liver. By overcoming the technical hurdle of nonspecific Cre-loxP-mediated recombination, this new technology provides more precise analysis of cell lineage and fate decisions and facilitates the in vivo study of stem and progenitor cell plasticity in disease and regeneration.
This study aimed to evaluate the association between interdental cleaning and untreated root caries amongst middle-aged and older adults in the US.
Data were obtained from the National Health and ...Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (2015–2016 and 2017–2018). Adults aged ≥40 years who underwent full mouth examination and root caries assessment were included. Participants were classified based on their interdental cleaning frequency as none, 1–3 d/wk, and 4–7 d/wk. Associations between interdental cleaning and untreated root caries were assessed using a weighted multivariable logistic regression model adjusted for sociodemographics, general behaviour, general health condition, oral conditions, oral health behavior, and dietary factors. Subgroup analyses stratified by age and sex were performed after adjusting for covariates in the logistic regression models.
The prevalence of untreated root caries was 15.3% amongst 6217 participants. Interdental cleaning for 4–7 d/wk was a significant risk factor (odds ratio, 0.67; 95% confidence interval, 0.52–0.85). It was associated with a 40% reduction in the risk of untreated root caries in participants aged 40 to 64 years and a 37% reduction in women. Untreated root caries was also significantly associated with age, family income, smoking status, root restoration, number of teeth, untreated coronal caries, and recent dental visit.
Interdental cleaning for 4–7 d/wk was associated with fewer untreated root caries amongst middle-aged adults and women in the US. The risk of root caries increases with age. Low family income was a risk indicator for root caries amongst middle-aged adults. Additionally, smoking, root restoration, number of teeth, untreated coronal caries, and recent dental visits were common risk factors for root caries in middle-aged and older people in the US.
The effects of ambient particulate matter (PM) pollution on pneumonia in adults are inconclusive, and few scientific data on a national scale have been generated in low- or middle-income countries, ...despite their much higher PM concentrations. We aimed to examine the association between PM levels and hospital admissions for pneumonia in Chinese adults.
A nationwide time series study was conducted in China between 2014 and 2017. Information on daily hospital admissions for pneumonia for 2014-2017 was collected from the database of Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI), which covers 282.93 million adults. Associations of PM concentrations and hospital admissions for pneumonia were estimated for each city using a quasi-Poisson regression model controlling for time trend, temperature, relative humidity, day of the week, and public holiday and then pooled by random-effects meta-analysis. Meta-regression models were used to investigate potential effect modifiers, including cities' annual-average air pollutants concentrations, temperature, relative humidity, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and coverage rates by the UEBMI. More than 4.2 million pneumonia admissions were identified in 184 Chinese cities during the study period. Short-term elevations in PM concentrations were associated with increased pneumonia admissions. At the national level, a 10-μg/m3 increase in 3-day moving average (lag 0-2) concentrations of PM2.5 (PM ≤2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter) and PM10 (PM ≤10 μm in aerodynamic diameter) was associated with 0.31% (95% confidence interval CI 0.15%-0.46%, P < 0.001) and 0.19% (0.11%-0.30%, P < 0.001) increases in hospital admissions for pneumonia, respectively. The effects of PM10 were stronger in cities with higher temperatures (percentage increase, 0.031%; 95% CI 0.003%-0.058%; P = 0.026) and relative humidity (percentage increase, 0.011%; 95% CI 0%-0.022%; P = 0.045), as well as in the elderly (percentage increase, 0.10% 95% CI 0.02%-0.19% for people aged 18-64 years versus 0.32% 95% CI 0.22%-0.39% for people aged ≥75 years; P < 0.001). The main limitation of the present study was the unavailability of data on individual exposure to PM pollution.
Our findings suggest that there are significant short-term associations between ambient PM levels and increased hospital admissions for pneumonia in Chinese adults. These findings support the rationale that further limiting PM concentrations in China may be an effective strategy to reduce pneumonia-related hospital admissions.
Summary
EtherCAT is a real‐time Ethernet protocol and has been widely used in the field of motion control owing to its high speed (100 or 1000 Mbps), low processor occupancy, and good synchronization ...performance in slaves. However, the master–slave synchronization method is blank in the EtherCAT protocol. The study proposes a novel master–slave synchronization method that relies on the stable sync0 of reference slave by adjusting the trigger moment of master interpolation period to settle packet loss caused by EtherCAT master–slave un‐synchronization, adaptively and dynamically. Furthermore, the proposed method improved EtherCAT to a whole new level, indicating that the EtherCAT master no longer depended on the real‐time operating system (RTOS). In addition, a synchronization predictive compensation mechanism was adopted to eliminate the compensation lag defect of existing synchronization methods. Compared with conventional studies, the synchronization method improved compensation efficiency, settled inaccurate compensation with evaluation derived from different working frequencies, and eliminated accumulative error in clock. Finally, the proposed method added almost no computation and communication load and only required eight or 16 bytes to modify the EtherCAT frame coding in the interpolation period. Experiments were carried out on machine tools to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method in improving the synchronization performance, with an average communication jitter of only 32–71 ns.
The proposed synchronization method improves EtherCAT to a whole new level, realizing the EtherCAT master no longer depending on the real‐time operating system (RTOS), completely.
EtherCAT master–slave synchronization is realized by adjusting the trigger moment of interpolation period in embedded master.
The proportional derivative (PD) controller based on safety interval Tsafety_interval and arithmetic sequence tsync0 is used to realize pre‐compensation, eliminate inaccurate compensation and improve compensation efficiency, and the mean jitter of synchronization communication is only 30 ~ 70 ns.
The measurement of chemical oxygen demand (COD) is very important in the process of sewage treatment. The value of COD reflects the effectiveness and trend of sewage treatment to a certain extent, ...but obtaining accurate data requires high cost and labor intensity. To1 solve this problem, this paper proposes an online soft measurement method for COD based on Convolutional Neural Network-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network-Attention Mechanism (CNN-BiLSTM-Attention) algorithm. Firstly, by analyzing the mechanism of the aerobic tank stage in the Anaerobic-Anoxic-Oxic (A.sup.2 O) wastewater treatment process, the selection range of input variables was preliminarily determined, and the collected sample dataset was subjected to correlation analysis. Finally, pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), electrical conductivity (EC), and water temperature (T) were determined as input variables for soft measurement prediction of COD.Then, based on the feature extraction ability of CNN and the advantage that BiLSTM is able to capture the backward and forward dependencies in time series data, combined with the attention mechanism that can assign higher weights to the key data, a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention algorithm model was established to soft measure COD in the effluent from the aerobic zone of the A.sup.2 O wastewater treatment process. At the same time, root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and coefficient of determination (R.sup.2) were utilized Three indicators were used to evaluate the model, and the results showed that the model can accurately predict the value of COD and has a high accuracy. At the same time, compared with models such as CNN-LSTM-Attention, CNN-BiLSTM, CNN-LSTM, LSTM, RNN, BP, SVM, XGBoost, and RF etc., the results showed that the CNN-BiLSTM Attention model performed the best, proving the superiority of the algorithm model.The Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicates significant differences between the CNN-BiLSTM-Attention model and other models.
Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) plays important roles in many biological and pathological processes, including transcriptional regulation and gene regulation. As lncRNA interacts with multiple proteins, ...predicting lncRNA-protein interactions (lncRPIs) is an important way to study the functions of lncRNA. Up to now, there have been a few works that exploit protein-protein interactions (PPIs) to help the prediction of new lncRPIs.
In this paper, we propose to boost the prediction of lncRPIs by fusing multiple protein-protein similarity networks (PPSNs). Concretely, we first construct four PPSNs based on protein sequences, protein domains, protein GO terms and the STRING database respectively, then build a more informative PPSN by fusing these four constructed PPSNs. Finally, we predict new lncRPIs by a random walk method with the fused PPSN and known lncRPIs. Our experimental results show that the new approach outperforms the existing methods.
Fusing multiple protein-protein similarity networks can effectively boost the performance of predicting lncRPIs.
There is persistent uncertainty regarding the developmental origins of coronary vessels, with 2 principal sources suggested as ventricular endocardium or sinus venosus (SV). These 2 proposed origins ...implicate fundamentally distinct mechanisms of vessel formation. Resolution of this controversy is critical for deciphering the programs that result in the formation of coronary vessels and has implications for research on therapeutic angiogenesis.
To resolve the controversy over the developmental origin of coronary vessels.
We first generated nuclear factor of activated T cells (Nfatc1)-Cre and Nfatc1-Dre lineage tracers for endocardium labeling. We found that Nfatc1 recombinases also label a significant portion of SV endothelial cells in addition to endocardium. Therefore, restricted endocardial lineage tracing requires a specific marker that distinguishes endocardium from SV. By single-cell gene expression analysis, we identified a novel endocardial gene natriuretic peptide receptor 3 (Npr3). Npr3 is expressed in the entirety of the endocardium but not in the SV. Genetic lineage tracing based on Npr3-CreER showed that endocardium contributes to a minority of coronary vessels in the free walls of embryonic heart. Intersectional genetic lineage tracing experiments demonstrated that endocardium minimally contributes to coronary endothelium in the embryonic ventricular free walls.
Our study suggested that SV, but not endocardium, is the major origin for coronary endothelium in the embryonic ventricular free walls. This work thus resolves the recent controversy over the developmental origin of coronary endothelium, providing the basis for studying coronary vessel formation and regeneration after injury.
Appropriate biomimetic scaffolds created via 3D bioprinting are promising methods for treating damaged menisci. However, given the unique anatomical structure and complex stress environment of the ...meniscus, many studies have adopted various techniques to take full advantage of different materials, such as the printing combined with infusion, or electrospining, to chase the biomimetic meniscus, which makes the process complicated to some extent. Some researchers have tried to tackle the challenges only by 3D biopringting, while its alternative materials and models have been constrained. In this study, based on a multilayer biomimetic strategy, we optimized the preparation of meniscus-derived bioink, gelatin methacrylate (GelMA)/meniscal extracellular matrix (MECM), to take printability and cytocompatibility into account together. Subsequently, a customized 3D bioprinting system featuring a dual nozzle + multitemperature printing was used to integrate the advantages of polycaprolactone (PCL) and meniscal fibrocartilage chondrocytes (MFCs)-laden GelMA/MECM bioink to complete the biomimetic meniscal scaffold, which had the best biomimetic features in terms of morphology and components. Furthermore, cell viability, mechanics, biodegradation and tissue formation in vivo were performed to ensure that the scaffold had sufficient feasibility and functionality, thereby providing a reliable basis for its application in tissue engineering.
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•We have optimized the preparation of meniscus-derived bioink with good printability and cytocompatibility.•A customized printing system for biomimetic meniscus, the dual-nozzle + multitemperature printing system was developed.•We have achieved multilayer meniscal biomimetic strategy, especially the best biomimetics of morphology and components.•Focusing on application prospect, we designed a few experiments to verity the feasibility and functionality of the scaffold.
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