Nucleic acid (NA) computation has been widely developed in the past years to solve kinds of logic and mathematic issues in both information technologies and biomedical analysis. However, the ...difficulty to integrate non‐NA molecules limits its power as a universal platform for molecular computation. Here, we report a versatile prototype of hybridized computation integrated with both nucleic acids and non‐NA molecules. Employing the conformationally controlled ligand converters, we demonstrate that non‐NA molecules, including both small molecules and proteins, can be computed as nucleic acid strands to construct the circuitry with increased complexity and scalability, and can be even programmed to solve arithmetical calculations within the computational nucleic acid system. This study opens a new door for molecular computation in which all‐NA circuits can be expanded with integration of various ligands, and meanwhile, ligands can be precisely programmed by the nuclei acid computation.
With utilization of conformationally controlled ligand converters, different kinds of non‐nucleic acid molecules, including both small molecules and proteins, can be integrated into nucleic acid computation to construct circuitries with increased complexity and scalability and to even perform algorithmic calculations. This hybridized system establishes a universal platform for molecular computation.
To reduce the economic loss caused by scale formation and corrosion of equipment and pipelines, a low phosphorus polymer scale inhibitor is synthesized and characterized, the ability of the polymer ...to mitigate the calcium scale and the influences of operating conditions on CaCO3 scale are investigated by static tests. X‐ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) studies are performed to understand the morphological changes of the scales in the presence of the polymer. The interaction between polymer molecules and calcite crystal surface is studied by molecular dynamics simulation. The synthesized polymer is compared with the commercial product such as hydrolysis polymaleic acid (HPMA), polyacrylic acid (PAA), and 1‐hydroxy ethylidene‐1,1‐diphosphonic acid (HEDP). The experimental results show that the polymer shows better inhibition of calcium scale than the commercial product. The scale inhibition efficiency of the polymer is 92% at 10 mg/L for CaCO3 scale, 83% at 14 mg/L for Ca3(PO4)2 scale, and 98% at 6 mg/L for CaSO4 scale. SEM and XRD analysis show that the polymer induces the conversion of CaCO3 from calcite to arachite and crystal. The interaction of the polymer with both 104 and 1–10 calcite crystal surfaces are more stable than that of commercial product. The experimental results are in good agreement with those of molecular dynamics simulation.
CaCO3 morphology before and after scal inhibitor application.
It has been established that grit has a fundamental role in the learning and teaching process since gritty learners are more likely to take part in classroom activities and they are also motivated to ...deal with challenges in difficult circumstances. In addition, to guard against these hardships as well as self-control in responding to unpredicted circumstances, a similar construct arouses in positive psychology called resilience that describes perseverance and emphasizes people's abilities. Besides, language learners' engagement and performance in the foreign or second language classroom can be improved through self-regulated learning (SRL) which is viewed as one of the most inspected issues in learning and psychology. A present review has been conducted to scrutinize the relationship between language learners' SRL and learners' resilience and grit based on their positive theoretical relationship with educational success. Consequently, the issue of educator training and administrative training is illuminated through several aspects.
Abstract
Ligand-oligonucleotide transduction provides the critical pathway to integrate non-nucleic acid molecules into nucleic acid circuits and nanomachines for a variety of strand-displacement ...related applications. Herein, a general platform is constructed to convert the signals of ligands into desired oligonucleotides through a precise kinetic control. In this design, the ligand-aptamer binding sequence with an engineered duplex stem is introduced between the toehold and displacement domains of the invading strand to regulate the strand-displacement reaction. Employing this platform, we achieve efficient transduction of both small molecules and proteins orthogonally, and more importantly, establish logical and cascading operations between different ligands for versatile transduction. Besides, this platform is capable of being directly coupled with the signal amplification systems to further enhance the transduction performance. This kinetically controlled platform presents unique features with designing simplicity and flexibility, expandable complexity and system compatibility, which may pave a broad road towards nucleic acid-based developments of sophisticated transduction networks.
Chemical structure of small molecule acceptors determines their performance in organic solar cells. Multiscale simulations are necessary to avoid trial‐and‐error based design, ultimately to save time ...and resources. In current study, the effect of sp2‐hybridized nitrogen substitution at the inner or the outmost position of central core, side chain, and terminal group of small molecule acceptors is investigated using multiscale computational modelling. Quantum chemical analysis is used to study the electronic behavior. Nitrogen substitution at end‐capping has significantly decreased the electron‐reorganization energy. No big change is observed in transfer integral and excited state behavior. However, nitrogen substitution at terminal group position is good way to improve electron‐mobility. Power conversion efficiency (PCE) of newly designed acceptors is predicted using machine learning. Molecular dynamics simulations are also performed to explore the dynamics of acceptor and their blends with PBDB‐T polymer donor. Florgy‐Huggins parameter is calculated to study the mixing of designed small molecule acceptors with PBDB‐T. Radial distribution function has indicated that PBDB‐T has a closer packing with N3 and N4. From all analysis, it is found that nitrogen substitution at end‐capping group is a better strategy to design efficient small molecule acceptors.
Multidimensional modelling is performed to envision the structural changes at atomic and molecular level. sp2‐hybridized nitrogen is substituted at the inner or the outmost position of central core, side chain, and terminal group of ITIC for improving the device performance. It is found that nitrogen substitution at end‐capping group is a better strategy to design efficient small molecule acceptors.
Abstract
Hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) up-regulates the expression of programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) in some extracranial malignancies. However, whether it could increase PD-L1 expression ...in intracranial tumor is still unknown. Here, we explored the relationship between HIF-1α and PD-L1 expression in glioma, and investigated their clinical significance. In glioma patients, HIF-1α and PD-L1 were overexpressed in high grade glioma tissues and were significantly associated with poor survival. In glioma cells, PD-L1 expression was induced under hypoxia condition, and the enhanced PD-L1 expression was abrogated by either HIF-1α knock-down or HIF-1α inhibitor treatment. Furthermore, ChIP-qPCR analysis showed the direct binding of HIF-1α to PD-L1 proximal promoter region, providing evidence that HIF-1α up-regulates PD-L1 in glioma. In glioma murine model, the combination treatment with HIF-1α inhibitor and anti-PD-L1 antibody caused a more pronounced suppressive effect on tumor growth compared to either monotherapy. Immunologically, the combination treatment improved both dendritic cell (DC) and CD8
+
T cell activation. Overall, our results demonstrated that positive correlation between PD-L1 and HIF-1α in glioma, and provide an alternative strategy, inhibiting HIF-1α, as combination therapies with immunotherapies to advance glioma treatment.
Electrocatalytic performance can be enhanced by engineering a purposely designed nanoheterojunction and fine‐tuning the interface electronic structure. Herein a new approach of developing atomic ...epitaxial in‐growth in Co‐Ni3N nanowires array is devised, where a nanoconfinement effect is reinforced at the interface. The Co‐Ni3N heterostructure array is formed by thermal annealing NiCo2O4 precursor nanowires under an optimized condition, during which the nanowire morphology is retained. The epitaxial in‐growth structure of Co‐Ni3N at nanometer scale facilitates the electron transfer between the two different domains at the epitaxial interface, leading to a significant enhancement in catalytic activities for both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions (10 and 16 times higher in the respective turn‐over frequency compared to Ni3N‐alone nanorods). The interface transfer effect is verified by electronic binding energy shift and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. This nanoconfinement effect occurring during in situ atomic epitaxial in‐growth of the two compatible materials shows an effective pathway toward high‐performance electrocatalysis and energy storages.
Co‐Ni3N nanorod arrays with an atomic epitaxial interface are synthesized, which exhibit significant enhancement in catalytic activities for both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions. A nanoconfinement effect is proposed to facilitate the interface charge transfer.
The incorporation of dynamic voltage scaling technology into computation offloading offers more flexibilities for mobile edge computing. In this paper, we investigate partial computation offloading ...by jointly optimizing the computational speed of smart mobile device (SMD), transmit power of SMD, and offloading ratio with two system design objectives: energy consumption of SMD minimization (ECM) and latency of application execution minimization (LM). Considering the case that the SMD is served by a single cloud server, we formulate both the ECM problem and the LM problem as nonconvex problems. To tackle the ECM problem, we recast it as a convex one with the variable substitution technique and obtain its optimal solution. To address the nonconvex and nonsmooth LM problem, we propose a locally optimal algorithm with the univariate search technique. Furthermore, we extend the scenario to a multiple cloud servers system, where the SMD could offload its computation to a set of cloud servers. In this scenario, we obtain the optimal computation distribution among cloud servers in closed form for the ECM and LM problems. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the energy consumption and shorten the latency with respect to the existing offloading schemes.
Recently, skeleton-based action recognition becomes popular owing to the development of cost-effective depth sensors and fast pose estimation algorithms. Traditional methods based on pose descriptors ...often fail on large-scale datasets due to the limited representation of engineered features. Recent recurrent neural networks (RNN) based approaches mostly focus on the temporal evolution of body joints and neglect the geometric relations. In this paper, we aim to leverage the geometric relations among joints for action recognition. We introduce three primitive geometries: joints, edges, and surfaces. Accordingly, a generic end-to-end RNN based network is designed to accommodate the three inputs. For action recognition, a novel viewpoint transformation layer and temporal dropout layers are utilized in the RNN based network to learn robust representations. And for action detection, we first perform frame-wise action classification, then exploit a novel multi-scale sliding window algorithm. Experiments on the large-scale 3D action recognition benchmark datasets show that joints, edges, and surfaces are effective and complementary for different actions. Our approaches dramatically outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods for both tasks of action recognition and action detection.
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