Understanding the formation of SEI films on Li4Ti5O12 (LTO) anodes offers a major benefit to large-scale applications of lithium ion batteries made therefrom. This paper reveals that an SEI film is ...formed above 1 V due to the interfacial reaction between the electrode and electrolyte: LTO anodes are previously considered free from SEI films when cycled between 1 and 3 V. The reactivity and the formation of SEI films are much affected by the morphology and surface area of the electrode. To study the above, LTO powders with different morphologies are synthesized using lithium acetate (LA) and lithium hydroxide (LH) as the lithium sources. LTO–LH consisting of agglomerates of primary small particles with a large surface area has higher reactivity than LTO–LA with a cubic structure and small surface area. As a result, the LTO–LH anode with a smooth SEI film offers better cyclic performance than the LTO–LA anode with a porous SEI film. The addition of vinylene carbonate to the electrolyte facilitates rapid formation of a protective SEI film on LTO–LA, greatly improving the rate and cyclic performance: stable specific capacity of 155.6 mAh g−1 and remarkable 135.2 mAh g−1 after 500 cycles at 10 C are recorded.
•An SEI film can be formed on the surface of Li4Ti5O12 anode even above 1 V.•The formation of SEI film is much affected by the morphology of the electrode.•It is assumed that the SEI film has a significant effect on cyclic performance of Li4Ti5O12 electrode.•It is found that vinylene carbonate (VC) helps rapid formation of a protective SEI film on Li4Ti5O12.
The dispersibility and interfacial wettability are two essential requirements for fabricating graphene/metal composites with high performance. However, the simultaneous improvement of dispersibility ...and wettability between the graphene and metal matrix is still a challenge. Herein we attempted to improve the dispersibility, interfacial wettability and mechanical properties of graphene/magnesium composites via an in-situ reaction wetting process. Graphene oxide (GO) was modified with ZnO coating by a coprecipitation route, and the composites were fabricated by an ultrasonic assisted stir casting method. The composites showed a microstructure with homogeneous dispersion of graphene in the matrix. Compared with unreinforced Mg matrix, the composites demonstrated an exceptional and joint improvement in yield strength, hardness, and good ductility. Microstructural examinations revealed that the molten Mg could react with ZnO coating and form an interfacial product composed of MgO during the composite fabrication. The interfacial in-situ reaction could facilitate interfacial wetting and the interfacial product MgO could improve the interfacial bonding between graphene and matrix. The grain-size refinement and load transfer provided by graphene were the two main strengthening mechanisms in the composite. This study provides new insights into the interfacial design of advanced graphene/metal composites with exceptionally high strength and ductility.
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Many important energy-transfer and optical processes, in both biological and artificial systems, depend crucially on excitonic coupling that spans several chromophores. Such coupling can in principle ...be described in a straightforward manner by considering the coherent intermolecular dipole-dipole interactions involved. However, in practice, it is challenging to directly observe in real space the coherent dipole coupling and the related exciton delocalizations, owing to the diffraction limit in conventional optics. Here we demonstrate that the highly localized excitations that are produced by electrons tunnelling from the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope, in conjunction with imaging of the resultant luminescence, can be used to map the spatial distribution of the excitonic coupling in well-defined arrangements of a few zinc-phthalocyanine molecules. The luminescence patterns obtained for excitons in a dimer, which are recorded for different energy states and found to resemble σ and π molecular orbitals, reveal the local optical response of the system and the dependence of the local optical response on the relative orientation and phase of the transition dipoles of the individual molecules in the dimer. We generate an in-line arrangement up to four zinc-phthalocyanine molecules, with a larger total transition dipole, and show that this results in enhanced 'single-molecule' superradiance from the oligomer upon site-selective excitation. These findings demonstrate that our experimental approach provides detailed spatial information about coherent dipole-dipole coupling in molecular systems, which should enable a greater understanding and rational engineering of light-harvesting structures and quantum light sources.
In recent years, updating the inventory of road infrastructures based on field work is labor intensive, time consuming, and costly. Fortunately, vehicle-based mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems ...provide an efficient solution to rapidly capture three-dimensional (3D) point clouds of road environments with high flexibility and precision. However, robust recognition of road facilities from huge volumes of 3D point clouds is still a challenging issue because of complicated and incomplete structures, occlusions and varied point densities. Most existing methods utilize point or object based features to recognize object candidates, and can only extract limited types of objects with a relatively low recognition rate, especially for incomplete and small objects. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a semantic labeling framework by combing multiple aggregation levels (point-segment-object) of features and contextual features to recognize road facilities, such as road surfaces, road boundaries, buildings, guardrails, street lamps, traffic signs, roadside-trees, power lines, and cars, for highway infrastructure inventory. The proposed method first identifies ground and non-ground points, and extracts road surfaces facilities from ground points. Non-ground points are segmented into individual candidate objects based on the proposed multi-rule region growing method. Then, the multiple aggregation levels of features and the contextual features (relative positions, relative directions, and spatial patterns) associated with each candidate object are calculated and fed into a SVM classifier to label the corresponding candidate object. The recognition performance of combining multiple aggregation levels and contextual features was compared with single level (point, segment, or object) based features using large-scale highway scene point clouds. Comparative studies demonstrated that the proposed semantic labeling framework significantly improves road facilities recognition precision (90.6%) and recall (91.2%), particularly for incomplete and small objects.
Point clouds collected by terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) from large-scale urban scenes contain a wide variety of objects (buildings, cars, pole-like objects, and others) with symmetric and ...incomplete structures, and relatively low-textured surfaces, all of which pose great challenges for automatic registration between scans. To address the challenges, this paper proposes a registration method to provide marker-free and multi-view registration based on the semantic feature points extracted. First, the method detects the semantic feature points within a detection scheme, which includes point cloud segmentation, vertical feature lines extraction and semantic information calculation and finally takes the intersections of these lines with the ground as the semantic feature points. Second, the proposed method matches the semantic feature points using geometrical constraints (3-point scheme) as well as semantic information (category and direction), resulting in exhaustive pairwise registration between scans. Finally, the proposed method implements multi-view registration by constructing a minimum spanning tree of the fully connected graph derived from exhaustive pairwise registration. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method performs well in various urban environments and indoor scenes with the accuracy at the centimeter level and improves the efficiency, robustness, and accuracy of registration in comparison with the feature plane-based methods.
MiR-221 and miR-222 (miR-221/222) are frequently up-regulated in various types of human malignancy including glioblastoma. Recent studies have reported that miR-221/222 regulate cell growth and cell ...cycle progression by targeting p27 and p57. However the underlying mechanism involved in cell survival modulation of miR-221/222 remains elusive.
Here we showed that miR-221/222 inhibited cell apoptosis by targeting pro-apoptotic gene PUMA in human glioma cells. Enforced expression of miR-22/222 induced cell survival whereas knockdown of miR-221/222 rendered cells to apoptosis. Further, miR-221/222 reduced PUMA protein levels by targeting PUMA-3'UTR. Introducing PUMA cDNA without 3'UTR abrogated miR-221/222-induced cell survival. Notably, knockdown of miR-221/222 induces PUMA expression and cell apoptosis and considerably decreases tumor growth in xenograft model. Finally, there was an inverse relationship between PUMA and miR-221/222 expression in glioma tissues.
To our knowledge, these data indicate for the first time that miR-221/222 directly regulate apoptosis by targeting PUMA in glioblastoma and that miR-221/222 could be potential therapeutic targets for glioblastoma intervention.
Natural enemies such as parasitoids and parasites depend on sensitive olfactory to search for their specific hosts. Herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) are vital components in providing host ...information for many natural enemies of herbivores. However, the olfactory-related proteins involved in the recognition of HIPVs are rarely reported. In this study, we established an exhaustive tissue and developmental expression profile of odorant-binding proteins (OBPs) from
, an essential natural enemy in the forestry ecosystem. Twenty DhelOBPs displayed various expression patterns in different organs and adult physiological states, suggesting a potential involvement in olfactory perception. In silico AlphaFold2-based modeling and molecular docking showed similar binding energies between six DhelOBPs (DhelOBP4, 5, 6, 14, 18, and 20) and HIPVs from
. While in vitro fluorescence competitive binding assays showed only recombinant DhelOBP4, the most highly expressed in the antennae of emerging adults could bind to HIPVs with high binding affinities. RNAi-mediated behavioral assays indicated that DhelOBP4 was an essential functional protein for
adults recognizing two behaviorally attractive substances:
-cymene and γ-terpinene. Further binding conformation analyses revealed that Phe 54, Val 56, and Phe 71 might be the key binding sites for DhelOBP4 interacting with HIPVs. In conclusion, our results provide an essential molecular basis for the olfactory perception of
and reliable evidence for recognizing the HIPVs of natural enemies from insect OBPs' perspective.
Conotoxins are disulfide-rich small peptides, which are invaluable peptides that target ion channel and neuronal receptors. Conotoxins have been demonstrated as potent pharmaceuticals in the ...treatment of a series of diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and epilepsy. In addition, conotoxins are also ideal molecular templates for the development of new drug lead compounds and play important roles in neurobiological research as well. Thus, the accurate identification of conotoxin types will provide key clues for the biological research and clinical medicine. Generally, conotoxin types are confirmed when their sequence, structure, and function are experimentally validated. However, it is time-consuming and costly to acquire the structure and function information by using biochemical experiments. Therefore, it is important to develop computational tools for efficiently and effectively recognizing conotoxin types based on sequence information. In this work, we reviewed the current progress in computational identification of conotoxins in the following aspects: (i) construction of benchmark dataset; (ii) strategies for extracting sequence features; (iii) feature selection techniques; (iv) machine learning methods for classifying conotoxins; (v) the results obtained by these methods and the published tools; and (vi) future perspectives on conotoxin classification. The paper provides the basis for in-depth study of conotoxins and drug therapy research.
We demonstrate maintenance and transmission of severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus by Haemaphysalis longicornis ticks in the larva, nymph, and adult stages with dissemination in ...salivary gland, midgut, and ovarian tissues. The H. longicornis tick is a competent vector to transmit this virus in both transovarial and transstadial modes.
Peptidylarginine deaminase 4 (PAD4) is a crucial post-translational modifying enzyme catalyzing the conversion of arginine into citrulline residues, and mediating the formation of neutrophil ...extracellular traps (NETs). PAD4 plays a vital role in the occurrence and development of cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, and various tumors. Therefore, PAD4 is considered as a promising drug target for disease diagnosis and treatment. More and more efforts are devoted to developing highly efficient and selective PAD4 inhibitors via high-throughput screening, structure-based drug design and structure-activity relationship study. This article outlined the physiological and pathological functions of PAD4, and corresponding representative small molecule inhibitors reported in recent years.
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•PAD4 inhibition is a promising method for diagnosis and treatment of diseases.•Detailed pathophysiology functions of PAD4 is described.•More research and clinical data are needed to understand the mechanism of PAD4 in diseases.
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