Long-acting and specific targeting are two important properties of excellent drug delivery systems. Currently, the long-acting strategies based on polyethylene glycol (PEG) are controversial, and ...PEGylation is incapable of simultaneously possessing targeting ability. Thus, it is crucial to identify and develop approaches to produce long-acting and targeted drug delivery systems. Sialic acid (SA) is an endogenous, negatively charged, nine-carbon monosaccharide. SA not only mediates immune escape in the body but also binds to numerous disease related targets. This suggests a potential strategy, namely “sialylation,” for preparing long-acting and targeted drug delivery systems. This review focuses on the application status of SA-based long-acting and targeted agents as a reference for subsequent research.
A detailed understanding the metals binding with algal organic matter (AOM) is essential to gain a deeper insight into the toxicity and migration of metals in algae cell. However, the molecular ...complexation mechanism of the metals binding with AOM remains unclear. In this study, cadmium ion (Cd2+) binding properties of AOMs from Scenedesmus obliquus, which included extracellular organic matter (EOM) and intracellular organic matter (IOM), were screened. When Cd2+ < 0.5 mg/L, the accumulation of Cd2+ could reach 40%, while Cd2+ > 0.5 mg/L, the accumulation of Cd2+ was only about 10%. EOM decreased gradually (from 8.51 to 3.98 mg/L), while IOM increased gradually (from 9.62 to 21.00 mg/L). The spectral characteristics revealed that IOM was richer in peptides/proteins and had more hydrophilic than EOM. Both EOM and IOM contained three protein-like components (containing tryptophan and tyrosine) and one humic-like component, and their contents in IOM were higher than that in EOM. The tryptophan protein-like substances changed greatly during Cd2+ binding, and that the tryptophan protein-like substances complexed to Cd2+ before tyrosine protein-like substances in IOM was identified. Moreover, the functional groups of N-H, O-H, and CO in AOM played an important role, and the N-H group was priority to interacts with Cd2+ in the complexing process. More functional groups (such as C-O and C-N) were involved in the metals complexing in EOM than in IOM. It could be concluded that Cd2+ stress promoted the secretion of AOM in Scenedesmus obliquus, and proteins in AOM could complex Cd2+ and alleviate its toxicity to algal cell. These findings provided deep insights into the interaction mechanism of AOM with Cd2+ in aquatic environments.
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•IOM was richer in peptides/proteins and more hydrophilic than EOM.•Protein-like components in IOM were clearly higher than those in EOM.•Tryptophan substances binding to Cd2+ before tyrosine substances in the IOM.•N-H functional groups were primarily responsible for the binding of Cd2+ to AOM.
Abstract
Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) is a fundamental research topic in the field of signal processing and wireless communication, which has widespread applications in cognitive radio, ...non‐collaborative communication etc. In this paper, the focus is on the multi‐modal utilization in AMR. Specifically, the universal and complementary characteristics of multiple modality data in the domain‐agnostic and domain‐specific aspects are mined, yielding the universal and complementary subspaces network accordingly (dubbed as UCNet). To facilitate the subspace construction, universal and complementary losses are proposed accordingly. The proposed UCNet has achieved the highest recognition accuracy of 93.2% at 10 dB on the RadioML2016.10A dataset, and the average accuracy is 92.6% at high SNR greater than zero.
The Low Energy X-ray telescope (LE) is one of the three main instruments of the
Insight-Hard
X-ray Modulation Telescope (
Insight-
HXMT)
.
It is equipped with Swept Charge Device (SCD) sensor arrays ...with a total geometrical area of 384 cm and an energy band from 0.7 to 13 keV. In order to evaluate the particle induced X-ray background and the cosmic X-ray background simultaneously, LE adopts collimators to define four types of Field Of Views (FOVs), i.e., 1.6°×6°, 4°×6°, 50°-60°×2°-6° and the blocked ones which block the X-ray by an aluminum cover. LE is constituted of three detector boxes (LEDs) and an electric control box (LEB) and achieves a good energy resolution of 140 eV@5.9 keV, an excellent time resolution of 0.98 ms, as well as an extremely low pileup (<1%@18000 cts/s). Detailed performance tests and calibration on the ground have been performed, including energy-channel relation, energy response, detection efficiency and time response.
Propolis has a very complex composition, with antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and other properties. To determine the composition of ethanol extracts of Brazilian green propolis (EEP-B) and their ...protective effect on mouse aortic endothelial cells (MAECs), the chemical composition of EEP-B was analysed by UPLC/Q-TOF-MS/MS, and the protective effect of EEP-B on the proliferation of lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced MAECs was determined by Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assays. The protein levels of inflammatory cytokines tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin- 6 (IL-6) were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and ICAM-1, VCAM-1 and MCP-1 expressions were analysed by western blotting. The results showed that a total of 24 compounds belonging to cinnamic acids and flavonoids, including 3,5-diisopentenyl-4-hydroxycinnamic acid (artepillin C), kaempferide, 3-isoprenyl p-coumaric acid, pinocembrin and 4'-methoxy pinobanksin, were identified in EEP-B. Among them, a new component, suggested to be 5-isoprenyl caffeic acid p-coumaric acid ester, was reported for the first time. The LPS-induced levels of TNF-α, IL-6, ICAM-1, VCAM-1 and MCP-1 were downregulated in response to 5, 10 and 20 μg/mL EEP-B. This study revealed that EEP-B could reduce LPS-induced inflammatory reactions, improve cell survival, and protect MAECs by regulating ICAM-1, VCAM-1 and MCP-1 expression. These findings could provide a theoretical basis for MAEC treatment using EEP-B.
The hashing method is widely used for large-scale image retrieval due to its low time and space complexity. However, the existing deep hashing methods are mainly designed for labeled datasets. ...Without supervised information, retrieval performance on unlabeled datasets is not guaranteed. In this letter, we propose a novel deep hashing approach for unsupervised image retrieval applications. The contributions are two-fold. First, the pseudolabels are generated using their global features aggregated from the pretrained network and employed as self-supervised information to optimize the objective function of training. Second, adaptive feature learning is used in this deep hashing framework to perform simultaneous hash function learning and global features learning in an unsupervised manner. The experimental results validated the effectiveness of the proposed method, obtaining state-of-the-art performances on several public datasets such as CIFAR-10, Holidays, and Oxford5k.
Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are emerging as an inexpensive and more sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries in the energy storage market. To advance their commercialization, one major ...scientific undertaking is to develop low-cost, reliable anode materials from abundant resources, like the success of graphite in the lithium-ion batteries. However, graphite is chemically inactive in storing sodium ions and, to render it viable in sodium-ion batteries, additional modification of graphite is required. Herein, we demonstrate a green and facile method to prepare cost-effective and stable graphitic SIB anodes. The modification process started with the electrochemical oxidation of expanded graphite to widen the interlayer and functionalize graphite layers, followed by a fast (20 min) thermal treatment at 150 °C to achieve controlled deoxygenation. The thermally processed electrochemical graphite oxide could provide a high reversible capacity of 268 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1 and 163 mAh g−1 at 500 mA g−1 as well as low fading in capacity (in average 0.0198% loss per cycle) over 2000 cycles. The electrochemical route eliminates the need for the harsh chemical oxidation of graphite, offering a promising approach for industrial production of low-cost anodes for sodium-ion batteries.
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Accurate calibration between LiDAR and camera sensors is crucial for autonomous driving systems to perceive and understand the environment effectively. Typically, LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration ...requires feature alignment and overlapping fields of view. Aligning features from different modalities can be challenging due to noise influence. Therefore, this paper proposes a targetless extrinsic calibration method for monocular cameras and LiDAR sensors that have a non-overlapping field of view. The proposed solution uses pose transformation to establish data association across different modalities. This conversion turns the calibration problem into an optimization problem within a visual SLAM system without requiring overlapping views. To improve performance, line features serve as constraints in visual SLAM. Accurate positions of line segments are obtained by utilizing an extended photometric error optimization method. Moreover, a strategy is proposed for selecting appropriate calibration methods from among several alternative optimization schemes. This adaptive calibration method selection strategy ensures robust calibration performance in urban autonomous driving scenarios with varying lighting and environmental textures while avoiding failures and excessive bias that may result from relying on a single approach.
Recently, deep learning models have been widely applied to modulation recognition, and they have become a hot topic due to their excellent end-to-end learning capabilities. However, current methods ...are mostly based on uni-modal inputs, which suffer from incomplete information and local optimization. To complement the advantages of different modalities, we focus on the multi-modal fusion method. Therefore, we introduce an iterative dual-scale attentional fusion (iDAF) method to integrate multimodal data. Firstly, two feature maps with different receptive field sizes are constructed using local and global embedding layers. Secondly, the feature inputs are iterated into the iterative dual-channel attention module (iDCAM), where the two branches capture the details of high-level features and the global weights of each modal channel, respectively. The iDAF not only extracts the recognition characteristics of each of the specific domains, but also complements the strengths of different modalities to obtain a fruitful view. Our iDAF achieves a recognition accuracy of 93.5% at 10 dB and 0.6232 at full signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The comparative experiments and ablation studies effectively demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the iDAF.
Autophagy is a self-degradation process in which damaged proteins and organelles are engulfed into autophagosomes for digestion and eventually recycled for cellular metabolism to maintain ...intracellular homeostasis. Accumulating studies have reported that autophagy has the Janus role in cancer as a tumor suppressor or an oncogenic role to promote the growth of established tumors and developing drug resistance. Importantly, cytoprotective autophagy plays a prominent role in many types of human cancers, thus inhibiting autophagy, and has been regarded as a promising therapeutic strategy for cancer therapy. Here, we focus on summarizing small-molecule compounds inhibiting the autophagy process, as well as further discuss other dual-target small-molecule compounds, combination strategies, and other strategies to improve potential cancer therapy. Therefore, these findings will shed new light on exploiting more small-molecule compounds inhibiting cytoprotective autophagy as candidate drugs for fighting human cancers in the future.
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