The floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition (FCCVD) method for producing single‐walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) has demonstrated great potential in transparent conductive film (TCF) application. ...In FCCVD, reducing the concentration of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is a well‐agreed method of improving the conductivity of SWNT TCF, achieved by producing thinner and longer CNT bundles. However, this method decreases the yield dramatically, which has persisted throughout the TCF development. Here, the production of large‐diameter double‐walled CNT (DWNT) TCFs via FCCVD is reported, which overcomes the tradeoff between performance and yield. These TCFs of DWNTs with an average diameter of ≈4 nm have a low sheet resistance of 35 Ω sq−1 at 90% transmittance. The conductivity here aligns with the best‐performing SWNT TCFs reported to date, showing a production yield greater than two orders of magnitude. The main factor contributing to the high performance and yield is considered to be the large tube diameter, which greatly improves the yield threshold of CNT bundling and leads to long tube length and unique junctions broadening. Moreover, the application of DWNT TCFs in perovskite solar cells exhibits a power conversion efficiency of 17.4%, which has not been reported yet in indium‐free CNT‐based solar cells.
The transparent conductive film (TCF) of carbon nanotubes with large diameters of ≈4 nm and the applications in perovskite solar cells is reported. The TCF performance here aligns with the best‐performing TCFs of carbon nanotubes reported to date, showing a production yield greater than two orders of magnitude, which benefits from the large tube diameter.
Despite the tremendous progresses toward our understanding of the mechanisms of how liver cancer was developed, the therapeutic outcomes of liver cancer in the clinic have very limited improvement ...within the past three decades or so. In addition, both the incidence and mortality of liver cancer worldwide are not dropping, but increasing steadily, in the last decade. Thus, it is time for us to rethink what has been wrong and how could we do better in the upcoming years, in order to achieve our goal of improving the therapeutic outcomes of patients with liver cancer in the clinic, and at the meantime, effectively reducing the incidence of liver cancer by blocking malignant transformation of hepatocytes from chronic viral infection. This is also one of the main reasons why we try to organize this special issue on primary liver cancer in the journal of Genes & Diseases. In this perspective, I will summarize the major obstacles confronted with in the prevention and management of patients with chronic hepatitis B infection and subsequent development of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Next, I will delineate the pitfalls and underlying mechanisms of why the current anti-viral strategies and therapeutic agents are not as effective as one expected in terms of successful reduction or prevention chronic hepatitis B infection associated liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. I will then provide my personal perspectives on potential approaches and strategies for effective prevention and management of hepatitis B-related liver cancer.
In this work, a parametric-based approach is proposed to perform joint range alignment and phase adjustment based on the intention of fully exploiting the energy of all the scatterers in the moving ...target and the two-dimensional coherent accumulation gain of both range and azimuth compressions. To that end, first, translational motion is modeled as a polynomial signal, and inspired by the fact that all the scatterers in the moving target experience the same translational range history, the phase difference operation and keystone transform (KT) are utilized to transform the energy of all the scatterers into one range cell. Second, by the virtue of the fractional Fourier transform (FrFT), the energy of all the scatterers is coherently accumulated into a peak point, and from which the polynomial coefficients can be obtained accurately. With the estimated polynomial coefficients, the dechirp operation and KT are applied jointly to compensate range misalignment and phase error. The analysis of the proposed method shows that it is of low computational complexity due to avoiding multidimensional search and improves the output SNR providing satisfactory low SNR performance. The experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Size-transformable nanomedicine has the potential to overcome systemic and local barriers, leading to efficient accumulation and penetration throughout the tumor tissue. However, the design of this ...type of nanomedicine was seldom based on active targeting and intracellular size transformation. Here, we report an intracellular size-transformable nanosystem, in which small and positively charged nanoparticles (<30 nm) prepared from the self-assembly of an amphiphilic hexadecapeptide derivative was coated by folic acid- and dopamine-decorated hyaluronan (HA) to form large and negatively charged nanoparticles (∼130 nm). This nanosystem has been proven to improve the blood circulation half-life of the drug and prevent premature intravascular drug leakage from the nanocarrier. Once accumulated in the tumor, the nanoparticles were prone to HA- and folic acid-mediated cellular uptake, followed by intracellular size transformation and discharge of transformed small nanoparticles. The size-transformable nanosystem facilitated the transcytosis-mediated tumor penetration and improved the internalization of nanoparticles by cells and the intracellular release of 7-ethyl-10 hydroxycamptothecin. With an indocyanine green derivative as the intrinsic component of the amphiphilic polymer, the nanosystem has exhibited additional theranostic functions: photoacoustic imaging, NIR-laser-induced drug release, and synergistic chemotherapy and phototherapy, leading to a 50% complete cure rate in a subcutaneous B16 melanoma model. This nanosystem with multimodalities and efficient tumor penetration has shown potentials in improving anticancer efficacy.
The evolution of increased competitive ability (EICA) hypothesis and the novel weapons hypothesis (NWH) are two non-mutually exclusive mechanisms for exotic plant invasions, but few studies have ...simultaneously tested these hypotheses. Here we aimed to integrate them in the context of Chromolaena odorata invasion.
We conducted two common garden experiments in order to test the EICA hypothesis, and two laboratory experiments in order to test the NWH.
In common conditions, C. odorata plants from the nonnative range were better competitors but not larger than plants from the native range, either with or without the experimental manipulation of consumers. Chromolaena odorata plants from the nonnative range were more poorly defended against aboveground herbivores but better defended against soilborne enemies. Chromolaena odorata plants from the nonnative range produced more odoratin (Eupatorium) (a unique compound of C. odorata with both allelopathic and defensive activities) and elicited stronger allelopathic effects on species native to China, the nonnative range of the invader, than on natives of Mexico, the native range of the invader.
Our results suggest that invasive plants may evolve increased competitive ability after being introduced by increasing the production of novel allelochemicals, potentially in response to naïve competitors and new enemy regimes.
Objective
Ovarian cancer (OC) affects nearly 22,000 women annually in the United States and ranks fifth in cancer deaths, largely because of being diagnosed at an advanced stage. Autophagy is the ...cellular process of self-degrading damaged or degenerate proteins and organelles. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are a group of RNA molecules whose transcripts are greater than 200 nt but are not translated into proteins. However, just a small number of autophagy-related lncRNAs have been explored in depth.
Methods
We used RNA sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and autophagy datasets to identify dysfunctional autophagy-related lncRNAs and provide potential useful biomarkers for OC diagnosis and prognosis.
Results
Seventeen differentially expressed lncRNAs (AC010186.3, AC006001.2, LBX2-AS1, SNHG17, AC011445.1, AC083880.1, MIR193BHG, AC025259.3, HCG14, AC007114.1, AC108673.2, USP30-AS1, AC010336.5, LINC01132, AC006333.2, LINC00665 and AC027348.1) were selected as independent prognostic factors for OC patients. Functional annotation of the data was performed through gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). The results suggested that the high-risk group was mainly enriched in specific tumor-related and metabolism pathways.
Conclusion
Based on the online databases, we identified novel autophagy-related lncRNAs for the prognosis of ovarian cancer.
The main challenges of semantic segmentation in vehicle-mounted scenes are object scale variation and trading off model accuracy and efficiency. Lightweight backbone networks for semantic ...segmentation usually extract single-scale features layer-by-layer only by using a fixed receptive field. Most modern real-time semantic segmentation networks heavily compromise spatial details when encoding semantics, and sacrifice accuracy for speed. Many improving strategies adopt dilated convolution and add a sub-network, in which either intensive computation or redundant parameters are brought. We propose a multi-level and multi-scale feature aggregation network (MMFANet). A spatial pyramid module is designed by cascading dilated convolutions with different receptive fields to extract multi-scale features layer-by-layer. Subseqently, a lightweight backbone network is built by reducing the feature channel capacity of the module. To improve the accuracy of our network, we design two additional modules to separately capture spatial details and high-level semantics from the backbone network without significantly increasing the computation cost. Comprehensive experimental results show that our model achieves 79.3% MIoU on the Cityscapes test dataset at a speed of 58.5 FPS, and it is more accurate than SwiftNet (75.5% MIoU). Furthermore, the number of parameters of our model is at least 53.38% less than that of other state-of-the-art models.
l-Tryptophan (Trp) metabolites and related neurotransmitters play crucial roles in physiological functions, and their imbalances are implicated in the pathology of depression, Alzheimer's disease and ...other diseases. Measurement of Trp metabolites and related neurotransmitters possesses a great potential to elucidate the disease mechanisms and evaluate the outcomes of therapeutic interventions. A simple, rapid, sensitive and specific liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method was developed for simultaneous determination of Trp, l-kynurenine (Kyn), kynurenic acid (Kyna), 3-hydroxykynurenine (3-HK), 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT), 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), norepinephrine (NE), l-glutamic acid (Glu), γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and acetylcholine (ACh) in mice serum and the brain tissues in a single chromatographic run. Samples were spiked with the internal standard, mixed with trifluoroacetic acid to precipitate protein and analyzed by LC-MS/MS. Chromatographic separation was achieved using a Restek Ultra Aqueous C18 column in combination with a gradient elution within 8 min. Mass spectrometric detection was performed using multiple reaction monitoring with electrospray ionization source in positive mode. The method exhibited good selectivity and correlation coefficient values for the calibration curves of each analyte were >0.99. The limit of detection and quantification ranged from 0.96 to 24.48 nmol/L and 3.42 to 244.82 nmol/L, respectively. The intra- and inter-day precision were ≤13.92%. All analytes were stable in prepared samples at room temperature in the autosampler for 24 h. This method was successfully applied to the analysis of biological samples from control and chronic mild stress (CMS) induced depression mice. It was found that Kyn and 3-HK pathways were enhanced by CMS, while the levels of Trp, Kyna, 5-HIAA, Glu, GABA and ACh were significantly reduced. The changes in 5-HT and NE levels were not uniform in the periphery and the brain. This method can therefore be applied to analyze Trp metabolites and related neurotransmitters levels to monitor disease states, study the mechanisms and outcomes of therapeutic interventions.
•Simultaneous quantification of tryptophan metabolites and related neurotransmitters•The validated method shows high selectivity, sensitivity and precision.•Analytes were successfully detected in control and chronic mild stress mice.
Although SDF-1/CXCR4 pathway is a potential mechanism of tumor proliferation and progression, the mechanism of controlling CXCR4 expression is not fully understood. This study was to confirm that ...miR-494-3p might be a potentially post-transcriptional regulator of CXCR4 and over-expression of miR-494 might suppress prostate cancer progression and metastasis.
We firstly postulated the post-transcriptional regulation of CXCR4 by miR-494-3p through bioinformatics analysis, and then it was demonstrated that miR-494-3p could regulate the CXCR4 mRNA post-transcriptionally by binding to the predicted site by dual reporter gene assays. The biological effect of miR-494-3p on prostate cancer cells proliferation, apoptosis, migration, and invasion was measured by MTT, TUNEL, flow cytometry, migration, and invasion assays.
It was shown that the mRNA and protein expression levels of CXCR4 were significantly up-regulated in PC-3 and DU145, whereas barely detected in LNCaP and RWPE-1. However, the CXCR4 protein levels were inversely related to the mature miR-494-3p expression levels in RWPE-1 and prostate cancer cells. The constitutive over-expression of miR-494-3p could down-regulate the protein level of CXCR4 in PC-3 and DU145. MiR-494-3p also could bind to the seed sequences in the 3'-UTR of the CXCR4 gene. Artificial over-expression of miR-494-3p could inhibit the growth, promote the apoptosis, and inhibit the migration and invasion of PC-3 and DU145 cells in vivo.
Our results suggested that miR-494-3p might play crucial role in prostate cancer by post-transcriptional regulation to CXCR4 mRNA. MiR-494-3p/CXCR4 pathway may be a potential therapeutic target to prevent prostate cancer progression and metastasis.
Acute lung injury (ALI) is a common and critical respiratory disorder caused by various factors, with viral infection being the leading contributor. Dehydroandrographolide (DAP), a constituent of the ...Chinese herbal plant Andrographis paniculata, exhibits a range of activities including anti-inflammatory, in vitro antiviral and immune-enhancing effects. This study evaluated the anti-inflammatory effects and pharmacokinetics (PK) profile of DAP in ALI mice induced by intratracheal instillation of Poly(I:C) (PIC). The results showed that oral administration of DAP (10–40 mg/kg) effectively suppressed the increase in lung wet–dry weight ratio, total cells, total protein content, accumulation of immune cells, inflammatory cytokines and neutrophil elastase levels in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of PIC-treated mice. DAP concentrations, determined by an LC-MS/MS method, in plasma after receiving DAP (20 mg/kg) were unchanged compared to those in normal mice. However, DAP concentrations and relative PK parameters in the lungs were significantly altered in PIC-treated mice, exhibiting a relatively higher maximum concentration, larger AUC, and longer elimination half-life than those in the lungs of normal mice. These results demonstrated that DAP could improve lung edema and inflammation in ALI mice, and suggested that lung injury might influence the PK properties of DAP, leading to increased lung distribution and residence. Our study provides evidence that DAP displays significant anti-inflammatory activity against viral lung injury and is more likely to distribute to damaged lung tissue.
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•DAP markedly ameliorates Poly(I:C)-induced lung injury in mice.•DAP greatly reduces inflammatory cytokines and NE levels, and inflammatory cells.•ALI causes DAP in the lung with higher Cmax, larger AUC and longer t1/2.•The PK of DAP in plasma remain unchanged in mice with ALI.
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