All‐inorganic lead halide perovskite quantum dots (IHP QDs) have great potentials in photodetectors. However, the photoresponsivity is limited by the low charge transport efficiency of the IHP QD ...layers. High‐performance phototransistors based on IHP QDs hybridized with organic semiconductors (OSCs) are developed. The smooth surface of IHP QD layers ensures ordered packing of the OSC molecules above them. The OSCs significantly improve the transportation of the photoexcited charges, and the gate effect of the transistor structure significantly enhances the photoresponsivity while simultaneously maintaining high Iphoto/Idark ratio. The devices exhibit outstanding optoelectronic properties in terms of photoresponsivity (1.7 × 104 A W−1), detectivity (2.0 × 1014 Jones), external quantum efficiency (67000%), Iphoto/Idark ratio (8.1 × 104), and stability (100 d in air). The overall performances of our devices are superior to state‐of‐the‐art IHP photodetectors. The strategy utilized here is general and can be easily applied to many other perovskite photodetectors.
High‐performance hybrid phototransistors based on all‐inorganic lead halide perovskite quantum dots and organic semiconductors are fabricated and characterized. Because of the outstanding properties of the materials, the gate‐tunable phototransistors exhibit significantly high performance, including photoresponsivity (≈1.7 × 104 A W−1), detectivity (≈2.0 × 1014 Jones), EQE (≈67000%), Iphoto/Idark ratio (≈8.1 × 104), and long‐term stability in air.
Ag electrode is widely used in inverted perovskite solar cells (PSCs), but its easy reaction and corrosive nature with perovskite always induces severe stability issue. Here, from typical theory of ...metal anticorrosion, a chemical anticorrosion approach for Ag electrode in inverted PSCs through introducing 2‐mercaptobenzothiazole (MBT) as a corrosion inhibitor is reported. MBT can strongly bond to Ag and form a compact MBT‐Ag chain on Ag surface owing to its N atom in thiazolyl ring and exocyclic thiol groups. As a result, Ag anticorrosion ability is greatly enhanced by increasing the corrosion potential and decreasing the corrosion current, thus effectively inhibiting possible chemical reaction and corrosion between perovskite and Ag electrodes. PSCs containing MBT/Ag exhibit high efficiency of over 23% with good stability, retaining 95 ± 4.1% of initial efficiency after storage for 3800 h in glovebox. Importantly, resulting PSCs also show excellent thermal stability, maintaining 90 ± 1.8% of initial efficiency after aging for 900 h at 85 °C.
A chemical anticorrosion strategy is proposed to inhibit Ag electrode corrosion in inverted perovskite solar cells through introducing 2‐mercaptobenzothiazole (MBT) inhibitor. MBT can bond on Ag surface to inhibit Ag corrosion. Resulting devices exhibit >23% efficiency with good stability, retaining >90% of initial efficiency whether after N2 storage for 3800 h or 85 °C aging for 900 h.
Lung adenocarcinoma (ADC) is the predominant histological type of lung cancer, and radiotherapy is one of the current therapeutic strategies for lung cancer treatment. Unfortunately, biological ...complexity and cancer heterogeneity contribute to radioresistance development. Karyopherin α2 (KPNA2) is a member of the importin α family that mediates the nucleocytoplasmic transport of cargo proteins. KPNA2 overexpression is observed across cancer tissues of diverse origins. However, the role of KPNA2 in lung cancer radioresistance is unclear. Herein, we demonstrated that high expression of KPNA2 is positively correlated with radioresistance and cancer stem cell (CSC) properties in lung ADC cells. Radioresistant cells exhibited nuclear accumulation of KPNA2 and its cargos (OCT4 and c‐MYC). Additionally, KPNA2 knockdown regulated CSC‐related gene expression in radioresistant cells. Next‐generation sequencing and bioinformatic analysis revealed that STAT1 activation and nuclear phospholipid scramblase 1 (PLSCR1) are involved in KPNA2‐mediated radioresistance. Endogenous PLSCR1 interacting with KPNA2 and PLSCR1 knockdown suppressed the radioresistance induced by KPNA2 expression. Both STAT1 and PLSCR1 were found to be positively correlated with dysregulated KPNA2 in radioresistant cells and ADC tissues. We further demonstrated a potential positive feedback loop between PLSCR1 and STAT1 in radioresistant cells, and this PLSCR1‐STAT1 loop modulates CSC characteristics. In addition, AKT1 knockdown attenuated the nuclear accumulation of KPNA2 in radioresistant lung cancer cells. Our results collectively support a mechanistic understanding of a novel role for KPNA2 in promoting radioresistance in lung ADC cells.
Nuclear KPNA2 promotes radioresistance and regulates cancer stem cell properties in lung adenocarcinoma cells. A loop between PLSCR1 and STAT1 is involved in KPNA2‐mediated radioresistance.
Composting is widely used for recycling of urban sewage sludge to improve soil properties, which represents a potential pathway of spreading antibiotic resistant bacteria and genes to soils. However, ...the dynamics of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and the underlying mechanisms during sewage sludge composting were not fully explored. Here, we used high-throughput quantitative PCR and 16S rRNA gene based illumina sequencing to investigate the dynamics of ARGs and bacterial communities during a lab-scale in-vessel composting of sewage sludge. A total of 156 unique ARGs and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) were detected encoding resistance to almost all major classes of antibiotics. ARGs were detected with significantly increased abundance and diversity, and distinct patterns, and were enriched during composting. Marked shifts in bacterial community structures and compositions were observed during composting, with Actinobacteria being the dominant phylum at the late phase of composting. The large proportion of Actinobacteria may partially explain the increase of ARGs during composting. ARGs patterns were significantly correlated with bacterial community structures, suggesting that the dynamic of ARGs was strongly affected by bacterial phylogenetic compositions during composting. These results imply that direct application of sewage sludge compost on field may lead to the spread of abundant ARGs in soils.
Rationale
Accumulating evidence has linked prolonged exposure to heavy metals to cancer occurrence in the urinary system. However, the specific biological mechanisms responsible for the association ...of heavy metals with the unusually high incidence of upper tract urothelial carcinoma in Taiwan are complex and incompletely understood.
Methods
To elucidate the specific biological mechanism and identify molecular indicators of the unusually high association of upper tract urothelial carcinoma with heavy metal exposure, protein expression following the treatment of T24 human bladder carcinoma and RT4 human bladder papilloma cell line models with arsenic (As) and cadmium (Cd) was studied. Proteomic changes in these cell models were integrated with data from a human bladder cancer (BLCA) tissue proteome to identify possible protein indicators of heavy metal exposure.
Results
After mass spectrometry based proteomic analysis and verification by Western blotting procedures, we identified 66 proteins that were up‐regulated and 92 proteins that were down‐regulated in RT4 cell extracts after treatment with As or Cd. Some 52 proteins were up‐regulated and 136 proteins were down‐regulated in T24 cell extracts after treatment with Cd. We further confirmed that down‐expression of the PML (promyelocytic leukemia) protein was sustained for at least 75 days after exposure of bladder cells to As. Dysregulation of these cellular proteins by As was associated with three biological pathways. Immunohistochemical analyses of paraffin‐embedded BLCA tissue slides confirmed that PML protein expression was decreased in BLCA tumor cells compared with adjacent noncancerous epithelial cells.
Conclusions
These data suggest that PML may play an important role in the pathogenesis of BLCA and may be an indicator of heavy metal exposure in bladder cells.
Display omitted
•Ordered porous hierarchical TiO2 (hier-TiO2) was synthesized by sintering MOFs.•The scaffold of scattered distribution was prepared by hier-TiO2 nanostructures.•The crystallization ...of perovskite was controlled due to ordered porous hier-TiO2.•Grains with enlarged sizes were formed due to scaffold of scattered distribution.•PSCs with hier-TiO2 scaffold show higher efficiency and better stability.
A type of quasi-mesoscopic perovskite solar cells (QM-PSCs) with porous hierarchical TiO2 (hier-TiO2) nanostructures of scattered distribution as scaffold was investigated. The porous hier-TiO2 nanostructures were synthesized by sintering MIL-125(Ti) of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) at 500°C in air and which were partly inherited from the ordered porosity of MIL-125(Ti). The ordered hier-TiO2 nanostructures were scattered on compact TiO2 layer to form a quasi-mesoscopic scaffold of scattered distribution, which can offer enough growth space for perovskite grains and promote the ordered growth of perovskite grains. The QM-PSCs shows a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.56%, much higher than PCE (11.38%) of PSCs with conventional small TiO2 nanoparticles (npt-TiO2) as scaffold and PCE (6.07%) of planar PSCs with compact TiO2 layer. The PCEs of PSCs with hier-TiO2 and npt-TiO2 remain 47% and 22% of the initial PCE values aging for 30days in air, indicating that PSCs with hier-TiO2 scaffold shown better stability and moisture resistance. The enhanced performance of QM-PSCs is primarily attributed to the superior wettability quasi-mesoscopic scaffold with ordered porous hier-TiO2 nanostructures, which help to form the high quality perovskite film with better crystillinity and less pin-holes, and improve the contact properties between perovksite and electron transport layer.
Carbon nanotube (CNT) has been considered as an ideal cathode material for field emission application for a long time. To improve field emission properties, coating CNT films to form a composite ...cathode is an effective approach. However, few reports have studied and revealed the effect of coated layer thickness. Hence, in this study, we employed an Au layer to coat CNT cathodes with capability to precisely control the coated film thickness and systematically investigated the film thickness effect on field emission properties of the CNT composite field-emission devices. A nonmonotonic relationship between field emission performances and cathode film thickness was observed, and a high performance with a rather low turn-on field of 0.60 V/μm and an ultrahigh field enhancement factor near to 20000 was optimally demonstrated for the CNT composite cathode with an Au layer thickness of 3 nm. Based on experimental data and analysis, the nonmonotonic tendency was found mainly due to effective field emitter density, and the cathode conductivity works only for ultrathin films. Besides, the CNT composite cathode had good stability and uniformity for low heat contact resistant. The superior performance of the CNT cathode composited with a proper Au layer demonstrated potential applications in vacuum electronic devices and an optimized thickness of the coated layer was important for field emission enhancement of composite cathodes.
Display omitted
•Screen-printed DWCNTs coated with controllable thicknesses of Au films act as the composite field emission cathodes.•The effective field emitter density is the main factor influencing the thickness dependent field emission performance.•Best performance of rather low Eto and Eth with an ultrahigh β is achieved for the cathode with an optimized Au layer thickness of 3 nm.•The conductivity of composite cathode only has a slight influence on field emission properties for thick films.
Multiple (selected) reaction monitoring (MRM/SRM) of peptides is a growing technology for target protein quantification because it is more robust, precise, accurate, high-throughput, and ...multiplex-capable than antibody-based techniques. The technique has been applied clinically to the large-scale quantification of multiple target proteins in different types of fluids. However, previous MRM-based studies have placed less focus on sample-preparation workflow and analytical performance in the precise quantification of proteins in saliva, a noninvasively sampled body fluid. In this study, we evaluated the analytical performance of a simple and robust multiple reaction monitoring (MRM)-based targeted proteomics approach incorporating liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry detection (LC-MRM/MS). This platform was used to quantitatively assess the biomarker potential of a group of 56 salivary proteins that have previously been associated with human cancers. To further enhance the development of this technology for assay of salivary samples, we optimized the workflow for salivary protein digestion and evaluated quantification performance, robustness and technical limitations in analyzing clinical samples. Using a clinically well-characterized cohort of two independent clinical sample sets (total n = 119), we quantitatively characterized these protein biomarker candidates in saliva specimens from controls and oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) patients. The results clearly showed a significant elevation of most targeted proteins in saliva samples from OSCC patients compared with controls. Overall, this platform was capable of assaying the most highly multiplexed panel of salivary protein biomarkers, highlighting the clinical utility of MRM in oral cancer biomarker research.
With the rising need for accessible cervical cancer screening, self‐sampling methods offer a promising alternative to traditional physician‐led sampling. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of ...the HygeiaTouch Self Sampling Kit for Women in detecting human papillomavirus (HPV) types and predicting cervical lesions. We studied the concordance in identifying high‐risk HPV (hrHPV) types between samples collected by physicians and those self‐collected by women using a self‐sampling kit for validation. Women aged 21–65, fitting into specific categories based on their cervical health history were eligible. Cohen's kappa coefficient to gauge concordance between the two specimen types and relative accuracy metrics in identifying cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) were also calculated, with physician‐sampled specimens serving as a reference. A total of 1210 participants from three institutes were involved. The self‐sampling kit closely matched the physician‐led method in terms of collecting valid specimens (100% vs. 100%), identifying hrHPV types (kappa: 0.75, 95% confidence interval 95% CI: 0.72–0.79; agreement: 87.7%, 95% CI: 85.8–89.6) and predicting CIN grade 2 or worse (CIN2+) (relative sensitivity: 0.949, relative accuracy: 0.959). Kappa values varied between 0.71 and 0.83 for different hrHPV types and combinations, with an overall value 0.75 (95% CI: 0.72–0.79) signifying robust compatibility between the two methods. Our study underscores the potential of the HygeiaTouch Self Sampling Kit as a reliable, efficient, and user‐friendly alternative to traditional sampling methods. This suggests that self‐sampling could be pivotal in expanding cervical cancer screening accessibility and enhancing detection rates.
Background. Long noncoding RNA MALAT1 is closely related to diabetes and kidney diseases and is expected to be a new target for the diagnosis and treatment of diabetic nephropathy. Objective. This ...study aimed to explore the circulating expression level and significance of lncRNA Malat1 in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and diabetic kidney disease (DKD). Methods. Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) was conducted to assess the expression of lncRNA Malat1 in 20 T2DM patients, 27 DKD patients, and 14 healthy controls, and then, the clinical significance was analyzed. Results. LncRNA MALAT1 expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) was significantly upregulated in T2DM and DKD groups when compared to control. Pearson’s correlation analysis showed correlation of lncRNA MALAT1 levels with ACR, urine β2-microglobulin (β2-MG), urine α1-microglobulin (α1-MG), creatinine (Cr), and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), while negative with superoxide dismutase (SOD) (r=−0.388, P<0.05). Binary regression analysis showed that ACR, creatinine, α1-MG, and LncRNA Malat1 were the risk factors for diabetic nephropathy with OR value of 1.166, 1.031, 1.031, and 2.019 (P<0.05). The area under ROC curve (AUC) of DKD identified by the above indicators was 0.914, 0.643, 0.807, and 0.797, respectively. The AUC of Joint prediction probability of DKD recognition was 0.914, and the sensitivity and specificity of DKD diagnosis were 1.0 and 0.806, respectively. (Take ≥0.251 as the diagnostic cutoff point). Conclusion. LncRNA Malat1 is highly expressed in DKD patients, and the combined detection of ACR, creatinine, α1-MG, and LncRNA Malat1 with diabetes mellitus may be the best way to diagnose diabetic nephropathy.
PDF
