Cancer vaccines hold great promise for improved cancer treatment. However, endosomal trapping and low immunogenicity of tumour antigens usually limit the efficiency of vaccination strategies. Here, ...we present a proton-driven nanotransformer-based vaccine, comprising a polymer-peptide conjugate-based nanotransformer and loaded antigenic peptide. The nanotransformer-based vaccine induces a strong immune response without substantial systemic toxicity. In the acidic endosomal environment, the nanotransformer-based vaccine undergoes a dramatic morphological change from nanospheres (about 100 nanometres in diameter) into nanosheets (several micrometres in length or width), which mechanically disrupts the endosomal membrane and directly delivers the antigenic peptide into the cytoplasm. The re-assembled nanosheets also boost tumour immunity via activation of specific inflammation pathways. The nanotransformer-based vaccine effectively inhibits tumour growth in the B16F10-OVA and human papilloma virus-E6/E7 tumour models in mice. Moreover, combining the nanotransformer-based vaccine with anti-PD-L1 antibodies results in over 83 days of survival and in about half of the mice produces complete tumour regression in the B16F10 model. This proton-driven transformable nanovaccine offers a robust and safe strategy for cancer immunotherapy.
The function of vitamin D on muscle is either indirect or does not involve the known receptor.
The active form of vitamin D, 1α,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, is critical for the regulation of serum calcium ...and phosphorus levels that in turn support bone mineralization and neuromuscular activity. It is well known that vitamin D deficiency causes rachitic/osteomalacic myopathy and cardiac disorder and the provision of vitamin D can reverse the symptoms. However, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. The question of whether the vitamin D receptor is found in muscle has been debated but not settled. We recently studied all available antibodies against the vitamin D receptor and found that most antibodies used detect proteins other than the vitamin D receptor, and therefore, the utility of these antibodies may generate the false-positive results. Using antibodies that do not detect proteins in tissues from vitamin D receptor null mice, we have developed a specific and sensitive immunohistochemical assay. The results from this investigation show that the vitamin D receptor is undetectable in skeletal, cardiac, and smooth muscle, suggesting that the function of vitamin D on muscle is either of an indirect nature or does not involve the known receptor.
In this paper, a phenomenological model of pneumatic muscle is established consisting of a contractile element, spring element, and damping element in parallel. To verify the practicability of ...pneumatic muscle (PM) modeling, dynamic surface control (DSC) characterized by convenient design and good transient performance is employed for realizing PM tracking control. However, parametric uncertainty is inevitable in PM modeling as friction and unknown external disturbances exist in a PM system. These PM modeling errors and unknown variables can undermine and deteriorate the control performance of PM systems. To solve this problem and improve control accuracy, a novel nonlinear disturbance observer-based dynamic surface control (NDOBDSC) is proposed for trajectory tracking of PM system. Through employing the nonlinear disturbance observer, the stated uncertainties can be estimated online and compensated. The proposed novel control scheme therefore integrates the advantages of DSC, while estimating time-varying uncertainties to achieve compensation of inherent uncertainties. The established control law guarantees that the closed-loop system is semiglobally uniformly and ultimately bounded. Both the simulation studies and practical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of NDOBDSC, showing that the control performance of NDOBDSC is satisfactory in the presence of modeling errors, friction, changing load, and other uncertainties in the PM system.
In this brief, a dynamic model of a mobile wheeled inverted pendulum (MWIP) system is improved considering friction forces, and a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO)-based dynamic surface controller ...is investigated to control the MWIP system. Using a coordinate transformation, this non-Class-I type underactuated system is presented as a semistrict feedback form, which is convenient for dynamic surface controller design. A dynamic surface controller together with an NDO is designed to stabilize the underactuated plant. The proposed approach can compensate the external disturbances and the model uncertainties to improve the system performance significantly. The stability of the closed-loop MWIP system is proved by Lyapunov theorem. Experiment results are presented to illustrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.
•The gully was the main sediment source, and the contribution of the gully to the slope was 8:2 between 1978 and 2010.•Erosion was dominated by the collapse of gully walls under the effect of ...gravity, which was triggered by rainstorms.•Changes in sediment contribution correlated to soil, landform, rainfall, coal mining and soil conservation.•Uncertainties of the fingerprinting approach are more significant and influential in complex environments.
Sediment sources in catchments under the control of check dams in the wind-water erosion crisscross region are more complicated compared to other regions on the Chinese Loess Plateau. This is due to their general complexity, which mainly results from variation in soil, landform, vegetation, and erosion agents. Accordingly, we used the composite fingerprinting approach to trace sediment sources in a typical small catchment in this region. The aim was to reveal the erosion characteristics of the catchment throughout the trapping history of the check dam. Sediment sources were classified into three-source (paleosol, loess and sand) and four-source (paleosol-gully, loess-gully, slope bare of sand and slope covered by sand) groups on the basis of soil and landform types, respectively. Sediment sources throughout the whole trapping history of the check dam (1978–2010) could be classified into three stages according to variation in sedimentation rate. Results showed that depositional sediment in the check dam was primarily from gullies (averaging 80.1%), especially the paleosol-gully (>54.1%). The large contribution of gullies indicated that the main erosion agents were streamflow from rainstorm events and gravity. Coal mining also had a significant impact on contribution of sediment sources, especially for slopes. Since 1987, mining began to change the structure of hills in this region, leading to slope fissures, collapse, and landslides at junctions where gullies meet slopes, which increased the risk of slope erosion. This has caused an increase in sediment from slopes bare of sand distributed under condition of continues implementation of soil conservation measures, which converted sloping cropland into grassland or forest. Further studies are necessary to gain better insight into sediment transport and deposition within such complex environments, as well as to distinguish between the effects of multiple erosion agents.
Propensity score matching is a method to reduce bias in non-randomized and observational studies. Propensity score matching is mainly applied to two treatment groups rather than multiple treatment ...groups, because some key issues affecting its application to multiple treatment groups remain unsolved, such as the matching distance, the assessment of balance in baseline variables, and the choice of optimal caliper width. The primary objective of this study was to compare propensity score matching methods using different calipers and to choose the optimal caliper width for use with three treatment groups. The authors used caliper widths from 0.1 to 0.8 of the pooled standard deviation of the logit of the propensity score, in increments of 0.1. The balance in baseline variables was assessed by standardized difference. The matching ratio, relative bias, and mean squared error (MSE) of the estimate between groups in different propensity score-matched samples were also reported. The results of Monte Carlo simulations indicate that matching using a caliper width of 0.2 of the pooled standard deviation of the logit of the propensity score affords superior performance in the estimation of treatment effects. This study provides practical solutions for the application of propensity score matching of three treatment groups.
The ecological quality of large-scale farms is a critical determinant of crop growth. In this paper, an ecological assessment procedure suitable for agricultural regions should be developed based on ...an improved remote sensing ecological index (IRSEI), which introduces an integrated salinity index (ISI) tailored to the salinized soil characteristics in farming areas and incorporates ecological indices such as the greenness index (NDVI), the humidity index (WET), the dryness index (NDBSI), and the heat index (LST). The results indicate that between 2013 and 2022, the mean IRSEI increasing from 0.500 in 2013 to 0.826 in 2020 before decreasing to 0.646 in 2022. From 2013 to 2022, the area of the farm that experienced slight to significant improvements in ecological quality reached 1419.91 km2, accounting for 71.94% of the total farm area. An analysis of different land cover types revealed that the IRSEI performed more reliably than did the original RSEI method. Correlation analysis based on crop yields showed that the IRSEI method was more strongly correlated with yield than was the RSEI method. Therefore, the proposed IRSEI method offers a rapid and effective new means of monitoring ecological quality for agricultural planting areas characterized by soil salinization, and it is more effective than the traditional RSEI method.
Quaternary ammonium salt polymers, a kind of polyelectrolyte with a quaternary ammonium group, are widely used in traditional and emerging industries due to their good water-solubility, adjustable ...cationicity and molecular weight, high efficiency and nontoxicity. In this paper, firstly, the properties and several synthesis methods of typical quaternary ammonium salt monomers were introduced. Secondly, the research progress on the synthesis of polymers was summarized from the perspective of obtaining products with high molecular weight, narrow molecular weight distribution and high monomer conversion, and special functional polymers. Thirdly, the relationships between the structures and properties of the polymer were analyzed from the perspectives of molecular weight, charge density, structural stability, and microstructural regulation of the polymer chain unit. Fourthly, typical examples of quaternary ammonium salt polymers in the application fields of water treatment, daily chemicals, petroleum exploitation, papermaking, and textile printing and dyeing were listed. Finally, constructive suggestions were put forward on developing quaternary ammonium salt polymers with high molecular weights, strengthening the research on the relationships between the structures and their properties and pinpointing relevant application fields.
This study proposes a real-time electro-myogram (EMG) pattern recognition approach for the control of multifunction myoelectric hands. In techniques, time and frequency information is extracted by ...wavelet packet transform (WPT) and the node energy of the WPT coefficients is selected as the feature of the EMG signals. Then a novel feature selection method based on a depth recursive search algorithm is developed so that the high-dimensional features can be reduced by a supervised feature reduction algorithm. Consequently, the support vector machine (SVM) is adopted to give the recognition result. In the experiment, a real-time EMG pattern recognition system is developed to control a virtual hand with EMG signals from antebrachium. The experimental results show both the high accuracy and better real-time performance of the proposed method.
Key message
We developed two CNNs for predicting ubiquitination sites in
Arabidopsis thaliana
, demonstrated their competitive performance, analyzed amino acid physicochemical properties and the CNN ...structures, and predicted ubiquitination sites in
Arabidopsis
.
As an important posttranslational protein modification, ubiquitination plays critical roles in plant physiology, including plant growth and development, biotic and abiotic stress, metabolism, and so on. A lot of ubiquitination site prediction models have been developed for human, mouse and yeast. However, there are few models to predict ubiquitination sites for the plant
Arabidopsis thaliana
. Based on this context, we proposed two convolutional neural network (CNN) based models for predicting ubiquitination sites in
A. thaliana
. The two models reach AUC (area under the ROC curve) values of 0.924 and 0.913 respectively in five-fold cross-validation, and 0.921 and 0.914 respectively in independent test, which outperform other models and demonstrate the competitive edge of them. We in-depth analyze the amino acid physicochemical properties in the neighboring sequence regions of the ubiquitination sites, and study the influence of the CNN structure to the prediction performance. Potential ubiquitination sites in the global
Arbidopsis
proteome are predicted using the two CNN models. To facilitate the community, the source code, training and test dataset, predicted ubiquitination sites in the
Arbidopsis
proteome are available at GitHub (
http://github.com/nongdaxiaofeng/CNNAthUbi
) for interest users.
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