The room-temperature solvent–solvent extraction (SSE) concept is used for the deposition of hybrid-perovskite thin films over large areas. In this simple process, perovskite precursor solution is ...spin-coated onto a substrate, and instead of the conventional thermal annealing treatment, the coated substrate is immediately immersed in a bath of another solvent at room temperature. This results in efficient extraction of the precursor-solvent and induces rapid crystallization of uniform, ultra-smooth perovskite thin films. The mechanisms involved in the SSE process are studied further, and its versatility in depositing high quality thin films of controlled thicknesses (20 to 700 nm) and various compositions (CH 3 NH 3 PbI (3−x) Br x ; x = 0, 1, 2, or 3) is demonstrated. Planar perovskite solar cells (PSCs) based on SSE-deposited CH 3 NH 3 PbI 3 perovskite thin films deliver power conversion efficiency (PCE) up to 15.2%, and most notably an average PCE of 10.1% for PSCs with sub-100 nm semi-transparent perovskite thin films. The SSE method has generic appeal, and its key attributes—room-temperature process, rapid crystallization, large-area uniform deposition, film-thickness control, ultra-smoothness, and compositional versatility—make the SSE method potentially suitable for roll-to-roll scalable processing of hybrid-perovskite thin films for future multifunctional PSCs.
Abstract
Background
There are no pharmacological interventions currently available to prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 or to treat COVID-19. The development of vaccines against COVID-19 is ...essential to contain the pandemic. we conducted a cross-sectional survey of Shanghai residents to understand residents’ willingness to be vaccinated with any future COVID-19 vaccines and take measures to further improve vaccination coverage.
Methods
We conducted a cross-sectional survey using self-administered anonymous questionnaires from 1 July to 8 September 2020. The main outcome was willingness of participants, and any children or older individuals living with them, to receive future COVID-19 vaccines. Logistic regression analyses were used to explore potential factors associated with vaccination willingness.
Results
A total of 1071 participants were asked about their willingness to receive future COVID-19 vaccines, for themselves and at least 747 children and 375 older individuals (≥60 years old) living with them. The highest proportion of expected willingness to vaccinate was among participants (88.6%), followed by children (85.3%) and older individuals (84.0%). The main reasons for reluctance to vaccinate among 119 participants were doubts regarding vaccine safety (60.0%) and efficacy (28.8%). Participants with a self-reported history of influenza vaccination were more likely to accept COVID-19 vaccines for themselves adjusted odds ratio (
OR
) = 1.83; 95% confidence interval (
CI
): 1.19–2.82, their children (adjusted
OR
= 2.08; 95%
CI
: 1.30–3.33), and older individuals in their household (adjusted
OR
= 2.12; 95%
CI
: 1.14–3.99). Participants with older individuals in their families were less willing to vaccinate themselves (adjusted
OR
= 0.59; 95%
CI
: 0.40–0.87) and their children (adjusted
OR
= 0.58; 95%
CI
: 0.38–0.89).
Conclusions
Participants were more reluctant to accept COVID-19 vaccines for older individuals living with them. The presence of older individuals in the home also affected willingness of participants and their children to be vaccinated.
Auxin is necessary for the inhibition of root growth induced by aluminium (Al) stress, however the molecular mechanism controlling this is largely unknown. Here, we report that YUCCA (YUC), which ...encodes flavin monooxygenase-like proteins, regulates local auxin biosynthesis in the root apex transition zone (TZ) in response to Al stress. Al stress up-regulates YUC3/5/7/8/9 in the root-apex TZ, which we show results in the accumulation of auxin in the root-apex TZ and root-growth inhibition during the Al stress response. These Al-dependent changes in the regulation of YUCs in the root-apex TZ and YUC-regulated root growth inhibition are dependent on ethylene signalling. Increasing or disruption of ethylene signalling caused either enhanced or reduced up-regulation, respectively, of YUCs in root-apex TZ in response to Al stress. In addition, ethylene enhanced root growth inhibition under Al stress was strongly alleviated in yuc mutants or by co-treatment with yucasin, an inhibitor of YUC activity, suggesting a downstream role of YUCs in this process. Moreover, ethylene-insensitive 3 (EIN3) is involved into the direct regulation of YUC9 transcription in this process. Furthermore, we demonstrated that PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR4 (PIF4) functions as a transcriptional activator for YUC5/8/9. PIF4 promotes Al-inhibited primary root growth by regulating the local expression of YUCs and auxin signal in the root-apex TZ. The Al-induced expression of PIF4 in root TZ acts downstream of ethylene signalling. Taken together, our results highlight a regulatory cascade for YUCs-regulated local auxin biosynthesis in the root-apex TZ mediating root growth inhibition in response to Al stress.
As a key determinant of employment behavior, employment intention is easily affected by the environment, others and their subconsciousness, thus deviating from the optimal decision predicted by the ...classical economic model. Peers are an important environmental factor that directly affects individual behavior, but their effect on employment intentions has not been fully verified. The paper analyzes the class peer effect on university students' employment intentions using random class assignment data from a central province in China. It is found that positive peer employment behavior has a significant positive effect on university students' employment intentions, and this result remains robust after replacing the proxy variables. Further analysis of the peer effect mechanism reveals that the provision and dissemination of school employment information enhances the peer effect in employment intentions, while the help given by parents and family background weakens the peer effect. The results of the dose effect of the peer effect show that the peer effect tends to increase over time.
Staphylococcal nuclease domain-containing protein 1 (SND1) is known to be involved in the progression of a variety of human cancers. However, the role of SND1 in cervical cancer remains unclear. ...Here, we found that the expression of SND1 in cervical cancer tissue was higher than that in normal cervical tissue. Importantly, high SND1 expression was closely associated with tumorigenic phenotype and shorter survival among cervical cancer patients. Functional assays demonstrated that SND1 knockdown inhibited the migration and invasion capabilities of cervical cancer cells in vitro. Additionally, a xenograft assay showed that silencing SND1 in cervical cancer cells suppressed lung metastasis in vivo. Further investigation revealed that knockdown of SND1 inhibited epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of cervical cancer cells by enhancing FOXA2 expression. Moreover, the pro-metastasis effect of SND1 in cervical cancer was at least in part dependent on FOXA2 inhibition.
Mechanistically, we found that SND1-induced FOXA2 ubiquitination resulted in degradation, mediated by the E3 ligase enzyme Smurf1. In summary, SND1 plays a crucial role in cervical cancer metastasis, and we provide evidence that SND1 may serve as a prognostic and therapeutic target in cervical cancer.
•High SND1 expression is positively correlated with tumorigenic phenotype and shorter survival in cervical cancer patients.•Knockdown of SND1 can suppress the metastasis of cervical cancer cells by inhibiting the EMT process.•The pro-metastasis effect of SND1 in cervical cancer is partially dependent on downregulation of FOXA2.•SND1 is involved in ubiquitination degradation of FOXA2 by promoting smurf1 expression.
This paper uses data from the 2018 College Graduates Employment Survey in a province in central China to investigate whether there is a fellow effect (a special kind of peer effect) among groups of ...college students in colleges and universities. It was found that a group of fellows with higher academic achievement would have a significant positive effect on individual students' achievement; conversely, it would have a significant negative effect on individual student's achievement. To avoid endogeneity problems, this paper conducted a two-stage regression analysis using the average education level of the parents of the fellow as an instrumental variable; to ensure the robustness of the findings, this paper used the fellow sample at the municipal level for the regression. The analysis of heterogeneity found that the effect of good grades in the fellow had a greater impact on the individual academic performance of girls compared to boys; in terms of geography, the effect of fellow showed a decreasing trend from eastern to central and western China; in terms of major categories, the effect of fellow also showed a greater difference between humanities majors and social science majors.
The breast and ovarian tumor suppressor BRCA1 constitutes a RING heterodimer E3 ligase with BARD1. BRCA1-associated protein 1 (BAP1) is a ubiquitin COOH-terminal hydrolase that was initially ...identified as a protein that bound to the RING finger domain of BRCA1. However, how BAP1 contributes to the E3 activity of BRCA1/BARD1 is unclear. Here, we report that BAP1 interacts with BARD1 to inhibit the E3 ligase activity of BRCA1/BARD1. Domains comprised by residues 182-365 of BAP1 interact with the RING finger domain of BARD1, and surface plasmon resonance spectroscopy (BIAcore) analyses showed that BAP1 interferes with the BRCA1/BARD1 association. The perturbation resulted in inhibition of BRCA1 autoubiquitination and NPM1/B23 ubiquitination by BRCA1/BARD1. Although BAP1 was capable of deubiquitinating the polyubiquitin chains mediated by BRCA1/BARD1 in vitro, a catalytically inactive mutant of BAP1, C91S, still inhibited the ubiquitination in vitro and in vivo, implicating a second mechanism of action. Importantly, inhibition of BAP1 expression by short hairpin RNA resulted in hypersensitivity of the cells to ionizing irradiation and in retardation of S-phase progression. Together, these results suggest that BAP1 and BRCA1/BARD1 coordinately regulate ubiquitination during the DNA damage response and the cell cycle.
With the development of smart education, teachers' precision teaching ability has increasingly become an important component of their professional ability. Based on the Socialization, ...Externalization, Combination, Internalization (SECI) model of knowledge management, this research constructs a theoretical model of data knowledge transformation, data consciousness, and teachers' precision teaching ability, and uses Partial Least Squares to analyze the interaction and influence among the elements. The empirical results show that the transformation of internal knowledge related to data has a significant positive impact on the improvement of teachers' precision teaching ability and data consciousness; the transformation of external knowledge related to teaching has a positive effect on the teaching management ability of teachers' precision teaching ability, but the effect is not significant. Data consciousness plays a partial mediating effect between internal knowledge transformation and teachers' precision teaching ability, and a complete mediating effect between external knowledge transformation and teaching management ability.
Heartbeat characteristic points are the main features of an electrocardiogram (ECG), which can provide important information for ECG-based cardiac diagnosis. In this manuscript, we propose a ...self-supervised deep learning framework with modified Densenet to detect ECG characteristic points, including the onset, peak and termination points of P-wave, QRS complex wave and T-wave. We extracted high-level features of ECG heartbeats from the QT Database (QTDB) and two other larger datasets, MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database (MITDB) and MIT-BIH Normal Sinus Rhythm Database (NSRDB) with no human-annotated labels as pre-training. By applying different transformations to ECG signals, the task of discriminating signals before and after transformation was defined as the pretext task. Subsequently, the convolutional layer was frozen and the weights of the self-supervised network were transferred to the downstream task of characteristic point localizations on heart beats in the QT dataset. Finally, the mean ± standard deviation of the detection errors of our proposed self-supervised learning method in QTDB for detecting the onset, peak, and termination points of P-waves, the onset and termination points of QRS waves, and the peak and termination points of T-waves were -0.24 ± 10.04, -0.48 ± 11.69, -0.28 ± 10.19, -3.72 ± 8.18, -4.12 ± 13.54, -0.68 ± 20.42, and 1.34 ± 21.04. The results show that the deep learning network based on the self-supervised framework constructed in this manuscript can accurately detect the feature points of a heartbeat, laying the foundation for automatic extraction of key information related to ECG-based diagnosis.
Background
There are various treatments for estrogen-positive breast cancer, mainly hormone therapy and molecular-targeted drugs. Acquiring resistance to these drugs is a major clinical problem. ...Additionally, little is known about the effect of drug resistance on the DNA repair mechanism. Poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitors currently used for treating HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer with
BRCA
mutations have been shown to be effective in
BRCA
-deficient cells with impaired homologous recombination repair. Here, we investigated the effect of drug resistance acquisition on the DNA repair mechanism and the effect of PARP inhibitors on ER (estrogen receptor) -positive breast cancer.
Methods
We investigated changes in the expression of DNA repair mechanism-related factors and repair ability of double-strand breaks (DSB) in various drug-resistant cell lines established in our laboratory. Additionally, PARP inhibitor susceptibility was investigated using olaparib.
Results
DSB repairs in MCF-7 and hormone therapy-resistant model cells were normal, and these cells demonstrated low sensitivity to olaparib. The resistant cell lines against CDK4/6 inhibitors, fulvestrant and mTOR/PI3K inhibitors showed decreased DSB repair ability and high olaparib sensitivity. They showed low sensitivity to CDK4/6 inhibitors, a close link between acquiring resistance to CDK4/6 inhibitors and hypersensitivity to olaparib.
Conclusions
Our study suggests some cases of acquiring drug resistance impairs DSB repair ability and sensitizes ER-positive breast cancer to PARP inhibitors.
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