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•The formation of Schottky barrier in MONC-3 can inhibit the backflow of electrons.•MONC-3 can convert the absorbed light energy into local high temperature.•Photodynamic and ...photothermal effects synergistically lead to bacterial death.•DFT calculation clarifies the charge transfer mechanism in Schottky heterojunction.
Developing green and highly efficient water disinfection technique is of great importance to public health. Herein, a near-infrared (NIR) light-triggerable thermo-sensitive defective molybdenum oxide-nitrogen doped carbon (MoO3-x/NCNs) composite was fabricated and applied to water disinfection. With the synergy of photodynamic and photothermal effects, the MoO3-x/NCNs achieve a rapid and effective inactivation of Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) as compared to photocatalytic treatment or thermal catalytic alone. Particularly, MONC-3 with optimal ratio can completely inactivate 7.6 log of E. coli and S. aureus within 60 min and 100 min, respectively. The MONC-3 hybrid exhibits efficient charge separation and migration ability due to the formation of Schottky heterojunction, resulting in the highly enhanced O2− (11.34 × 10−10 M) generation activity. Meanwhile, excellent NIR light absorption and photothermal conversion efficiency (52.6%) of MONC-3 can generate local high temperature to promote photocatalytic reaction rate and destruct the bacterial integrity. The monitoring of cell damage process confirmed the irreversible death of bacteria. Based on density functional theory (DFT) calculation, the antibacterial mechanism and Schottky effect were clarified. This work provides new insights for constructing a water disinfection strategy based on plasma-induced photothermal synergy catalysis.
The piRNA machinery is known for its role in mediating epigenetic silencing of transposons. Recent studies suggest that this function also involves piRNA-guided cleavage of transposon-derived ...transcripts. As many piRNAs also appear to have the capacity to target diverse mRNAs, this raises the intriguing possibility that piRNAs may act extensively as siRNAs to degrade specific mRNAs. To directly test this hypothesis, we compared mouse PIWI （MI- WI）-associated piRNAs with experimentally identified cleaved mRNA fragments from mouse testes, and observed cleavage sites that predominantly occur at position 10 from the 5＇ end of putative targeting piRNAs. We also noted strong biases for U and A residues at nucleotide positions 1 and 10, respectively, in both piRNAs and mRNA frag- ments, features that resemble the pattern of piRNA amplification by the ＇ping-pong＇ cycle. Through mapping of MIWI-RNA interactions by CLIP-seq and gene expression profiling, we found that many potential piRNA-targeted mRNAs directly interact with MIWI and show elevated expression levels in the testes of Miwi catalytic mutant mice. Reporter-based assays further revealed the importance of base pairing between piRNAs and mRNA targets and the requirement for both the slicer activity and piRNA-loading ability of MIWI in piRNA-mediated target repression. Importantly, we demonstrated that proper turnover of certain key piRNA targets is essential for sperm formation. Together, these findings reveal the siRNA-like function of the piRNA machinery in mouse testes and its central requirement for male germ cell development and maturation.
In this study, a manganese-cobalt bimetalli oxide composite material was innovatively prepared by the chemical co-precipitation method at low temperatures, in which activated carbon fibers (ACFs) as ...an organic carbon skeleton carrier could strengthen the stability of nanomaterials. The as-obtained composites were promising with rich chemical bonds, high redox properties, appreciable adsorption capacity, remarkable catalytic performance, and favorable stability. Experimental results showed that within 120 min, the composites could effectively degrade more than 90% of ciprofloxacin (CIP) by activating peroxomonosulfate (PMS). The electron transfer between the bimetal oxides improved the catalytic activation efficiency. The mechanism study suggested that SO4·−, ·OH, O2·−, and 1O2 are the main active substances, and combined with LSV and multimeter, it was found that there was electron transfer in the reaction system and Co3O4–Mn3O4@ACFs had the strongest electron transfer capability. In addition, the synthesized Co3O4–Mn3O4@ACFs have the potential for a wide range of applications due to the advantages of efficient PMS utilization efficiency and easy recovery properties. This work provided another perspective on the degradation of fluoroquinolone antibiotics in aqueous matrices in persulfate-based AOPs.
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•Co3O4–Mn3O4@ACFs showed higher PMS utilization.•The richer chemical bonds formation was possibly due to low temperature.•Carbon support strengthened the stability of the nano-composites to further improve catalytic activity.•The reactive oxygen species（ROSs) produced included SO4·−, ·OH, O2·−and 1O2.•The non-radical pathway of electron transfer in the reaction system was also at work.
DNA barcoding and metabarcoding have been increasingly used in species delimitation and species diversity assessment, respectively, and the molecular markers used in animals are mainly derived from ...mitochondrial DNA. It is well known that the phenomenon of multiple mitochondrial haplotypes within the same specimen (hereafter referred to as “mitotype diversity”) may have a negative impact on the proper assessment of biodiversity by metabarcoding. However, few studies have focused on the incidence of this phenomenon and its effects on metabarcoding results using different sample preparation strategies, such as mock community construction using pooled high‐throughput sequencing (HTS) data, DNA‐pooling and Tissue‐pooling. In this study, we investigated mitotype diversity and its influence on metabarcoding based on 398 specimens from 66 species of Insecta and 82 specimens from 16 species of Arachnida by HTS of the mitochondrial cox1 gene fragment. The results revealed that mitotype diversity was common in the studied taxa and significantly increased the number of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) using the three sample preparation strategies. The results also showed that the bioinformatics pipeline based on authentic amplicon sequence variants was more reliable than the pipeline based on OTUs. Regarding the sample preparation strategies of DNA‐pooling and Tissue‐pooling commonly used in metabarcoding, our results revealed that their results of metabarcoding were quite similar, and the Tissue‐pooling strategy was therefore preferred because of its simplicity. Our study calls for additional attention to the interference of mitotype diversity on the results of DNA metabarcoding in biodiversity assessment.
Wolbachia is a genus of bacterial endosymbionts that impacts the breeding systems of their hosts. Wolbachia can confuse the patterns of mitochondrial variation, including DNA barcodes, because it ...influences the pathways through which mitochondria are inherited. We examined the extent to which these endosymbionts are detected in routine DNA barcoding, assessed their impact upon the insect sequence divergence and identification accuracy, and considered the variation present in Wolbachia COI. Using both standard PCR assays (Wolbachia surface coding protein--wsp), and bacterial COI fragments we found evidence of Wolbachia in insect total genomic extracts created for DNA barcoding library construction. When >2 million insect COI trace files were examined on the Barcode of Life Datasystem (BOLD) Wolbachia COI was present in 0.16% of the cases. It is possible to generate Wolbachia COI using standard insect primers; however, that amplicon was never confused with the COI of the host. Wolbachia alleles recovered were predominantly Supergroup A and were broadly distributed geographically and phylogenetically. We conclude that the presence of the Wolbachia DNA in total genomic extracts made from insects is unlikely to compromise the accuracy of the DNA barcode library; in fact, the ability to query this DNA library (the database and the extracts) for endosymbionts is one of the ancillary benefits of such a large scale endeavor--which we provide several examples. It is our conclusion that regular assays for Wolbachia presence and type can, and should, be adopted by large scale insect barcoding initiatives. While COI is one of the five multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) genes used for categorizing Wolbachia, there is limited overlap with the eukaryotic DNA barcode region.
CD155, an immunoglobulin-like adhesion molecule, plays an important role in carcinoma such as cells migration, proliferation, metastasis, and tumor immune. The upregulation of CD155 has been found in ...several human malignancies, but its expression in cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) still remains unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate CD155 expression and its correlations with clinicopathologic data, angiogenesis, and prognosis in the patients with CCA.
CD155 expression was investigated in 20 paired CCA tissues and corresponding paracancerous tissues by Western blotting and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction assays at protein and mRNA levels. Besides, this study evaluated the correlation between the tumor CD155 expression and the level of both vascular endothelial growth factor and intratumoral microvessel density by immunohistochemistry in 90 cases of CCA. Moreover, the clinical and prognostic significance of CD155 in CCA was assessed by immunohistochemistry.
The protein and mRNA levels of CD155 were higher in CCA tumor tissues compared with corresponding paracancerous tissues (
<0.05). Immunohistochemical staining showed that CD155 was located in the cytoplasm of carcinoma cells and overexpressed in 61.2% (55/90) CCA tissues. Obviously, CD155 expression level was significantly correlated with tumor histological grade (
=0.002), lymph node metastasis (
<0.001), and tumor-node-metastasis (
=0.03). Additionally, Spearman rank correlation test demonstrated that CD155 expression was positively associated with vascular endothelial growth factor (
=0.481,
<0.001) and microvessel density (
=0.442,
<0.001) in CCA tissues. More importantly, CCA patients with high CD155 expression had a markedly shorter overall survival (
<0.001) and disease-free survival (
<0.001) after surgical resection, and multivariate analysis showed that high CD155 expression was an independent poor prognostic predictor of overall survival and disease-free survival (
<0.001).
Our results revealed that upregulated CD155 correlated with aggressive clinicopathologic characteristics, angiogenesis, and poor prognosis in CCA and may be a promising prognostic biomarker for the CCA patients.
Cancer cells acquire genetic heterogeneity to escape from immune surveillance during tumor evolution, but a systematic approach to distinguish driver from passenger mutations is lacking. Here we ...investigate the impact of different immune pressure on tumor clonal dynamics and immune evasion mechanism, by combining massive parallel sequencing of immune edited tumors and CRISPR library screens in syngeneic mouse tumor model and co-culture system. We find that the core microRNA (miRNA) biogenesis and targeting machinery maintains the sensitivity of cancer cells to PD-1-independent T cell-mediated cytotoxicity. Genetic inactivation of the machinery or re-introduction of ANKRD52 frequent patient mutations dampens the JAK-STAT-interferon-γ signaling and antigen presentation in cancer cells, largely by abolishing miR-155-targeted silencing of suppressor of cytokine signaling 1 (SOCS1). Expression of each miRNA machinery component strongly correlates with intratumoral T cell infiltration in nearly all human cancer types. Our data indicate that the evolutionarily conserved miRNA pathway can be exploited by cancer cells to escape from T cell-mediated elimination and immunotherapy.
The symbiosis system comprising eukaryotic hosts, intracellular bacterium
Wolbachia
, and temperate bacteriophages WO is widely spread through nearly half the number of arthropod species. The ...relationships between the three components of the system are extremely intricate. Even though the bacteriophage WO can have diverse influences on the ecology and evolution of
Wolbachia
, little is known about the distribution and evolution of the phages. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to report that in infected fig wasps (
Ceratosolen solmsi
,
Kradibia gibbosae
, and
Wiebesia pumilae
), the genomes of all the
Wolbachia
strains had only one cryptic WO prophage, which contained defects in the genomic structural modules. This phenomenon was contrary to the widely accepted understanding that
Wolbachia
with cryptic prophages usually possesses at least one intact WO prophage consisting of gene sequences of the head, baseplate, and tail modules, through which the prophage could form intact virions. In addition to the genetic structure features, the phylogenetic relationships of WO and
Wolbachia
also revealed that bacteriophage WO can horizontally spread among a certain genus or a group of insect hosts, nearly free from the restriction of the affiliation of
Wolbachia
. Combined with the vertical transmission along with
Wolbachia
, the wide spread of WO phages can be explained. Furthermore, the gender preference and functional module preference for transcriptional activity of the genes in cryptic WOs implied the antagonized coevolutionary pattern between WO prophages and their
Wolbachia
hosts.
Nanoemulsions can be used for transporting pharmaceutical phytochemicals in skin-care products because of their stability and rapid permeation properties. However, droplet size may be a critical ...factor aiding permeation through skin and transdermal delivery efficiency. We prepared d-limonene nanoemulsions with various droplet sizes by ultrasonic emulsification using mixed surfactants of sorbitane trioleate and polyoxyethylene (20) oleyl ether under different hydrophilic–lipophilic balance (HLB) values. Droplet size decreased with increasing HLB value. With HLB 12, the droplet size was 23nm, and the encapsulated ratio peaked at 92.3%. Transmission electron microscopy revealed spherical droplets and the gray parts were d-limonene precipitation incorporated in spherical droplets of the emulsion system. Franz diffusion cell was used to evaluate the permeation of d-limonene nanoemulsion through rat abdominal skin; the permeation rate depended on droplet size. The emulsion with the lowest droplet size (54nm) achieved the maximum permeation rate. The concentration of d-limonene in the skin was 40.11μL/cm2 at the end of 360min. Histopathology revealed no distinct voids or empty spaces in the epidermal region of permeated rat skin, so the d-limonene nanoemulsion may be a safe carrier for transdermal drug delivery.
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