In order to study the electrochemical corrosion law for the 13Cr stainless-steel tubing material in a high-speed Cl-containing liquid, a high-speed-flow experiment and a small three-electrode system, ...embedded in a small pipe, were used. The open circuit potential (OCP), polarization curve (PC) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) of the stainless-steel surface were tested in a medium with a flow velocity ranging from 10 to 22 m/s containing 1 w/% and 2 w/% of NaCl. By comparing it with the changes in the electrochemical-reaction parameters of the material in distilled water, the results of the experiment including the critical flow velocity, the change of corrosion rate and the electrochemical-reaction control steps were obtained. By theoretically solving the frictional force of the liquid against the wall surface and the adsorption capacity of the oxide film, and assuming that the oxide film is a macromolecular combination, the relationship between the adsorption capacity of different surface films and the critical flow velocity in the high-speed pipe flow was established. The results of this experiment and calculation can provide a preliminary prediction of the critical flow velocity corresponding to the inflection point of the wall-surface corrosion rate in an industrial pipe flow, thereby improving the process parameters and reducing the wall damage.
To achieve fiber optic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors for disposable immunoassays, the following activities are required: first, to manufacture highly consistent fiber optic SPR sensors; ...second, to develop highly reproducible and reliable surface modification methods for the sensors; third, to establish methods of analysis and evaluation to determine the capability and reliability of biomolecular detection. In this work, we prepared microprobe-type fiber optic SPR sensors and selected highly consistent sensors according to the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) model. To obtain reliable surface modification, carbon disulfide (CS2) was introduced as a crosslinker to modify anti-human IgG on the surface of fiber optic SPR biosensors for the first time. After systematic improvement and optimization, the CS2-based biosensors obtained a higher human IgG sensitivity and lower human IgG detection limit than conventional (11-MUA)-based biosensors. The PCC model was employed to evaluate the consistency of the surface-functionalized biosensors, and experimental results showed that the CS2-based biosensors exhibited reliable consistency, while the (11-MUA)-based biosensors did not. Finally, the proposed CS2-based biosensors have high selectivity and work well in serum. The surface modification method and reliable and consistency evaluation model for the sensors reported in this paper can contribute to the development of disposable fiber optic SPR biosensors.
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•A highly reproducible and microprobe-type fiber optic SPR biosensors modified by CS2 for disposable immunoassays is proposed.•The PCC model is first introduced into fiber optic SPR biosensors for the evaluation of capability and reliability.•The proposed CS2-based biosensors obtained a higher sensitivity and lower LOD than conventional (11-MUA)-based biosensors.•The proposed CS2-based biosensors have high selectivity and maintain the same level of sensitive detection in serum.
Previous work exhibited different brain grey matter volume (GMV) changes between patients with early adult onset depression (EOD, age 18-29) and later adult onset depression (LOD, age 30-44) by using ...30-year-old as the cut-off age. To identify whether regional homogeneity (ReHo) changes are also different between EOD and LOD by using same cut-off age, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect the abnormal ReHo between patients with EOD and LOD in the present study.
Resting-state fMRI scans of 58 patients with EOD, 62 patients with LOD, 60 young healthy controls (HC), and 52 old HC were obtained. The ReHo approach was used to analyze the images.
The ANOVA analysis revealed that the ReHo values in the frontoparietal, occipital, and cerebellar regions were significantly different among the four groups. Relative to patients with LOD, patients with EOD displayed significantly increased ReHo in the left precuneus, and decreased ReHo in the right fusiform. The ReHo values in the left precuneus and the right fusiform had no significant correlation with the score of the depression rating scale or illness duration in both patient subgroups. Compared to young HC, patients with EOD showed significantly increased ReHo in the right frontoparietal regions and the right calcarine. Furthermore, the increased ReHo in the right frontoparietal regions, right insula and left hippocampus, and decreased ReHo in the left inferior occipital gyrus, right middle occipital gyrus, left calcarine, and left supplementary motor area were observed in patients with LOD when compared to old HC.
The ReHo of brain areas that were related to mood regulation was changed in the first-episode, drug-naive adult patients with MDD. Adult patients with EOD and LOD exhibited different ReHo abnormalities relative to each age-matched comparison group, suggesting that depressed adult patients with different age-onset might have different pathological mechanism.
Background
Malnutrition and subsequent alterations in body composition (BC), particularly sarcopenia, are common but not yet elucidated in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD); we aimed to ...detail the changes in BC and the characteristics of co‐occurrence of malnutrition and sarcopenia in IBD patients and to investigate its effect on quality of life.
Methods
This study was a multicentre, prospective, observational study involving four tertiary referral hospitals in China. The following data were collected from consecutive IBD inpatients: demographic information, medical history, recent weight change, handgrip strength (HGS) and BC parameters by bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). Nutritional assessments were performed through stepwise screening (Nutritional Risk Screening 2002) and diagnosis (World Health Organization‐related body mass index BMI, subjective global assessment, European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism 2015 and Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition GLIM criteria). The quality of life was assessed by the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire. IBD patients were compared with 1:1 sex‐, age‐ and BMI‐matched healthy controls (MHC).
Results
A total of 238 IBD patients (177 Crohn's disease CD and 61 ulcerative colitis UC), 68.5% male, with a mean age of 38.5 ± 14.0 years and a mean BMI of 19.8 ± 3.5 kg/m2, were recruited. Compared with MHC (n = 122), IBD patients showed significant deterioration in BC and physical function, characterized by muscle depletion (appendicular skeletal muscle mass index ASMI, 8.0 ± 1.3 vs. 6.7 ± 1.2 kg/m2, Δ% −15.0% −22.0%, −10.0%, P < 0.001) and fat accumulation (visceral fat area, 32.9 ± 22.6 vs. 66.5 ± 35.8, Δ% 110.0% 35.0%, 201.0%, P < 0.001). The prevalence of GLIM‐defined malnutrition and sarcopenia in IBD patients was 60.1% and 25.2%, respectively. The nutritional status of patients with CD was worse than that of patients with UC. The activity phase of IBD significantly and negatively affected BC, while the lesion location did not. The co‐occurrence of sarcopenia and malnutrition was not optimistic; 16.4–21.8% of patients suffer from sarcopenia and malnutrition based on different criteria at the same time, which was accompanied by a reduction in quality of life. HGS was correlated with various BC parameters (body cell mass, r = 0.76; ASMI, r = 0.70; fat‐free mass, r = 0.73, all P < 0.001).
Conclusions
GLIM‐defined malnutrition and sarcopenia were prevalent in IBD patients and kept a high rate of co‐occurrence, which was accompanied with impaired quality of life. The alteration of BC in IBD patients was characterized by muscle depletion and fat accumulation. The strong correlation between HGS and BIA‐derived BC suggested its hopeful evaluation in nutritional status and sarcopenia in IBD patients.
Aluminum-ion battery (AIB) is intriguing for electrochemical power sources due to its potentially high capacity and high safety. However, the most investigated graphitic and metal dichalcogenide ...cathode materials normally possess moderate capacity and inferior cycling stability, respectively, which limit the performance of current AIBs. Here, we develop a polyaniline (PANI)/ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) composite as a cathode material of AIB using chloroaluminate ionic liquid as an electrolyte. During the charging/discharging process, two obvious platforms are observed at high voltages of 1.1 V and 1.5–1.7 V. The PANI/OMC cathode exhibits outstanding performance in terms of high specific capacity (140 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1), good rate performance (118 mAh g−1 at 2000 mA g−1) and excellent cycling stability (only 12% loss of capacity after 5000 cycles). Based on the ex-situ characterizations, the charge storage of PANI is found to be via the doping/de-doping of anions such as AlCl4−.
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•The PANI/OMC cathode shows outstanding electrochemical performance in AIBs.•The ex-situ characterizations reveal the charge storage mechanism.•The charge storage in PANI is by the doping/de-doping of anions such as AlCl4−.•The synthetic strategy can be extended to other conductive polymers.
The Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) has recently been proposed as a consensus criterion for identifying malnutrition. However, data on the application of GLIM criteria in patients ...with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are limited. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the validity of this neoteric criterion for identifying malnutrition and investigate the association between malnutrition and quality of life (QoL) in patients with IBD.
This multicenter, prospective, observational study assessed hospitalized patients with IBD at four general hospitals. Nutritional status was evaluated using criteria from the World Health Organization (WHO) related body mass index (BMI) cut-off value, Subjective Global Assessment (SGA), European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism (ESPEN) criteria of malnutrition in 2015, and GLIM criteria. Kappa (K) values were calculated to determine interrater validity and consistency among different prevalence of malnutrition. Patients’ QoL was assessed by the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ).
A total of 238 hospitalized patients with IBD were enrolled, with a mean age of 38.5 ± 14.0 years, 68.5% of them were male, and 177 with Crohn's disease (CD). Among all patients, 39.5% were underweight (BMI < 18.5 kg/m2), and the prevalence of malnutrition was 66.0%, 47.5%, and 60.1% according to SGA, ESPEN, and GLIM criteria, respectively. Moreover, the prevalence of malnutrition was significantly higher among patients with CD than those with ulcerative colitis (UC), according to GLIM criteria (69.5% vs. 32.8%, p < 0.001). The GLIM criteria showed a substantial concordance with ESPEN criteria (K = 0.67, 95% confidence interval CI 0.58–0.76, p < 0.001), and a fair concordance with the SGA (K = 0.57, 95% CI 0.46–0.68, p < 0.001) and WHO criteria (K = 0.52, 95% CI 0.43–0.62, p < 0.001). An impairment in the nutritional status was accompanied by a progressive reduction in the patients' QoL.
The prevalence of malnutrition is high in patients with IBD. The GLIM criteria may be an appropriate and effective tool to identify malnutrition in the IBD populations due to its substantial concordance with ESPEN and a fair concordance with SGA and WHO-related BMI. GLIM-defined malnutrition showed an enormous adverse impact on patients’ QoL.
Incorporating two pyrrole subunits at the bay positions of perylene-diimide has been a long-pursued goal since 2009, but it has not been achieved due to high strain. Herein, via one step ...Buchwald–Hartwig reaction, PDI-2N was successfully generated with a bowl depth of 1.52 Å. Though with electron-rich pyrrole embedding, PDI-2N’s radical anion and dianion were facilely prepared and were investigated both experimentally and theoretically. Moreover, PDI-2N crystallized in different manners under distinct conditions, and it formed tubular crystals with infinite two-directional columnar stacking under DMF conditions. This finding develops a dream bowl-shaped PDI derivative that holds great promise in organoelectronics.
Hard-to-transfect cells are cells that are known to present special difficulties in intracellular delivery of exogenous entities. However, the special transport behaviors underlying the special ...delivery problem in these cells have so far not been examined carefully. Here, we combine single-particle motion analysis, cell biology studies, and mathematical modeling to investigate nanoparticle transport in bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs), a technologically important type of hard-to-transfect cells. Tat peptide-conjugated quantum dots (QDs-Tat) were used as the model nanoparticles. Two different yet complementary single-particle methods, namely, pair-correlation function and single-particle tracking, were conducted on the same cell samples and on the same viewing stage of a confocal microscope. Our results reveal significant differences in each individual step of transport of QDs-Tat in BMSCs vs a commonly used model cell line, HeLa cells. Single-particle motion analysis demonstrates that vesicle escape and cytoplasmic diffusion are dramatically more difficult in BMSCs than in HeLa cells. Cell biology studies show that BMSCs use different biological pathways for the cellular uptake, vesicular transport, and exocytosis of QDs-Tat than HeLa cells. A reaction–diffusion–advection model is employed to mathematically integrate the individual steps of cellular transport and can be used to predict and design nanoparticle delivery in BMSCs. This work provides dissective, quantitative, and mechanistic understandings of nanoparticle transport in BMSCs. The investigative methods described in this work can help to guide the tailored design of nanoparticle-based delivery in specific types and subtypes of hard-to-transfect cells.
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common malignant male neoplasm in the American male population. Our prior studies have demonstrated that protein phosphatase 1 regulatory subunit 12A (PPP1R12A) ...could be an efficient prognostic factor in patients with PCa, promoting further investigation. The present study attempted to construct a gene signature based on PPP1R12A and metabolism-related genes to predict the prognosis of PCa patients.
The mRNA expression profiles of 499 tumor and 52 normal tissues were extracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. We selected differentially expressed PPP1R12A-related genes among these mRNAs. Tandem affinity purification-mass spectrometry was used to identify the proteins that directly interact with PPP1R12A. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was used to extract metabolism-related genes. Univariate Cox regression analysis and a random survival forest algorithm were used to confirm optimal genes to build a prognostic risk model.
We identified a five-gene signature (
,
,
,
, and
) that was associated with PPP1R12A and metabolism in PCa, which effectively predicted disease-free survival (DFS) and biochemical relapse-free survival (BRFS). Moreover, the signature was validated by two internal datasets from TCGA and one external dataset from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO).
The five-gene signature is an effective potential factor to predict the prognosis of PCa, classifying PCa patients into high- and low-risk groups, which might provide potential novel treatment strategies for these patients.
Little is known about the pathological mechanism of early adult onset depression (EOD) and later adult onset depression (LOD). We seek to determine whether grey matter volume (GMV) change in EOD and ...LOD are different, which could also delineate EOD and LOD.
In present study, 147 first-episode, drug-naive patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), age between 18 and 45, were divided into two groups on the basis of age of MDD onset: the early adult onset group (age 18-29) and the later adult onset group (age 30-44), and a total of 130 gender-, and age-, matched healthy controls (HC) were also divided into two groups which fit for each patient group. Magnetic resonance imaging was conducted on all subjects. The voxel-based morphometry (VBM) approach was employed to analyze the images.
Widespread abnormalities of GMV throughout parietal, temporal, limbic regions, occipital cortex and cerebellum were observed in MDD patients. Compare to young HC, reduced GMV in right fusiform gyrus, right middle temporal gyrus, vermis III and increased GMV in right middle occipital gyrus were seen in the EOD group. In contrast, relative to old HC, decreased GMV in the right hippocampus and increased GMV in the left middle temporal gyrus were observed in the LOD group. Compared to the LOD group, the EOD group had smaller GMV in right posterior cingulate cortex. There was no significant correlation between GMV of the right posterior cingulate cortex and the score of the depression rating scale in patients group.
The GMV of the brain areas that were related to mood regulation was decreased in the first-episode, drug-naive adult patients with MDD. Adult patients with EOD and LOD exhibited different GMV changes relative to each age-matched comparison group, suggesting depressed adult patients with different age-onset might have different pathological mechanism.
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