Thin-film composite membranes formed by conventional interfacial polymerization generally suffer from the depth heterogeneity of the polyamide layer, i.e., nonuniformly distributed free volume pores, ...leading to the inefficient permselectivity. Here, we demonstrate a facile and versatile approach to tune the nanoscale homogeneity of polyamide-based thin-film composite membranes via inorganic salt-mediated interfacial polymerization process. Molecular dynamics simulations and various characterization techniques elucidate in detail the underlying molecular mechanism by which the salt addition confines and regulates the diffusion of amine monomers to the water-oil interface and thus tunes the nanoscale homogeneity of the polyamide layer. The resulting thin-film composite membranes with thin, smooth, dense, and structurally homogeneous polyamide layers demonstrate a permeance increment of ~20-435% and/or solute rejection enhancement of ~10-170% as well as improved antifouling property for efficient reverse/forward osmosis and nanofiltration separations. This work sheds light on the tunability of the polyamide layer homogeneity via salt-regulated interfacial polymerization process.
Aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) has been shown to be involved in early observations of depression. The aim of this study was to determine if serum levels of miRNA-451a, miRNA-34a-5p, and ...miRNA-221-3p can serve as indicators of disease progression or therapeutic efficacy in depression. We collected data from 84 depressed patients and 78 control volunteers recruited from the medical staff at the West China Hospital. Depression severity was rated using the 24-item Hamilton Depression Scale (HAMD). Serum miRNA-451a, miRNA-34a-5p, and miRNA-221-3p levels were determined in samples from the depressed patients before and 8 weeks after antidepressant treatment as well as in samples from controls. Compared with the controls, the patients had lower miRNA-451a levels, higher miRNA-34a-5p and miRNA-221-3p levels, and increased HAMD scores whether they underwent antidepressant treatment or not. Eight weeks after antidepressant treatment, the patients exhibited increased miRNA-451a levels, decreased miRNA-34a-5p and miRNA-221-3p levels, and reduced HAMD scores. The serum level of miRNA-451a was negatively correlated with HAMD scores of the patients, while the serum levels of miRNA-34a-5p and miRNA-221-3p were positively correlated with HAMD scores whether the patients underwent antidepressant treatment or not. Paroxetine was markedly effective in 50 patients who also displayed an increased level of miRNA-451a but reduced levels of miRNA-34a-5p and miRNA-221-3p. In contrast, paroxetine was moderately effective or ineffective in 34 patients. In conclusion, depressed patients had lower serum miRNA-451a but higher serum miRNA-34a-5p and miRNA-221-3p, and these miRNAs are potential predictors of the efficacy of antidepressants.
This study aims to investigate the role of IGF-1 in chronic-stress induced depression through the PI3K/Akt/FoxO3a pathway. A rat model of chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) was established. In ...total, 48 rats were randomized into control (normal rats), CUMS (CUMS modeled rats) and CUMS + IGF-1 (injection of IGF-1 before CUMS modeling) groups. Body weight, horizontal (number of horizontal crossing) and vertical activity (rearing times), and sucrose consumption were identified one day before and after the open-field test. The mRNA and protein expression of PI3K, Akt, FoxO3a and Bim in the hippocampus was measured by RT-qPCR and Western blotting, respectively. Compared with the control group, a lower body weight, a decreased number of horizontal crossings, reduced rearing times and lower sucrose consumption were observed in the CUMS and CUMS + IGF-1 groups after the test. However, a higher body weight, number of horizontal crossings, rearing times and sucrose consumption were found in the CUMS + IGF-1 group than those in the CUMS group. Compared with the control group, mRNA and protein expression of PI3K, Akt and FoxO3a was decreased, and Bim mRNA and protein expression was increased in the CUMS + IGF-1 and CUMS groups. Meanwhile, in comparison to the CUMS group, mRNA and protein expression of PI3K, Akt and FoxO3a was elevated, and Bim mRNA and protein expression was reduced in the CUMS + IGF-1 group. The results suggested that IGF-1 exerted an antidepressant-like effect on chronic-stress induced depression through the PI3K/Akt/FoxO3a pathway.
For the quality of the fused outcome is determined by the amount of the information captured from the source images, thus, a multi-modal medical image fusion method is developed in the ...shift-invariant shearlet transform (SIST) domain. The two-state Hidden Markov Tree (HMT) model is extended into the SIST domain to describe the dependent relationships of the SIST coefficients of the cross-scale and inter-subbands. Base on the model, we explain why the conventional Average–Maximum fusion scheme is not the best rule for medical image fusion, and therefore a new scheme is developed, where the probability density function and standard deviation of the SIST coefficients are employed to calculate the fused coefficients. Finally, the fused image is obtained by directly applying the inverse SIST. Integrating the SIST and the HMT model, more spatial feature information of the singularities and more functional information contents can be preserved and transferred into the fused results. Visual and statistical analyses demonstrate that the fusion quality can be significantly improved over that of five typical methods in terms of entropy and mutual information, edgeinformation, standarddeviation, peak signal to noise and structural similarity. Besides, color distortion can be suppressed to a great extent, providing a better visual sense.
Lung stem cells are instructed to produce lineage-specific progeny through unknown factors in their microenvironment. We used clonal 3D cocultures of endothelial cells and distal lung stem cells, ...bronchioalveolar stem cells (BASCs), to probe the instructive mechanisms. Single BASCs had bronchiolar and alveolar differentiation potential in lung endothelial cell cocultures. Gain- and loss-of-function experiments showed that BMP4-Bmpr1a signaling triggers calcineurin/NFATc1-dependent expression of thrombospondin-1 (Tsp1) in lung endothelial cells to drive alveolar lineage-specific BASC differentiation. Tsp1 null mice exhibited defective alveolar injury repair, confirming a crucial role for the BMP4-NFATc1-TSP1 axis in lung epithelial differentiation and regeneration in vivo. Discovery of this pathway points to methods to direct the derivation of specific lung epithelial lineages from multipotent cells. These findings elucidate a pathway that may be a critical target in lung diseases and provide tools to understand the mechanisms of respiratory diseases at the single-cell level.
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•Lung endothelial cells control lung stem cell differentiation•In vitro expansion and multilineage differentiation of single lung stem cells•Endothelial TSP1 is required for alveolar differentiation and lung regeneration•BMP4 induces lung-specific, calcineurin/NFATc1-dependent TSP1 expression
3D organoid lung cultures reveal a mechanism by which lung endothelial cells instruct lung stem cells to differentiate into a particular lineage, opening up potential avenues for stimulating these stem cells in response to respiratory-disease-associated injury.
Most of the traditional medical image fusion methods that use the multi-scale decomposition schemes suffer from the bad image representations and the loss of the dependency in different highpass ...subbands. To deal with these problems, a novel dependency model, named Explicit Generalized Gaussian Density Dependency (EGGDD) model, is developed by the shift-invariant shearlet transform (SIST). Substantially different from describing the dependency by two hidden states in the Hidden Markov Tree (HMT) model, we provide the scheme to explicitly describe the marginal statistics of each highpass subband using the Generalized Gaussian Density (GGD), as well as the dependency between different subbands by the Kullback–Leibler distance (KLD). After embedding the obtained dependency into each highpass subband, an efficient fusion scheme, inspired by the divisive normalization response in the V1 visual cortex model, is developed to combine the highpass-subband coefficients. The experiments demonstrate that the developed method can produce better fusion results than those of some existing methods by the comparison of visual sense and quantitative measurements in terms of mutual information, entropy, spatial frequency, standard deviation, QAB/F and QW.
Centrifugal partition chromatography in the pH‐zone‐refining mode was successfully applied to the separation of alkaloids from the crude extract of Corydalis decumbens. The experiment was performed ...with a two‐phase solvent system composed of petroleum ether‐ethyl acetate‐ethanol‐water (5:5:3:7, v/v/v/v) where triethylamine (10 mM) was added to the stationary phase and hydrochloric acid (10 mM) to the mobile phase. From 1.6 g of the crude extract, 43 mg protopine, 189 mg (+)‐egenine, and 158 mg tetrahydropalmatine were obtained with a purity of 98.2%, 94.6%, and 96.7%, respectively. Tetrahydropalmatine showed an interesting anticomplement effect with CH50 0.11 and AP50 0.25 mg/mL, respectively. In a mechanistic study, tetrahydropalmatine interacted with C1, C3, C4, and C5 components in the complement activation cascade.
Mulberry leaf is a common vegetable with a variety of beneficial effects, such as hypoglycemic activity. However, the underlying mechanism of its hypoglycemic effect have not been fully revealed. In ...this study, two flavonoid derivatives were isolated from mulberry leaves, a new geranylated flavonoid compound (1) and its structural analogue (2). The structures of compounds 1 and 2 were elucidated using spectroscopic analysis. To study the potential hypoglycemic properties of these compounds, their regulatory effects on protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) were investigated. In comparison to oleanolic acid, compounds 1 and 2 showed significant inhibitory activities (IC50 = 4.53 ± 0.31 and 10.53 ± 1.76 μM) against PTP1B, the positive control (IC50 = 7.94 ± 0.76 μM). Molecular docking predicted the binding sites of compound 1 to PTP1B. In insulin-resistance HepG2 cell, compound 1 promoted glucose consumption in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, western blot and polymerase chain reaction analyses indicated that compound 1 might regulate glucose consumption through the PTP1B/IRS/PI3K/AKT pathway. In conclusion, geranylated flavonoids in mulberry leaves inhibite PTP1B and increase the glucose consumption in insulin-resistant cells. These findings provide an important basis for the use of mulberry leaf flavonoids as a dietary supplement to regulate glucose metabolism.
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