Exosomes, naturally derived nanovesicles secreted from various cell types, can serve as an effective platform for the delivery of various cargoes, because of their intrinsic ability such as long ...blood circulation and immune escapinge. However, unlike conventional synthetic nanoparticles, drug release from exosomes at defined targets is not controllable. Moreover, endowing exosomes with satisfactory cancer‐targeting ability is highly challenging. Here, for the first time, a biological and synthetic hybrid designer exosome is described with photoresponsive functionalities based on a donor cell‐assisted membrane modification strategy. Practically, the designer exosome effectively accumulates at target tumor sites via dual ligand‐mediated endocytosis. Then the localized hyperthermia induced by the conjunct gold nanorods under near‐infrared irradiation impacts the permeability of exosome membrane to enhance drug release from exosomes, thus inhibiting tumor relapse in a programmable manner. The designer exosome combines the merits of both synthetic materials and the natural nanovesicles. It not only preserves the intrinsic functionalities of native exosome, but also gains multiple abilities for efficient tumor targeting, controlled release, and thermal therapy like synthetic nanocarriers. The versatile designer exosome can provide functional platforms by engineering with more multifarious functionalities from synthetic materials to achieve individualized precise cancer therapy in the future.
A biological and synthetic hybrid designer exosome is presented with photoresponsive functionalities based on a donor cell‐assisted membrane modification strategy. The dual ligand engineered exosomes are shown to significantly increase accumulation at the target tumor site and can burst release drug under controllable near‐infrared irradiation in vitro and in vivo.
A novel core-shell nanocomposite of hollow carbon spheres coated with needle-like polyaniline (denoted by HCS@PANI) was prepared and used for rapid determination of malathion. The fabricated ...electrochemical biosensor showed high sensitivity and low detection limit of 0.16pgmL−1 within a linear range from 1.0ngmL−1 to 10μgmL−1 of the malathion concentration, as well as high selectivity, acceptable stability, and good reproducibility.
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•Hollow carbon spheres@polyaniline core-shell nanocomposite (HCS@PANI) was prepared.•HCS@PANI was anchored with AChE to construct electrochemical inhibition biosensor.•Low detection limit and wide linear range of malathion were obtained.•High selectivity, stability, and applicability of the electrochemical biosensor.
A novel electrochemical biosensor was constructed by anchoring acetylcholine esterase (AChE) onto the core-shell nanostructured composite of hollow carbon spheres coated with needle-like polyaniline (denoted by HCS@PANI), and used for rapid determination of malathion, which was established based on the chemisorption/desorption process of AChE used as an indicator. The uniformly distributed HCS was wrapped with the needle-like PANI nanowires to form the HCS@PANI nanocomposite, which not only exhibits high specific surface area and chemical functionality but also possesses strong electrochemical activity. After AChE was adsorbed onto the HCS@PANI nanocomposite, the electrochemical catalysis of AChE/HCS@PANI-based biosensor towards acetylthiocholine chloride (ATCl) was inhibited in the presence of malathion, which was applied to detect malathion, and the biosensor exhibited a low detection limit of 0.16ngmL−1 within a linear range from 1.0ngmL−1 to 10μgmL−1 of the malathion concentration. Also, the results suggested that the developed electrochemical biosensor showed high selectivity, good reproducibility, and applicability for malathion detection, indicating that the proposed method using the HCS@PANI nanocomposite as the sensitive layer for the AChE immobilization and catalysis of ATCl has potential application in high-sensitive pesticide determinations.
RNAi therapeutics are believed to be the future of personalized medicine and have shown promise in early clinical trials. However, many physiological barriers exist in the systemic delivery of siRNAs ...to the cytoplasm of targeted cells to perform their function. To overcome these barriers, many siRNA delivery systems have been developed. Among these, lipid-based nanoparticles have great potential owing to their biocompatibility and low toxicity in comparison with inorganic nanoparticles and viral systems. This review discusses the hurdles of systemic siRNA delivery and highlights the recent progress made in lipid-based nanoparticles, which are categorized based on their key lipid components, including cationic lipid, lipoprotein, lipidoid, neutral lipid and anionic lipid-based nanoparticles. It is expected that these lipid nanoparticle-based siRNA delivery systems will have an enabling role for personalized cancer medicine, where siRNA delivery will join forces with genetic profiling of individual patients to achieve the best treatment outcome.
Clays are widely used in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering applications and it is crucial to understand its behaviour for the dynamic field conditions. The presence of a temperature ...gradient across clayey soils that exhibit semi-permeable membrane (or osmotic) behaviour may promote a number of complex processes, including thermal expansion or consolidation, thermally induced osmosis, thermal diffusion, along with other flow and deformation processes. Chemical-osmosis and chemico-osmotic consolidation that are significant in isothermal conditions are also affected by temperature. Publications on chemical-osmosis, and to some extent thermo-osmosis behaviour of semi-permeable clays under coupled conditions are widely available. However, studies that include the influence of both thermo-osmosis and chemical-osmosis together are rare. In this paper, a fully coupled numerical model is presented to study the effects of both osmotic processes on thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical behaviour of semi-permeable clays. Solute spread in a landfill clay liner is investigated under the combined influence of mechanical, thermal, and chemical loading. Model results show that the clay deformation is sensitive to thermo-osmosis; and the effects of thermo-osmotic consolidation, excess pore water dissipation, and the overall settlement increases with temperature. Variation of the source temperature from 40 °C to 80 °C yielded an increase of 11.3% of the peak soil settlement. Significant contribution of thermo-osmosis on solute transport is noticed in this study and ignoring the process substantially deviate from the realism. Up to 80% overprediction of cadmium spread is observed in the clay liner when the thermo-osmotic processes are neglected.
•Non-isothermal coupled model is presented to study semipermeable clay behaviours.•Combined effects of mechanical loading, chemical, thermo-osmosis are investigated.•Thermo-osmotic consolidation significantly influences the overall soil settlement.•Solute transport is overpredicted when thermal-volume-change behaviour is ignored.
For centrosymmetric materials such as monolayer graphene, no optical second-harmonic generation (SHG) is generally expected, because it is forbidden under the electric-dipole approximation. Yet we ...observe a strong, doping-induced SHG from graphene, with its highest strength comparable to the electric-dipole-allowed SHG in noncentrosymmetric 2D materials. This novel SHG has the nature of an electric-quadrupole response, arising from the effective breaking of inversion symmetry by optical dressing with an in-plane photon wave vector. More remarkably, the SHG is widely tuned by carrier doping or chemical potential, being sharply enhanced at Fermi-edge resonances but vanishing at the charge neutral point that manifests the electron-hole symmetry of massless Dirac fermions. This striking behavior in graphene, which should also arise in graphenelike Dirac materials, expands the scope of nonlinear optics and holds the promise of novel optoelectronic and photonic applications.
Metal nanoparticles (NPs) are widely used in daily life and commercial activities owing to their unique physicochemical properties. Consequently, there is an increasing risk of daily and occupational ...exposure to metal NPs, which raises concerns regarding their health hazards. Programmed cell deaths (PCDs) have been clarified to be involved in metal NP-induced cytotoxicity, including apoptosis, autophagy, and pyroptosis. However, whether and how ferroptosis, a newly recognized PCD, contributes to metal NP-induced cell death remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the ferroptotic effects of two representative metal NPs, silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), on macrophages in vitro. Our results revealed that AgNPs, rather than AuNPs, induced non-apoptotic PCD, accompanied by lipid peroxidation and iron homeostasis disorders, which are two hallmarks of ferroptosis, in macrophages. Treatment with a ferroptosis inhibitor (ferrostatin-1) and iron chelator (deferoxamine) reversed AgNP-induced PCD, corroborating the induction of ferroptosis upon exposure to AgNPs. Moreover, our results revealed that smaller AgNPs elicited greater ferroptotic effects on macrophages than larger ones. Importantly, ferroptosis in AgNP-treated macrophages was mainly triggered by AgNPs per se rather than by Ag ions. Overall, our study highlights the ferroptotic effects elicited by AgNPs in macrophages, which will promote the understanding of their cytotoxic effects and facilitate the safer design of metal nanoproducts.
•Ferroptosis played a key role in AgNP-induced cytotoxicity in macrophages.•Upon AgNP11Highlights Point 3: Ag nanoparticles rather than released Ag ions induced ferroptosis in macrophages.-exposure, cellular Fe2+ was increased, and the LPO and cell death were iron-dependent.
Essential proteins are distinctly important for an organism's survival and development and crucial to disease analysis and drug design as well. Large-scale protein-protein interaction (PPI) data sets ...exist in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which provides us with a valuable opportunity to predict identify essential proteins from PPI networks. Many network topology-based computational methods have been designed to detect essential proteins. However, these methods are limited by the completeness of available PPI data. To break out of these restraints, some computational methods have been proposed by integrating PPI networks and multi-source biological data. Despite the progress in the research of multiple data fusion, it is still challenging to improve the prediction accuracy of the computational methods.
In this paper, we design a novel iterative model for essential proteins prediction, named Randomly Walking in the Heterogeneous Network (RWHN). In RWHN, a weighted protein-protein interaction network and a domain-domain association network are constructed according to the original PPI network and the known protein-domain association network, firstly. And then, we establish a new heterogeneous matrix by combining the two constructed networks with the protein-domain association network. Based on the heterogeneous matrix, a transition probability matrix is established by normalized operation. Finally, an improved PageRank algorithm is adopted on the heterogeneous network for essential proteins prediction. In order to eliminate the influence of the false negative, information on orthologous proteins and the subcellular localization information of proteins are integrated to initialize the score vector of proteins. In RWHN, the topology, conservative and functional features of essential proteins are all taken into account in the prediction process. The experimental results show that RWHN obviously exceeds in predicting essential proteins ten other competing methods.
We demonstrated that integrating multi-source data into a heterogeneous network can preserve the complex relationship among multiple biological data and improve the prediction accuracy of essential proteins. RWHN, our proposed method, is effective for the prediction of essential proteins.
A three dimensional (3D) nanostructured composite based on the self-assembly of MoS2 nanospheres and polyaniline (PANI) loaded on reduced graphene oxide (denoted by 3D MoS2-PANI/rGO) was prepared via ...a feasible one-pot hydrothermal process. The 3D MoS2-PANI/rGO nanocomposite not only exhibits good functionality and bioaffinity but also displays high electrochemical catalytic activity. As such, the developed 3D MoS2-PANI/rGO nanocomposite can be employed as the sensing platform for simultaneously detecting small biomolecules, i.e., ascorbic acid (AA), dopamine (DA), and uric acid (UA). The peak currents obtained from the differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) measurements depended linearly on the concentrations in the wide range from 50 μM to 8.0 mM, 5.0 to 500 μM, and 1.0 to 500 μM, giving low detection limits of 22.20, 0.70, and 0.36 μM for AA, DA, and UA, respectively. Furthermore, the 3D MoS2-PANI/rGO-based electrochemical sensor also exhibited high selectivity, good reproducibility and stability toward small molecule detection. The present sensing strategy based on 3D MoS2-PANI/rGO suggests a good reliability in the trace determination of electroactive biomolecules.
A triazine-based porous framework can be conveniently prepared as a novel metal-free electrocatalyst, which shows superior bifunctional electrocatalytic activities for both OER and ORR as well as the ...great potential in application for zinc-air battery.
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•Convenient synthesis of a triazine-based porous framework.•Superior electrocatalytic performances for both OER and ORR.•High-efficient metal-free electrocatalyst for Zn-air battery.
A metal-free carbon catalyst, melem-cyanuric acid complex (MCAC), was prepared by hydrogen bonding assembly and further explored as a novel bifunctional electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). The proposed MCAC network presented nanosheet-like structure, nitrogen-rich, and large specific surface area, which are close to the natures of graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) and N-doped reduced graphene oxide (N-rGO), but giving much more defect active sites and regular framework structure. Compared with the g-C3N4, N-rGO and other reported carbon-nitride electrocatalysts, the MCAC nanosheets exhibited a lower overpotential of 1.45 V at a current density of 10 mA cm−2 for OER, along with a higher half-potential of 0.8 V and larger limit current density of −6.0 mA cm−2 for ORR. Density functional theory calculation revealed that the melem N atoms bonded with cyanurate greatly enhanced the OER activity by increasing the interaction between catalysts and intermediates. Furthermore, as a metal-free electrocatalyst, MCAC displayed superior reversible oxygen electrocatalytic activity, giving a small overpotential difference (0.76 V). The rechargeable zinc-air battery with MCAC as the air electrode in a two-electrode configuration showed a high open-circuit potential of 1.383 V and a specific capacity of 613.5 mA h gZn−1 at 10 mA cm−2. This work opens up a new avenue to develop advanced porous solids as metal-free electrocatalysts for the energy storage and conversion applications.
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