The effects of various cross-linking agents on the physicochemical properties of hydroxypropyl distarch phosphate (HPDSP)/polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) composite films prepared by extrusion blowing were ...investigated. Four types of cross-linking agents with multicarboxyl or multihydroxyl structures were used in the preparation of starch/PHA films. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that the citric acid, adipic acid, and borax cross-linked films had a more continuous and homogeneous texture than the films with boric acid. X-ray diffraction (XRD) indicated that the addition of cross-linking agents increased the relative crystallinity of the films, but hindered the formation of intercalated structures in the polymer matrix. The films containing adipic acid exhibited the highest light transmittance and the lowest water vapor and oxygen permeabilities. The films with boric acid showed the highest tensile strength, while the citric acid cross-linked films exhibited the highest elongation at break. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) suggested that the cross-linked films had better thermal stability than the control films. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analysis confirmed that the cross-linking agents participated in the intermolecular interactions of grafting or cross-linking between starch and PHA.
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•Starch/PHA films with different cross-linking agents were prepared by film blowing.•Cross-linking agents addition improved mechanical and barrier properties of films.•Compatibility and thermal stability of films were improved by cross-linking agents.•Grafting or cross-linking occurred in the films as confirmed by XRD and FTIR.•Citric acid and adipic acid are more suitable for preparation of starch/PHA films.
Summary
Syntrophic interaction occurs during anaerobic fermentation of organic substances forming methane as the final product. H2 and formate are known to serve as the electron carriers in this ...process. Recently, it has been shown that direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET) occurs for syntrophic CH4 production from ethanol and acetate. Here, we constructed paddy soil enrichments to determine the involvement of DIET in syntrophic butyrate oxidation and CH4 production. The results showed that CH4 production was significantly accelerated in the presence of nanoFe3O4 in all continuous transfers. This acceleration increased with the increase of nanoFe3O4 concentration but was dismissed when Fe3O4 was coated with silica that insulated the mineral from electrical conduction. NanoFe3O4 particles were found closely attached to the cell surfaces of different morphology, thus bridging cell connections. Molecular approaches, including DNA‐based stable isotope probing, revealed that the bacterial Syntrophomonadaceae and Geobacteraceae, and the archaeal Methanosarcinaceae, Methanocellales and Methanobacteriales, were involved in the syntrophic butyrate oxidation and CH4 production. Among them, the growth of Geobacteraceae strictly relied on the presence of nanoFe3O4 and its electrical conductivity in particular. Other organisms, except Methanobacteriales, were present in enrichments regardless of nanoFe3O4 amendment. Collectively, our study demonstrated that the nanoFe3O4‐facilitated DIET occurred in syntrophic CH4 production from butyrate, and Geobacter species played the key role in this process in the paddy soil enrichments.
Ferroptosis is a newly recognized type of cell death, which is different from traditional necrosis, apoptosis or autophagic cell death. However, the position of ferroptosis in lipopolysaccharide ...(LPS)-induced acute lung injury (ALI) has not been explored intensively so far. In this study, we mainly analyzed the relationship between ferroptosis and LPS-induced ALI.
In this study, a human bronchial epithelial cell line, BEAS-2B, was treated with LPS and ferrostatin-1 (Fer-1, ferroptosis inhibitor). The cell viability was measured using CCK-8. Additionally, the levels of malondialdehyde (MDA), 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), and iron, as well as the protein level of SLC7A11 and GPX4, were measured in different groups. To further confirm the in vitro results, an ALI model was induced by LPS in mice, and the therapeutic action of Fer-1 and ferroptosis level in lung tissues were evaluated.
The cell viability of BEAS-2B was down-regulated by LPS treatment, together with the ferroptosis markers SLC7A11 and GPX4, while the levels of MDA, 4-HNE and total iron were increased by LPS treatment in a dose-dependent manner, which could be rescued by Fer-1. The results of the in vivo experiment also indicated that Fer-1 exerted therapeutic action against LPS-induced ALI, and down-regulated the ferroptosis level in lung tissues.
Our study indicated that ferroptosis has an important role in the progression of LPS-induced ALI, and ferroptosis may become a novel target in the treatment of ALI patients.
Magnetic topological insulators (TI) provide an important material platform to explore quantum phenomena such as quantized anomalous Hall effect and Majorana modes, etc. Their successful material ...realization is thus essential for our fundamental understanding and potential technical revolutions. By realizing a bulk van der Waals material MnBi
Te
with alternating septuple MnBi
Te
and quintuple Bi
Te
layers, we show that it is ferromagnetic in plane but antiferromagnetic along the c axis with an out-of-plane saturation field of ~0.22 T at 2 K. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements and first-principles calculations further demonstrate that MnBi
Te
is a Z
antiferromagnetic TI with two types of surface states associated with the MnBi
Te
or Bi
Te
termination, respectively. Additionally, its superlattice nature may make various heterostructures of MnBi
Te
and Bi
Te
layers possible by exfoliation. Therefore, the low saturation field and the superlattice nature of MnBi
Te
make it an ideal system to investigate rich emergent phenomena.
Economic, efficient and safe hydrogen storage is the key to hydrogen economy. High pressure gaseous hydrogen storage offers the simplest solution in terms of infrastructure requirements and has ...become the most popular and highly developed method. There are three types of high pressure gaseous hydrogen storage vessel, namely: stationary, vehicular, and bulk transportation. First, recent progress toward low-cost, large capacity and light-weight on high pressure gaseous hydrogen storage vessels is reviewed. Then, three important aspects of high pressure gaseous hydrogen safety, i.e., hydrogen embrittlement of metals at room temperature, temperature rise in hydrogen fast filling, and potential risks such as diffusion, deflagration, and detonation after hydrogen leakage are introduced. A concise overview of the development on code and standard for high pressure hydrogen storage is also presented. Finally, some suggestions on the further research are proposed.
► Recent progress on high pressure gaseous hydrogen storage vessels, high pressure gaseous hydrogen safety and related codes and standards is reviewed in this article. Then some suggestions on the following aspects are proposed: ► Light-weight and low-cost bulk transportation high pressure gaseous hydrogen storage vessel. Significant challenges have been optimizing manufacturing issues, increasing service pressure, and minimizing production expenses. Methods for various tests, such as rail impact test, bonfire test, sub-length cycle test, sub-scale cycle test, etc. should be developed to validate manufacturing process and design. ► Durability of components in contact with high pressure hydrogen. It is necessary to establish a property database for fatigue and hydrogen embrittlement of materials used in high pressure hydrogen service and to develop related evaluation method for components in contact with high pressure hydrogen. ► Performance test method for high pressure hydrogen system and its key components. Performance-based tests ensure high pressure hydrogen system and its key components are fully capable of avoiding failure (rupture, leakage) under extreme conditions of usage that include extensive fueling frequency, physical damage and harsh environmental conditions. Methods are to be established and validated. ► Prediction and control of risk due to leakage of high pressure hydrogen. There is interaction between obstacles and hydrogen flow, hydrogen flame, detonation wave, and its impact on deflagration to detonation transition (DDT). Such interaction should be considered during establishing method for prediction and control of risk caused by leakage of high pressure hydrogen.
The power conversion efficiency of organic–inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells has increased rapidly, but the device stability remains a big challenge. Previous studies show the grain boundary ...(GB) can facilitate ion migration and initiate device degradation. Herein, methimazole (MMI) is employed for the first time to construct a surface “patch” by in situ converting residual PbI2 at GBs. The resultant MMI–PbI2 complex can effectively suppress ion migration and inhibit diffusion of the metal electrodes. The origin of the surface “patch” effect and their working mechanisms are investigated experimentally and theoretically at the microscopic level. It hence demonstrates a simple and effective method to prolong the device stability in the context of GB engineering, which could be extensively applied to perovskite‐based optoelectronics.
In situ converted grain‐boundary “patches” effectively suppress metal electrode diffusion and ion migration. As a result, perovskite solar cells with grain‐boundary patches exhibit significant enhancement in long‐term stability. It is believed that this simple and feasible grain‐boundary engineering technique can be extensively applied to other mixed perovskite optoelectronics.
Understanding the phenotypic drug response on cancer cell lines plays a vital role in anti-cancer drug discovery and re-purposing. The Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) database provides ...open data for researchers in phenotypic screening to build and test their models. Previously, most research in these areas starts from the molecular fingerprints or physiochemical features of drugs, instead of their structures.
In this paper, a model called twin Convolutional Neural Network for drugs in SMILES format (tCNNS) is introduced for phenotypic screening. tCNNS uses a convolutional network to extract features for drugs from their simplified molecular input line entry specification (SMILES) format and uses another convolutional network to extract features for cancer cell lines from the genetic feature vectors respectively. After that, a fully connected network is used to predict the interaction between the drugs and the cancer cell lines. When the training set and the testing set are divided based on the interaction pairs between drugs and cell lines, tCNNS achieves 0.826, 0.831 for the mean and top quartile of the coefficient of determinant (R
) respectively and 0.909, 0.912 for the mean and top quartile of the Pearson correlation (R
) respectively, which are significantly better than those of the previous works (Ammad-Ud-Din et al., J Chem Inf Model 54:2347-9, 2014), (Haider et al., PLoS ONE 10:0144490, 2015), (Menden et al., PLoS ONE 8:61318, 2013). However, when the training set and the testing set are divided exclusively based on drugs or cell lines, the performance of tCNNS decreases significantly and R
and R
drop to barely above 0.
Our approach is able to predict the drug effects on cancer cell lines with high accuracy, and its performance remains stable with less but high-quality data, and with fewer features for the cancer cell lines. tCNNS can also solve the problem of outliers in other feature space. Besides achieving high scores in these statistical metrics, tCNNS also provides some insights into the phenotypic screening. However, the performance of tCNNS drops in the blind test.
The interaction between light and tissue such as absorption and scattering limits the penetration depth and spatiotemporal resolution of
fluorescence bioimaging in a noninvasive manner. The ...near-infrared window (NIR) between 700 and 1700 nm, generally emphasized as the NIR-II (1000-1700 nm) window, has been developed into a promising bio-optical solution chosen as the lower interaction effect in this spectrum. Besides, the beam shaping techniques used in microscopy can also optimize the image quality making the combination change NIR imaging. In this Review, we summarize the recent progress developed on NIR fluorescence including inorganic molecules, small organic molecules, and fluorescence proteins. We also cover the recent advanced beam shaped microscopy techniques to provide options to combine with the emitters introduced previously. Combined with the developed advanced techniques, the improvement potential of current challenges is also discussed.
Hyperspectral images reconstruction focuses on recovering the spectral information from a single RGBimage. In this paper, we propose two advanced Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for the heavily ...underconstrained inverse problem. We first propose scale attention pyramid UNet (SAPUNet), which uses U-Net with dilated convolution to extract features. We establish the feature pyramid inside the network and use the attention mechanism for feature selection. The superior performance of this model is due to the modern architecture and capturing of spatial semantics. To provide a more accurate solution, we propose another distinct architecture, named W-Net, that builds one more branch compared to U-Net to conduct boundary supervision. SAPUNet and scale attention pyramid WNet (SAPWNet) provide improvements on the Interdisciplinary Computational Vision Lab at Ben Gurion University (ICVL) datasetby 42% and 46.6%, and 45% and 50% in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and relative RMSE, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed models are more accurate than the state-of-the-art hyperspectral recovery methods.
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