Microplastics (MPs), the appearance of which has gained considerable interest, can act as vectors to transport other pollutants such as metals into organisms. In this study, the sorption isotherms of ...three model heavy metals (i.e., Cu2+, Cd2+, and Pb2+) on four virgin plastic particles including chlorinated polyethylene (CPE), PVC, and two polyethylene plastic particles (i.e., LPE and HPE). HPE and LPE were investigated. The results showed that MPs can load high amounts of Pb2+, Cu2+ and Cd2+. The sorption affinity of the three metals to the model MPs followed the sequence of CPE > PVC > HPE > LPE. The adsorption process was affected by the chemical structure and electronegativity of the sorbents, and seemed irrelevant to the crystallinity of MPs. For the three metals, Pb2+ exhibited significantly stronger sorption than did Cu2+ and Cd2+ due to the strong electrostatic interaction. Moreover, pH can significantly affect the sorption of metals on MPs, but ionic strength exerted a relatively slight effect on this process. In brief, the electrostatic interaction played an important role in the sorption of Pb2+ to model MPs. For Cd2+ and Cu2+, sorption was determined by electrostatic interaction together with surface complexation onto the plastic surface. This study indicates that depending on the surface physicochemical properties of MPs the adsorption behavior can vary significantly. Therefore, the adsorption process of metals on MPs should be readily affected by other environmental mediums in the environment. The study provides additional insight into the behavior of MPs as a vector of metals.
•Sorption of Cu2+, Cd2+, and Pb2+ on four virgin plastic particles was investigated.•The sorption strength followed the order of Pb2+>Cu2+>Cd2+.•PH and ionic strength can affect the sorption of metals on MPs.•Electrostatic interaction played an important role in the sorption of Pb2+ to MPs.•Electrostatic interaction and complexation determined the sorption of Cd2+ and Cu2+.
•The application of isoreticular chemistry in MOF structure design, including microstructure design, pore size tailoring, secondary building unit modification, post-synthesis modification, and ...cooperative regulation are summarized and highlight.•The adsorption/separation function-oriented MOF structure design and high-throughput screening process are summarized. Based on isoreticular chemistry design and optimized high-performance MOF adsorbents and membranes, we are committed to exploring an energy-intensive and environmentally friendly alternative separation route, and strive to achieve efficient separation of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, natural gas, and petroleum-based platform compounds.
Precise control of the pore size and environment of metal–organic framework (MOF) is a necessary condition for achieving high performance of gas adsorption and separation. After nearly two decades of development, the synthesis of MOF materials has gradually evolved from exploration and trial to precise-design, including function-oriented microstructure design and optimization, pore size tailoring, and secondary building unit (SBU) modification. The unique pore environments of MOF materials enable their advantages in gas adsorption and separation applications. In addition, the introduction of isoreticular chemistry within MOFs (with the same framework structure and different chemical components) provides opportunities for improving gas adsorption and separation performance. Isoreticular chemistry gives MOFs more functions to promote specific binding or sieving with gas molecules. Furthermore, MOF-based adsorbents and separation membranes exhibit superior separation performance in many industrial gas purification processes. In this review, we summarized and highlight the application of isoreticular chemistry in MOF structure design, including microstructure design, pore size tailoring, SBU modification, post-synthesis modification, and cooperative regulation. The gas adsorption and separation performances are improved through pore size and environment optimization. In addition, we also summarized the adsorption/separation function-oriented MOF structure design and high-throughput screening process. Based on isoreticular chemistry design and optimized high-performance MOF adsorbents and separation membranes, an energy-intensive and environmentally friendly alternative separation route is explored to achieve efficient separation of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, natural gas, and petroleum-based compounds. Finally, we provided an outlook based on prospect developments of isoreticular chemistry within MOFs for gas storage and separation.
The effectiveness of ESG performance in promoting corporate innovation has been widely demonstrated. However, a significant research gap remains unexplored that prior scholars have neglected the ...research into the influence of ESG performance on corporate innovation strategy. Using the sample of China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2020, this paper analyzes the influence of ESG performance on corporate innovation strategy. It is found that ESG performance can promote substantial innovation and strategic innovation in different degrees. Further analyses show that ESG performance can promote substantial innovation more than strategic one. Therefore, while pursuing upgrading and transformation, corporations should pay more attention to the influence of ESG performance on innovation strategies, and promote a virtuous circle of long-term development of corporations.
In this paper, we present a novel bottom-up salient object detection approach by exploiting the relationship between the saliency detection and the Markov absorption probability. First, we calculate ...a preliminary saliency map by the Markov absorption probability on a weighted graph via partial image borders as background prior. Unlike most of the existing background prior-based methods which treated all image boundaries as background, we only use the left and top sides as background for simplicity. The saliency of each element is defined as the sum of the corresponding absorption probability by several left and top virtual boundary nodes, which are most similar to it. Second, a better result is obtained by ranking the relevance of the image elements with foreground cues extracted from the preliminary saliency map, which can effectively emphasize the objects against the background, whose computation is processed similarly as that in the first stage and yet substantially different from the former one. At last, three optimization techniques - content-based diffusion mechanism, superpixelwise depression function, and guided filter - are utilized to further modify the saliency map generalized at the second stage, which is proved to be effective and complementary to each other. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on four publicly available benchmark data sets demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method against 17 state-of-the-art methods.
Most solid tumors and their metastases experience periods of low oxygen or hypoxia, which is of major clinical significance as it promotes both tumor progression and resistance to therapy. Critical ...mediators of the hypoxic response are the hypoxia-inducible factors HIF-1α and HIF-2α. The HIFs are nonredundant and regulate both overlapping and unique downstream target genes. Here, we describe a novel mechanism for the switch between HIF-1α- and HIF-2α-dependent transcription during tumor hypoxia caused by the hypoxia associated factor (HAF). HAF is overexpressed in a variety of tumors and its levels are decreased during acute hypoxia, but increased following prolonged hypoxia. We have previously identified HAF as an E3 ubiquitin ligase that binds and ubiquitinates HIF-1α by an oxygen and pVHL-independent mechanism, thus targeting HIF-1α for proteasomal degradation. Here, we show that HAF also binds to HIF-2α, but at a different site than HIF-1α, and increases HIF-2α transactivation without causing its degradation. HAF, thus, switches the hypoxic response of the cancer cell from HIF-1α-dependent to HIF-2α-dependent transcription and activates genes involved in invasion such as MMP9, PAI-1, and the stem cell factor OCT-3/4. The switch to HIF-2α-dependent gene expression caused by HAF also promotes an enriched tumor stem cell population, resulting in highly aggressive tumors in vivo. Thus, HAF, by causing a switch from a HIF-1α- to HIF-2α-dependent response to hypoxia, provides a mechanism for more aggressive growth of tumors under prolonged hypoxia.
Bromodomain and extraterminal domain (BET) protein inhibitors are emerging as promising anticancer therapies. The gene encoding the E3 ubiquitin ligase substrate-binding adaptor speckle-type POZ ...protein (SPOP) is the most frequently mutated in primary prostate cancer. Here we demonstrate that wild-type SPOP binds to and induces ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation of BET proteins (BRD2, BRD3 and BRD4) by recognizing a degron motif common among them. In contrast, prostate cancer-associated SPOP mutants show impaired binding to BET proteins, resulting in decreased proteasomal degradation and accumulation of these proteins in prostate cancer cell lines and patient specimens and causing resistance to BET inhibitors. Transcriptome and BRD4 cistrome analyses reveal enhanced expression of the GTPase RAC1 and cholesterol-biosynthesis-associated genes together with activation of AKT-mTORC1 signaling as a consequence of BRD4 stabilization. Our data show that resistance to BET inhibitors in SPOP-mutant prostate cancer can be overcome by combination with AKT inhibitors and further support the evaluation of SPOP mutations as biomarkers to guide BET-inhibitor-oriented therapy in patients with prostate cancer.
Remote sensing images often have limited resolution, which can hinder their effectiveness in various applications. Super-resolution techniques can enhance the resolution of remote sensing images, and ...arbitrary resolution super-resolution techniques provide additional flexibility in choosing appropriate image resolutions for different tasks. However, for subsequent processing, such as detection and classification, the resolution of the input image may vary greatly for different methods. In this paper, we propose a method for continuous remote sensing image super-resolution using feature-enhanced implicit neural representation (SR-FEINR). Continuous remote sensing image super-resolution means users can scale a low-resolution image into an image with arbitrary resolution. Our algorithm is composed of three main components: a low-resolution image feature extraction module, a positional encoding module, and a feature-enhanced multi-layer perceptron module. We are the first to apply implicit neural representation in a continuous remote sensing image super-resolution task. Through extensive experiments on two popular remote sensing image datasets, we have shown that our SR-FEINR outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy. Our algorithm showed an average improvement of 0.05 dB over the existing method on ×30 across three datasets.
Enhancer RNA (eRNA) in Human Diseases Wang, Yunzhe; Zhang, Chenyang; Wang, Yuxiang ...
International journal of molecular sciences,
10/2022, Letnik:
23, Številka:
19
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Enhancer RNAs (eRNAs), a class of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) transcribed from enhancer regions, serve as a type of critical regulatory element in gene expression. There is increasing evidence ...demonstrating that the aberrant expression of eRNAs can be broadly detected in various human diseases. Some studies also revealed the potential clinical utility of eRNAs in these diseases. In this review, we summarized the recent studies regarding the pathological mechanisms of eRNAs as well as their potential utility across human diseases, including cancers, neurodegenerative disorders, cardiovascular diseases and metabolic diseases. It could help us to understand how eRNAs are engaged in the processes of diseases and to obtain better insight of eRNAs in diagnosis, prognosis or therapy. The studies we reviewed here indicate the enormous therapeutic potency of eRNAs across human diseases.
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•Long-term topical application of particulate matter (PM) in mouse eyes result in changes similar to those observed in dry eyes.•PM induced cytotoxic effect in a time- and ...dose-dependent manner in both HCE cells and ocular surface.•ROS generation and apoptosis occurrence are associated with the ocular pathogenesis of PM impairment.
Exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (fine PM) pollution has been previously associated with ocular surface diseases. But, to the best of our knowledge, the in vivo long-term effects of fine PM on the ocular surface have not been investigated. We aimed to evaluate the effects of fine PM on cultured human corneal epithelial (HCE) cells and on the ocular surfaces of mice, with standard reference material of fine PM(SRM 2786). We applied fine PM suspension to the eyes of C57BL/6 mice for up to 6 months. In vivo examinations, including tear secretion, tear film break-up time (TBUT) and corneal fluorescein staining, were performed in the 3rd and 6th month. At the end of the in vivo study, the corneal histological changes and conjunctival goblet cells were examined by staining, and cytokines in tissue were also detected. In addition, HCE cells were treated with fine PM for 12 h and 24 h. Then, cell apoptosis and reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation was detected. We found that fine PM damages the mouse eye in a dose- and time-dependent manner. In mice, the tear secretion and tear film break-up time were significantly reduced, along with the development of corneal epithelial damage, apoptosis of conjunctival epithelial cells and hypoplasia of conjunctival goblet cells. In addition, IL-18, IL-22, IL-23 and MCP-1 were increased in both conjunctiva and cornea of the fine PM-treated animals. Furthermore, increased apoptosis and ROS production were observed in time- and dose-dependent manner in HCE cells after fine PM exposure for 12 h and 24 h. Our results indicate that fine PM is cytotoxic to both HCE cells and the ocular surface. Long-term topical application of fine PM suspension in mice results in ocular surface changes that are similar to those observed with dry eye.
The neural mechanisms underlying forward suppression in the auditory cortex remain a puzzle. Little attention is paid to thalamic contribution despite the important fact that the thalamus gates ...upstreaming information to the auditory cortex. This study compared the time courses of forward suppression in the auditory thalamus, thalamocortical inputs and cortex using the two-tone stimulus paradigm. The preceding and succeeding tones were 20-ms long. Their frequency and amplitude were set at the characteristic frequency and 20 dB above the minimum threshold of given neurons, respectively. In the ventral division of the medial geniculate body of the thalamus, we found that the duration of complete forward suppression was about 75 ms and the duration of partial suppression was from 75 ms to about 300 ms after the onset of the preceding tone. We also found that during the partial suppression period, the responses to the succeeding tone were further suppressed in the primary auditory cortex. The forward suppression of thalamocortical field excitatory postsynaptic potentials was between those of thalamic and cortical neurons but much closer to that of thalamic ones. Our results indicate that early suppression in the cortex could result from complete suppression in the thalamus whereas later suppression may involve thalamocortical and intracortical circuitry. This suggests that the complete suppression that occurs in the thalamus provides the cortex with a "silence" window that could potentially benefit cortical processing and/or perception of the information carried by the preceding sound.
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