Titanium Alloy Ti-6Al-4V Electrochemical Dissolution Behavior in NaNO3 and NaCl Solutions at Low Current Density.

Jet electrochemical micromilling (JEMM) exhibits significant potential for high-efficiency and high-quality machining of titanium alloy microstructures. However, during the JEMM process, the machined surface of the workpiece inevitably experiences stray current attacks at low current levels. Due to the formation of a dense passive film on the surface of the titanium alloy under electrochemical action, stray corrosion occurs on the machined surface. Hence, the electrochemical dissolution behavior of titanium alloys at low current densities directly impacts both machining efficiency and quality. This study first analyzed the effects of electrolyte composition and current density on the transpassive potential, breakdown of the passive film, current efficiency, and the dissolved surface on Ti-6Al-4V. The transpassive potential and electrochemical impedance of Ti-6Al-4V were found to be lower in NaCl solution than in NaNO3 solution. In addition, lower current densities enabled higher current efficiency and resulted in a more uniform and flat dissolution surface. Subsequent experiments used these two solutions for JEMM of complex-shaped microstructures on Ti-6Al-4V. The findings demonstrated that, compared to the NaNO3 solution, the use of NaCl solution increases the material removal rate by approximately 30%, enhances the aspect ratio by about 26%, and reduces surface roughness by roughly 58%. This indicates that employing NaCl solution can lead to superior machining efficiency and quality.

Species differences in carbon drawdown during marine phytoplankton growth.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) has been proposed as a mitigation method for negative carbon emission. Its effects on marine phytoplankton communities would depend on species differences in tolerance to high pH, which results from phytoplankton photosynthetic drawdown of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). In this study, 20 marine phytoplankton species were grown in sealed batch cultures and DIC, pH and chlorophyll a (Chl-a) were measured at the peaks of biomass. These results revealed a wide range of species differences. The drawdown DIC (ΔDIC) vs. increases in pH (ΔpH) graph resembled a Michaelis-Menten curve: significantly linear for ΔDIC < ~1000 µM and starting to plateau at ΔDIC > 1000 µM. This indicated that two mechanisms were operating: CO2 limitation at ΔpH < 1.41 and biologically-mediated precipitation-CO2 released carbon uptake at ΔpH > 1.41. These findings suggest that the potential effects of OAE on the phytoplankton communities would depend on the species differences in oceans.

Survey of Heterodera glycines Population Abundance and Virulence Phenotypes During 2021 to 2022 in Heilongjiang Province.

Soybean cyst nematode (SCN), Heterodera glycines, poses a significant threat to global soybean production. Heilongjiang, the largest soybean-producing province in China, contributes more than 40% to the country's total yield. This province has much longer history of SCN infestation. To assess the current situation in Heilongjiang, we conducted a survey to determine the SCN population density and virulence phenotypes during 2021 to 2022 and compared the data with a previous study in 2015. A total of 377 soil samples from 48 counties representing 11 major soybean-planting regions were collected. The prevalence of SCN increased from 55.4% in 2015 to 59% in the current survey. The population densities ranged from 80 to 26,700 eggs and juveniles per 100 cm3 of soil. Virulence phenotypes were evaluated for 60 representative SCN populations using the H. glycines (HG) type test, revealing nine different HG types. The most common virulence phenotypes were HG types 7 and 0, accounting for 56.7 and 20% of all SCN populations, respectively. The prevalence of populations with a female index (FI) greater than 10% on PI 548316 increased from 64.5% in 2015 to 71.7%. However, the FI on the commonly used resistance sources PI 548402 (Peking) and PI 437654 remained low at 3.3%. These findings highlight the increasing prevalence and changing virulence phenotypes of SCN in Heilongjiang. They also emphasize the importance of rotating soybean varieties with different resistance sources and urgently identifying new sources of resistance to combat SCN.

Combining metabolomics and transcriptomics to reveal the potential medicinal value of rare species Glycyrrhiza squamulose.

Licorice is a well-known Chinese medicinal plant that is widely used to treat multiple diseases and process food; however, wild licorice is now facing depletion. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify and protect licorice germplasm diversity. In this study, metabolomic and transcriptomic analyses were conducted to investigate the biodiversity and potential medicinal value of the rare wild Glycyrrhiza squamulose. A total of 182 differentially accumulated metabolites and 395 differentially expressed genes were identified by comparing Glycyrrhiza uralensis and Glycyrrhiza squamulose. The molecular weights of the chemical component of G. squamulose were comparable with those of G. uralensis, suggesting that G. squamulose may have medicinal value. Differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs), mainly flavonoids such as kaempferol-3-O-galactoside, kaempferol-3-O-(6"malonyl) glucoside, and hispidulin-7-O-glucoside, showed potential vitality in G. squamulose. Comparative transcriptomics with G. uralensis showed that among the 395 differentially expressed genes (DEGs), 69 were enriched in the isoflavonoid biosynthesis pathway. Multiomics analysis showed that the distinction in flavonoid biosynthesis between G. squamulose and G. uralensis was strongly associated with the expression levels of IF7GT and CYP93C. In addition to identifying similarities and differences between G. squamulose and G. uralensis, this study provides a theoretical basis to protect and investigate rare species such as G. squamulose.

Jet Electrochemical Micromilling of Ti-6Al-4V Using NaCl-Ethylene Glycol Electrolyte.

Titanium alloys are widely used in aerospace and biomedicine because of their excellent mechanical characteristics, but these properties also make such alloys difficult to cut. Jet electrochemical micromilling (JEMM) is based on the principle of electrochemical anodic dissolution; it has some inherent advantages for the machining of titanium alloy microstructures. However, titanium oxidizes readily, forming an oxide film that impedes a uniform dissolution during electrochemical machining. Therefore, a high voltage and an aqueous NaCl electrolyte are usually used to break the oxide film, which can lead to severe stray corrosion. To overcome this problem, the present study investigated the JEMM of Ti-6Al-4V using a NaCl-ethylene glycol (NaCl-EG) electrolyte. Electrochemical testing showed that Ti-6Al-4V exhibits a better corrosion resistance in the NaCl-EG electrolyte compared to the aqueous NaCl electrolyte, thereby reducing stray corrosion. The localization and surface quality of the grooves were enhanced significantly when using JEMM with a NaCl-EG electrolyte. A multiple-pass strategy was adopted during JEMM to improve the aspect ratio, and the effects of the feed depth and number of passes on the multiple-pass machining performance were investigated. Ultimately, a square annular microstructure with a high geometric dimensional consistency and a smooth surface was obtained via JEMM with multiple passes using the optimal parameters.

Nucleophile-Controlled Trapping of Gold Carbene by Nitriles and Water: Synthesis of 5H-Pyrimido[5,4-b]indoles and 2-Benzylidene-3-indolinones.

A gold-catalyzed, nucleophile-controlled cascade reaction of N-(2-azidophenyl-ynyl)methanesulfonamides with nitriles and water is described that provides structurally diverse 5H-pyrimido[5,4-b]indoles and 2-benzylidene-3-indolinones in good to excellent yields. Mechanistic studies indicate that the ß-sulfonamido-α-imino gold carbene is the key intermediate which is generated through the gold-catalyzed cyclization of N-(2-azidophenyl-ynyl)methanesulfonamides and undergoes formal [4 + 2] cascade annulation with nitriles and intramolecular SN2' type reaction with water, respectively.

Application progress of nursing intervention in cardiac surgery.

As a stressor, cardiac surgery affects the physiology and psychology of patients, as well as their postoperative recovery. Patients tend to worry about cognitive deficiency, pain, discomfort, the risk of death, sleep, complications, and other factors, resulting in stress and anxiety. Moreover, serious adverse events, such as circulatory and respiratory dysfunction and infection, tend to occur after cardiac surgery and increase the economic burden on patients. Therefore, appropriate nursing interventions should be selected to strengthen patients' cognitive levels, compliance, and postoperative practices to accelerate their recovery, reduce complications, and shorten hospital stays so as to contribute to patients' lives and health.

PDFF-CNN: An attention-guided dynamic multi-orientation feature fusion method for gestational age prediction on imbalanced fetal brain MRI dataset.

BACKGROUND: Fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based gestational age prediction has been widely used to characterize normal fetal brain development and diagnose congenital brain malformations. PURPOSE: The uncertainty of fetal position and external interference leads to variable localization and direction of the fetal brain. In addition, pregnant women typically concentrate on receiving MRI scans during the fetal anomaly scanning week, leading to an imbalanced distribution of fetal brain MRI data. The above-mentioned problems pose great challenges for deep learning-based fetal brain MRI gestational age prediction. METHODS: In this study, a pyramid squeeze attention (PSA)-guided dynamic feature fusion CNN (PDFF-CNN) is proposed to robustly predict gestational ages from fetal brain MRI images on an imbalanced dataset. PDFF-CNN contains four components: transformation module, feature extraction module, dynamic feature fusion module, and balanced mean square error (MSE) loss. The transformation and feature extraction modules are employed by using the PSA to learn multiscale and multi-orientation feature representations in a parallel weight-sharing Siamese network. The dynamic feature fusion module automatically learns the weights of feature vectors generated in the feature extraction module to dynamically fuse multiscale and multi-orientation brain sulci and gyri features. Considering the fact of the imbalanced dataset, the balanced MSE loss is used to mitigate the negative impact of imbalanced data distribution on gestational age prediction performance. RESULTS: Evaluated on an imbalanced fetal brain MRI dataset of 1327 routine clinical T2-weighted MRI images from 157 subjects, PDFF-CNN achieved promising gestational age prediction performance with an overall mean absolute error of 0.848 weeks and an R2 of 0.904. Furthermore, the attention activation maps of PDFF-CNN were derived, which revealed regional features that contributed to gestational age prediction at each gestational stage. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the proposed PDFF-CNN might have broad clinical applicability in guiding treatment interventions and delivery planning, which has the potential to be helpful with prenatal diagnosis.

Identification of cytochrome P450 gene family and functional analysis of HgCYP33E1 from Heterodera glycines.

The cytochrome P450 (CYP) genes of nematode play a crucial role in the metabolic detoxification of xenobiotics including pesticides. Heterodera glycines, also known as the soybean cyst nematode, is a sedentary endoparasite that infests plant roots, causing high annual economic losses in soybean production regions globally. In this study, we identified 36 CYP genes at a genome-wide level of the H. glycines isolate TN10 using all CYPs from Caenorhabditis elegans as queries. Subsequently, a full-length cDNA of HgCYP33E1 which was significantly up-regulated by the conventional nematicide abamectin was initially cloned from H. glycines. It presented significantly higher expressions in the second-stage juvenile (J2) compared to other parasitic stages of H. glycines. qRT-PCR analysis suggested that the expression of HgCYP33E1 was also xenobiotically induced by soybean root exudate and the metabolites of biocontrol agents. Using RNA interference (RNAi), we investigated the function of HgCYP33E1 in H. glycines parasitism and nematicide selectivity. Compared to the control and dsGFP-treated group, silencing of HgCYP33E1 did not affect the J2 behaviors and the early invasion ability, while it decreased the number of J4s in soybean roots after 18-d inoculation with the dsHgCYP33E1-treated nematodes. In addition, knockdown of HgCYP33E1 in H. glycines resulted in an increase in J2 mortality after 24-h incubation with abamectin compared to the GFP dsRNA-soaked and the control group. These findings revealed the potential role of HgCYP33E1 in the xenobiotic detoxification pathway of H. glycines. Moreover, our data also provided valuable gene information for studying the functions of the CYP family in H. glycines host adaption.

Biocontrol efficacy of Bacillus velezensis strain YS-AT-DS1 against the root-knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita in tomato plants.

Root-knot nematodes (RKNs; Meloidogyne spp.), one of the most economically important plant-parasitic nematodes (PPNs), cause severe yield and quality losses in agriculture annually. The application of biological control agents is an environmentally safe and effective approach to control RKNs. Here, we report the genomic characteristics of a Bacillus velezensis strain YS-AT-DS1 (Bv-DS1) isolated from the tidal soil, revealing that it has a 4.73 Mb circular chromosome with an average GC-content of 46.43%, 3,977 genes, 86 tRNAs, and 27 rRNAs, and contains secondary metabolite clusters for producing antimicrobial compounds. In vitro assays indicated that Bv-DS1 has not only antagonistic activities against fungal pathogens, but also shows nematicidal activity, with a mortality rate of 71.62% mortality rates in second-stage juvenile (J2s) Meloidogyne incognita. We then focused on the biocontrol efficiency of Bv-DS1 against M. incognita in pot assays. Preinoculation with Bv-DS1 enhanced tomato growth, and significantly reduced the infection rate of J2s, and the number of galls and egg masses on tomato roots. The underlying mechanism in Bv-DS1-induced resistance to M. incognita was further investigated through split-root experiments, and analysing the expression of the genes related to jasmonic acid (JA), salicylic acid (SA), and the tonoplast intrinsic protein (TIP). The results indicated that Bv-DS1 could not activate host systemic-induced resistance (ISR) in the split-root system of tomatoes. Additionally, the expression of JA- (LOX D and MC) and SA- (PAL2 and PR) responsive genes did not change in Bv-DS1-pretreated plants at 3 and 14 days after nematode inoculation. The presented data showed that JA-and SA-dependent pathways were not required for the biocontrol action of the Bv-DS1 against RKN. The TIP genes, responsible for transport of water and small substrates in plants, have previously been shown to negatively regulate the parasitism of PPNs. Surprisingly, Bv-DS1 compromised the downregulation of TIP1.1 and TIP1.3 by M. incognita. Together, our data suggest that Bv-DS1 exhibits a dual effect on plant growth promotion and protection against RKN, possibly related to the regulation of water and solute transport via TIPs. Thus, the Bv-DS1 strain could be used as a biocontrol agent for RKN control in sustainable agriculture.

Effects of Dietary Glycinin on Oxidative Damage, Apoptosis and Tight Junction in the Intestine of Juvenile Hybrid Yellow Catfish, Pelteobagrus fulvidraco ♀ × Pelteobaggrus vachelli ♂.

The objective of this study was to examine the influences of glycinin for growth and intestinal structural integrity related to oxidative damage, apoptosis and tight junction of juvenile hybrid yellow catfish (Pelteobagrus fulvidraco ♀ × Pelteobaggrus vachelli ♂). Fish (initial weight, 1.02 ± 0.01 g) were fed diets containing five different levels of glycinin at 0%, 2%, 4%, 6%, and 8% for 8 weeks. The results demonstrated that dietary glycinin levels had a negative correlation with final weight, feed intake, protein efficiency ratio and survival rate of the experiment fish. When the level of dietary glycinin exceeded 4%, the structural integrity of the posterior intestine was observably impaired, characterized by disordered and exfoliated margin of intestinal villi, blurred and broken boundaries of tight junctions, damaged organelles and cell vacuolation. Levels of 4-8% dietary glycinin depressed the total antioxidant capacity and total superoxide dismutase activities of posterior intestine. Furthermore, a high level of dietary glycinin linearly and quadratically down-regulated the mRNA expressions of Claudin-1, Occludin and ZO-1, while it linearly and significantly up-regulated the mRNA expressions of Bax, Cyt C, Caspase 3, Caspase 9 and p53 in the posterior intestine. In conclusion, dietary 4-8% glycinin impaired the morphological structure of the posterior intestine by inducing oxidative stress and cell apoptosis, and eventually impeded the growth performance of juvenile hybrid yellow catfish.

Rituximab Treatment of Primary Cutaneous Follicle Center Lymphoma: A Retrospective Review.

BACKGROUND: Primary cutaneous B-cell lymphoma (PCBCL) presents only in the skin at the time of diagnosis with no evidence of extracutaneous disease, and primary cutaneous follicle center lymphoma (PCFCL) is the most common subtype. There is currently a lack of prospective randomized control trials and large retrospective studies investigating the efficacy of different treatment options for PCFCL. This retrospective study was conducted to describe our local clinical experience and outcomes of patients treated with rituximab-containing regimens. OBJECTIVES: To describe our local clinical experience and treatment outcomes of patients treated with rituximab-containing regimens. METHODS: A retrospective study consisting of 25 PCFCL patients treated with different modalities. Patient records were reviewed and analyzed using a Kaplan-Meier estimation and SAS 9.4 software. RESULTS: After the initial treatment, all patients had CR except for 1 patient in the observation group. Further, 60% of patients in surgery, 20% in chemoimmunotherapy, 67% in rituximab monotherapy, 33% in steroid injection/systemic prednisone, and 33% in observation experienced a relapse. Although no significant difference was found between treatment groups due to the small sample size, time to relapse trends provides insight into treatment responses. Chemoimmunotherapy had the lowest relapse rate in the first 5 years post-treatment, whereas surgery had a higher tendency to relapse. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the potential for rituximab-containing chemoimmunotherapy to yield adverse effects, it is effective in achieving a prolonged clinical remission in patients with PCFCL. It remains a reasonable treatment option for diffuse, extensive, or treatment-resistant disease.