The decrease of intraflagellar transport impairs sensory perception and metabolism in ageing.

Sensory perception and metabolic homeostasis are known to deteriorate with ageing, impairing the health of aged animals, while mechanisms underlying their deterioration remain poorly understood. The potential interplay between the declining sensory perception and the impaired metabolism during ageing is also barely explored. Here, we report that the intraflagellar transport (IFT) in the cilia of sensory neurons is impaired in the aged nematode Caenorhabditis elegans due to a daf-19/RFX-modulated decrease of IFT components. We find that the reduced IFT in sensory cilia thus impairs sensory perception with ageing. Moreover, we demonstrate that whereas the IFT-dependent decrease of sensory perception in aged worms has a mild impact on the insulin/IGF-1 signalling, it remarkably suppresses AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) signalling across tissues. We show that upregulating daf-19/RFX effectively enhances IFT, sensory perception, AMPK activity and autophagy, promoting metabolic homeostasis and longevity. Our study determines an ageing pathway causing IFT decay and sensory perception deterioration, which in turn disrupts metabolism and healthy ageing.

Band-rejection filter with high extinction ratio using prism-waveguide cascaded coupling system.

A band-rejection filter is proposed based on a prism-waveguide cascaded coupling system, which is composed of an equilateral trapezium prism and a deposited multilayer structure. By properly adjusting the thickness of the coupling layer and the light extinction coefficient of the guiding layer, the radiative and intrinsic dampings matching condition could be well satisfied, and then a series of reflectivity dips will appear in the reflectivity wavelength spectrum. Since the module of reflectivity is smaller than one, the extinction ratio of the rejected frequency via the cascaded coupling system is twice as high as that of the single-coupling technology. By narrowing the guiding layer to a micrometer scale, the free spectral range is broad enough to cover the Raman spectrum scattered from the frequently used sample. In addition, the numerically calculated results show that the light in the free spectral range is mostly reflected, with an insertion loss down to 0.45 dB. Compared to previously reported band-rejection filters, it is relatively simple to manufacture our device, which possesses potential applications to help distinguish the Raman signal from the elastic scattering background.

Generation 9 polyamidoamine dendrimer encapsulated platinum nanoparticle mimics catalase size, shape, and catalytic activity.

Poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM) encapsulated platinum nanoparticles were synthesized and used as catalase mimics. Acetylated generation 9 (Ac-G9) PAMAM dendrimer with a molecular size around 10 nm was used as a template to synthesize platinum nanoparticles. The feeding molar ratio of Pt(4+) and Ac-G9 is 2048, and the synthesized platinum nanoparticle (Ac-G9/Pt NP) has an average size of 3.3 nm. Ac-G9/Pt NP has a similar molecular size and globular shape with catalase (~11 nm). The catalytic activity of Ac-G9/Pt NP on the decomposition of H2O2 is approaching that of catalase at 37 °C. Ac-G9/Pt NP shows differential response to the changes of pH and temperature compared with catalase, which can be explained by different catalytic mechanisms of Ac-G9/Pt NP and catalase. Ac-G9/Pt NP also shows horseradish peroxidase activity and is able to scavenge free radicals such as di(phenyl)-(2,4,6-trinitrophenyl)iminoazanium (DPPH). Furthermore, Ac-G9/Pt NP shows excellent biocompatibility on different cell lines and can down-regulate H2O2-induced intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) in these cells. These results suggest that dendrimers are promising mimics of proteins with different sizes and Ac-G9/Pt NP can be used as an alternative candidate of catalase to decrease oxidation stress in cells.