The potential roles and mechanisms of Chitinase-3-like-1 in the pathogenesis of type 2-biased airway diseases.

The immune modulation in the epithelium is a protective feature of the epithelial function in the mucosal airways. Dysfunction of the epithelium can lead to chronic allergic airway inflammatory diseases, such as chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP), allergic rhinitis (AR), and allergic asthma. Chitinase-3-like-1 (CHI3L1) is a key modulator in the epithelium against irritants, pathogens, and allergens and is involved in cancers, autoimmune diseases, neurological disorders, and other chronic diseases. Induction of epithelial cell-derived CHI3L1 is also confirmed to be implicated in the pathogenesis of Th2-related airway diseases like CRSwNP, AR, and allergic asthma, triggering a cascade of subsequent inflammatory reactions leading to the disease development. The techniques that block the biological function of CHI3L1 include small interfering RNA, neutralizing antibodies, and microRNAs and these methods proved to be successful in preclinical and clinical investigation in cancers, autoimmune diseases, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Therefore, treatment with CHI3L1-blocking methods could open up therapeutic options for allergic airway diseases. This review article discusses the role of epithelial cell-derived CHI3L1 in the development of CRSwNP, AR, and allergic asthma and examines the use of CHI3L1 as a potential therapeutic agent for allergic airway diseases.

Formation of Hybrid Perovskite Tin Iodide Single Crystals by Top-Seeded Solution Growth.

Hybrid perovskites have generated a great deal of interest because of their potential in photovoltaic applications. However, the toxicity of lead means that there is interest in finding a nontoxic substitute. Bulk single crystals of both cubic CH3NH3 SnI3 and CH(NH2)2 SnI3 were obtained by using the top-seeded solution growth method under an ambient atmosphere. Structural refinement, band gap, thermal properties, and XPS measurements of CH3NH3 SnI3 and CH(NH2)2 SnI3 single crystals are also reported in detail. These results should pave the way for further applications of CH3NH3 SnI3 and CH(NH2)2 SnI3.

[Effect of three mixing methods on air bubbles and solidification state of alginate impression materials].

PURPOSE: To evaluate the effect of full-automatic mixing machine method, clockwise manual mixing and combined eight-shaped manual mixing on air bubble content, flowability, temperature, working time and setting time of alginate impression materials. METHODS: With the same condition, alginate impression materials were mixed by three different methods. The number of bubbles, area, flowability, temperature, working time and setting time were evaluated with SPSS 24.0 software package. RESULTS: The number of bubbles in the automatic mixing group was (2.30±2.50), and the area was (0.17±0.18) mm2, which was less than the number of clockwise manual mixing group (59.60±14.19), and the total area (7.41±2.24) mm2 (P＜0.01). The flowability of the clockwise manual mixing group [(39.52±0.85) mm] was less than that of the full-automatic mixing group [(50.78±0.90) mm] and the combined eight-character manual mixing group [(50.36±1.75) mm](P＜0.01).The setting time of the material mixed by three methods was eligible for clinical use. CONCLUSIONS: The mixing method of alginate impression material has an effect on material's bubble content, flowability and temperature changes. The impression materials mixed by full-automatic mixing method are better in terms of bubble content, flowability and other properties. If manual mixing is used, combined eight-shaped manual mixing method can help reduce impression bubbles and deformation, and improve flowability.

Removing BaP from soil by biochar prepared with medicago and corn straw using batch and solid-phase extraction method.

Low-cost materials with a highly efficient adsorption capability prepared from corn straw and medicago (abbreviated to CB and MB), which can effectively remove benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) from contaminated soil, were prepared at a temperature of 350 °C under limited-oxygen conditions. The appearance traits, contents of C, H, N and functional group types of CB and MB were obtained by SEM, elemental analysis and FT-IR. Through the batch method, it was found that the adsorption of BaP by CB and MB was in accordance with pseudo-secondary kinetics because the correlation coefficients are 0.855 with CB and 0.948 with MB, respectively, and the maximum adsorption capacity in the fitting (CB: 78.2 mg kg-1, MB: 88.8 mg kg-1) was consistent with the actual measurement (CB: 79.8 mg kg-1, MB: 89.3 mg kg-1). Freundlich and Langmuir equations can well describe the isothermal adsorption data of CB and MB due to the correlation coefficients all being greater than 0.87. Soil samples treated with ASE were separated by solid-phase extraction (SPE) with different biochar contents in packed columns. It was found that the contributions of CB and MB to the removal of BaP increased from 58.5% and 60.4% to 80.6% and 82.1%, respectively, which could effectively reduce BaP in polluted soil.

Clinical characteristics, surgical management, and prognostic factors for supratentorial hemangioblastoma: A retrospective study.

Background: Supratentorial hemangioblastoma is an extremely rare neoplasm. The aim of this study is to delineate the clinical features among cystic and solid supratentorial hemangioblastoma patients and evaluate the risk factors for progression-free survival (PFS). Methods: We conducted a literature search in PubMed for histopathologically identified supratentorial hemangioblastoma between 1947 and 2021 and extracted and collected the clinical features of patients treated at our own institute. The rate of PFS was determined using Kaplan-Meier analysis. Differences in categorical factors, such as the location of tumor and diagnosis of von Hippel-Lindau disease, were analyzed using the Pearson χ 2 test. A Cox regression analysis was performed to evaluate the association between various variates and survival outcomes. Results: A total of 237 cases of supratentorial hemangioblastoma were identified from 169 studies. A survival analysis found that patients with cystic tumors had a significantly better prognosis than those with solid tumors (log-rank, p = 0.0122). Cox regression analysis suggested that cystic hemangioblastoma (hazard ratio (HR): 0.186, 95% CI: 0.043-0.803, p < 0.05) and gross total resection (GTR) (HR: 0.126, 95% CI: 0.049-0.323, p < 0.001) were significant predictors of longer survival (PFS) for supratentorial hemangioblastoma. Following an analysis of 13 supratentorial hemangioblastoma cases from our institute, we validated that cystic tumor had improved prognosis than solid tumor (log-rank, p = 0.0096) and GTR was superior to subtotal resection (log-rank, p = 0.0029). Conclusions: Cystic hemangioblastoma vs. solid hemangioblastoma may be two tumoral statuses with different clinical features, and a specific treatment strategy should be considered.

What is the Impact of Bisphenol A on Sperm Function and Related Signaling Pathways: A Mini-review?

Bisphenol A (BPA) is an organic synthetic compound that is ubiquitously present in daily life. It is a typical environmental endocrine disruptor that affects the functions of endogenous hormones. There is a significant negative correlation between BPA and male reproduction. This mini-review describes current research data on the negative effects of BPA on sperm functions in humans and animal models, as well as on its supposed mechanisms of action, such as CATSPER-Ca2+ signaling, cAMP-protein kinase A signaling, and epigenetic changes. The published evidence showed an adverse impact of BPA on sperm tail morphology, counts, motility, and acrosome reaction action. Sperm function related signaling pathways, such as CATSPER-Ca2+ signaling, cAMP-protein kinase A signaling, and phosphorylation signaling, as well as epigenetic changes and sperm aging, are associated with BPA exposure in human and animal models. The clear risks of BPA exposure can provide greater awareness of the potential threat of environmental contaminants on male fertility.

Threshold-Based Widespread Event Detection.

Widespread event detection is a fundamental network function that has many important applications in cybersecurity, traffic engineering, and distributed data mining. This paper introduces a new probabilistic threshold-based event detection problem, which is to find all events that appear in any w-out-of-a monitors with probabilistic guarantee on false positives, where a is the total number of monitors and the threshold w(≤ a) is a positive integer parameter that can be arbitrarily set, according to specific application requirements. We develop an efficient threshold filter solution and its improved versions, which combine Bloom filters, counting Bloom filter, threshold filter and compressed filters in a series of encoding and filtering steps, providing tradeoff between detection accuracy and communication overhead. We theoretically optimize the system parameters in the proposed solutions to minimize the communication overhead under the constraint of probabilistic detection guarantee. Extensive simulations demonstrate the practical viability of the proposed solutions in their ability of finding widespread events in a large network with few false positives and low communication overhead.

Achieving Strong Privacy in Online Survey.

Thanks to the proliferation of Internet access and modern digital and mobile devices, online survey has been flourishing into data collection of marketing, social, financial and medical studies. However, traditional data collection methods in online survey suffer from serious privacy issues. Existing privacy protection techniques are not adequate for online survey for lack of strong privacy. In this paper, we propose a practical strong privacy online survey scheme SPS based on a novel data collection technique called dual matrix masking (DM2), which guarantees the correctness of the tallying results with low computation overhead, and achieves universal verifiability, robustness and strong privacy. We also propose a more robust scheme RSPS, which incorporates multiple distributed survey managers. The RSPS scheme preserves the nice properties of SPS, and further achieves robust strong privacy against joint collusion attack. Through extensive analyses, we demonstrate our proposed schemes can be efficiently applied to online survey with accuracy and strong privacy.