Policies of voluntary services involved in public health emergencies in China: Evolution, evaluation, and expectation.

Background: Public health emergencies have an immense effect on social stability, economic development, and human life. Volunteers played an indispensable role in health monitoring, assistance with daily life, and social network repairing. However, few policies analysis concentrated on the voluntary services involved in public health emergencies. Objectives: This study aims to analyze and summarize the advantages and flaws of the policy documents relating to voluntary services involved in public health emergencies, and put forward the enlightenment on policymaking and optimization. Methods: A three-dimensional analysis framework of "Policy instruments-Participants of voluntary services-Stages of voluntary services" was designed. Policy documents at the national level were retrieved from the official websites of the State Council of the People's Republic of China and its departments as well as the PKULAW Database. NVivo software was applied to analyze the contents of the included policy documents. Gephi software was adopted to conduct a visualized atlas analysis of the cooperative network among policymaking departments. Results: A total of 77 policy documents were included, and most were published in 2020 (n = 40). The Ministry of Civil Affairs (n = 19) and the National Health Commission (n = 18) issued more documents than the other departments. They cooperated more extensively with other departments. In policy documents, supply-side policy instruments were utilized the most (65.4%), followed by demand-side (23.9%). Voluntary organizations in the form of ambiguous sense were most mentioned as service participants (n = 73). In the stages of service delivery, service content mainly involved the prevention and control of public health emergencies (27, 18.9%) and psychological counseling (26, 18.2%). Conclusion: Time distribution of policy documents featured "incubation period-outbreak and continuous evolution period-elimination recovery period." Joint issuing became the dominant form. The internal structure of policy instruments was unbalanced with different priorities, and the overall structure is expected to be optimized to promote voluntary organization management, reinforce external resources, and close the gap between policymaking and policy implementation. Volunteers' competence and voluntary organizations' system needs to be improved, and the contents of voluntary services should be enriched for the preparedness for future public health emergency.

Decision Tree Searching Strategy to Boost the Identification of Cross-Linked Peptides.

We describe an efficient decision tree searching strategy (DTSS) to boost the identification of cross-linked peptides. The DTSS approach allows the identification of a wealth of complementary information to facilitate the construction of more protein-protein interaction networks for human cell lysate, which was tested by the use of a recently reported cross-linking data set (ACS Cent. Sci. 2019, 5, 1514-1522). A variant of the PhoX-linker, named pDSPE, was synthesized and applied to cross-link Escherichia coli cell lysate to demonstrate that the acquisition of doubly charged ions can significantly improve identification results. The method can be seamlessly integrated to other search engines to maximize the number of identified cross-links.

A graphene oxide-based FRET sensor for rapid and specific detection of unfolded collagen fragments.

The unstructured collagen species plays a critical role in a variety of important biological processes as well as pathological conditions. In order to develop novel diagnosis and therapies for collagen-related diseases, it is essential to construct simple and efficient methods to detect unfolded collagen fragments. We therefore have designed a FITC-labeled collagen mimic triple helical peptide, whose adsorption on the surface of GO effectively quenches its fluorescence. The newly constructed GO/FITC-GPO complex specifically detects unstructured collagen fragments, but not fully folded triple helix species. The detection shows a clear preference for the collagen targets with complementary GPO-rich sequences. The conformation-sensitive, sequence-specific GO-based approach can be applied as an efficient biosensor for rapid detection of unfolded collagen fragments at nM level, and may have great potential in drug screening for inhibitors of unfolded collagen. It may provide a prototype to develop GO-based assays to detect other important unstructured proteins involved in diseases.

Stability, Pharmacokinetics, Biodistribution and Safety Assessment of Folate-Conjugated Pullulan Acetate Nanoparticles as Cervical Cancer Targeted Drug Carriers.

It is recognized that the stability and journey in the body of nanoparticles are important issues for drug formulations. In this study, we prepared folate-conjugated pullulan acetate nanoparticles (FPANs) and epirubicin loaded FPANs (FPA/EPI) using dialysis method. The storage stability of FPANs and FPA/EPI at 4 degrees C could be up to 3 months. Using folate receptor overexpressed Hela cells, dose dependent cellular uptake and receptor-mediated endocytosis of FPA/EPI were confirmed. From the in vivo pharmacokinetics test, compared to free EPI, half-life time (t½) of FPA/EPI was extended 1.57 times and the area under-the-curve (AUC) increased 3.95 times as well. In addition, biodistribution data showed that, EPI concentration in tumor in FPA/EPI group was 2.01 times higher than that in free EPI group after 96 h; The concentration of drug in liver treated by FPA/EPI was 5.7-11.6 times, while in heart, kidney, especially in stomach and intestine were much lower than those in free EPI group from 24 to 96 h. Furthermore, blank FPANs showed no apparent acute toxicity at dose up to 125 mg/kg. All results suggested that FPA/EPI showed a promising potential on treating cervical carcinoma and its metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma in future because of the high stability, less toxicity and tumor targeting.

Simultaneous determination of iridoid glycosides and flavanoids in Lamionphlomis rotate and its herbal preparation by a simple and rapid capillary zone electrophoresis method.

Iridoid glycosides and flavanoids are two main effective components of Lamiophlomis rotata (Benth.) kudo. However, there is no method for simultaneous analysis of iridoid glycosides and flavanoids in L. rotata and its pharmaceutical preparations. A simple and rapid capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) method was developed and validated for simultaneous determination of two iridoid glycosides (8-O-acetylshanzhiside methylester and 8-deoxyshanzhiside) and three flavanoids (apigenin, quercetin and luteolin) in L. rotata. Operational variables, such as the voltage, buffer concentration and pH were optimized, the final optimum separation condition was 10 mM sodium tetraborate-20 mM NaH(2) PO(4) (pH 8.5)-15% (v/v) methanol, 238 nm UV detection, 18 kV applied voltage. The linearity and the recovery of the proposed method were very satisfactory (correlation coefficients were 0.9994-0.9998 and the recoveries were 94.5-108.8% for the analytes) and the method allowed analytes in real samples to be determined within 9 min. The proposed CZE method can be used for quality control of iridoid glycosides and flavanoids in L. rotata and its herbal preparation.

Characteristics and assessment of phthalate esters in urban dusts in Guangzhou city, China.

Phthalate esters (PAEs) were examined in indoor and outdoor dust samples from the subtropical city of Guangzhou, China. The ∑(16)PAEs concentrations ranged from 121 to 3,223 µg g(-1) dust, with the median concentration of 840 µg g(-1) dust. Significantly higher concentrations of PAEs in dust samples were found in offices where electrical and electronic devices, carpet pads, and office furniture were widely used. Of the 16 PAEs, diisobutyl phthalate (DiBP), di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP), and di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) dominated the PAEs in indoor and outdoor dust samples, and accounted for >96.8% and >93.1% of the ∑(16)PAEs concentrations, respectively. The median daily inhalation exposure of ∑(16)PAEs were 3.53 and 0.247 µg kg(-1) body weight day(-1), and at the 95(th) percentile were 7.62 and 0.530 µg kg(-1) body weight day(-1), up on the measured concentrations and estimated dust ingestion rates, respectively, for toddles and adults. The ubiquitous distribution of PAEs as noted in this study suggests the need for detailed assessment of PAEs concentrations using more sites and to further investigate the factors influencing PAEs exposure in China.