Disulfidptosis-related signatures for prognostic and immunotherapy reactivity evaluation in hepatocellular carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers in the world and a nonnegligible health concern on a worldwide scale. Disulfidptosis is a novel mode of cell death, which is mainly caused by the collapse of the actin skeleton. Although many studies have demonstrated that various types of cell death are associated with cancer treatment, the relationship between disulfidptosis and HCC has not been elucidated. METHODS: Here, we mainly applied bioinformatics methods to construct a disulfidptosis related risk model in HCC patients. Specifically, transcriptome data and clinical information were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. A total of 45 co-expressed genes were extracted between the disulfidptosis-related genes (DRGs) and the differential expression genes (DEGs) of liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) in the TCGA database. The LIHC cohort was divided into two subgroups with different prognosis by k-mean consensus clustering and functional enrichment analysis was performed. Subsequently, three hub genes (CDCA8, SPP2 and RDH16) were screened by Cox regression and LASSO regression analysis. In addition, a risk signature was constructed and the HCC cohort was divided into high risk score and low risk score subgroups to compare the prognosis, clinical features and immune landscape between the two subgroups. Finally, the prognostic model of independent risk factors was constructed and verified. CONCLUSIONS: High DRGs-related risk score in HCC individuals predict poor prognosis and are associated with poor immunotherapy response, which indicates that risk score assessment model can be utilized to guide clinical treatment strategy.

Engineering Properties of PVA Fibre-Reinforced Geopolymer Mortar Containing Waste Oyster Shells.

Recycling crushed waste oyster shells (WOS) as a fine aggregate is an attractive method of disposal. However, its use in geopolymer mortar has not been reported. The influence of PVA fibres on the engineering properties of the new geopolymer mortar is still unclear. To bridge the gap, this study investigated the influence of various PVA fibre contents (0-1.05 vol%) on the flowability, compressive, flexural strengths, drying shrinkage, sorptivity, chloride resistance, porosity, fibre dispersion, embodied CO2 emissions (ECO2e), and embodied energy (EE) of the geopolymer mortar. The results indicated that the inclusion of 0.15-1.05 vol% of PVA fibres improved the flexural strength by 10.10-42.31% and reduced the drying shrinkage by 13.37-65.79%. The flowability and compressive strength decreased by 10.78-34.28% and 7.50-27.65%, respectively, but they were sufficient for construction. The sorptivity increased by 1.45-15.16%, and the chloride resistance decreased by 15.09-56.35%, but the geopolymer mortar was still classified as low chloride penetrability. In summary, the optimal content of PVA fibres is 0.45 vol%, and the geopolymer mortar has good engineering properties and eco-efficiency. The cost analysis and high-temperature resistance of the geopolymer mortar are neglected in this study, which should be evaluated in future work.

[Determination of the cations concentrations in the dialysis fluid by an atom absorption spectrometer].

The atom absorption spectrometer is introduced to determine the cation concentrations such as potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium in the dialysis fluid. They are accurately determined by proper preparation and correct dilution ratio under the optimized measuring conditions. Compared with the current arbitrate methods (EDTA titration determination of calcium and magnesium), it supplements the methods of international and industrial standards for determination of cations.