Organic Branched Heterostructures with Optical Interconnects for Photonic Barcodes.

Optical interconnects exhibit superior potential in the precise regulation of photon transmission for organic photonic circuits. However, the rational design of well-defined organic heterostructures toward active optoelectronics remains challenging. Herein, we designed organic branched heterostructures (OBHs) with accurate spatial organization for optical interconnection. Notably, the precise regulation of OBHs has been controllably achieved including the trunk morphologies and the branched microwire number. Significantly, these as-prepared OBHs inherently exhibit the multichannel coupling outputs and the excitation position-dependent waveguide characteristics, leading to various outcoupling signals with tunable intensity and emission colors. The optical interconnects are realized due to the occurrence of exciton conversion and photon propagation between branch and trunk at the heterojunction, benefiting the application possibilities of two-dimensional (2D) optical barcodes.

Anti-inflammatory effects of isorhamnetin on LPS-stimulated human gingival fibroblasts by activating Nrf2 signaling pathway.

Periodontitis is a highly prevalent infective and inflammatory disease with an adverse impact on systemic health. Isorhamnetin, a flavonoid mainly isolated from Hippophae fhamnoides L. fruit, has been reported to have anti-inflammatory effect. This study aimed to investigate the anti-inflammatory effects and mechanism of isorhamnetin on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced inflammatory response in human gingival fibroblasts (HGFs). The production of inflammatory mediators and the expression of proteins were measured by ELISA and western blot analysis. The results demonstrated that isorhamnetin attenuated LPS-induced release of PGE2, NO, IL-6, and IL-8 in HGFs. Isorhamnetin also inhibited LPS-induced NF-κB activation. The expression of Nrf2 and HO-1 were up-regulated by treatment of isorhamnetin. Furthermore, knockdown of Nrf2 by siRNA reversed the anti-inflammatory effects of isorhamnetin. In conclusion, these results suggested that isorhamnetin inhibited LPS-induced inflammation in HGFs by activating Nrf2 signaling pathway.

Dynamic Epitaxial Growth of Organic Heterostructures for Polarized Exciton Conversion.

Highly spatial and angular precision in epitaxial-growth process is crucial for constructing organic low-dimensional heterostructures (OLDHs) with the desired substructures, which remains significant challenge owing to the unpredicted location of complex heterogeneous nucleation. Herein, a dynamic epitaxial-growth approach is developed along the tailored longitudinal/horizontal directions to create diverse OLDHs with hierarchical architectures. The controlled morphology evolution of seed crystals from kinetic to thermodynamic species is achieved via incrementally increasing the crystallization time from 0 to 600 s. Accordingly, the kinetic and thermodynamic seed crystals respectively present the specific lattice-matching crystal-planes of (100) and (011), which facilitates the longitudinal epitaxial-growth (LG) process for triblock heterostructures, and the horizontal epitaxial-growth (HG) process for axial-branch heterostructures. The dominant core/shell heterostructures are prepared via both LG and HG processes with a crystallization time of ≈30 s. Significantly, these prepared OLDHs realize the rationally polarized exciton conversion for optical logic gate application through the exciton conversion and photon propagation at the heterojunction. This strategy provides an avenue for the precise synthesis of OLDHs with anisotropy optical characters for integrated optoelectronics.

Application of a New Microtensile Bond Strength Testing Technique for the Evaluation of Enamel Bonding.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate adhesives' enamel bonding performance utilising the traditional microtensile bond strength test (µTBST) and a new double-sided microtensile bond strength test (DµTBST) to assess the suitability of the latter. METHODS: A 'tug-of-war' direct encounter design was employed to compare the enamel bond strengths of two universal adhesives and their different application modes simultaneously under the same tensile load applied to double-sided bonded specimens. Clearfil Universal Bond (CU; Kuraray, Kurashiki, Japan) and Scotchbond Universal Adhesive (SB; 3M ESPE, St Paul, MN, USA) were applied in self-etch (S) and etch-and-rinse (E) mode on 110 human molar samples to perform two experiments. Experiment 1 compared the enamel bond strengths of the combinations of adhesive application modes utilising µTBST. The data were analysed using a Welch analysis of variance (ANOVA), followed by a Games-Howell test. Experiment 2 employed DµTBST to determine the suitability of the new double-sided bonded assembly and ascertain which of the adhesive application mode combinations was superior. The data were analysed using a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, followed by pairwise comparisons with a Mantel-Cox log-rank test. The level of significance was set at P ˂ 0.05. RESULTS: The µTBST results did not show significant differences for CUE vs CUS, SBE vs SBS, CUS vs SBS and CUS vs SBE (P ˃ 0.05); however, from DµTBST, the survival distributions for the interventions were statistically significantly different (χ2(3) = 145.130, P ˂ 0.0005), indicating the superiority of universal adhesive CU over SB and application mode E over S with certainty. CONCLUSION: DµTBST was able to add more discerning outcomes to the µTBST results, indicating that the new technique could become a valuable adjunct to the conventional method.