Enhancing the performance of electrorheological fluids by structure design.

By incorporating polar fibers into the design of electrorheological (ER) fluids, a 130% performance improvement can be achieved with the addition of only 0.8 vol% of polar long fibers. We quantitatively analyzed the impact of relatively long fibers on improving ER performance by measuring the yield stress, shear stress, and current density after adding fibers. Both optical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy were used to observe and analyze the interaction between ER particles and polar fibers. The results indicate that, under the influence of an electric field, the fibers transform the one-dimensional chain-like structure into a two-dimensional mesh structure, greatly improving the ER performance. The transformation of structure induced by the polar fibers in the ER fluids amplifies the ER effect. However, the inclusion of non-polar fibers does not contribute to this enhancement, as a point of comparison. Moreover, to ensure the universality of this method, we used two different types of ER fluids in experiments. The utilization of this method offers a straightforward, environmentally friendly, and highly effective approach. Furthermore, this study provides a novel technical solution aimed at enhancing the performance of ER fluids.

Regulation of Mertk Surface Expression via ADAM17 and γ-Secretase Proteolytic Processing.

Mertk, a type I receptor tyrosine kinase and member of the TAM family of receptors, has important functions in promoting efferocytosis and resolving inflammation under physiological conditions. In recent years, Mertk has also been linked to pathophysiological roles in cancer, whereby, in several cancer types, including solid cancers and leukemia/lymphomas. Mertk contributes to oncogenic features of proliferation and cell survival as an oncogenic tyrosine kinase. In addition, Mertk expressed on macrophages, including tumor-associated macrophages, promotes immune evasion in cancer and is suggested to act akin to a myeloid checkpoint inhibitor that skews macrophages towards inhibitory phenotypes that suppress host T-cell anti-tumor immunity. In the present study, to better understand the post-translational regulation mechanisms controlling Mertk expression in monocytes/macrophages, we used a PMA-differentiated THP-1 cell model to interrogate the regulation of Mertk expression and developed a novel Mertk reporter cell line to study the intracellular trafficking of Mertk. We show that PMA treatment potently up-regulates Mertk as well as components of the ectodomain proteolytic processing platform ADAM17, whereas PMA differentially regulates the canonical Mertk ligands Gas6 and Pros1 (Gas6 is down-regulated and Pros1 is up-regulated). Under non-stimulated homeostatic conditions, Mertk in PMA-differentiated THP1 cells shows active constitutive proteolytic cleavage by the sequential activities of ADAM17 and the Presenilin/γ-secretase complex, indicating that Mertk is cleaved homeostatically by the combined sequential action of ADAM17 and γ-secretase, after which the cleaved intracellular fragment of Mertk is degraded in a proteasome-dependent mechanism. Using chimeric Flag-Mertk-EGFP-Myc reporter receptors, we confirm that inhibitors of γ-secretase and MG132, which inhibits the 26S proteasome, stabilize the intracellular fragment of Mertk without evidence of nuclear translocation. Finally, the treatment of cells with active γ-carboxylated Gas6, but not inactive Warfarin-treated non-γ-carboxylated Gas6, regulates a distinct proteolytic itinerary-involved receptor clearance and lysosomal proteolysis. Together, these results indicate that pleotropic and complex proteolytic activities regulate Mertk ectodomain cleavage as a homeostatic negative regulatory event to safeguard against the overactivation of Mertk.

Research on named entity recognition of adverse drug reactions based on NLP and deep learning.

Introduction: Adverse drug reactions (ADR) are directly related to public health and become the focus of public and media attention. At present, a large number of ADR events have been reported on the Internet, but the mining and utilization of such information resources is insufficient. Named entity recognition (NER) is the basic work of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which aims to identify entities with specific meanings from natural language texts. Methods: In order to identify entities from ADR event data resources more effectively, so as to provide valuable health knowledge for people, this paper introduces ALBERT in the input presentation layer on the basis of the classic BiLSTM-CRF model, and proposes a method of ADR named entity recognition based on the ALBERT-BiLSTM-CRF model. The textual information about ADR on the website "Chinese medical information query platform" (https://www.dayi.org.cn) was collected by the crawler and used as research data, and the BIO method was used to label three types of entities: drug name (DRN), drug component (COM), and adverse drug reactions (ADR) to build a corpus. Then, the words were mapped to the word vector by using the ALBERT module to obtain the character level semantic information, the context coding was performed by the BiLSTM module, and the label decoding was using the CRF module to predict the real label. Results: Based on the constructed corpus, experimental comparisons were made with two classical models, namely, BiLSTM-CRF and BERT-BiLSTM-CRF. The experimental results show that the F 1 of our method is 91.19% on the whole, which is 1.5% and 1.37% higher than the other two models respectively, and the performance of recognition of three types of entities is significantly improved, which proves the superiority of this method. Discussion: The method proposed can be used effectively in NER from ADR information on the Internet, which provides a basis for the extraction of drug-related entity relationships and the construction of knowledge graph, thus playing a role in practical health systems such as intelligent diagnosis, risk reasoning and automatic question answering.

The improvement of intestinal dysbiosis and hepatic metabolic dysfunction in dextran sulfate sodium-induced colitis mice: effects of curcumin.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Curcumin may have promising application in the prevention and amelioration of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). However, the underlying mechanisms underpinning the ability of curcumin to interact with the gut and liver in IBD remains to be defined, which is the exploration aim of this study. METHODS: Mice with dextran sulfate sodium salt (DSS)-induced acute colitis were treated either with 100 mg/kg of curcumin or phosphate buffer saline (PBS). Hematoxylin-eosin (HE) staining, 16S rDNA Miseq sequencing, proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1 H NMR) spectroscopy, and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) were applied for analysis. Spearman's correlation coefficient (SCC) was utilized to assess the correlation between the modification of intestinal bacteria and hepatic metabolite parameters. RESULTS: Curcumin supplementation not only prevented further loss of body weight and colon length in IBD mice but also improved diseases activity index (DAI), colonic mucosal injury, and inflammatory infiltration. Meanwhile, curcumin restored the composition of the gut microbiota, significantly increased Akkermansia, Muribaculaceae_unclassified, and Muribaculum, and significantly elevated the concentration of propionate, butyrate, glycine, tryptophan, and betaine in the intestine. For hepatic metabolic disturbances, curcumin intervention altered 14 metabolites, including anthranilic acid and 8-amino-7-oxononanoate while enriching pathways related to the metabolism of bile acids, glucagon, amino acids, biotin, and butanoate. Furthermore, SCC analysis revealed a potential correlation between the upregulation of intestinal probiotics and alterations in liver metabolites. CONCLUSION: The therapeutic mechanism of curcumin against IBD mice occurs by improving intestinal dysbiosis and liver metabolism disorders, thus contributing to the stabilization of the gut-liver axis.

A Faster and More Accurate Iterative Threshold Algorithm for Signal Reconstruction in Compressed Sensing.

Fast iterative soft threshold algorithm (FISTA) is one of the algorithms for the reconstruction part of compressed sensing (CS). However, FISTA cannot meet the increasing demands for accuracy and efficiency in the signal reconstruction. Thus, an improved algorithm (FIPITA, fast iterative parametric improved threshold algorithm) based on mended threshold function, restart adjustment mechanism and parameter adjustment is proposed. The three parameters used to generate the gradient in the FISTA are carefully selected by assessing the impact of them on the performance of the algorithm. The developed threshold function is used to replace the soft threshold function to reduce the reconstruction error and a restart mechanism is added at the end of each iteration to speed up the algorithm. The simulation experiment is carried out on one-dimensional signal and the FISTA, RadaFISTA and RestartFISTA are used as the comparison objects, with the result that in one case, for example, the residual rate of FIPITA is about 6.35% lower than those three and the number of iterations required to achieve the minimum error is also about 102 less than that of FISTA.

Mertk: An emerging target in cancer biology and immuno-oncology.

Mertk, a type I Receptor Tyrosine Kinase (RTK) and member of the TAM (Tyro3, Axl, and Mertk) family of homologous tyrosine kinases, has important roles in signal transduction both homeostatically on normal cells as well as patho-physiologically on both tumor-associated macrophages and malignant cells by its overexpression in a wide array of cancers. The main ligands of Mertk are Vitamin K-modified endogenous proteins Gas6 and Protein S (ProS1), heterobifunctional modular proteins that bind Mertk via two carboxyl-terminal laminin-like globular (LG) domains, and an N-terminal Gla domain that binds anionic phospholipids, whereby externalized phosphatidylserine (PS) on stressed viable and caspase-activated apoptotic cells is most emblematic. Recent studies indicate that Vitamin K-dependent γ-carboxylation on the N-terminal Gla domain of Gas6 and Protein S is necessary for PS binding and Mertk activation, implying that Mertk is preferentially active in tissues where there is high externalized PS, such as the tumor microenvironment (TME) and acute virally infected tissues. Once stimulated, activated Mertk can provide a survival advantage for cancer cells as well as drive compensatory proliferation. On monocytes and tumor-associated macrophages, Mertk promotes efferocytosis and acts as an inhibitory receptor that impairs host anti-tumor immunity, functioning akin to a myeloid checkpoint inhibitor. In recent years, inhibition of Mertk has been implicated in a dual role to enhance the sensitivity of cancer cells to cytotoxic agents along with improving host anti-tumor immunity with anti-PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapy. Here, we examine the rationale of Mertk-targeted immunotherapies, the current and potential therapeutic strategies, the clinical status of Mertk-specific therapies, and potential challenges and obstacles for Mertk-focused therapies.

Superheating of grain boundaries within bulk colloidal crystals.

Whether grain boundaries (GBs) premelt is a longstanding question, because of the difficulty of direct experimental tests. Here, we focused an optical beam to locally heat single GBs within bulk hard-sphere colloidal crystals, observing the melting dynamics at single-particle resolution by video microscopy. The melting point is determined by analysing both the Lindemann parameter and the critical nucleus size for homogeneous nucleation. We found that all the GBs, including the high-energy GBs, can be superheated and melt via a heterogeneous nucleation mechanism. Based on the classical nucleation theory of GBs, we measured the incubation time and contact angle of the critical nucleus to compute all relevant kinetic factors, as well as the energy barrier, nucleation rate and the diffusion coefficient at the solid-liquid interface under weak superheating. The superheat limits of GBs with various misorientations have also been measured to further explore the instability mechanism. Under traditional uniform heating, premelting occurs only at triple junctions, whereas GBs retain their original structures up to the melting point. The premelted regions at triple junctions further interrupt high-energy GBs from superheating, through intrusion by uniform liquid layers. Overall, our experiments confirm the existence of superheating of GBs.

Deletion of ER-retention motif on SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reduces cell hybrid during cell-cell fusion.

BACKGROUND: The novel SARS-CoV-2 has quickly become a global pandemic since the first reported case in December 2019, with the virus infecting millions of people to date. The spike (S) protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus plays a key role in binding to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), a host cell receptor for SARS-CoV-2. S proteins that are expressed on the cell membrane can initiate receptor-dependent syncytia formation that is associated with extensive tissue damage. Formation of syncytia have been previously observed in cells infected with various other viruses (e.g., HIV, Ebola, Influenza, and Herpesviruses). However, this phenomenon is not well documented and the mechanisms regulating the formation of the syncytia by SARS-CoV-2 are not fully understood. RESULTS: In this study, we investigated the possibility that cell fusion events mediated by the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 and ACE2 interaction can occur in different human cell lines that mimic different tissue origins. These cell lines were transduced with either wild-type (WT-S) S protein or a mutated variant where the ER-retention motif was removed (Δ19-S), as well as human ACE2 expression vectors. Different co-culture combinations of spike-expressing 293T, A549, K562, and SK-Hep1 cells with hACE2-expressing cells revealed cell hybrid fusion. However, only certain cells expressing S protein can form syncytial structures as this phenomenon cannot be observed in all co-culture combinations. Thus, SARS-CoV-2 mediated cell-cell fusion represents a cell type-dependent process which might rely on a different set of parameters. Recently, the Δ19-S variant is being widely used to increase SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus production for in vitro assays. Comparison of cell fusion occurring via Δ19-S expressing cells shows defective nuclear fusion and syncytia formation compared to WT-S. CONCLUSIONS: This distinction between the Δ19-S variant and WT-S protein may have downstream implications for studies that utilize pseudovirus-based entry assays. Additionally, this study suggest that spike protein expressed by vaccines may affect different ACE2-expressing host cells after SARS-CoV-2 vaccine administration. The long-term effects of these vaccines should be monitored carefully. Δ19-S mRNA may represent a safer mRNA vaccine design in the future.

Disseminated Mycobacterium avium Infection Complicated with Chylous Ascites in a Patient with Neutralizing Autoantibodies to Interferon-γ.

A 68-year-old man visited our hospital due to anorexia, weight loss and a fever. We diagnosed the patient with disseminated Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) and confirmed the presence of interferon (IFN)-γ neutralizing autoantibodies (IFN-γAb). His lesions improved following antibiotic therapy, but chylous ascites (CA) developed seven months after treatment. CA was able to be controlled by subcutaneous octreotide and diet therapy. IFN-γAb is recognized as having a critical role in the pathogenesis of disseminated MAC disease, but its clinical features are not fully understood. CA may be a complication that develops during the treatment of disseminated MAC infection.

Homogeneous melting near the superheat limit of hard-sphere crystals.

A defect-free crystal can be superheated into a metastable state above its melting point and eventually melts via homogeneous nucleation. Further increasing the temperature leads to the metastable crystal becoming unstable and melting catastrophically once beyond its superheat limit. The homogeneous melting is not well studied near the superheat limit and this limit is difficult to measure accurately, even for the simplest model of hard-sphere crystals. Here our molecular-dynamics simulations identify its superheat limit at volume fraction φlimit = 0.494 ± 0.003, which is higher than the previous theoretical estimations. We found that the hard-sphere crystal at the superheat limit does not satisfy Born's melting criterion, but has a vanishing bulk modulus, i.e. a spinodal instability, which preempts other thermodynamic or mechanical instabilities. At the strong superheating regime, the nucleation deviates from the assumptions in the classical nucleation theory. In contrast to crystallization which often develops nuclei with various intermediate structures, the melting of face-centered cubic (fcc) hard-sphere crystal does not produce intermediate structures such as body-centered cubic (bcc) crystallites although bcc is more stable than fcc at the strong superheating regime. Moreover, we found that the time evolutions of the order parameters and the pressure all exhibit a compressed exponential function, in contrast to the stretched exponential relaxation of supercooled liquids. The compressed exponential functions have the same exponent, which poses a new challenge to theory.

Direct observation of liquid nucleus growth in homogeneous melting of colloidal crystals.

The growth behaviour of liquid nucleus is crucial for crystal melting, but its kinetics is difficult to predict and remains challenging in experiment. Here we directly observed the growth of individual liquid nuclei in homogeneous melting of three-dimensional superheated colloidal crystals with single-particle dynamics by video microscopy. The growth rate of nucleus at weak superheating is well fitted by generalizing the Wilson-Frenkel law of crystallization to melting and including the surface tension effects and non-spherical-shape effects. As the degree of superheating increases, the growth rate is enhanced by nucleus shape fluctuation, nuclei coalescence and multimer attachment. The results provide new guidance for the refinement of nucleation theory, especially for the poorly understood strong-superheating regime. The universal Lindemann parameter observed at the superheat limit and solid-liquid interfaces indicates a connection between homogeneous and heterogeneous melting.

Two-step nucleation mechanism in solid-solid phase transitions.

The microscopic kinetics of ubiquitous solid-solid phase transitions remain poorly understood. Here, by using single-particle-resolution video microscopy of colloidal films of diameter-tunable microspheres, we show that transitions between square and triangular lattices occur via a two-step diffusive nucleation pathway involving liquid nuclei. The nucleation pathway is favoured over the direct one-step nucleation because the energy of the solid/liquid interface is lower than that between solid phases. We also observed that nucleation precursors are particle-swapping loops rather than newly generated structural defects, and that coherent and incoherent facets of the evolving nuclei exhibit different energies and growth rates that can markedly alter the nucleation kinetics. Our findings suggest that an intermediate liquid should exist in the nucleation processes of solid-solid transitions of most metals and alloys, and provide guidance for better control of the kinetics of the transition and for future refinements of solid-solid transition theory.

Test of the universal scaling law of diffusion in colloidal monolayers.

Using the techniques of optical microscopy and particle tracking, we measure the pair correlation function and Brownian diffusion in monolayers of strongly interacting colloidal particles suspended at or near three different interfaces and test the universal scaling law of the normalized diffusion coefficient, D[over ˜]≃e(αΔS), as a function of the excess entropy ΔS for a wide range of particle concentrations. It is found that the universal scaling law with α=1 holds well for highly charged polystyrene spheres suspended at an air-water interface, where the strong electrostatic interactions play a dominant role. For monolayer suspensions of hard-sphere-like particles, where hydrodynamic interactions become important, deviations from the universal scaling law are observed. The experiment indicates that the hydrodynamic corrections could be incorporated into the universal scaling law of diffusion with an exponent α<1.

Imaging the homogeneous nucleation during the melting of superheated colloidal crystals.

The nucleation process is crucial to many phase transitions, but its kinetics are difficult to predict and measure. We superheated and melted the interior of thermal-sensitive colloidal crystals and investigated by means of video microscopy the homogeneous melting at single-particle resolution. The observed nucleation precursor was local particle-exchange loops surrounded by particles with large displacement amplitudes rather than any defects. The critical size, incubation time, and shape and size evolutions of the nucleus were measured. They deviate from the classical nucleation theory under strong superheating, mainly because of the coalescence of nuclei. The superheat limit agrees with the measured Born and Lindemann instabilities.

[Electricity generation performance of two-chamber microbial full cell in the treatment of simulated wastewater].

The start-up procedures, the degradation efficiency of organics at the anode and the removal efficiency of Cu2+ at the cathode of the cell were studied, based on which the performance of MFC (microbial fuel cell) in electricity generation and wastewater treatment was evaluated. A simple two-chamber microbial fuel cell was established with simulated molasses wastewater as substrate at the anode and simulated electroplating wastewater as an electron acceptor at the cathode. The results from a batch of experiments showed that the highest voltage output of 417.00 mV was obtained at an external resistance of 800 Omega, and that the maximum power density of 44.17 mW x m(-2) was obtained with an internal resistance of 293 Omega based on the polarization curve. In addition, COD removal rate reached its highest value (47.31%) in the fifth cycle, and the maximum removal rate (59.76%) for Cu2+ was recorded in the fourth cycle. In summary, the application of MFC in the treatment of organic wastewater and electroplating wastewater is feasible.

The effects of 12C6+ irradiation on cell cycle, apoptosis, and expression of caspase-3 in the human lung cancer cell line h1299.

INTRODUCTION: We aimed to investigate the effects of (12)C(6+) irradiation on the cell cycle and apoptosis as well as the associated mechanisms in the human lung cancer cell line H1299. METHODS: After irradiation with different doses of (12)C(6+) for varying lengths of incubation, the changes in H1299 cells were assayed by flow cytometry and the microculture tetrazolium test. The expression of caspase-3 was detected by immunocytochemistry, western blot, and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). RESULTS: The G(2)/M phase was blocked after treatment with 1 and 2 Gy at the 12-hour time point, and the most obvious block of G(2)/M occurred after treatment with 2 and 4 Gy at the 24-hour time point in a dose-dependent manner. The apoptosis rate increased with increasing radiation dose and reached a peak after the cells were irradiated with 2 Gy and incubated for 48 hours. In addition, the RT-PCR, western blot, and ICC results showed that irradiation with (12)C(6+) significantly increased the expression of caspase-3 compared with the control group (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Irradiation of H1299 cells with (12)C(6+) induced apoptosis and significantly inhibited their growth through heavy ion irradiation-mediated activation of the caspase-3 pathway. Our results show that caspase-3 may play an important role in radiation-induced apoptosis through a p53-independent pathway.

Allicin induces apoptosis in EL-4 cells in vitro by activation of expression of caspase-3 and -12 and up-regulation of the ratio of Bax/Bcl-2.

Garlic (Allium sativum L.; Liliaceae) has been widely demonstrated in the role of cancer prevention, but the specific compound in garlic corresponding to this effect and its mechanisms are not clearly known. Allicin is one of the organic sulphur compounds derived from garlic. In the present study we investigated the anti-proliferative and pro-apoptotic activities of allicin in murine T-lymphocytes (EL-4) and the mechanism of inducing apoptosis in vitro. The results showed that allicin was effective in inhibiting the proliferation of EL-4 cells in vitro in a concentration-dependent manner. Further, allicin could induce the formation of apoptotic bodies, nuclear condensation, DNA spallation, and even activated the expression of caspase-3, -12 and cytochrome C (cyt C). Finally, allicin up-regulated the ratio of Bax/Bcl-2 and induced a mitochondrion membrane potential (MMP) decrease. Allicin induced apoptosis in EL-4 cells in a time- and concentration-dependent manner, in which the mitochondrial pathway might play a central role.

Two features at the two-dimensional freezing transitions.

We studied the two-dimensional freezing transitions in monolayers of microgel colloidal spheres with short-ranged repulsions in video-microscopy experiments, and monolayers of hard disks, and Yukawa particles in simulations. These systems share two common features at the freezing points: (1) the bimodal distribution profile of the local orientational order parameter; (2) the two-body excess entropy, s(2), reaches -4.5±0.5 k(B). Both features are robust and sensitive to the freezing points, so that they can potentially serve as empirical freezing criteria in two dimensions. Compared with the conventional freezing criteria, the first feature has no finite-size ambiguities and can be resolved adequately with much less statistics; and the second feature can be directly measured in macroscopic experiments without the need for microscopic information.

Melting in two-dimensional Yukawa systems: a Brownian dynamics simulation.

We studied the melting behavior of two-dimensional colloidal crystals with a Yukawa pair potential by Brownian dynamics simulations. The melting follows the Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young (KTHNY) scenario with two continuous phase transitions and a middle hexatic phase. The two phase-transition points were accurately identified from the divergence of the translational and orientational susceptibilities. Configurational temperatures were employed to monitor the equilibrium of the overdamped system and the strongest temperature fluctuation was observed in the hexatic phase. The inherent structure obtained by rapid quenching exhibits three different behaviors in the solid, hexatic, and liquid phases. The measured core energy of the free dislocations, E(c) = 7.81 ± 0.91 k(B)T, is larger than the critical value of 2.84 k(B)T, which consistently supports the KTHNY melting scenario.

Two-dimensional freezing criteria for crystallizing colloidal monolayers.

Video microscopy was employed to explore crystallization of colloidal monolayers composed of diameter-tunable microgel spheres. Two-dimensional (2D) colloidal liquids were frozen homogenously into polycrystalline solids, and four 2D criteria for freezing were experimentally tested in thermal systems for the first time: the Hansen-Verlet freezing rule, the Lowen-Palberg-Simon dynamical freezing criterion, and two other rules based, respectively, on the split shoulder of the radial distribution function and on the distribution of the shape factor of Voronoi polygons. Importantly, these freezing criteria, usually applied in the context of single crystals, were demonstrated to apply to the formation of polycrystalline solids. At the freezing point, we also observed a peak in the fluctuations of the orientational order parameter and a percolation transition associated with caged particles. Speculation about these percolated clusters of caged particles casts light on solidification mechanisms and dynamic heterogeneity in freezing.