Wearable bio-adhesive metal detector array (BioMDA) for spinal implants.

Dynamic tracking of spinal instrumentation could facilitate real-time evaluation of hardware integrity and in so doing alert patients/clinicians of potential failure(s). Critically, no method yet exists to continually monitor the integrity of spinal hardware and by proxy the process of spinal arthrodesis; as such hardware failures are often not appreciated until clinical symptoms manifest. Accordingly, herein, we report on the development and engineering of a bio-adhesive metal detector array (BioMDA), a potential wearable solution for real-time, non-invasive positional analyses of osseous implants within the spine. The electromagnetic coupling mechanism and intimate interfacial adhesion enable the precise sensing of the metallic implants position without the use of radiation. The customized decoupling models developed facilitate the precise determination of the horizontal and vertical positions of the implants with incredible levels of accuracy (e.g., <0.5 mm). These data support the potential use of BioMDA in real-time/dynamic postoperative monitoring of spinal implants.

Supporting data-enhanced hybrid ordinary differential equation model for phosphate dynamics in municipal wastewater treatment.

A parallel hybrid ordinary differential equation (ODE) integrating the Activated Sludge Model No. 2d (ASM2d) and an artificial neural network (ANN) was developed to simulate biological phosphorus removal (BPR) with high accuracy and interpretability. Two novelties were introduced; first, the involved supporting data (i.e., phosphate-release activity) were incorporated as an input in the ANN. Second, the outputs of the ANN were selective. Three models were implemented using different ANN outputs, and all three outperformed ASM2d in phosphate estimation for anaerobic/aerobic sequencing batch reactor operation. In particular, the incorporation of four variables responsible for BPR into the ANN enabled the highest performance (R2 = 0.93) owing to the capture of increasing phosphate-accumulating organisms (PAOs). The ANN with the supporting data worked satisfactorily to compensate for ASM2d by adding proper PAOs, resulting in improvement in phosphate estimation. The novel parallel hybrid ODE can simulate BPR while maintaining physical meaning.

Multi-functional adhesive hydrogel as bio-interface for wireless transient pacemaker.

Traditional temporary cardiac pacemakers (TCPs), which employ transcutaneous leads and external wired power systems are battery-dependent and generally non-absorbable with rigidity, thereby necessitating surgical retrieval after therapy and resulting in potentially severe complications. Wireless and bioresorbable transient pacemakers have, hence, emerged recently, though hitting a bottleneck of unfavorable tissue-device bonding interface subject to mismatched mechanical modulus, low adhesive strength, inferior electrical performances, and infection risks. Here, to address such crux, we develop a multifunctional interface hydrogel (MIH) with superior electrical performance to facilitate efficient electrical exchange, comparable mechanical strength to natural heart tissue, robust adhesion property to enable stable device-tissue fixation (tensile strength: ∼30 kPa, shear strength of ∼30 kPa, and peel-off strength: ∼85 kPa), and good bactericidal effect to suppress bacterial growth. Through delicate integration of this versatile MIH with a leadless, battery-free, wireless, and transient pacemaker, the entire system exhibits stable and conformal adhesion to the beating heart while enabling precise and constant electrical stimulation to modulate the cardiac rhythm. It is envisioned that this versatile MIH and the proposed integration framework will have immense potential in overcoming key limitations of traditional TCPs, and may inspire the design of novel bioelectronic-tissue interfaces for next-generation implantable medical devices.

Comprehensive assessment of multiple biomarker mechanisms in the brackish water clam Corbicula japonica exposed to polystyrene microplastics using structural equation modeling.

Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we investigated multiple biomarker mechanisms in terms of biochemical and individual marker responses in the brackish water clam Corbicula japonica following acute exposure to polystyrene microplastic (PS-MP). This study is the first to comprehensively explore multiple biomarker responses in bivalves using SEM. The model revealed that PS-MP accumulation was an independent biomarker, exhibiting significant direct effects on superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) among the biochemical markers. Although CAT generally interacts closely with SOD, no significant relationship was identified between them, indicating that CAT may have independently responded to PS-MP stress. Among individual markers, significant indirect effects were observed on clearance rate (CR), reflecting feeding activity and valve open rate, indicating excretion activity via SOD and CAT. Finally, the carbon-based scope for growth was significantly influenced by CR. SEM is efficient and useful for identifying significant direct and indirect pathway relationships and for uncovering uncommon relationships in unified multiple biomarker mechanisms in aquatic studies.

A popcorn-inspired strategy for compounding graphene@NiFe2O4 flexible films for strong electromagnetic interference shielding and absorption.

Compounding functional nanoparticles with highly conductive and porous carbon scaffolds is a basic pathway for engineering many important functional devices. However, enabling uniform spatial distribution of functional particles within a massively conjugated, monolithic and mesoporous structure remains challenging, as the high processing temperature for graphitization can arouse nanoparticle ripening, agglomerations and compositional changes. Herein, we report a unique "popcorn-making-mimic" strategy for preparing a highly conjugated and uniformly compounded graphene@NiFe2O4 composite film through a laser-assisted instantaneous compounding method in ambient condition. It can successfully inhibit the unwanted structural disintegration and mass loss during the laser treatment by avoiding oxidation, bursting, and inhomogeneous heat accumulations, thus achieving a highly integrated composite structure with superior electrical conductivity and high saturated magnetization. Such a single-sided film exhibits an absolute shielding effectiveness of up to 20906 dB cm2 g-1 with 75% absorption rate, superior mechanical flexibility and excellent temperature/humidity aging reliability. These performance indexes signify a substantial advance in EMI absorption capability, fabrication universality, small form-factor and device reliability toward commercial applications. Our method provides a paradigm for fabricating sophisticated composite materials for versatile applications.

A three-dimensional liquid diode for soft, integrated permeable electronics.

Wearable electronics with great breathability enable a comfortable wearing experience and facilitate continuous biosignal monitoring over extended periods1-3. However, current research on permeable electronics is predominantly at the stage of electrode and substrate development, which is far behind practical applications with comprehensive integration with diverse electronic components (for example, circuitry, electronics, encapsulation)4-8. Achieving permeability and multifunctionality in a singular, integrated wearable electronic system remains a formidable challenge. Here we present a general strategy for integrated moisture-permeable wearable electronics based on three-dimensional liquid diode (3D LD) configurations. By constructing spatially heterogeneous wettability, the 3D LD unidirectionally self-pumps the sweat from the skin to the outlet at a maximum flow rate of 11.6 ml cm-2 min-1, 4,000 times greater than the physiological sweat rate during exercise, presenting exceptional skin-friendliness, user comfort and stable signal-reading behaviour even under sweating conditions. A detachable design incorporating a replaceable vapour/sweat-discharging substrate enables the reuse of soft circuitry/electronics, increasing its sustainability and cost-effectiveness. We demonstrated this fundamental technology in both advanced skin-integrated electronics and textile-integrated electronics, highlighting its potential for scalable, user-friendly wearable devices.

[Application of electronic skin in healthcare and virtual reality].

Electronic skin has shown great application potential in many fields such as healthcare monitoring and human-machine interaction due to their excellent sensing performance, mechanical properties and biocompatibility. This paper starts from the materials selection and structures design of electronic skin, and summarizes their different applications in the field of healthcare equipment, especially current development status of wearable sensors with different functions, as well as the application of electronic skin in virtual reality. The challenges of electronic skin in the field of wearable devices and healthcare, as well as our corresponding strategies, are discussed to provide a reference for further advancing the research of electronic skin.

Genome resources for the elite bread wheat cultivar Aikang 58 and mining of elite homeologous haplotypes for accelerating wheat improvement.

Despite recent progress in crop genomics studies, the genomic changes brought about by modern breeding selection are still poorly understood, thus hampering genomics-assisted breeding, especially in polyploid crops with compound genomes such as common wheat (Triticum aestivum). In this work, we constructed genome resources for the modern elite common wheat variety Aikang 58 (AK58). Comparative genomics between AK58 and the landrace cultivar Chinese Spring (CS) shed light on genomic changes that occurred through recent varietal improvement. We also explored subgenome diploidization and divergence in common wheat and developed a homoeologous locus-based genome-wide association study (HGWAS) approach, which was more effective than single homoeolog-based GWAS in unraveling agronomic trait-associated loci. A total of 123 major HGWAS loci were detected using a genetic population derived from AK58 and CS. Elite homoeologous haplotypes (HHs), formed by combinations of subgenomic homoeologs of the associated loci, were found in both parents and progeny, and many could substantially improve wheat yield and related traits. We built a website where users can download genome assembly sequence and annotation data for AK58, perform blast analysis, and run JBrowse. Our work enriches genome resources for wheat, provides new insights into genomic changes during modern wheat improvement, and suggests that efficient mining of elite HHs can make a substantial contribution to genomics-assisted breeding in common wheat and other polyploid crops.

A nanometallic conductive composite-hydrogel core-shell microneedle skin patch for real-time monitoring of interstitial glucose levels.

A microneedle-based skin patch system allows the minimally invasive extraction of skin interstitial fluid, which offers hope for the realization of quantitative and non-invasive diagnosis/monitoring of biological/physiological signals (biomarkers) in the human body. This work describes a nanometallic conductive composite-hydrogel core-shell microneedle skin patch that can realize minimally invasive real-time monitoring of physiological signals. The microneedle sensing system contains an inner conductive silver paste core and an outer bioactive hydrogel layer. The inner core is coated with biomarker-specific enzymes while the outer hydrogel layer extracts the biomarkers from the skin interstitial fluid. This patch can be integrated with the commercial signal processing and transmission modules and enable real-time monitoring. Taking glucose as a model biomarker, we confirm the function and potential application of this core-shell microneedle patch for transdermal diagnosis. It is proven that the core-shell microneedle patch can quickly extract skin interstitial fluid within 30 seconds and has a fast and linear response to glucose concentrations from 0 to 21 mM with a correlation coefficient of 0.9970, which may pave the way for the future development of smart wearable devices with minimally invasive transdermal biosensors.

Thin, soft, wearable system for continuous wireless monitoring of artery blood pressure.

Continuous monitoring of arterial blood pressure (BP) outside of a clinical setting is crucial for preventing and diagnosing hypertension related diseases. However, current continuous BP monitoring instruments suffer from either bulky systems or poor user-device interfacial performance, hampering their applications in continuous BP monitoring. Here, we report a thin, soft, miniaturized system (TSMS) that combines a conformal piezoelectric sensor array, an active pressure adaptation unit, a signal processing module, and an advanced machine learning method, to allow real wearable, continuous wireless monitoring of ambulatory artery BP. By optimizing the materials selection, control/sampling strategy, and system integration, the TSMS exhibits improved interfacial performance while maintaining Grade A level measurement accuracy. Initial trials on 87 volunteers and clinical tracking of two hypertension individuals prove the capability of the TSMS as a reliable BP measurement product, and its feasibility and practical usability in precise BP control and personalized diagnosis schemes development.

Epigenetic Landscape Is Largely Shaped by Diversiform Transposons in Aegilops tauschii.

Transposons (TEs) account for more than 80% of the wheat genome, the highest among all known crop species. They play an important role in shaping the elaborate genomic landscape, which is the key to the speciation of wheat. In this study, we analyzed the association between TEs, chromatin states, and chromatin accessibility in Aegilops tauschii, the D genome donor of bread wheat. We found that TEs contributed to the complex but orderly epigenetic landscape as chromatin states showed diverse distributions on TEs of different orders or superfamilies. TEs also contributed to the chromatin state and openness of potential regulatory elements, affecting the expression of TE-related genes. Some TE superfamilies, such as hAT-Ac, carry active/open chromatin regions. In addition, the histone mark H3K9ac was found to be associated with the accessibility shaped by TEs. These results suggest the role of diversiform TEs in shaping the epigenetic landscape and in gene expression regulation in Aegilops tauschii. This has positive implications for understanding the transposon roles in Aegilops tauschii or the wheat D genome.

Intra-Varietal Diversity and Its Contribution to Wheat Evolution, Domestication, and Improvement in Wheat.

Crop genetic diversity is essential for adaptation and productivity in agriculture. A previous study revealed that poor allele diversity in wheat commercial cultivars is a major barrier to its further improvement. Homologs within a variety, including paralogs and orthologs in polyploid, account for a large part of the total genes of a species. Homolog diversity, intra-varietal diversity (IVD), and their functions have not been elucidated. Common wheat, an important food crop, is a hexaploid species with three subgenomes. This study analyzed the sequence, expression, and functional diversity of homologous genes in common wheat based on high-quality reference genomes of two representative varieties, a modern commercial variety Aikang 58 (AK58) and a landrace Chinese Spring (CS). A total of 85,908 homologous genes, accounting for 71.9% of all wheat genes, including inparalogs (IPs), outparalogs (OPs), and single-copy orthologs (SORs), were identified, suggesting that homologs are an important part of the wheat genome. The levels of sequence, expression, and functional variation in OPs and SORs were higher than that of IPs, which indicates that polyploids have more homologous diversity than diploids. Expansion genes, a specific type of OPs, made a great contribution to crop evolution and adaptation and endowed crop with special characteristics. Almost all agronomically important genes were from OPs and SORs, demonstrating their essential functions for polyploid evolution, domestication, and improvement. Our results suggest that IVD analysis is a novel approach for evaluating intra-genomic variations, and exploitation of IVD might be a new road for plant breeding, especially for polyploid crops, such as wheat.

Soft, miniaturized, wireless olfactory interface for virtual reality.

Recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technologies accelerate the creation of a flawless 3D virtual world to provide frontier social platform for human. Equally important to traditional visual, auditory and tactile sensations, olfaction exerts both physiological and psychological influences on humans. Here, we report a concept of skin-interfaced olfactory feedback systems with wirelessly, programmable capabilities based on arrays of flexible and miniaturized odor generators (OGs) for olfactory VR applications. By optimizing the materials selection, design layout, and power management, the OGs exhibit outstanding device performance in various aspects, from response rate, to odor concentration control, to long-term continuous operation, to high mechanical/electrical stability and to low power consumption. Representative demonstrations in 4D movie watching, smell message delivery, medical treatment, human emotion control and VR/AR based online teaching prove the great potential of the soft olfaction interface in various practical applications, including entertainment, education, human machine interfaces and so on.

Genome sequencing of Sitopsis species provides insights into their contribution to the B subgenome of bread wheat.

Wheat (Triticum aestivum, BBAADD) is an allohexaploid species that originated from two polyploidization events. The progenitors of the A and D subgenomes have been identified as Triticum urartu and Aegilops tauschii, respectively. Current research suggests that Aegilops speltoides is the closest but not the direct ancestor of the B subgenome. However, whether Ae. speltoides has contributed genomically to the wheat B subgenome and which chromosome regions are conserved between Ae. speltoides and the B subgenome remain unclear. Here, we assembled a high-quality reference genome for Ae. speltoides, resequenced 53 accessions from seven species (Aegilops bicornis, Aegilops longissima, Aegilops searsii, Aegilops sharonensis, Ae. speltoides, Aegilops mutica [syn. Amblyopyrum muticum], and Triticum dicoccoides) and revealed their genomic contributions to the wheat B subgenome. Our results showed that centromeric regions were particularly conserved between Aegilops and Triticum and revealed 0.17 Gb of conserved blocks between Ae. speltoides and the B subgenome. We classified five groups of conserved and non-conserved genes between Aegilops and Triticum, revealing their biological characteristics, differentiation in gene expression patterns, and collinear relationships between Ae. speltoides and the wheat B subgenome. We also identified gene families that expanded in Ae. speltoides during its evolution and 789 genes specific to Ae. speltoides. These genes can serve as genetic resources for improvement of adaptability to biotic and abiotic stress. The newly constructed reference genome and large-scale resequencing data for Sitopsis species will provide a valuable genomic resource for wheat genetic improvement and genomic studies.

Output characteristics and driving factors of non-point source nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the Three Gorges reservoir area (TGRA) based on migration process: 1995-2020.

Although physical models at present have made important achievements in the assessment of non-point source pollution (NPSP), the requirement for large volumes of data and their accuracy limit their application. Therefore, constructing a scientific evaluation model of NPS nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) output is of great significance for the identification of N and P sources as well as pollution prevention and control in the basin. We considered runoff, leaching and landscape interception conditions, and constructed an input-migration-output (IMO) model based on the classic export coefficient model (ECM), and identified the main driving factors of NPSP using geographical detector (GD) in Three Gorges Reservoir area (TGRA). The results showed that, compared with the traditional export coefficient model, the prediction accuracy of the improved model for total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) increased by 15.46 % and 20.17 % respectively, and the error rates with the measured data were 9.43 % and 10.62 %. It was found that the total input volume of TN in the TGRA had declined from 58.16 × 104 t to 48.37 × 104 t, while the TP input volume increased from 2.76 × 104 t to 4.11 × 104 t, and then decreased to 4.01 × 104 t. In addition Pengxi River, Huangjin River and the northern part of Qi River were high value areas of NPSP input and output, but the range of high value areas of migration factors has narrowed. Pig breeding, rural population and dry land area were the main driving factors of N and P export. The IMO model can effectively improve prediction accuracy, and has significant implications for the prevention and control of NPSP.

Tiller Number1 encodes an ankyrin repeat protein that controls tillering in bread wheat.

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a major staple food for more than one-third of the world's population. Tiller number is an important agronomic trait in wheat, but only few related genes have been cloned. Here, we isolate a wheat mutant, tiller number1 (tn1), with much fewer tillers. We clone the TN1 gene via map-based cloning: TN1 encodes an ankyrin repeat protein with a transmembrane domain (ANK-TM). We show that a single amino acid substitution in the third conserved ankyrin repeat domain causes the decreased tiller number of tn1 mutant plants. Resequencing and haplotype analysis indicate that TN1 is conserved in wheat landraces and modern cultivars. Further, we reveal that the expression level of the abscisic acid (ABA) biosynthetic gene TaNCED3 and ABA content are significantly increased in the shoot base and tiller bud of the tn1 mutants; TN1 but not tn1 could inhibit the binding of TaPYL to TaPP2C via direct interaction with TaPYL. Taken together, we clone a key wheat tiller number regulatory gene TN1, which promotes tiller bud outgrowth probably through inhibiting ABA biosynthesis and signaling.