Low-temperature plasma jet suppresses bacterial colonisation and affects wound healing through reactive species.

An argon-based low-temperature plasma jet (LTPJ) was used to treat chronically infected wounds in Staphylococcus aureus-laden mice. Based on physicochemical property analysis and in vitro antibacterial experiments, the effects of plasma parameters on the reactive nitrogen and oxygen species (RNOS) content and antibacterial capacity were determined, and the optimal treatment parameters were determined to be 4 standard litre per minute and 35 W. Additionally, the plasma-treated activation solution had a bactericidal effect. Although RNOS are related to the antimicrobial effect of plasma, excess RNOS may be detrimental to wound remodelling. In vivo studies demonstrated that medium-dose LTPJ promoted MMP-9 expression and inhibited bacterial growth during the early stages of healing. Moreover, LTPJ increased collagen deposition, reduced inflammation, and restored blood vessel density and TGF-ß levels to normal in the later stages of wound healing. Therefore, when treating chronically infected wounds with LTPJ, selecting the medium dose of plasma is more advantageous for wound recovery. Overall, our study demonstrated that low-temperature plasma jets may be a potential tool for the treatment of chronically infected wounds.

High-Voltage Electrostatic Field Hydrogel Microsphere 3D Culture System Improves Viability and Liver-like Properties of HepG2 Cells.

Three-dimensional (3D) hepatocyte models have become a research hotspot for evaluating drug metabolism and hepatotoxicity. Compared to two-dimensional (2D) cultures, 3D cultures are better at mimicking the morphology and microenvironment of hepatocytes in vivo. However, commonly used 3D culture techniques are not suitable for high-throughput drug screening (HTS) due to their high cost, complex handling, and inability to simulate cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions. This article describes a method for rapid and reproducible 3D cell cultures with ECM-cell interactions based on 3D culture instrumentation to provide more efficient HTS. We developed a microsphere preparation based on a high-voltage electrostatic (HVE) field and used sodium alginate- and collagen-based hydrogels as scaffolds for 3D cultures of HepG2 cells. The microsphere-generating device enables the rapid and reproducible preparation of bioactive hydrogel microspheres. This 3D culture system exhibited better cell viability, heterogeneity, and drug-metabolizing activity than 2D and other 3D culture models, and the long-term culture characteristics of this system make it suitable for predicting long-term liver toxicity. This system improves the overall applicability of HepG2 spheroids in safety assessment studies, and this simple and controllable high-throughput-compatible method shows potential for use in drug toxicity screening assays and mechanistic studies.

Centrifugal microfluidic platform with digital image analysis for parallel red cell antigen typing.

This study presents a portable multichannel microfluidic device for parallel and digital analysis of red cell antigen typing. A zigzag-shaped precise metering channel was designed for the simultaneous aliquoting of samples, which is independent of the volume of the predeposited blood-typing reagents in the reaction chambers. The entire assay protocol can be conducted using a sequential-step spinning protocol, which resembles that of conventional tube tests for blood typing; however, the manual procedure is largely reduced compared to that of conventional systems. After loading the samples, the disc is centrifuged in a defined program with five sequential steps, each of which can be completed in a few seconds. Through step-wise centrifugation, predeposited antibodies react with red blood cells, enabling the parallel identification of multiple red blood cell antigens without cross-contamination in 1 min. This is combined with gentle mixing to rapidly concentrate the agglutinates, making both visual and digital determination of agglutination straightforward. A customized image analysis algorithm for automatically determining the agglutination state was developed to complement this microfluidic system. The acquired image is processed after the test. The blood type is determined using a machine learning algorithm based on a histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and support vector machines (SVM). This allows digital analysis to mirror the classical laboratory procedure for blood-type determination more accurately. The system was trained using a validated dataset of 150 blood samples, presenting 750 different agglutination patterns. The combination of SVM and HOG achieved 94.10% in the micro-weighted performance evaluation. This integrated microfluidic chip-based platform provides a "sample-in and answer out" demonstration for red blood cell typing, ensuring fast and reliable results because minimum manual steps are involved.

Uncovering a causal connection between the Lachnoclostridium genus in fecal microbiota and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis.

Background: Previous observational studies have indicated that an imbalance in gut microbiota may contribute to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). However, given the inevitable bias and unmeasured confounders in observational studies, the causal relationship between gut microbiota and NAFLD cannot be deduced. Therefore, we employed a two-sample Mendelian randomization (TSMR) study to assess the causality between gut microbiota and NAFLD. Methods: The gut microbiota-related genome-wide association study (GWAS) data of 18,340 individuals were collected from the International MiBioGen consortium. The GWAS summary data for NAFLD from the Anstee cohort (1,483 cases and 17,781 controls) and the FinnGen consortium (894 cases and 217,898 controls) were utilized in the discovery and verification phases, respectively. The inverse variance weighted (IVW) method was used as the principal method in our Mendelian randomization (MR) study, with sensitivity analyses using the MR-Egger, weighted median, simple mode, and weighted mode methods. The MR-Egger intercept test, Cochran's Q test, and leave-one-out analysis were conducted to identify heterogeneity and pleiotropy. Moreover, a fixed-effect meta-analysis was conducted to verify the robustness of the results. Results: The gene prediction results showed that at the genus level, four gut microbiota were causally associated with NAFLD in the GWAS conducted by Anstee et al. The relative abundance of Intestinimonas (OR: 0.694, 95%CI: 0.533-0.903, p = 0.006, IVW), Lachnoclostridium (OR: 0.420, 95%CI: 0.245-0.719, p = 0.002, IVW), and Senegalimassilia (OR: 0.596, 95%CI: 0.363-0.978, p = 0.041, IVW) was negatively associated with NAFLD. The relative abundance of Ruminococcus1 (OR: 1.852, 95%CI: 1.179-2.908, p = 0.007, IVW) was positively correlated with NAFLD. Among them, the Lachnoclostridium genus was validated in FinnGen GWAS (OR: 0.53, 95%CI: 0.304-0.928, p = 0.026, IVW). The Lachnoclostridium genus was also significantly associated with NAFLD risk in the meta-analyses (OR: 0.470, 95%CI: 0.319-0.692, p = 0.0001, IVW). No heterogeneity or pleiotropy was observed. Conclusion: This study provided new evidence of the relationship between the Lachnoclostridium genus and NAFLD, suggesting that augmentation of the relative abundance of the Lachnoclostridium genus through the oral administration of probiotics or fecal microbiota transplantation could be an effective way to reduce the risk of NAFLD.

Chicken Egg Yolk Antibodies (IgYs) block the binding of multiple SARS-CoV-2 spike protein variants to human ACE2.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is still spreading worldwide, and there is an urgent need to effectively prevent and control this pandemic. This study evaluated the potential efficacy of Egg Yolk Antibodies (IgY) as a neutralizing agent against the SARS-CoV-2. We investigated the neutralizing effect of anti-spike-S1 IgYs on the SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus, as well as its inhibitory effect on the binding of the coronavirus spike protein mutants to human ACE2. Our results show that the anti-Spike-S1 IgYs showed significant neutralizing potency against SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus, various spike protein mutants, and even SARS-CoV in vitro. It might be a feasible tool for the prevention and control of ongoing COVID-19.

Comparative study of gene expression profiles rooted in acute myocardial infarction and ischemic/reperfusion rat models.

Mining data in depth of genome-wide sequencing data generated from pathological target tissues under disease conditions is necessary for seeking novel functional genes, and developing more biological study directions for the field. Based on our previous published RNA-seq data generated from acute myocardial ischemia and ischemia-reperfusion in rat heart, we re-analysed these two data sets using bioinformatics tools. All these raw fastq files were extracted from Illumina BCL using the Illumina CASAVA program. Four groups were obtained: UD (genes up-regulated in MI but down-regulated in I/R injury), DU (genes down-regulated in MI but up-regulated in I/R injury), UU (genes both up-regulated in MI and I/R injury), and DD (genes both down-regulated in MI and I/R injury) groups. The results showed that 304 common genes in the UD group, 236 common genes in the DU group, 318 common genes in the UU group, and 159 common genes in the DD group detected by comparing data sets of the MI and the I/R injury. We then listed the top 30 DEGs for each group, and carried out GO and KEGG analyses for enrichment and pathway studies for those top expressed genes. Further analysis of INTERPRO Protein Domains and Features enriched by DEGs showed that 20% of the Domains enriched were related to c-type lectin, and 17% of these domains are related to neurotransmitter-gated ion-channel. 15% of PFAM Protein Domains were about Neurotransmitter-gated ion-channel. There were only 8 SMART Protein Domains DEGs enriched and 37.5% of which were concerned about leucine-rich. Collagen involvement in Reactome Pathways accounted for 22.7%. We found that only a few DEGs in these two disease conditions have been reported in the literatures, suggesting that there are many new genes would be considered in the future studies. These analyses would provide some information for seeking more novel targets of these two clinic diseases, acute myocardial ischemia and myocardial ischemia/reperfusion.

Intelligent fault identification for industrial automation system via multi-scale convolutional generative adversarial network with partially labeled samples.

Rolling bearings are the widely used parts in most of the industrial automation systems. As a result, intelligent fault identification of rolling bearing is important to ensure the stable operation of the industrial automation systems. However, a major problem in intelligent fault identification is that it needs a large number of labeled samples to obtain a well-trained model. Aiming at this problem, the paper proposes a semi-supervised multi-scale convolutional generative adversarial network for bearing fault identification which uses partially labeled samples and sufficient unlabeled samples for training. The network adopts a one-dimensional multi-scale convolutional neural network as the discriminator and a multi-scale deconvolutional neural network as the generator and the model is trained through an adversarial process. Because of the full use of unlabeled samples, the proposed semi-supervised model can detect the faults in bearings with limited labeled samples. The proposed method is tested on three datasets and the average classification accuracy arrived at of 100%, 99.28% and 96.58% respectively Results indicate that the proposed semi-supervised convolutional generative adversarial network achieves satisfactory performance in bearing fault identification when the labeled data are insufficient.

Robust, Lightweight, Hydrophobic, and Fire-Retarded Polyimide/MXene Aerogels for Effective Oil/Water Separation.

Polyimide (PI) aerogels have attracted great attention owing to their low density and excellent thermal stability. However, hydrophobic surface modification is required for PI aerogels to improve their ability in oil/water separation due to their amphiphilic characteristic. Two-dimensional MXenes (transition metal carbides/nitrides) can be utilized as nanofillers to enhance the properties of polymers because of their unique layered structure and versatile interface chemistry. Herein, the robust, lightweight, and hydrophobic PI/MXene three-dimensional architectures were fabricated via freeze-drying of polyamide acid/MXene suspensions and thermal imidization. Polyamide acid was synthesized using N-N-dimethylacetamide and 4,4'-oxydianiline. MXene (Ti3C2Tx) dispersion was obtained via the etching of Ti3AlC2 and ultrasonic exfoliation. Taking advantage of the strong interaction between PI chains and MXene nanosheets, the interconnected, highly porous, and hydrophobic PI/MXene aerogels with low density were fabricated, resulting in the improved compressive performance, remarkable oil absorption capacity, and efficient separation of oil and water. For the PI/MXene-3 aerogel (weight ratio, 5.2:1) without any surface modification, the water contact angle was 119° with a density of 23 mg/cm3. This aerogel can completely recover to its original height after 50 compression-release cycles, exhibiting superelasticity and exceptional fatigue-resistant ability. It also showed high absorption capacities to various organic liquids ranging from approximately 18 to 58 times of their own weight. This hybrid aerogel can rapidly separate the chloroform, soybean oil, and liquid paraffin from the water-oil system. The thermally stable hybrid aerogel also exhibited excellent fire safety properties and outstanding reusability under an extreme environment.

Effects of Shengmai injection add-on therapy to chemotherapy in patients with non-small cell lung cancer: a meta-analysis.

PURPOSE: Shengmai injection (SMI) has shown promising outcomes in the management of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This meta-analysis aimed to investigate the add-on effects of SMI to chemotherapy in NSCLC patients. METHODS: A comprehensive literature search was performed in the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, CNKI, VIP, and Wanfang up to December 2017. Only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating SMI in combination with chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone in NSCLC patients were eligible. The outcome measures were quality of life, chemotherapy-induced grade 3/4 myelosuppression or gastrointestinal reactions, and objective tumor response (equals complete response plus partial response). Pooled risk ratio (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was used to evaluate dichotomous and continuous outcome, respectively. RESULTS: A total of 15 RCTs were included and analyzed. Meta-analysis showed that SMI combined with chemotherapy was associated with a significant improvement in Karnofsky Performance Status (RR 2.36; 95% CI 1.50-3.96) compared with the chemotherapy alone. Moreover, adjunctive treatment with SMI significantly reduced grade 3/4 myelosuppression (RR 0.61; 95% CI 0.46-0.81) and gastrointestinal reactions (RR 0.64; 95% CI 0.46-0.90). However, there was no significant difference in objective tumor response (RR 1.17; 95% CI 0.99-1.37) between two groups. CONCLUSIONS: SMI add-on therapy appeared to be more effective in improving quality of life and reducing chemotherapy-induced adverse effects. However, more well-designed RCTs are warranted to confirm the findings of this meta-analysis because of the suboptimal methodological quality of the included trials.

[Preconcentration with crosslinked chitosan for determination of trace manganese in waters by flame atomic absorption spectrometry].

A novel method for the preconcentration with crosslinked chitosan (CCTS) and determination of trace manganese in waters by flame atomic absorption spectrometry has been presented. The absorption rate of manganese (VII) by CCTS was 98% at pH 3.00. The effect of preconcentration time, dosage of CCTS, temperature, sample volume and co-existing elements have been investigated. The mechanism of adsorption of CCTS for Mn(VII) was also discussed. The detection limit of the method was 1.86 microg x L(-1), and the relative standard deviation (RSD) was 2.0% (n = 10). The method has been applied to the determination of trace manganese in south lake and Changjiang water with satisfactory results.