Walking Dead Macrophage-Based Positive Enhancement MRI for Ultrahighly Efficient Diagnosis of Nephritis.

Nephritis is an inflammatory condition of the glomerulus, and the clinical gold standard for its diagnosis is a kidney biopsy. However, obtaining biopsy results can take several days, which does not meet the requirement of rapid diagnosis, especially for rapidly progressive types. To achieve an effective and noninvasive diagnosis, we propose a nephritis-specific, positive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agent based on Gd3+ anchored walking dead macrophage Gd-RAW. Gd-RAW exhibits high selectivity for inflammatory renal parenchyma and provides comparable results to histopathology methods. The Gd-RAW-based MRI contrast agent reduces the diagnostic time of nephritis from 14 days of biopsy to 1 h. Furthermore, in a unilateral nephritis model constructed by increasing the glycerol concentration, the T1WI of renal parenchyma exhibits an increased signal-to-noise ratio, which is crucial for evaluating nephritic severity. This work promotes rapid diagnosis of nephritis and potentially provides sufficient evidence for clinicians to offer timely treatment to patients. The methodology of paramagnetic ion-anchored macrophage corpse also opens up new prospects for designing more specific and biosafe MRI contrast agents.

Soil Quality Assessment of Different Land Use Types Based on TOPSIS Method in Hilly Sandy Area of Loess Plateau, Northern China.

In order to combat land desertification and to evaluate the soil quality of different cover land types, and thereby determine the best land use strategy for vegetation restoration, this research comprehensively analyzed the soil quality of different land use/cover types in the hilly sandy area of the Loess Plateau by using the Kruskal-Wallis test (K-W test) and principal component analysis (PCA) technique for order preference by the similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and the potential ecological risk index (RI). The result indicated that the cropland abandonment over a period of time could improve the soil quality to a certain extent; however, the process of natural restoration was very slow compared with that of the planted mixed shrubs. The soil quality of all land use/cover types in the hilly sandy area of Youyu County clearly improved after 10-25 years of revegetation, but the degree of improvement varied greatly with the different planted species and their combinations. The low levels of soil organic matter, total nitrogen and available phosphorus were the major limiting factors affecting soil quality improvement under different land use/cover types, not metal toxicity. Pioneer species of H. rhamnoide, C. korshinskii and Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica, etc. are vital to vegetation restoration of the study area. Revegetation using these species is therefore recommended to combat future desertification in this area.