Lignin-Stabilized Tough, Sticky, and Recyclable Liquid Metal/Protein Organogels for Multifunctional Epidermal Smart Materials.

Biomass-encapsulated liquid metals (LMs) composite gels have aroused tremendous attention as epidermal smart materials due to their biocompatibility and sustainability. However, they can still not simultaneously possess toughness, adhesion, and recoverability. In this work, the tough, sticky, and recyclable protein-encapsulated LMs organogels (GLMx) are fabricated through the micro-interfacial stabilization of LMs by lignin and the following preparation of food-making inspired gels. With the help of lignin modification, the LMs micro-drops demonstrated uniform dispersion in the protein matrix, as well as dense non-covalent interactions (e.g., H─bond and hydrophobic interaction) with amino acid residues in peptide chains, which endowed the GLMx with high conductivity (≈5.4 S m-1), toughness (≈738.2 kJ m-3), self-adhesiveness (a maximal lap-shear strength of ≈58.3 kPa), and recoverability. By tightly adhering onto human skin, the GLMx can act as epidermal sensors to detect drastic (e.g., joint bending) and subtle body movements (e.g., swallowing) and even recognize handwriting and speaking in real-time. Moreover, the organogels can also harvest solar energy and convert it into heat and electricity, which is promising in self-powered intelligent devices. Thus, this work paves a facile way to prepare protein/LMs composite organogels that are suitable for multiple applications like healthcare, human-robot interactions, and solar energy conversion.

BAMRE: Joint extraction model of Chinese medical entities and relations based on Biaffine transformation with relation attention.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain various valuable medical entities and their relationships. Although the extraction of biomedical relationships has achieved good results in the mining of electronic health records and the construction of biomedical knowledge bases, there are still some problems. There may be implied complex associations between entities and relationships in overlapping triplets, and ignoring these interactions may lead to a decrease in the accuracy of entity extraction. To address this issue, a joint extraction model for medical entity relations based on a relation attention mechanism is proposed. The relation extraction module identifies candidate relationships within a sentence. The attention mechanism based on these relationships assigns weights to contextual words in the sentence that are associated with different relationships. Additionally, it extracts the subject and object entities. Under a specific relationship, entity vector representations are utilized to construct a global entity matching matrix based on Biaffine transformations. This matrix is designed to enhance the semantic dependencies and relational representations between entities, enabling triplet extraction. This allows the two subtasks of named entity recognition and relation extraction to be interrelated, fully utilizing contextual information within the sentence, and effectively addresses the issue of overlapping triplets. Experimental observations from the CMeIE Chinese medical relation extraction dataset and the Baidu2019 Chinese dataset confirm that our approach yields the superior F1 score across all cutting-edge baselines. Moreover, it offers substantial performance improvements in intricate situations involving diverse overlapping patterns, multitudes of triplets, and cross-sentence triplets.

Sustainable Biochar Nanosheets Derived from Sweet Sorghum Residues via Superbase Pretreatment.

Two-dimensional (2D) sheet-like biochar as promising alternatives to graphene nanosheets has gained significant attention in materials science while being highly restricted by its complicated synthetic steps. In this study, the dimethyl sulfoxide/potassium hydroxide (DMSO/KOH) superbase system was first used to pretreat sweet sorghum residues (SS) and then carbonized to prepare sheet-like biochar. Ascribing to the strong nucleophilicity of DMSO/KOH, a synergistic effect was achieved by partially removing non-cellulosic components in SS and swelling the amorphous region of cellulose, leaving more layered cellulose behind (∼46.5 wt %), which was favorable for the formation of 2D biochar nanosheets with high graphitization degrees (∼93.1%). This strategy was also suitable for other biomass fibers (e.g., straw, wood powders, and nuclear shells) to obtain sheet-like biochar. The resulting sheet-like biochar could be compounded with cellulose nanofibers to achieve the structural design of composites and solve the molding problem of biochar, which was beneficial for dyeing wastewater treatment. Thus, this work provides insight into a simple strategy for developing 2D ultrathin sheet-like biochar from sustainable biomass wastes.

Parametric studies on energy utilization of the Chinese medicine residues: Preparation and properties of densified pellet.

The depletion of fossil fuels has fueled an increased interest in biomass resources usage for heat and electricity generation. As an important biomass resource, Chinese medicine residues have great potential in substituting fossil fuels. However, that is basically limited by its poor properties, including low bulk density, high moisture content, and inhomogeneous structure. Herein, a safe and sustainable strategy was reported to prepare a high-quality densified pellet derived from Chinese medicine residues to address these worries. In this process, mixed and simple size materials were densified under various moisture content and pressure using a laboratory electronic tablet press machine equipped a single pellet mold. Results showed that higher pressure, ideal moisture content (∼6.5 %), and mixed particle size could densify better quality pellets. These findings pave the way for the safely and efficient resource utilization of Chinese medicine residues, as well as providing theoretical guidance and technical support for the household heating.

Lignin reinforced tough, adhesive, and recoverable protein organohydrogels for wearable strain sensing under sub-zero temperatures.

Protein-based hydrogels with promising biocompatibility and biodegradability have attracted considerable interest in areas of epidermal sensing, whereas, which are still difficult to synchronously possess high mechanical strength, self-adhesion, and recoverability. Hence, the bio-polymer lignosulfonate-reinforced gluten organohydrogels (GOHLx) are fabricated through green and simple food-making processes and the following solvent exchange with glycerol/water binary solution. Ascribing to the uniform distribution of lignosulfonate in gluten networks, as well as the noncovalent interactions (e.g., H-bond) between them, the resultant GOHLx exhibit favorable conductivity (∼14.3 × 10-4 S m-1), toughness (∼711.0 kJ m-3), self-adhesion (a maximal lap-shear strength of ∼33.5 kPa), high sensitivity (GF up to ∼3.04), and durability (∼3000 cycles) toward shape deformation, which are suitable for the detection of both drastic (e.g., elbow and wrist bending) and subtle (e.g., swallowing and speaking) human movements even under -20 °C. Furthermore, the GOHLx is also biocompatible, degradable, and recoverable (by a simple kneading process). Thus, this work may pave a simple, green, and cheap way to prepare all-biomass-based, tough, sticky, and recoverable protein-based organohydrogels for epidermal strain sensing even in harsh environments.

Green conversion of delignified sorghum straw and polyethylene glycol into form-stable phase change materials with promising solar energy capture, transition, and storage capabilities.

Phase change materials (PCMs) have attracted considerable attention as a thermal energy management technology for thermal storage. However, achieving high energy-storing abilities, low leakage rates, and solar absorption abilities simultaneously in PCMs remains greatly challenging. This research proposed a green strategy for preparing sorghum straw-based PCMs. By facile delignification and solvothermal process, delignified sorghum straw (DSS) and carbon quantum dots (CQDs) derived from removal lignin are prepared. The obtained PEG@CQDs/DSS possessed considerable reusable stabilities, excellent photo-thermal conversion properties, and thermal energy management capacities due to the delicate micropores and intrinsic noncovalent interactions among components. Especially, the PEG@CQDs-7.5/DSS exhibited superior solar-thermal conversion capabilities (with conducive photo-thermal conversion efficiency ~90.84%), and kept stable after 100 cycles of heating and cooling, in which the melting enthalpy value is ~168.1 J/g (enthalpy efficiency of ~91.11%). In conclusion, the synthesized PCMs showed potential for application in energy-saving and building thermal management.

GEFormerDTA: drug target affinity prediction based on transformer graph for early fusion.

Predicting the interaction affinity between drugs and target proteins is crucial for rapid and accurate drug discovery and repositioning. Therefore, more accurate prediction of DTA has become a key area of research in the field of drug discovery and drug repositioning. However, traditional experimental methods have disadvantages such as long operation cycles, high manpower requirements, and high economic costs, making it difficult to predict specific interactions between drugs and target proteins quickly and accurately. Some methods mainly use the SMILES sequence of drugs and the primary structure of proteins as inputs, ignoring the graph information such as bond encoding, degree centrality encoding, spatial encoding of drug molecule graphs, and the structural information of proteins such as secondary structure and accessible surface area. Moreover, previous methods were based on protein sequences to learn feature representations, neglecting the completeness of information. To address the completeness of drug and protein structure information, we propose a Transformer graph-based early fusion research approach for drug-target affinity prediction (GEFormerDTA). Our method reduces prediction errors caused by insufficient feature learning. Experimental results on Davis and KIBA datasets showed a better prediction of drugtarget affinity than existing affinity prediction methods.

Polymerizable deep eutectic solvent treated lignocellulose: Green strategy for synergetic production of tough strain sensing elastomers and nanocellulose.

Liquid free ion-conductive elastomers (ICEs) have demonstrated promising potential in various advanced application scenarios including sensor, artificial skin, and human-machine interface. However, ICEs that synchronously possess toughness, adhesiveness, stability, and anti-bacterial capability are still difficult to achieve yet highly demanded. Here, a one-pot green and sustainable strategy was proposed to fabricate multifunctional ICEs by extracting non-cellulose components (mainly lignin and hemicellulose) from lignocellulose with polymerizable deep eutectic solvents (PDES) and the subsequent in-situ photo-polymerization process. Ascribing to the uniform dispersion of non-cellulose components in PDES, the resultant ICEs demonstrated promising mechanical strength (a tensile strength of ~1200 kPa), high toughness (~9.1 MJ m-3), favorable adhesion (a lap-shear strength up to ~61.5 kPa toward metal), conducive stabilities, and anti-bacterial capabilities. With the help of such advantages, the ICEs exhibited sensitive (a gauge factor of ~23.5) and stable (~4000 cycles) performances in human motion and physiological signal detection even under sub-zero temperatures (e.g., -20 °C). Besides, the residue cellulose can be mechanically isolated into nanoscale fibers, which matched the idea of green chemistry.

Advances in molecular biomarkers research and clinical application progress for gastric cancer immunotherapy.

Gastric cancer is characterized by high morbidity and mortality worldwide. Early-stage gastric cancer is mainly treated with surgery, while for advanced gastric cancer, the current treatment options remain insufficient. In the 2022 NCCN Guidelines for Gastric Cancer, immunotherapy is listed as a first-line option for certain conditions. Immunotherapy for gastric cancer mainly targets the PD-1 molecule and achieves therapeutic effects by activating T cells. In addition, therapeutic strategies targeting other molecules, such as CTLA4, LAG3, Tim3, TIGIT, and OX40, have also been developed to improve the treatment efficacy of gastric cancer immunotherapy. This review summarizes the molecular biomarkers of gastric cancer immunotherapy and their clinical trials.

Effects of exosomes on tumor immunomodulation and their potential clinical applications (Review).

Exosomes are small extracellular vesicles containing proteins, nucleic acids and lipids, which can transmit information between cells, and can interfere with the epigenetic characteristics and functions of recipient cells. Tumor­derived exosomes play a crucial role as communicators in the tumor microenvironment, and are involved in the occurrence and development of various tumors. The present review article summarizes the biogenesis of exosomes and their communication with local and remote cells, focusing on the function of tumor­derived exosomes in the tumor microenvironment, including the promotion of angiogenesis, the induction of epithelial mesenchymal transformation, and the activation and inhibition of immune cells, as well as the effects of exosomes on the tumor microenvironment during microbial infections. Additionally, the effects of exosomes on tumor immunotherapy and the potential applications of exosomes as biomarkers, delivery vehicles and cancer vaccines in cancer diagnostics and therapeutics are discussed.

Effects of helicobacter pylori on tumor microenvironment and immunotherapy responses.

Helicobacter pylori is closely associated with gastric cancer. During persistent infection, Helicobacter pylori can form a microenvironment in gastric mucosa which facilitates the survival and colony formation of Helicobacter pylori. Tumor stromal cells are involved in this process, including tumor-associated macrophages, mesenchymal stem cells, cancer-associated fibroblasts, and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, and so on. The immune checkpoints are also regulated by Helicobacter pylori infection. Helicobacter pylori virulence factors can also act as immunogens or adjuvants to elicit or enhance immune responses, indicating their potential applications in vaccine development and tumor immunotherapy. This review highlights the effects of Helicobacter pylori on the immune microenvironment and its potential roles in tumor immunotherapy responses.

Study of Combustion Characteristics and Kinetics of Agriculture Briquette Using Thermogravimetric Analysis.

The present paper was aimed to investigate the physicochemical properties and combustion characteristics of corn straw briquette as a fuel energy. The results of physicochemical properties displayed that corn straw briquette has higher volatile matter, lower ash content, and higher heating value. Combustion characteristics and kinetic analysis were investigated using thermogravimetry analysis at various heating rates of 10, 15, and 20 °C/min. It was observed that the maximum burning rate shifted to a higher temperature as the heating rate increased. In addition, a lower heating rate would help in better heat transfer, leading to less mass residual. In contrast, the combustion characteristic index showed a nearly 2-fold increase under a higher heating rate, indicating a good combustion performance. The combustion kinetics were expressed using isoconversional methods with Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose and Ozawa-Flynn-Wall methods, which authenticated the average activation energy at 108.85 and 114.42 kJ/mol, respectively. These results can provide a theoretical basis and data support for further utilization of agriculture biomass briquette.

Biocomposites from Organic Solid Wastes Derived Biochars: A Review.

The replacement of natural fiber with biochars to prepare biocomposites has attracted widespread attention recently. Biochar has unique properties, including the porous structure, large specific surface area, high thermal stability, good conductivity, renewable and abundant feedstock source, and environmental friendliness, which provide excellent properties, environmental benefits, and low production costs for biochar-based composites. Biocomposites from organic solid waste-derived biochars show good prospects worldwide in terms of positive social, environmental, and economic impacts. This paper reviews current biochars, elucidates the effects of biochars on the characteristics and performance of biochar composites, and points out the challenges and future development prospects of biochar composites.

Effects of Lubricant and Toughening Agent on the Fluidity and Toughness of Poplar Powder-Reinforced Polylactic Acid 3D Printing Materials.

Three dimensional (3D) printing materials were manufactured with polylactic acid (PLA) and poplar powder using the twin screw extruder and 3D printing consumables extruder. Lubricant (TPW604) and toughening agent polyolefin elastomer (POE) were utilized to improve the fluidity and toughness of the materials. 3D printing materials were tested by infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, melt flow rate, rheology behavior, impact and scanning electron microscope. The results show that the poplar powder could decrease impact strength of PLA, the same as TPW604. Unlike poplar powder, TPW604 can improve the fluidity of 3D printing materials. And POE can fill the voids formed by poplar powder in PLA, enhance interface compatibility between poplar powder and PLA, and effectively improve the fluidity and impact strength of 3D printing materials.

Mechanical Properties of Rice Husk Biochar Reinforced High Density Polyethylene Composites.

Rice husk biochar was utilized to reinforce high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and to prepare biochar/plastic composites (BPC) by the extrusion method. Morphologies, non-isothermal crystallization behavior, and mechanical properties of the composites were investigated. The SEM (scanning electron microscope) showed that HDPE was embedded into the holes of the rice husk biochar. The DSC (differential scanning calorimeter) showed that biochar could reduce the crystallization rate and the higher the content of rice husk biochar, the slower the crystallization rate. Significantly, the bending and tensile strength of BPC could reach 53.7 and 20 MPa, far beyond WPC (wood plastic composites). With the increase of filler content, BPC were still stronger than WPC, although the impact strength of BPC and WPC all showed a general decline in the trend. The strong interaction was achieved by the utilization of rice husk biochar to reinforce HDPE.

The Preparation and Characterization of Pyrolysis Bio-Oil-Resorcinol-Aldehyde Resin Cold-Set Adhesives for Wood Construction.

Resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF) resin is a kind of excellent exterior-grade wood structural adhesive, which can be conveniently cold-set for various applications. In order to decrease the production cost, pyrolysis bio-oil from renewable bioresources was used to replace resorcinol to synthesize the bio-oil-resorcinol-aldehyde (BRF) resin. The effect of replacing resorcinol with bio-oil on the properties, bonding performance, and characterization of resorcinol-aldehyde resin was comparatively investigated. A higher solid content and viscosity, albeit a lower shear strength, was found when the replacement ratio of bio-oil increased. The bonding performance of BRF with 10 and 20 wt % bio-oil was close to that of the pure RF resin. However, the trends of being less cross-linked, more easily decomposed, but more porous were found when the substitution ratio of bio-oil was higher than 20 wt %. Interestingly, it was found that the wood failure values of the BRF resins with bio-oil of no more than 20 wt % were slightly higher than that of the pure RF resin. On the whole, BRF resins with 20 wt % bio-oil is recommended as a wood structural adhesive, comprehensively considering the bio-oil substitution ratio and resin properties. The results obtained here showed that pyrolysis bio-oil is a promising green raw material for the production of RF resin with lower cost.

The Dynamic Mechanical Analysis of Highly Filled Rice Husk Biochar/High-Density Polyethylene Composites.

In this study, rice husk biochar/high-density polyethylene (HDPE) composites were prepared via melt mixing followed by extrusion. Effects of biochar content and testing temperature on the dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) of the composites were studied. Morphological analysis of the rice husk biochar and composites were evaluated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results showed that biochar had a positive effect on dynamic viscoelasticity, creep resistance and stress relaxation properties of the composites, but the creep resistance and stress relaxation of the composites decreased with the increase of temperature. SEM analysis showed that HDPE components were embedded in the holes of the rice husk biochar, and it is believed that strong interaction was achieved.