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Long-term excessive exposure to fluoride from environmental sources can cause serious public health problems such as dental fluorosis and skeletal fluorosis. The aberrant activation of osteoblasts in the early stage is one of the critical steps during the pathogenesis of skeletal fluorosis and canonical Wnt signaling pathway participate in the progress. However, the specific mechanism that how canonical Wnt signaling pathway was mediated is not yet clear. In this study, we found that miR-21-5p induced the activation of canonical Wnt signaling pathway via targeting PTEN and DKK2 during fluoride induced osteoblasts activation and firstly demonstrated the forward loop between canonical Wnt signaling and miR-21-5p in the process. These findings suggested an important regulatory role of miR-21-5p on canonical Wnt signaling pathway during skeletal fluorosis and miR-21-5p might be a potential therapeutic target for skeletal fluorosis.

In this paper, the magnetostructural transformation from paramagnetic austenite to ferromagnetic martensite is described as a synergistic-type phase transformation because the structural and magnetic subsystems exhibit two unique synergistic effects: (1) lattice vibration and magnetic entropy changes synergistically contribute to the total entropy change; (2) the structure and magnetism synergistically response to external cross-fields. Such synergistic-type phase transformation has been explored in Ni-Mn-Ga-X (X = Sn, Sb) Heusler alloys. By the substitution of Sn/Sb for Ga, a temperature window of 50 K for the synergistic-type phase transformation has been established in the phase diagram of Ni-Mn-Ga-X (X = Sn, Sb). Associated with the synergistic contribution of lattice vibration and magnetic entropy changes, the samples exhibit high phase transformation entropy changes (≥1.2 J/molK) within the temperature window. The synergistic effects of the magnetostructural transformation make the Ni-Mn-Ga-X (X = Sn, Sb) alloys to be potential multicaloric materials.

Biselenophene (BS) is generally considered as a promising building block for constructing organic semiconductors, and the 3-positions of selenophene in BS offer a great opportunity for further structural modification. Herein, a novel fluorinated biselenophene, 3,3′-difluoro-2,2′-biselenophene (BSF), was designed and synthesized successfully, and subsequently incorporated into a polymer backbone leading to the resulting polymer PNDIBSF. The polymer backbone planarity was significantly improved via the enhanced intramolecular noncovalent Se⋯F coulombic interactions. Meanwhile, the electronic structure of the polymer was effectively tuned by the high electronegativity of F atoms. All-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs) with J71 and PNDIBSF as polymer donor and acceptor achieved power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.20%. In comparsion, all-PSCs based on the nonfluorinated analogue polymer acceptor (PNDIBS) had low PCE of 2.74%. The results demonstrated that BSF is a promising building block for constructing polymer acceptor in all-PSCs, and the fluorination offers a sufficient strategy for further improving performance of selenophene-based polymer semiconductors.