Search

Abstract Omniphobic membranes, due to their exceptional properties, have drawn significant attention for overcoming the bottleneck in membrane distillation (MD) technology. This study demonstrates an innovative method for fabricating an omniphobic membrane that is simple and facile compared to other methods such as wet/dry etching and photolithography. The surface morphology of springtails was imitated using electrospraying technique to coat a polyvinylidene fluoride substrate with concave-shaped polystyrene beads that were successfully developed by controlling the electrical traction (voltage) and air resistance (humidity). Then, the lipid coating of springtail surfaces was mimicked by dip-coating the membrane in a low-toxicity short-chain perfluoropolyether lubricant. The concave structure’s tiny air pockets increased membrane hydrophobicity significantly, indicated by the fact that the first round of water bouncing took only 16.3 ms. Finally, in MD treatment of seawater containing 1.0 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate, the optimized omniphobic membrane maintained a stable 99.9% salt rejection rate.

Abstract Identifying interactions between T-cell receptors (TCRs) and immunogenic peptides holds profound implications across diverse research domains and clinical scenarios. Unsupervised clustering models (UCMs) cannot predict peptide-TCR binding directly, while supervised predictive models (SPMs) often face challenges in identifying antigens previously unencountered by the immune system or possessing limited TCR binding repertoires. Therefore, we propose HeteroTCR, an SPM based on Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (GNN), to accurately predict peptide-TCR binding probabilities. HeteroTCR captures within-type (TCR-TCR or peptide-peptide) similarity information and between-type (peptide-TCR) interaction insights for predictions on unseen peptides and TCRs, surpassing limitations of existing SPMs. Our evaluation shows HeteroTCR outperforms state-of-the-art models on independent datasets. Ablation studies and visual interpretation underscore the Heterogeneous GNN module’s critical role in enhancing HeteroTCR’s performance by capturing pivotal binding process features. We further demonstrate the robustness and reliability of HeteroTCR through validation using single-cell datasets, aligning with the expectation that pMHC-TCR complexes with higher predicted binding probabilities correspond to increased binding fractions.

Membrane distillation is susceptible to thermal inefficiency and membrane wetting issues during seawater desalination. Here, authors design a MXene-engineered membrane that imparts efficient localized photothermal effect and strong water repellency, achieving sustainable freshwater production.