Search

Objective: Cancer patients are frequently accompanied by problems in lipid metabolism. Uncertainty exists as to whether changes in serum lipids occur in patients with papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) and their relationship with iodine nutrition remains obscure. The aim of this study was to explore lipid metabolism disturbances in PTC patients and their relationship with iodine nutrition status. Methods: A total of 909 patients who were initially diagnosed with PTC and 183 patients who were initially diagnosed with benign thyroid nodules were enrolled in this study. The serum iodine concentration (SIC), the urine iodine concentration (UIC) and nine serum lipids indicators were measured. The generalized linear model (GLM) together with other statistical methods were used to determine whether there were differences in serum lipids between patients with PTC and those with benign thyroid nodules. Results: After adjusting for baseline information, triglycerides (TG) levels in the control group (4.29±1.21) were significantly higher than in the cancer group (1.59±1.25). The rate of abnormal thyroid function was significantly lower in the patients with PTC than in the patients with benign nodules. In the PTC patients, different clinicopathological features had an impact on thyroid function, as reflected by a significant increase in FT3 in PTC with lymph node metastases, a significant increase in TSH, TGAb, and TPOAb, and a significant decrease in FT4 in PTC with AITD. Correlation analysis revealed weak to moderate correlations between iodine nutritional status, thyroid function, and serum lipids. In benign thyroid nodule patients, LDL-C and ApoB values in patients with benign thyroid nodules were significantly higher in the high SIC group than in the adequate and deficient groups. In PTC patients. ApoE levels in the low UIC group were significantly higher than in the middle and high UIC groups. Mediating effects were used to analyze the effect of iodine nutrition on the serum lipids, it showed that the total and direct effects of iodine nutritional status on serum lipids were significant, and the mediating effect of thyroid function was not significant. Conclusion: TG levels in the control group were significantly higher than in the PTC group. Iodine nutritional status influences lipids, and an excess or deficient iodine nutrition increases the risk of dyslipidemia in patients with thyroid nodule. Iodine nutritional status had a direct effect on serum lipids.

Metagenomic sequencing (mNGS) is a powerful diagnostic tool to detect causative pathogens in clinical microbiological testing owing to its unbiasedness and substantially reduced costs. Rapid and accurate classification of metagenomic sequences is a critical procedure for pathogen identification in dry-lab step of mNGS test. However, clinical practices of the testing technology are hampered by the challenge of classifying sequences within a clinically relevant timeframe. Here, we present GPMeta, a novel GPU-accelerated approach to ultrarapid pathogen identification from complex mNGS data, allowing users to bypass this limitation. Using mock microbial community datasets and public real metagenomic sequencing datasets from clinical samples, we show that GPMeta has not only higher accuracy but also significantly higher speed than existing state-of-the-art tools such as Bowtie2, Bwa, Kraken2 and Centrifuge. Furthermore, GPMeta offers GPMetaC clustering algorithm, a statistical model for clustering and rescoring ambiguous alignments to improve the discrimination of highly homologous sequences from microbial genomes with average nucleotide identity >95%. GPMetaC exhibits higher precision and recall rate than others. GPMeta underlines its key role in the development of the mNGS test in infectious diseases that require rapid turnaround times. Further study will discern how to best and easily integrate GPMeta into routine clinical practices. GPMeta is freely accessible to non-commercial users at https://github.com/Bgi-LUSH/GPMeta.

Substrate photopatterning has provided versatile applications in biomedical fields. Herein, an universal and efficient photoligation reaction has been used to prepare a patterned capture substrate for a sandwich SERS immunoassay. Photoirradiation induces mild and efficient immobilization of antibodies at the desired region of a gold surface, and the antibody-antigen interaction helps the substrate to capture the antigens in solution specifically. After exposing to SERS probes, i.e., the gold nanoparticles labelled with both antibodies and intrinsically strong Raman reporters, multiple quantitative SERS determination of antigens can be achieved with high sensitivity and specificity. The limit of detection can be as low as 10−12 mol/L for four kinds of cancer biomarkers, which provides a promising method for the construction of highly sensitive and high-throughput SERS detection chip and the application of in vitro diagnosis.

Photoisomerization chemistry was used to simulate light signal transduction, in which the light-controlled reciprocating translocation of molecules in lipids activates or deactivates the hydrolysis reaction for an encapsulated substrate.

Many studies have reported that bottom-up multisensory integration of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information can distort our sense of body-ownership, producing rubber hand illusion (RHI). There is less evidence about when and how the body-ownership is distorted in the brain during RHI. To examine whether this illusion effect occurs preattentively at an early stage of processing, we monitored the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) component (the index of automatic deviant detection) and N2 (the index for conflict monitoring). Participants first performed an RHI elicitation task in a synchronous or asynchronous setting and then finished a passive visual oddball task in which the deviant stimuli were unrelated to the explicit task. A significant interaction between Deviancy (deviant hand vs. standard hand) and Group (synchronous vs. asynchronous) was found. The asynchronous group showed clear mismatch effects in both vMMN and N2, while the synchronous group had such effect only in N2. The results indicate that after the elicitation of RHI bottom-up integration could be retrieved at the early stage of sensory processing before top-down processing, providing evidence for the priority of the bottom-up processes after the generation of RHI and revealing the mechanism of how the body-ownership is unconsciously distorted in the brain.

The coal gasification process produces a large amount of coal gasification slag (CGS), which enriches the heavy metals in the raw coal. The CGS will not only occupies land resources in the long-term storage, but also has potential ecological pollution risks. In this study, eight kinds of CGS samples from different regions of China were subjected, and their chemical composition and environmental risks were studied. Two leaching methods issued by the ministry of ecology and environment of China were used to carry out leaching experiments for evaluating the hazardous waste level of CGS. The results show that, among eight samples, the comprehensive potential ecological risk of all samples did not reach high risk, and there are two kinds of CGCS and two kinds of CGFS reach middle risk. In general, CGS is not hazardous solid wastes, most of which are Class I general industrial solid wastes, and a few are Class II general industrial solid wastes. These conclusions indicate that heavy metals in CGS have certain potential ecological risks. Under different leaching conditions, except for Be, the precipitation amount of heavy metals in CGS is basically within the limited range of relevant standards, but its environmental risks cannot be ignored.

Our previous study confirmed that cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) leads to acute lung injury (ALI) via inducing high-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) release. Recent research showed HMGB1 promotes pulmonary injury mainly via exosomes transport. Currently, alveolar epithelial cell (AEC) necroptosis has been demonstrated to be involved in ALI. However, it is unknown whether exosomal inflammatory cytokine HMGB1 promotes ALI by inducing AEC necroptosis and its underling mechanisms remain elusive. Here, a prospective cohort study was carried out, in which plasma samples from 21 CPB patients were isolated at 4 specific time points: pre-CPB, 2 h, 12 h, and 24 h after initiation of CPB. Plasma exosomes were extracted via ultra-high-speed centrifugation and co-cultured with AEC cell line-A549 cells at increasing concentrations of 50, 100 and 150 μg/ml. Then, HMGB1 antagonist-Box A and mtDNA deficiency ethidium bromide (EtBr) were applied to explore the underlying role of exosomal HMGB1 and cytoplasm mitochondrial DNA in AEC. Western blot analysis showed that plasma exosomal HMGB1 expression gradually increased and peaked at 24 h after CPB. 24 hours Treatment of CPB-derived exosomes at 150 μg/ml for 24 h could induce necroptosis by promoting mitochondrial fission and further elevating cytoplasm mtDNA levels in A549 cells, which was successfully blocked by Box A or EtBr. Most importantly, EtBr significantly inhibited cytoplasm mtDNA downstream cGAS/STING signal pathway. Collectively, these data demonstrate that CPB-derived plasma exosomal HMGB1 contributes to AEC necroptosis through the mtDNA/cGAS/STING pathway.

Peptide-based supramolecular hydrogels have attracted great attention due to their good biocompatibility and biodegradability and have become promising candidates for biomedical applications. The bottom-up self-assembly endows the peptides with a highly ordered secondary structure, which has proven to be an effective strategy to improve the mechanical properties of hydrogels through strong physical interactions and energy dissipation. Inspired by the excellent mechanical properties of spider-silk, which can be attributed to the rich β-sheet crystal formation by the hydrophobic peptide fragment, a hydrophobic peptide (HP) that can form a β-sheet assembly was designed and introduced into a poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) scaffold to improve mechanical properties of hydrogels by the cooperative intermolecular physical interactions. Compared with hydrogels without peptide grafting (P-HP0), the strong β-sheet self-assembly domain endows the hybrid hydrogels (P-HP20, P-HP29, and P-HP37) with high strength and toughness. The fracture tensile strength increased from 0.3 to 2.1 MPa (7 times), the toughness increased from 0.4 to 21.6 MJ m-3 (54 times), and the compressive strength increased from 0.33 to 10.43 MPa (31 times) at 75% strain. Moreover, the hybrid hydrogels are enzymatically degradable due to the dominant contribution of the β-sheet assembly for network cross-linking. Combining the good biocompatibility and sustained drug release of the constructed hydrogels, this hydrophobic β-sheet peptide represents a promising candidate for the rational design of hydrogels for biomedical applications.

Pressurized oxy-coal combustion technologies are attracting more attention of researchers because of their advantages of carbon capture. While the ambient pressure could significantly influence the...

The increasing penetration of wind power deteriorates the frequency stability of power systems. To address this issue, a fast frequency response (FFR) from wind farms is required to provide frequency support. However, the power point tracking controllers in wind turbines may counteract the effect of droop-based fast frequency controllers during the frequency response, which makes it difficult to estimate the exact contribution of droop-based fast frequency controllers in wind farms to the system frequency behavior. To address this issue, this article proposes a control parameter design method to fully utilize the frequency support potential of wind turbines. To achieve this goal, an explicit expression for the relationship between the droop-based fast frequency control parameters of the wind turbines and the steady-state frequency deviation is derived. Considering that the fast frequency controller may have a negative effect on the small-signal rotor angle stability, we present a coordinated parameter optimization model of droop-based fast frequency controllers, which improves the system frequency behavior while meeting the small-signal rotor angle stability requirement. A sensitivity-based method is presented to solve the proposed optimization model, which efficiently handles violations of the control parameter constraints. Case studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.