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Abstract Osteoclast is critical in skeletal development and fracture healing, yet the impact and underlying mechanisms of their metabolic state on these processes remain unclear. Here, by using osteoclast-specific small GTPase Rheb1-knockout mice, we reveal that mitochondrial respiration, rather than glycolysis, is essential for cathepsin K (CTSK) production in osteoclasts and is regulated by Rheb1 in a mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1)-independent manner. Mechanistically, we find that Rheb1 coordinates with mitochondrial acetyl-CoA generation to fuel CTSK, and acetyl-CoA availability in osteoclasts is the central to elevating CTSK. Importantly, our findings demonstrate that the regulation of CTSK by acetyl-CoA availability is critical and may confer a risk for abnormal endochondral ossification, which may be the main cause of poor fracture healing on alcohol consumption, targeting Rheb1 could successfully against the process. These findings uncover a pivotal role of mitochondria in osteoclasts and provide a potent therapeutic opportunity in bone disorders.

Abstract Fiber optic sensors have been gradually used in aerospace, petrochemical, electronic power, civil engineering, and biomedical fields because of their many advantages such as the anti-electromagnetic interference, corrosion resistance, light weight, small size, high accuracy, and easy reuse. In recent years, sensing and demodulation technologies based on microwave photonics have attracted widespread attention. Optical fiber sensing combined with microwave photonics has higher sensitivity and flexibility, which is important for the demodulation of interferometric signals. This article introduces and analyzes the principle, structure, and performance of the demodulation technology of fiber optic interferometric signals based on microwave photonics from the perspective of system structures, such as filters, oscillators, and interferometers, and discusses the future research and development directions.

Abstract Long reads that cover more variants per read raise opportunities for accurate haplotype construction, whereas the genotype errors of single nucleotide polymorphisms pose great computational challenges for haplotyping tools. Here we introduce KSNP, an efficient haplotype construction tool based on the de Bruijn graph (DBG). KSNP leverages the ability of DBG in handling high-throughput erroneous reads to tackle the challenges. Compared to other notable tools in this field, KSNP achieves at least 5-fold speedup while producing comparable haplotype results. The time required for assembling human haplotypes is reduced to nearly the data-in time.

Highlights The process of machine learning is introduced in detail. Recent developments in machine learning for low-dimensional electrocatalysts are briefly reviewed. Future directions and perspectives for machine learning in hydrogen evolution reaction are critically discussed.

Background Up the reproductive tract, there are large differences in the composition of vaginal microbes. Throughout the menstrual cycle, the structure of the vaginal microbiome shifts. Few studies have examined both in combination. Our study was designed to explore trends in the microbiome of different parts of the vagina in healthy women over the menstrual cycle. Methods We performed metagenomic sequencing to characterize the microbiome differences between the cervical orifice and mid-vagina throughout the menstrual cycle. Results Our results showed the vaginal microbiome of healthy women in the cervical orifice and the mid-vagina was similar during the periovulatory and luteal phases, with Lactobacillus being the dominant bacteria. In the follicular phase, Acinetobacter was detected in the cervical orifice. From the follicular phase to the luteal phase, the community state types (all five community status types were defined as CSTs) in samples No. 10 and No. 11 changed from CST III to CST I. In addition, the composition of the vaginal microbiome in healthy women from different regions of China was significantly different. We also detected viruses including Human alphaherpesvirus 1 (HSV-1) during periovulatory phase. Conclusion This study is valuable for understanding whether the microbial composition of the vagina is consistent in different parts of the menstrual cycle.

The integration of heterostructures within electrode materials is pivotal for enhancing electron and Li-ion diffusion kinetics. In this study, we synthesized CoO/MnO heterostructures to enhance the electrochemical performance of MnO using a straightforward electrostatic spinning technique followed by a meticulously controlled carbonization process, which results in embedding heterostructured CoO/MnO nanoparticles within porous nitrogen-doped carbon nanofibers (CoO/MnO/NC). As confirmed by density functional theory calculations and experimental results, CoO/MnO heterostructures play a significant role in promoting Li+ ion and charge transfer, improving electronic conductivity, and reducing the adsorption energy. The accelerated electron and Li-ion diffusion kinetics, coupled with the porous nitrogen-doped carbon nanofiber structure, contribute to the exceptional electrochemical performance of the CoO/MnO/NC electrode. Specifically, the as-prepared CoO/MnO/NC exhibits a high reversible specific capacity of 936 mA h g−1 at 0.1 A g−1 after 200 cycles and an excellent high-rate capacity of 560 mA h g−1 at 5 A g−1, positioning it as a competitive anode material for lithium-ion batteries. This study underscores the critical role of electronic and Li-ion regulation facilitated by heterostructures, offering a promising pathway for designing transition metal oxide-based anode materials with high performances for lithium-ion batteries.

Abstract Cell–cell interactions are the fundamental behaviors to regulate cellular activities. A comprehensive evaluation of intercellular interactions requires direct profiling of various signaling behaviors simultaneously at the single‐cell level, which remains lacking. Herein, an integrative single‐cell secretion analysis platform is presented to profile different secreted factors (four proteins, three extracellular vesicles (EV) phenotypes), spatial distances, and migration information (distances and direction) simultaneously from high‐throughput paired single cells using an antibody‐barcode microchip. Applying the platform to analyze the tumor–stromal and tumor–immune interactions with the human oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) cell lines and primary OSCC cells reveals that the initial distances between cells would determine their migratory distances and direction to approach stable organization. The cell–cell in close proximity enhances protein secretions while attenuating EV secretions. Migration has a more profound correlation with protein secretions than EV secretions, in which absolute migration distance affects protein secretions significantly but not the direction. These findings highlight the significance of spatial organization in regulating cell signaling behaviors and demonstrate that the integrative single‐cell secretion profiling platform is well‐suited for a comprehensive dissection of intercellular communication and interactions, providing new avenues for understanding cell–cell interaction biology and how different signaling behaviors coordinate within the tumor microenvironment.

Glycans are an important group of natural biopolymers, which not only play the role of a major biological energy resource but also as signaling molecules. As a result, structural characterization or sequencing of glycans, as well as targeted synthesis of glycans, is of great interest for understanding their structure–function relationship. However, this generally involves tedious manual operations and high reagent consumptions, which are the main technical bottlenecks retarding the advances of both automatic glycan sequencing and synthesis. Until now, automated enzymatic glycan sequencers or synthesizers are still not available on the market. In this study, to promote the development of automation in glycan sequencing or synthesis, first, programmed degradation and synthesis of glycans catalyzed by enzymes were successfully conducted on a digital microfluidic (DMF) device by using microdroplets as microreactors. In order to develop automatic glycan synthesizers and sequencers, a strategy integrating enzymatic oligosaccharide degradation or synthesis and magnetic manipulation to realize the separation and purification process after enzymatic reactions was designed and performed on DMF. An automatic process for enzymatic degradation of tetra-N-acetyl chitotetraose was achieved. Furthermore, the two-step enzymatic synthesis of lacto-N-tetraose was successfully and efficiently completed on the DMF platform. This work demonstrated here would open the door to further develop automatic enzymatic glycan synthesizers or sequencers based on DMF.

Abstract Background With the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing technology, the cost of whole genome sequencing drops rapidly, which leads to an exponential growth of genome data. How to efficiently compress the DNA data generated by large-scale genome projects has become an important factor restricting the further development of the DNA sequencing industry. Although the compression of DNA bases has achieved significant improvement in recent years, the compression of quality score is still challenging. Results In this paper, by reinvestigating the inherent correlations between the quality score and the sequencing process, we propose a novel lossless quality score compressor based on adaptive coding order (ACO). The main objective of ACO is to traverse the quality score adaptively in the most correlative trajectory according to the sequencing process. By cooperating with the adaptive arithmetic coding and an improved in-context strategy, ACO achieves the state-of-the-art quality score compression performances with moderate complexity for the next-generation sequencing (NGS) data. Conclusions The competence enables ACO to serve as a candidate tool for quality score compression, ACO has been employed by AVS(Audio Video coding Standard Workgroup of China) and is freely available at https://github.com/Yoniming/ACO.

Abstract Transition metal oxides with high capacity still confront the challenges of low initial coulombic efficiency (ICE, generally

Hard carbon is regarded as one of the greatest potential anode materials for sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) because of its affordable price and large layer spacing. However, its poor initial coulombic efficiency (ICE) and low specific capacity severely restrict its practical commercialization in SIBs. In this work, we successfully constructed abundant oxygen-containing functional groups in hard carbon by using pre-oxidation anthracite as the precursor combined with controlling the carbonization temperature. The oxygen-containing functional groups in hard carbon can increase the reversible Na+ adsorption in the slope region, and the closed micropores can be conducive to Na+ storage in the low-voltage platform region. As a result, the optimal sample exhibits a high initial reversible sodium storage capacity of 304 mAh g−1 at 0.03 A g−1, with an ICE of 67.29% and high capacitance retention of 95.17% after 100 cycles. This synergistic strategy can provide ideas for the design of high-performance SIB anode materials with the intent to regulate the oxygen content in the precursor.

Abstract Secreted proteins are critical mediators in various biological systems, including the immune system, nervous system, and tumor microenvironment. Understanding profound cellular functional heterogeneity in secretion requires multiplexed secreted protein analysis at the single‐cell level. However, most single‐cell protein secretion analysis technologies rely on bulky, expensive instruments, preventing widespread use. Herein, we proposed using a portable and low‐cost desktop scanner to detect multiplexed proteins secreted from single cells. Gold nanoparticle‐enhanced silver staining and tyramide signal amplification are combined to construct a two‐step amplification for single‐cell secretion assay detection. We used this approach to investigate the heterogeneous immune response of macrophages at the single‐cell level, which revealed that only a minority of cells could secrete 10‐fold more MCP‐1 and TNF‐α than the averaged secretion. The reported platform eliminates bulky equipment for single‐cell secretion analysis, making it affordable for basic and clinical research.

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) technology for protein identification from mass spectrometry and related algorithms is developing rapidly. The spectrum-centric analysis of DIA data without the use of spectra library from data-dependent acquisition data represents a promising direction. In this paper, we proposed an untargeted analysis method, Dear-DIAXMBD, for direct analysis of DIA data. Dear-DIAXMBD first integrates the deep variational autoencoder and triplet loss to learn the representations of the extracted fragment ion chromatograms, then uses the k-means clustering algorithm to aggregate fragments with similar representations into the same classes, and finally establishes the inverted index tables to determine the precursors of fragment clusters between precursors and peptides and between fragments and peptides. We show that Dear-DIAXMBD performs superiorly with the highly complicated DIA data of different species obtained by different instrument platforms. Dear-DIAXMBD is publicly available at https://github.com/jianweishuai/Dear-DIA-XMBD.

Tumor metastasis is a hallmark of colorectal cancer (CRC), in which exosome plays a crucial role with its function in intercellular communication. Plasma exosomes were collected from healthy control (HC) donors, localized primary CRC and liver-metastatic CRC patients. We performed proximity barcoding assay (PBA) for single-exosome analysis, which enabled us to identify the alteration in exosome subpopulations associated with CRC progression. By in vitro and in vivo experiments, the biological impact of these subpopulations on cancer proliferation, migration, invasion, and metastasis was investigated. The potential application of exosomes as diagnostic biomarkers was evaluated in 2 independent validation cohorts by PBA. Twelve distinct exosome subpopulations were determined. We found 2 distinctly abundant subpopulations: one ITGB3-positive and the other ITGAM-positive. The ITGB3-positive cluster is rich in liver-metastatic CRC, compared to both HC group and primary CRC group. On the contrary, ITGAM-positive exosomes show a large-scale increase in plasma of HC group, compared to both primary CRC and metastatic CRC groups. Notably, both discovery cohort and validation cohort verified ITGB3+ exosomes as potential diagnostic biomarker. ITGB3+ exosomes promote proliferation, migration, and invasion capability of CRC. In contrast, ITGAM+ exosomes suppress CRC development. Moreover, we also provide evidence that one of the sources of ITGAM+ exosomes is macrophage. ITGB3+ exosomes and ITGAM+ exosomes are proven 2 potential diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic biomarkers for management of CRC.

BackgroundThe data about the clinical features and outcomes of Chinese patients with follicular lymphoma (FL) are limited. Here, we conducted a retrospective study to explore the initial treatment strategies and clinical outcomes of Chinese patients with FL in the real world.MethodThis study included FL patients who were newly diagnosed in Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital from March 2002 to August 2020.ResultsA total of 926 FL patients were enrolled. The median age was 54 years old, and the majority of the Chinese FL patients had advanced-stage disease and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group(ECOG)

MXene-based composites have been widely used in electric energy storage device. As a member of MXene, niobium carbide (Nb2C) is a good electrode candidate for energy storage because of its high specific surface area and electronic conductivity. However, a pure Nb2C MXene electrode exhibits limited supercapacitive performance due to its easy stacking. Herein, sodium anthraquinone-2-sulfonate (AQS) with high redox reactivity was employed as a tailor to enhance the accessibility of ions and electrolyte and enhance the capacitance performance of Nb2C MXene. The resulting Nb2C–AQS composite had three-dimensional porous layered structures. The supercapacitors (SCs) based on the Nb2C–AQS composite exhibited a considerably higher electrochemical capacitance (36.3 mF cm−2) than the pure Nb2C electrode (16.8 mF cm−2) at a scan rate of 20 mV s−1. The SCs also exhibited excellent flexibility as deduced from the almost unchanged capacitance values after being subjected to bending. A capacitance retention of 99.5% after 600 cycles was observed for the resulting SCs, indicating their good cycling stability. This work proposes a surface modification method for Nb2C MXene and facilitates the development of high-performance SCs.

Curcumin (Cur) is a kind of polyphenol with a variety of topical pharmacological properties including antioxidant, analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities. However, its low water solubility and poor skin bioavailability limit its effectiveness. In the current study, we aimed to develop microemulsion-based keratin–chitosan gel for the improvement of the topical activity of Cur. The curcumin-loaded microemulsion (CME) was formulated and then loaded into the keratin–chitosan (KCS) gel to form the CME-KCS gel. The formulated CME-KCS gel was evaluated for its characterization, in vitro release, in vitro skin permeation and in vivo activity. The results showed that the developed CME-KCS gel had an orange-yellow and gel-like appearance. The particle size and zeta potential of the CME-KCS gel were 186.45 ± 0.75 nm and 9.42 ± 0.86 mV, respectively. The CME-KCS gel showed desirable viscoelasticity, spreadability, bioadhesion and controlled drug release, which was suitable for topical application. The in vitro skin permeation and retention study showed that the CME-KCS gel had better in vitro skin penetration than the Cur solution and achieved maximum skin drug retention (3.75 ± 0.24 μg/cm2). In vivo experimental results confirmed that the CME-KCS gel was more effective than curcumin-loaded microemulsion (Cur-ME) in analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities. In addition, the CME-KCS gel did not cause any erythema or edema based on a mice skin irritation test. These findings indicated that the developed CME-KCS gel could improve the skin penetration and retention of Cur and could become a promising formulation for topical delivery to treat local diseases.

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the photon sphere, shadow radius and quasinormal modes of a four-dimensional charged Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet black hole. The perturbation of a massless scalar field in the black hole’s background is adopted. The quasinormal modes are gotten by the 6th order WKB approximation approach and shadow radius, respectively. When the value of the Gauss–Bonnet coupling constant increase, the values of the real parts of the quasinormal modes increase and those of the imaginary parts decrease. The coincidence degrees of quasinormal modes derived by the two approaches increases with the increase of the values of the Gauss–Bonnet coupling constant and multipole number. It shows the correspondence between the shadow and test field in the four-dimensional Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet–Maxwell gravity. The radii of the photon sphere and shadow increase with the decrease of the Gauss–Bonnet coupling constant.

Persistent infection and prolonged shedding of human bocavirus 1 (HBoV1) in children have been reported, and the role of HBoV1 as a sole causative pathogen in acute respiratory infection (ARI) is yet to be established. While the reported prevalence of HBoV infection varies due to different detection methods and sampling criteria, determining the viral and bacterial etiology of HBoV infection using multiplex real-time PCR is yet to be reported. Herein, we aimed to further explore the pathogenicity of HBoV in patients with ARI by screening the viral and bacterial infections in children with ARI in Qingdao and comparing the epidemiological, clinical characteristics, and etiological results. Human bocavirus was identified in 28.1% of the samples, and further sequencing analysis of the detected HBoV confirmed 96.4% as HBoV1. The rate of HBoV as a single viral infection was 75%, and the rate of coinfection with bacteria was 66.1%, suggesting the need for continued monitoring of HBoV in children with ARIs. Clinical characterization suggested that HBoV infection may affect the function of organs, such as the liver, kidney, and heart, and the blood acid–base balance. Additionally, it is essential to promote awareness about the importance of disinfection and sterilization of the hospital environment and standardizing operations. The interactions between HBoV and other pathogens remain to be investigated in further detail in the future.

Background: By recruiting the MCM8–MCM9 helicase to DNA damage site, the Homologous Recombination Factor With OB-Fold (HROB) is involved in the repair of inter-strand crosslink and homologous recombination. Previous studies have shown that HROB may play an oncogenic role by promoting cell proliferation and chemoresistance in several tumor types. However, the potential diagnostic and prognostic values of HROB have not been systemically explored in pan-cancer.Methods: We analyzed the expression pattern of HROB among tumor tissues and normal tissues in several public databases, including Human Protein Atlas and the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and investigated the association between the HROB expression and pathological stage and patient prognosis. We also analyzed the association between HROB expression and cancer stemness and immune infiltration of cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) and CD8+ T cells in pan-cancer. Finally, we explored the potential biological function of HROB through pathway enrichment analysis.Results: In most tumor types, HROB is overexpressed in tumor tissues compared with non-tumor tissues. High HROB expression was correlated with poor prognosis and advanced pathological stages. HROB expression was robustly correlated with cancer stemness. Moreover, significant correlations between CAFs, CD8+ T-cell infiltration, and HROB expression were observed in several tumor types. Pathway enrichment analysis revealed that cell cycle and mitotic-regulated pathways were strongly enriched in HROB co-expressed genes.Conclusion: HROB may be a potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarker in pan-cancer, which may play a role in tumorigenesis and disease progression by affecting the cancer stemness of tumor tissues and immune cell infiltration.

Recently, CNN-based methods for hyperspectral image super-resolution (HSISR) have achieved outstanding performance. Due to the multi-band property of hyperspectral images, 3D convolutions are natural candidates for extracting spatial–spectral correlations. However, pure 3D CNN models are rare to see, since they are generally considered to be too complex, require large amounts of data to train, and run the risk of overfitting on relatively small-scale hyperspectral datasets. In this paper, we question this common notion and propose Full 3D U-Net (F3DUN), a full 3D CNN model combined with the U-Net architecture. By introducing skip connections, the model becomes deeper and utilizes multi-scale features. Extensive experiments show that F3DUN can achieve state-of-the-art performance on HSISR tasks, indicating the effectiveness of the full 3D CNN on HSISR tasks, thanks to the carefully designed architecture. To further explore the properties of the full 3D CNN model, we develop a 3D/2D mixed model, a popular kind of model prior, called Mixed U-Net (MUN) which shares a similar architecture with F3DUN. Through analysis on F3DUN and MUN, we find that 3D convolutions give the model a larger capacity; that is, the full 3D CNN model can obtain better results than the 3D/2D mixed model with the same number of parameters when it is sufficiently trained. Moreover, experimental results show that the full 3D CNN model could achieve competitive results with the 3D/2D mixed model on a small-scale dataset, suggesting that 3D CNN is less sensitive to data scaling than what people used to believe. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, CAVE and Harvard, demonstrate that our proposed F3DUN exceeds state-of-the-art HSISR methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Fe-based sulfides are a promising type of anode material for sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) due to their high theoretical capacities and affordability. However, these materials often suffer from issues such as capacity deterioration and poor conductivity during practical application. To address these challenges, an N-doped Fe7S8 anode with an N, S co-doped porous carbon framework (PPF-800) was synthesized using a template-assisted method. When serving as an anode for SIBs, it delivers a robust and ultrafast sodium storage performance, with a discharge capacity of 489 mAh g−1 after 500 cycles at 5 A g−1 and 371 mAh g−1 after 1000 cycles at 30 A g−1 in the ether-based electrolyte. This impressive performance is attributed to the combined influence of heteroatomic doping and adjustable interface engineering. The N, S co-doped carbon framework embedded with Fe7S8 nanoparticles effectively addresses the issues of volumetric expansion, reduces the impact of sodium polysulfides, improves intrinsic conductivity, and stimulates the dominant pseudocapacitive contribution (90.3% at 2 mV s−1). Moreover, the formation of a stable solid electrolyte interface (SEI) film by the effect of uniform pore structure in ether-based electrolyte produces a lower transfer resistance during the charge–discharge process, thereby boosting the rate performance of the electrode material. This work expands a facile strategy to optimize the electrochemical performance of other metal sulfides.

The policy-controlled signature (PCS) scheme uses the access policy to control signature verification permission. However public access policy that may contain private information will leak user privacy. At the same time, the expressiveness of access structures in the PCS schemes is weak. Therefore, we propose a policy-controlled signature scheme with strong expressiveness and privacy-preserving policy (PCS-PP), in which linear secret sharing schemes is to design access structure which has strong expression, the three primes composite order bilinear groups is used to hide the attribute value into the attribute name that may expose the privacy data by data distortion concept. The proposed PCS-PP scheme not only has correctness and privacy-preserving policy, but also supports fine-grained signature verification. In addition, the unforgeability is proved in the random oracle model. Compared to the related schemes, the proposed PCS-PP scheme has superiority in features, computation cost and storage.

We present four datasets on proteomics profiling of HeLa and SiHa cell lines associated with the research described in the paper “PROTREC: A probability-based approach for recovering missing proteins based on biological networks” [1]. Proteins in each cell line were acquired by two different data acquisition methods. The first was Data Dependent Acquisition-Parallel Accumulation Serial Fragmentation (DDA-PASEF) and the second was Parallel Accumulation-Serial Fragmentation combined with data-independent acquisition (diaPASEF) [2,3]. Protein assembly was performed following search against the Swiss-Prot Human database using Peaks Studio for DDA datasets and Spectronaut for DIA datasets. The assembled result contains identified PSMs, peptides and proteins that are above threshold for each HeLa and SiHa sample. Coverage-wise, for DDA-PASEF, approximately 6,090 and 7,298 proteins were quantified for HeLa and SiHA sample, while13,339 and 8,773 proteins were quantified by diaPASEF for HeLa for SiHa sample, respectively. Consistency-wise, diaPASEF has fewer missing values (∼ 2%) compared to its DDA counterparts (∼5–7%). The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium (http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org) via the iProX partner repository [4] with the dataset identifier PXD029773.

Mercury ion is a highly toxic anthropogenic pollutants and has serious well-known effects on human. There is an ever-growing demand for convenient detection of mercury driven contaminants in environment, including coastal seawater. However, most of the reported methods are instrument-based and are not easy for portable detection. Our protocol described an efficient Digital Microfluidics method for detecting mercury in coastal seawater samples. It combined the miniaturization/automation potential of digital microfluidics and the sensitivity of fluorescence probe. To overcome a potential risk of driven failure, induced by diversity ion ingredients in seawater, a feedback control loop was included into control system. The method showed satisfied stability and selectivity in Hg sensing under high salinity condition, with the sensitivity of Hg2+ at the parts-per-billion level and total testing time of less than 20 s. With the advantages of being fast, amenable to automation and low cost, this protocol is promising for the formation of simple and rapid sensor device, especially for a routine monitoring and emergency detection of Hg/or other metals in coastal waters. Keywords: Digital microfluidics, Feedback-controlling, Fluorimetric sensor, Hg detection, Seawater

To improve the precision of dynamic distance measurement based on the frequency-swept interferometry (FSI) system, a Doppler-induced error compensation model based on a scheme increasing the frequency sweeping rate is proposed. A distance demodulation method based on a Fourier transformation is investigated when the defined quasi-stationary coefficient approaches a constant. Simulations and experiments based on dynamic distance with a sinusoidal change demonstrate that the proposed method has a standard deviation of 0.09 μm within a distance range of 4 μm at a sweeping rate of 60 KHz.

Abstract Structure pulverization and poor electrical conductivity of metal dichalcogenides result in serious capacity decay both in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) and sodium-ion batteries (SIBs). To resolve the above problems, a combination of metal dichalcogenides with conductive scaffolds as high-performance electrode materials has aroused tremendous interest recently. Herein, we synthesize a 3D honeycomb-like rGO anchored with SnS2 quantum dots (3D SnS2 QDs/rGO) composite via spray-drying and sulfidation. The unique 3D-ordered honeycomb-like structure can confine the volume change of SnS2 QDs in the lithiation/delithiation and sodiation/desodiation processes, provide enough space for electrolyte reservoirs, promote the conductivity of the SnS2 QDs, and improve the electron transfer. As a result, the 3D SnS2 QDs/rGO composite electrode delivers a high capacity and long cycling stability (862 mAh/g for LIB at 0.1 A/g after 200 cycles, 233 mAh/g for SIB at 0.5 A/g after 200 cycles). This study provides a feasible synthesis route for preparing 3D-ordered porous networks in varied materials for the development of high-performance LIBs and SIBs in future.

BackgroundStomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) is one of the most common malignancies worldwide with poor prognosis. It remains unclear whether the prognosis is associated with somatic gene mutations.MethodsIn this research, we collected two independent STAD cohorts with both genetic profiling and clinical follow-up data, systematically investigated the association between the prognosis and somatic mutations, and analyzed the influence of heterogeneity on the prognosis-genetics association.ResultsTypical association was identified between somatic mutations and overall prognosis for individual cohorts. In The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort, a list of 24 genes was also identified that tended to mutate within cases of the poorest prognosis. The association showed apparent heterogeneity between different cohorts, although common signatures could be identified. A machine-learning model was trained with 20 common genes that showed a similar mutation rate difference between prognostic groups in the two cohorts, and it classified the cases in each cohort into two groups with significantly different prognosis. The model outperformed both single-gene models and TNM-based staging system significantly.ConclusionThe study made a systematic analysis on the association between STAD prognosis and somatic mutations, identified signature genes that showed mutation preference in different prognostic groups, and developed an effective multi-gene model that can effectively predict the overall prognosis of STAD in different cohorts.

Environmental pollution and energy shortage make the development of clean energy more and more urgent. As a kind of clean renewable energy, hydrogen has attracted more attention recently. WO3-based materials have emerged as one of the most promising candidates for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) due to their attractive electrocatalytic activity, low cost, as well as electrochemical durability. In this minireview, we systematically provide an overview of WO3-based materials applied for HER, including pure WO3, doped WO3, and WO3-based composite materials. Furthermore, the strategies to enhance their electrocatalytic performance are summarized and discussed, such as morphological engineering, doping, as well as compositing with other materials. Finally, the limitation and challenges of WO3-based materials for HER and their prospects for future research are proposed. We believe that this minireview will be favorable for scientists to seek more promising HER electrocatalysts.

Tim-3 is a promising target for antitumor immunotherapy. A number of clinical trials are evaluating the efficacy of anti-Tim-3 therapies as a single agent or combinations in solid tumors and haematologic malignancies. However, there remains a considerable lack of data on Tim-3 signalling, especially the genetic characteristics and immune microenvironment, in diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Herein, we identified three genetic mutations in galectin-9, a major ligand of Tim-3, in six patients with DLBCL (6/188, 3.2%) that were not detected in the COSMIC database. The Oncomine database showed that the mRNA levels of Tim-3 were higher in DLBCL cells than those in normal B cells. Multiplexed immunofluorescence revealed that patients with Tim-3-expressing tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (Tim-3+ TILs) exhibited poor outcomes than those with Tim-3- TILs (p=0.041). The median survival times of these patients were 65.0 (95% confidence interval (CI): 71.2–88.6) and 79.9 months (95% CI: 54.4–75.6), respectively. Furthermore, we defined a novel subtype of exhausted T cells, named as exhausted Tim-3+ CD8+ T cells, and found that patients with exhausted Tim-3+ CD8+ T cells (median survival, 62.8 months, 95% CI: 50.0–75.6) exhibited shorter survival than those with nonexhausted Tim-3- CD8+ T cells (median survival, 82.5 months, 95% CI: 72.0–92.9; p=0.034). Overall, these findings provide the genetic status of the Tim-3 ligand in DLBCL. Patients with Tim-3+ TILs and exhausted Tim-3+ CD8+ T cells exhibited inferior survival, thus highlighting the possibility of potential therapeutic applications of the inhibition of Tim-3 alone or in combination with other immune checkpoints for treatment of patients with DLBCL.

In this paper, SiO2 aerogels were prepared by a sol–gel method. Using Ketjen Black (KB), Super P (SP) and Acetylene Black (AB) as a conductive agent, respectively, the effects of the structure and morphology of the three conductive agents on the electrochemical performance of SiO2 gel anode were systematically investigated and compared. The results show that KB provides far better cycling and rate performance than SP and AB for SiO2 anode electrodes, with a reversible specific capacity of 351.4 mA h g−1 at 0.2 A g−1 after 200 cycles and a stable 311.7 mA h g−1 at 1.0 A g−1 after 500 cycles. The enhanced mechanism of the lithium storage performance of SiO2-KB anode was also proposed.

To improve the fringe contrast and the sensitivity of Fabry-Perot (FP) pressure sensors, a silicone rubber FP pressure sensor based on a spherical optical fiber end face is proposed. The ratio of silicone rubber ingredients and the diameter and thickness of silicone rubber diaphragm were optimized by a simulation based on experimental tests that analyzed elastic parameters, and the influence of the radius of a spherical optical fiber and the initial cavity length of the sensor on the fringe contrast was investigated and optimized. Pressure sensor samples were fabricated for pressure test and temperature cross-influence test. Gas pressure experimental results within a pressure range of 0~40 kPa show the average sensitivity of the sensor is −154.56 nm/kPa and repeatability error is less than 0.71%. Long-term pressure experimental results show it has good repeatability and stability. Temperature experimental results show its temperature cross-sensitivity is 0.143 kPa/°C. The good performance of the proposed FP pressure sensor will expand its applications in biochemical applications, especially in human body pressure monitoring.

A fast real-time demodulation method based on the coarsely sampled spectrum is proposed for transient signals of fiber optic extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometers (EFPI) sensors. The feasibility of phase demodulation using a coarse spectrum is theoretically analyzed. Based on the coarse spectrum, fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm is used to roughly estimate the cavity length. According to the rough estimation, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) algorithm is applied to calculate the cavity length accurately. The dense wavelength division multiplexer (DWDM) is used to split the broadband spectrum into the coarse spectrum, and the high-speed synchronous ADC collects the spectrum. The experimental results show that the system can achieve a real-time dynamic demodulation speed of 50 kHz, a static measurement root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.184 nm, and a maximum absolute and relative error distribution of 15 nm and 0.005% of the measurement cavity length compared with optical spectrum analyzers (OSA).

SiOx is considered as a promising anode for next-generation Li-ions batteries (LIBs) due to its high theoretical capacity; however, mechanical damage originated from volumetric variation during cycles, low intrinsic conductivity, and the complicated or toxic fabrication approaches critically hampered its practical application. Herein, a green, inexpensive, and scalable strategy was employed to fabricate NG/SiOx/NG (N-doped reduced graphene oxide) homogenous hybrids via a freeze-drying combined thermal decomposition method. The stable sandwich structure provided open channels for ion diffusion and relieved the mechanical stress originated from volumetric variation. The homogenous hybrids guaranteed the uniform and agglomeration-free distribution of SiOx into conductive substrate, which efficiently improved the electric conductivity of the electrodes, favoring the fast electrochemical kinetics and further relieving the volumetric variation during lithiation/delithiation. N doping modulated the disproportionation reaction of SiOx into Si and created more defects for ion storage, resulting in a high specific capacity. Deservedly, the prepared electrode exhibited a high specific capacity of 545 mAh g−1 at 2 A g−1, a high areal capacity of 2.06 mAh cm−2 after 450 cycles at 1.5 mA cm−2 in half-cell and tolerable lithium storage performance in full-cell. The green, scalable synthesis strategy and prominent electrochemical performance made the NG/SiOx/NG electrode one of the most promising practicable anodes for LIBs.

In modern management, the design of equity structure exerts an important influence on the operation and development of a company. A scientific and reasonable equity structure for companies in the early days will prevent and control their own risks in different stages, while the application of information management technology is also indispensable in the current big data environment. Therefore, this paper determined the weight by means of the 0-9 scoring method to evaluate the importance of equity and propose the idea of innovative design for the equity structure in multiple-holding start-ups. Eventually, a tool to optimize equity structure was designed to serve as information management technology for risk prevention and control in start-ups. It can effectively safeguard the rights and interests of all the shareholders based on various ranks, demonstrating the sincerity of the founding team to the greatest extent. By setting a rational proportion and making fine-tuning in accordance with the needs of all stakeholders, both the decision rights of the founding team and the trust of the external investors are guaranteed.

Abstract The BCL6 (B-Cell Lymphoma 6) gene is a proto-oncogene that is often expressed in diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCLs). BCL6 loss of function can kill DLBCL cells, demonstrating that BCL6 is necessary for the survival of DLBCL cells and could be a therapeutic target. In this study, we found that BCL6 protein levels were consistently upregulated in DLBCL tissues, whereas its mRNA levels varied randomly in tissues, suggesting that a post-transcriptional mechanism was involved in BCL6 regulation. We used bioinformatics analysis to search for miRNAs, which potentially target BCL6, and identified specific targeting sites for miR-10a in the 3′-untranslated region (3′-UTR) of BCL6. We further identified an inverse correlation between miR-10a levels and BCL6 protein levels, but not mRNA levels, in DLBCL tumor tissue samples. By overexpressing or knocking down miR-10a in DLBCL cells, we experimentally validated that miR-10a directly recognizes the 3′-UTR of the BCL6 transcript and regulated BCL6 expression. Furthermore, we demonstrated that negatively regulating BCL6 by miR-10a suppressed the proliferation and promoted apoptosis of DLBCL cells.

This article introduces a detection method and apparatus for rapid detection of the content of ferromagnetic wear particles in the lubricating oil, as well as the signal processing circuit. Moreover, an electromagnetic sensor of transformer type is used; meanwhile, the content of ferromagnetic substances in the lubricating oil is detected by the detection of changes in relevant parameters of the electromagnetic sensors based on the fact that the existence of the ferromagnetic wear particles has resulted in the changes in spatial distribution of the magnetic field. Finally, the influence of non-ferromagnetic pollutants may be eliminated and a high linearity may be achieved with low cost and good real time.

Construction of a suitable hybrid structure has been considered an important approach to address the defects of metal sulfide anode materials. V3S4 nanosheets anchored on an N, S co-coped graphene (VS/NSG) aerogel were successfully fabricated by an efficient self-assembled strategy. During the heat treatment process, decomposition, sulfuration and N, S co-doping occurred. This hybrid structure was not only endowed with an enhanced capability to buffer the volume expansion, but also improved electron conductivity as a result of the conductive network that had been constructed. The dominating pseudocapacitive contribution (57.78% at 1 mV s−1) enhanced the electrochemical performance effectively. When serving as anode material for lithium ion batteries, VS/NSG exhibits excellent lithium storage properties, including high rate capacity (480 and 330 mAh g−1 at 5 and 10 A g−1, respectively) and stable cyclic performance (692 mAh g−1 after 400 cycles at 2 A g−1).

In recent years, transitional metal sulfides have received much attention as lithium ion batteries (LIBs) anode. In this paper, FeS/C nanosheets are prepared through Fe-based metal organic frameworks (Fe-MOFs) as a precursor. The electrochemical performance of FeS/C nanosheets has been obviously improved due to the synergistic effect of the oxygen doped carbon and the special flake morphology. When the test current density is 0.1 A/g, the initial discharge capacities of FeS/C nanosheets is up to 1702 mAh/g and can retain reversible capacities of about 830 mAh/g over 150 cycles with the voltage ranging from 0.01 V to 3 V. Moreover, these composite materials are proved to have a good rate performance and the capacities reach 460 mAh/g even at a higher current density of 5 A/g. This work suggests that FeS/C nanosheets are excellent anode materials for LIBs.

A continuous-time white Gaussian channel can be formulated using a white Gaussian noise, and a conventional way for examining such a channel is the sampling approach based on the Shannon–Nyquist sampling theorem, where the original continuous-time channel is converted to an equivalent discrete-time channel, to which a great variety of established tools and methodology can be applied. However, one of the key issues of this scheme is that continuous-time feedback and memory cannot be incorporated into the channel model. It turns out that this issue can be circumvented by considering the Brownian motion formulation of a continuous-time white Gaussian channel. Nevertheless, as opposed to the white Gaussian noise formulation, a link that establishes the information-theoretic connection between a continuous-time channel under the Brownian motion formulation and its discrete-time counterparts has long been missing. This paper is to fill this gap by establishing causality-preserving connections between continuous-time Gaussian feedback/memory channels and their associated discrete-time versions in the forms of sampling and approximation theorems, which we believe will play important roles in the long run for further developing continuous-time information theory. As an immediate application of the approximation theorem, we propose the so-called approximation approach to examine continuous-time white Gaussian channels in the point-to-point or multi-user setting. It turns out that the approximation approach, complemented by relevant tools from stochastic calculus, can enhance our understanding of continuous-time Gaussian channels in terms of giving alternative and strengthened interpretation to some long-held folklore, recovering “long-known” results from new perspectives, and rigorously establishing new results predicted by the intuition that the approximation approach carries. More specifically, using the approximation approach complemented by relevant tools from stochastic calculus, we first derive the capacity regions of continuous-time white Gaussian multiple access channels and broadcast channels, and we then analyze how feedback affects their capacity regions: feedback will increase the capacity regions of some continuous-time white Gaussian broadcast channels and interference channels, while it will not increase capacity regions of continuous-time white Gaussian multiple access channels.