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Objective To investigate the value of real-time tissue elastography (RTE) in evaluating donor liver quality and postoperative early allograft dysfunction (EAD) in liver transplantation patients. Methods A total of 58 patients who received liver transplantation in Organ Transplantation Center of our hospital from October 2020 to January 2022 were enrolled, and according to the recovery of liver function in the early stage after surgery, the patients were divided into EAD group and non-EAD group. The two groups were compared in terms of the indicators such as the routine ultrasound examination and RTE measurement of donor liver before liver transplantation, liver function and coagulation function of recipients before and after liver transplantation, and preoperative Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score. The logistic regression analysis was performed for the indicators with significant differences, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was plotted to calculate the area under the ROC curve (AUC) and assess the performance of related factors. Results Compared with the non-EAD group, the EAD group had significantly higher liver fibrosis (LF) index of donor liver and MELD score of recipients (t=4.822, 2.902,P1.645 was a risk factor for EAD after liver transplantation, and the ROC curve analysis showed that donor liver LF index had an AUC of 0.840 in predicting EAD after surgery, with a sensitivity of 82.4%, a specificity of 73.2%, and a cut-off value of 1.645. Conclusion High LF index of donor liver before liver transplantation is a risk factor for EAD in recipients after liver transplantation, and RTE measurement for LF index of donor liver before li-ver transplantation has a certain value in assessing the quality of donor liver and predicting the onset of EAD.

The management of hypertrophic scars (HSs), characterized by excessive collagen production, involves various nonsurgical and surgical interventions. However, the absence of a well‐defined molecular mechanism governing hypertrophic scarring has led to less‐than‐ideal results in clinical antifibrotic treatments. Therefore, our study focused on the role of decorin (DCN) and its regulatory role in the TGF‐β/Smad signalling pathway in the development of HSs. In our research, we observed a decrease in DCN expression within hypertrophic scar tissue and its derived cells (HSFc) compared to that in normal tissue. Then, the inhibitory effect of DCN on collagen synthesis was confirmed in Fc and HSFc via the detection of fibrosis markers such as COL‐1 and COL‐3 after the overexpression and knockdown of DCN. Moreover, functional assessments revealed that DCN suppresses the proliferation, migration and invasion of HSFc. We discovered that DCN significantly inhibits the TGF‐β1/Smad3 pathway by suppressing TGF‐β1 expression, as well as the formation and phosphorylation of Smad3. This finding suggested that DCN regulates the synthesis of collagen‐based extracellular matrix and fibrosis through the TGF‐β1/Smad3 pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to extract and integrate information from different modalities to accurately identify the sentiment expressed in multimodal data. How to effectively capture the relevant information within a specific modality and how to fully exploit the complementary information among multiple modalities are two major challenges in multimodal sentiment analysis. Traditional approaches fail to obtain the global contextual information of long time-series data when extracting unimodal temporal features, and they usually fuse the features from multiple modalities with the same method and ignore the correlation between different modalities when modeling inter-modal interactions. In this paper, we first propose an Attentional Temporal Convolutional Network (ATCN) to extract unimodal temporal features for enhancing the feature representation ability, then introduce a Multi-layer Feature Fusion (MFF) model to improve the effectiveness of multimodal fusion, which fuses the different-level features by different methods according to the correlation coefficient between the features, and cross-modal multi-head attention is used to fully explore the potential relationship between the low-level features. The experimental results on SIMS and CMU-MOSI datasets show that the proposed model achieves superior performance on sentiment analysis tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficacy of ulcerative colitis (UC) therapy is closely connected to the composition of gut microbiota in the gastrointestinal tract. Prebiotic-based nanoparticles (NPs) provide a more precise approach to alleviate UC via modulating gut microbiota dysbiosis. The present study develops an efficient prebiotic-based colon-targeted drug delivery system (PCDDS) by using prebiotic pectin (Pcn) and chitosan (Csn) polysaccharides as a prebiotic shell, with the anti-inflammatory drug sulfasalazine (SAS) loaded into a poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) core to construct SAS@PLGA-Csn-Pcn NPs. Then, we examine its characterization, cellular uptake, and in vivo therapeutic efficacy. The results of our study indicate that the Pcn/Csn shell confers efficient pH-sensitivity properties. The gut microbiota-secreted pectinase serves as the trigger agent for Pcn/Csn shell degradation, and the resulting Pcn oligosaccharides possess a substantial prebiotic property. Meanwhile, the formed PCDDSs exhibit robust biodistribution and accumulation in the colon tissue, rapid cellular uptake, efficient in vivo therapeutic efficacy, and modulation of gut microbiota dysbiosis in a mouse colitis model. Collectively, our synthetic PCDDSs demonstrate a promising and synergistic strategy for UC therapy., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (Copyright © 2024 Hui Li et al.)

A core-shell structured dual Z-scheme ternary photocatalyst BiVO 4 @ZnIn 2 S 4 /Bi 2 Sn 2 O 7 was fabricated via hydrothermal and heat-circumfluence strategy. With ZnIn 2 S 4 serving as a bridge to connect BiVO 4 and Bi 2 Sn 2 O 7 , the developed ternary catalyst displayed boosted charge transfer and spatial separation capabilities. The effect of mass ratios of BiVO 4 @ZnIn 2 S 4 and Bi 2 Sn 2 O 7 on photodegradation efficiency under visible light irradiation was explored. The optimal ternary heterojunction photocatalyst possessed remarkable photocatalytic rate constant for Rhodamine B (RhB) degradation, which was 63 and 12 times higher than that of BiVO 4 and Bi 2 Sn 2 O 7 , respectively. In addition, the as-prepared ternary photocatalyst had good universality. Notably, the novel dual Z-scheme photocatalysts could improve the separating/transferring efficiency and reduction/oxidation ability of charge carriers. Meanwhile, the hierarchical structure offered sufficient reaction sites for photodegradation. This work provides a new insight into the rational design of ternary dual Z-scheme photocatalysts., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID)/apolipoprotein B RNA-editing catalytic component (APOBEC) family is a vertebrate-restricted subgrouping of a superfamily of zinc (Zn)-dependent deaminases that has members distributed throughout the biological world. AID and APOBEC2 are the oldest family members with APOBEC1 and the APOBEC3s being later arrivals restricted to placental mammals. Many AID/APOBEC family members exhibit cytidine deaminase activity on polynucleotides, although in different physiological contexts. Here, we examine the AID/APOBEC proteins in the context of the entire Zn-dependent deaminase superfamily. On the basis of secondary structure predictions, we propose that the cytosine and tRNA deaminases are likely to provide better structural paradigms for the AID/APOBEC family than do the cytidine deaminases, to which they have conventionally been compared. These comparisons yield predictions concerning likely polynucleotide-interacting residues in AID/APOBEC3s, predictions that are supported by mutagenesis studies. We also focus on a specific comparison between AID and the APOBEC3s. Both are DNA deaminases that function in immunity and are responsible for the hypermutation of their target substrates. AID functions in the adaptive immune system to diversify antibodies with targeted DNA deamination being central to this function. APOBEC3s function as part of an innate pathway of immunity to retroviruses with targeted DNA deamination being central to their activity in retroviral hypermutation. However, the mechanism by which the APOBEC3s fulfill their function of retroviral restriction remains unresolved.