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Clostridium autoethanogenum protein (CAP) is a promising protein source for aquaculture; however, how CAP influences fish quality is worth extensive research. We randomly allocated 630 turbot with initial body weights of about 180 g into 6 groups, with fishmeal-based control diet or diet with CAP replacing 15% (CAP15), 30% (CAP30), 45% (CAP45), 60% (CAP60), or 75% (CAP75) of fishmeal protein. After a 70-d feeding trial, the fillet yield (P = 0.015) and content of protein (P = 0.017), collagen (P 0.05). By contrast, the muscle hardness increased linearly with increasing CAP (P = 0.004), accompanied by linear reduction of muscle fiber area (P = 0.003) and expression of myogenesis-related genes, including cathepsin D (ctsd P

The present work evaluated the effects of dietary fishmeal replacement with three non-food protein sources, including defatted Tenebrio molitor meal (TM), Clostridium autoethanogenum protein meal (CAP) and Chlorella vulgaris meal (CV), on the freshness traits of turbot Scophthalmus maximus. TM, CAP, or CV were used to respectively replace 0 %, 15 %, 30 %. 45 %, 60 % and 75 % of dietary fishmeal protein. Turbot (180.5 ± 2.5 g) were fed with eighteen experimental diets for 70 days, and were stored at 4 ℃ for 3 days. TM and CAP linearly increased QIM scores, but no obvious trend between QIM scores and CV dietary level. The TM15 diet decreased the QIM score, indicating better overall freshness compared to the other TM-groups. Chromameter indicated that consumers could not distinguish the color differences among groups (ΔE < 3). The muscle hardness of all groups was significantly reduced after storage (P30 %) resulted in increased pH, TVB-N, and TBA levels compared with the fish fed TM0 diet. But cathepsin B and L activities showed no significant differences across all TM-groups. Among the CAP-groups, no significant differences were noted in pH and TBA levels; however, CAP linearly increased TVB-N levels after storage. CV did not significantly influence the post-storage pH, TVB-N, and TBA levels. The muscle glycogen content showed no significant variance among the groups. In conclusion, a 15 % dietary replacement of fishmeal with TM optimized the freshness of turbot by decelerating muscle softening, lipid oxidation, and the production of volatile nitrogen compounds, whereas higher levels of TM accelerated these processes. CAP replacement level exceeding 15 % enhanced the production of volatile nitrogen compounds. Dietary inclusion of CV did not impact the freshness of turbot during storage.

Clostridium autoethanogenum protein (CAP) is an emerging protein source with several key advantages and it has investigated on juvenile turbot (9.13 g). However, it was indicated that fish growth stage is a decisive factor for CAP performance and the influence of CAP on turbot intestine health has not been reported. Thus, it is worth investigating the effects of CAP on turbot extensively. In the present study, a 67-day feeding experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of CAP on turbot in the grow-out phase from growth performance, intestine and liver health. Six hundred and thirty turbot with an initial body weight of about 150 g were randomly divided into 6 groups, which were fed with fishmeal-based control diet or diet with CAP to replace 15%, 30%, 45%, 60% and 75% of fishmeal protein in control diet, respectively. From growth and feed utilization, the substitution level of CAP should not exceed 30%, which was less than previous reported on juvenile turbot. The palatability of the feed was linearly reduced. Although CAP did not induce enteritis, it decreased the intestine villi height in middle intestine and villi density in distal intestine. Except for decreasing the size of hepatocytes by CAP at 45% or higher substitution levels, no other abnormality observed in liver histology. However, dietary CAP reduced the triglyceride and cholesterol levels in the plasma at 30% or higher levels and linearly down-regulated genes related to lipogenesis in liver. The genes related lipid transportation and oxidation were up-regulated by CAP at the substitution levels of 15–60%. The present work confirmed the safety of CAP in fish feed and suggested more work should be conducted before it widely used in aquafeed.

The yellow mealworm Tenebrio molitor (TM) is promising feed ingredient for aquafeed. However, consumers might reject insect-fed fish unless they know their quality. Nevertheless, reports on how TM influences fish quality were rare and yielded conflicting results; furthermore, there are no evaluations on quality of turbot Scophthalmus maximus fed TM. Therefore, turbot with an initial body weight of 150 g were fed six experimental feeds containing increasing levels of defatted TM to replace fishmeal for 85 days. The substitution levels were 0% (control), 15% (TM15), 22 30% (TM30), 45% (TM45), 60% (TM60), and 75% (TM75). The result showed TM replacing up to 45% of fishmeal did not negatively impact growth performance or fillet yield. Dietary TM optimized the health value of muscle fatty acids regarding thrombogenicity index, atherogenicity index, and hypocholesterolemic to hypercholesterolemic fatty acids ratio but linearly decreased the muscle contents of hydroxyproline, collagen, and n-3 PUFA. However, turbot fed TM15 maintained the contents of these nutrients compared with those fed the control diet. The naked eye cannot perceive skin color changes induced by TM; but the odor, flavor, and texture of cooked fillets changed by TM at both sampling times could be distinguished by sensory evaluation. Furthermore, texture analyzer reported that the hardness of raw fillets significantly decreased by the end of the experiment but not on the 56th day. Correlation analysis revealed that the fillet was softened due to the muscle water content increase and muscle ultrastructure (lengths of H band, bright band, dark band, sarcomere) alternation. In conclusion, there were time-dependent effects of TM on turbot growth performance and fillet texture. Substitution of fishmeal with TM at 15% or less level did not influence the nutritional quality, but TM at any dose softened the fillet, which could be attributed to its influence on moisture content and myofibrillar structure.

In carnivorous fish feed, soybean meal was widely used as the alternative protein source to fish meal, but its negative influence on fish immunity and gut health limits its application. Yeast β-glucan is a well-documented immunostimulant and prebiotic, and carboxymethylglucan has higher potential bioactivity. The present work was to investigate and compare the effects of yeast β-glucan and carboxymethylglucan on the immunity and gut health of turbot Scophthalmus maximus (with initial weight of 7.6 g) fed a diet containing 400 g kg−1 soybean meal. Yeast β-glucan and carboxymethylglucan was respectively supplemented at the dose of 2 g kg−1. Enteritis was observed in fish fed the soybean meal diet. Beta-glucan or carboxymethylglucan supplementation significantly increased serum lysozyme activity, and the concentrations of IgM, complement 3 and complement 4. These two additives significantly decreased the infiltration of leukocytes in the lamina propria and submucosa and the expression of inflammatory cytokine of il-8. Compared with β-glucan, the fish fed carboxymethylglucan showed higher growth performance, feed utilization, lysozyme activity, concentrations of IgM, complement 3 and complement 4 but lower enteritis severity and inflammatory cytokines expression (il-1β, il-8, tnf-a and tgf-β). The structure of intestinal autochthonous bacteria was also altered by dietary yeast β-glucan and carboxymethylglucan. In conclusion, the present work confirmed the beneficial influence of dietary yeast β-glucan and carboxymethylglucan on turbots suffering from soy enteropathy. And carboxymethylglucan showed better protective effects than β-glucan against soybean meal-induced intestinal inflammation on turbot.

Photothermal therapy is a promising tumor treatment approach that selectively eliminates cancer cells while assuring the survival of normal cells. It transforms light energy into thermal energy, making it gentle, targeted, and devoid of radiation. However, the efficacy of treatment is hampered by the absence of accurate and noninvasive temperature measurement method in the therapy. Therefore, there is a pressing demand for a noninvasive temperature measurement method that is real-time and accurate. This article presents one such attempt based on thermal strain photoacoustic (PA) temperature measurement. The method was first modelled, and a circular array-based photoacoustic photothermal system was developed. Experiments with Indian ink as tumor simulants suggest that the temperature monitoring in this work achieves a precision of down to 0.3 °C. Furthermore, it is possible to accomplish real-time temperature imaging, providing accurate two-dimensional temperature mapping for photothermal therapy. Experiments were also conducted on human fingers and nude mice, validating promising potentials of the proposed method for practical implementations.

Untethered magnetic soft robots show great potential for biomedical and small-scale micromanipulation applications due to their high flexibility and ability to cause minimal damage. However, most current research on these robots focuses on marine and reptilian biomimicry, which limits their ability to move in unstructured environments. In this work, we design a quadruped soft robot with a magnetic top cover and a specific magnetization angle, drawing inspiration from the common locomotion patterns of quadrupeds in nature and integrating our unique actuation principle. It can crawl and tumble and, by adjusting the magnetic field parameters, it adapts its locomotion to environmental conditions, enabling it to cross obstacles and perform remote transportation and release of cargo.

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is a noninvasive emerging imaging method based on the photoacoustic effect, which provides necessary assistance for medical diagnosis. It has the characteristics of large imaging depth and high contrast. However, limited by the equipment cost and reconstruction time requirements, the existing PAI systems distributed with annular array transducers are difficult to take into account both the image quality and the imaging speed. In this paper, a triple-path feature transform network (TFT-Net) for ring-array photoacoustic tomography is proposed to enhance the imaging quality from limited-view and sparse measurement data. Specifically, the network combines the raw photoacoustic pressure signals and conventional linear reconstruction images as input data, and takes the photoacoustic physical model as a prior information to guide the reconstruction process. In addition, to enhance the ability of extracting signal features, the residual block and squeeze and excitation block are introduced into the TFT-Net. For further efficient reconstruction, the final output of photoacoustic signals uses ‘filter-then-upsample’ operation with a pixel-shuffle multiplexer and a max out module. Experiment results on simulated and in-vivo data demonstrate that the constructed TFT-Net can restore the target boundary clearly, reduce background noise, and realize fast and high-quality photoacoustic image reconstruction of limited view with sparse sampling.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs), derived from the primary tumor and carrying genetic information, contribute significantly to the process of tumor metastasis. The analysis and detection of CTCs can be used to assess the prognosis and treatment response in patients with tumors, as well as to help study the metastatic mechanisms of tumors and the development of new drugs. Since CTCs are very rare in the blood, it is a challenging problem to enrich CTCs efficiently. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of microfluidics-based enrichment devices for CTCs in recent years. We explore in detail the methods of enrichment based on the physical or biological properties of CTCs; among them, physical properties cover factors such as size, density, and dielectric properties, while biological properties are mainly related to tumor-specific markers on the surface of CTCs. In addition, we provide an in-depth description of the methods for enrichment of single CTCs and illustrate the importance of single CTCs for performing tumor analyses. Future research will focus on aspects such as improving the separation efficiency, reducing costs, and increasing the detection sensitivity and accuracy.

Microrobots powered by multi-physics fields are becoming a hotspot for micro–nano manufacturing. Due to the small size of microrobots, they can easily enter small spaces that are difficult for ordinary robots to reach and perform a variety of special tasks. This gives microrobots a broad application prospect in many fields. This paper describes the materials, structures, and driving principles of microrobots in detail and analyzes the advantages and limitations of their driving methods in depth. In addition, the paper discusses the detailed categorization of the action forms of microrobots and explores their diversified motion modes and their applicable scenarios. Finally, the article highlights the wide range of applications of microrobots in the fields of biomedicine and environmental protection, emphasizing their great potential for solving real-world problems and advancing scientific progress.

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) has been developed, and photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) is widely used for in vivo tissue and mouse imaging. Simulated annealing (SA) algorithm solves optimization problems, and compressed sensing (CS) recovers sparse signals from undersampled measurements. We aim to develop an advanced sparse imaging framework for PACT, which invloves the use of SA to find an optimal sparse array element distribution and CS to perform sparse imaging. PACT reconstructions were performed using a dummy and porcine liver phantoms. Compared to traditional sparse reconstruction algorithms, the proposed method recovers signals using few ultrasonic transducer elements, enabling high-speed, low-cost PACT for practical application.

Photothermal therapy (PTT) is a new type of tumor treatment technology that is noninvasive, repeatable, and does not involve radiation. Owing to the lack of real-time and accurate noninvasive temperature measurement technology in current PTT surgical procedures, empirical and open-loop treatment laser power control mode inevitably leads to overtreatment. Thermal radiation causes irreversible damage to normal tissue around cancer tissue and seriously affects the therapeutic effect of PTT and other therapies conducted at the same time. Therefore, real-time measurement and control of the temperature and thermal damage of the therapeutic target are critical to the success of PTT. To improve the accuracy and safety of PTT, we propose a multi-wavelength photoacoustic (PA) temperature feedback based PTT method and system. PA thermometry information at different wavelengths is mutually corrected, and the therapeutic light dose is regulated in real time to accurately control the treatment temperature. The experimental results on the swine blood sample confirm that the proposed method can realize real-time temperature measurement and control of the target area with an accuracy of 0.56 °C and 0.68 °C, demonstrating its good prospects for application.