Water-Borne Perovskite Quantum Dot-Loaded, Polystyrene Latex Ink

Highly lipophilic nanocrystals (NCs) of cesium lead halides were successfully embedded in polystyrene (PS) particles by deliberately controlling the swelling of the PS particles in the mixtures of good and bad organic solvents. The resulting composite particles were readily transferred into water via simple stepwise solvent exchange, which yielded water-borne perovskite NC-based inks with outstanding structural and chemical stability in aqueous media. Minimal change in the photoluminescence (PL) of the NCs loaded in the PS particles was visible after 1 month of incubation of the composite particles in water in a broad pH range from 1 to 14, which could otherwise be hardly realized. Loading into the PS particles also made the NCs highly stable against polar organic solvents, such as ethanol, intense light irradiation, and heat. The NC PL intensity slightly changed after the composite particles were heated at 75°C and under irradiation of strong blue light (@365 nm) for 1 h. Furthermore, the PS matrices could effectively inhibit the exchange of halide anions between two differently sized perovskite NCs loaded therein, thereby offering a considerable technical advantage in the application of multiple perovskite NCs for multicolor display in the future

Osthole improves collagen-induced arthritis in a rat model through inhibiting inflammation and cellular stress

Abstract Background Osthole is a natural product that has multiple bioactive functions and has been reported to exert potent immunosuppressive effects. However, the therapeutic effect of osthole on arthritis has not been explored. In the present study, a collagen-induced arthritis rat model, IL-1β-stimulated SW982 cells, and RA-like fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLS) were employed to investigate the effect and possible mechanism of osthole on arthritis in vivo and in vitro. Results 20 and 40 mg/kg osthole significantly alleviated collagen-induced arthritic symptoms based on histopathology and clinical arthritis scores, and improved erosion using HE staining. 20 and 40 mg/kg osthole decreased the level of IL-1β, TNF-α and IL-6 in rats and ameliorated oxidative stress in serum evaluated using ELISA kits. In addition, treatment with 50 and 100 μM osthole for 48 h inhibited 10 ng/ml IL-1β-stimulated proliferation and migration of SW982, and significantly inhibited the expression of matrix metalloproteinases, such as MMP-1, MMP-3 and MMP-13, as detected by western blot. 50 and 100 μM osthole also blocked the generation of IL-6 and TNF-α in IL-1β-stimulated SW982 cells. The NF-κB and MAPK pathways were also inhibited by osthole in IL-1β-treated SW982 cells. Conclusion These results collectively demonstrated that osthole improves collagen-induced arthritis in a rat model and IL-1β-treated SW982 cells through inhibiting inflammation and cellular stress in vivo and in vitro, and osthole might be a promising therapeutic agent for RA

A Comprehensive Exploration of the lncRNA CCAT2: A Pan-Cancer Analysis Based on 33 Cancer Types and 13285 Cases

Whether the lncRNA CCAT2 expression level affects the clinical progression and outcome of cancer patients has not yet been fully elucidated. There is still an inconsistent view regarding the correlation between CCAT2 expression and clinicopathological factors, including survival data. Besides, the regulation mechanism of CCAT2 in human cancer is still unclear. Our study analyzed a large number of publication data and TCGA databases to identify the association of CCAT2 expression with clinicopathological factors and to explore the regulatory mechanisms in human cancers. We designed a comprehensive study to determine the expression of CCAT2 in human cancer by designing a meta-analysis of 20 selected studies and the TCGA database, using StataSE 12.0 to explore the relationship between CCAT2 expression and both the prognosis and clinicopathological features of 33 cancer types and 13285 tumor patients. Moreover, we performed GO and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses on potential target genes of CCAT2 collected from GEPIA and LncRNA2Target V2.0. The level of CCAT2 expression in tumor tissues is higher than that in paired normal tissues and is significantly associated with a poor prognosis in cancer patients. Besides, overexpression of CCAT2 was significantly associated with tumor size, clinical stage, and TNM classification. Meanwhile, CCAT2 expression is the highest in stage II of human cancer, followed by stage III. Finally, 111 validated target gene symbols were identified, and GO and KEGG demonstrated that the CCAT2 validation target was significantly enriched in several pathways, including microRNAs in the cancer pathway. In summary, CCAT2 can be a potential biomarker associated with the progression and prognosis of human cancer

Synthesis and Characterization of g-C₃N₄/Ag₃PO₄/TiO₂/PVDF Membrane with Remarkable Self-Cleaning Properties for Rhodamine B Removal

g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/TiO2 nanocomposite materials were loaded onto a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane using a phase inversion method to obtain a photocatalytic flat membrane for dye removal. The morphology, structure, and photocatalytic activity of the g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/TiO2 nanoparticles and composite membrane were evaluated. The g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/TiO2/PVDF membrane exhibited superior morphology, hydrophilic properties, and antifouling performance compared with the raw PVDF membrane. Four-stage filtration was performed to evaluate the self-cleaning and antifouling capacity of the g-C3N4/Ag3PO4/TiO2/PVDF membrane. Upon irradiating the composite membrane with visible light for 30 min, its irreversible fouling resistance (Rir) was low (9%), and its flux recovery rate (FRR) was high (71.0%) after five filtration cycles. The removal rate of rhodamine B (RhB) from the composite membrane under visible light irradiation reached 98.1% owing to the high photocatalytic activity of the membrane, which was superior to that of raw PVDF membrane (42.5%). A mechanism of photocatalytic composite membranes for RhB degradation was proposed. Therefore, this study is expected to broaden prospects in the field of membrane filtration technology

Mapping the Space of Inorganic and Hybrid Halides and Their Optical Properties Using Mechanochemistry and First-Principles Calculations

Inorganic and hybrid metal halides (MHs) are a class of ionic compounds that attract growing interest due to their richness of structure, properties, and resulting applications. These are largely ionic in nature and hence dominantly follow solid-state synthesis reactions rather than the solution approach. Keeping the importance of these materials in mind, herein, combination reactions of compounds via mechanochemistry is considered as a universal synthetic approach for the synthesis of MHs, and a library of MHs, including all inorganic MHs, ternary (A–B–X) MHs, enormous number of quaternary MHs based on representative 10 double perovskites (A–B–B′–X), and most of the hybrid ones based on randomly selected 49 samples as representative from the 1300 ones, are reported. The fundamental structure–property relationships are well revealed, where most of the MHs exhibit bright photoluminescence and/or magnetic properties for a few materials. Hence, the adopted concept of material design and related with their crystal structure and material properties for such a large number of halide materials not only help in building a library but also provide fundamental guidance to develop new MH materials with selective optoelectronic and magnetic properties.

Shape Control of Ternary Sulfide Nanocrystals

Synthesis of semiconductor nanocrystals with a definite shape is the foundation of their anisotropy properties investigation; however, it is more challenging in ternary metal sulfides than that of noble metal and binary sulfides. In this paper, we report a solvent polarity control strategy to prepare a family of ternary sulfide (Ag₃SbS₃) semiconductor nanocrystals with tunable polyhedral shapes. The crystal growth speed along different directions was confined by the capping effect of the polarity of solvents that was defined by reaction temperature. Crystal shape of Ag₃SbS₃ nanocrystals could be tailored as a sphere, hexagonal plate, and prism. A shape-controllable growth mechanism was analyzed based on the Bravais–Friedel–Donnay–Harker theory by taking crystal structure characteristics and the polarity of solvents into consideration. The semiconductor nanocrystals show a near value of the band gaps for different shaped samples and facet-dependent photocatalytic water-splitting activities, which may result from the discrimination of the terminal surface structure and binding energy of Sb and S for the three different shaped nanocrystals. Thus, we provide a new crystal shape tunable strategy for ternary sulfide nanocrystal synthesis, which is important for optimizing properties and applications of sulfide semiconductor nanocrystals