Towards superior biopolymer gels by enabling interpenetrating network structures:A review on types, applications, and gelation strategies

Gels derived from single networks of natural polymers (biopolymers) typically exhibit limited physical properties and thus have seen constrained applications in areas like food and medicine. In contrast, gels founded on a synergy of multiple biopolymers, specifically polysaccharides and proteins, with intricate interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) structures, represent a promising avenue for the creation of novel gel materials with significantly enhanced properties and combined advantages. This review begins with the scrutiny of newly devised IPN gels formed through a medley of polysaccharides and/or proteins, alongside an introduction of their practical applications in the realm of food, medicine, and environmentally friendly solutions. Finally, based on the fact that the IPN gelation process and mechanism are driven by different inducing factors entwined with a diverse amalgamation of polysaccharides and proteins, our survey underscores the potency of physical, chemical, and enzymatic triggers in orchestrating the construction of crosslinked networks within these biomacromolecules. In these mixed systems, each specific inducer aligns with distinct polysaccharides and proteins, culminating in the generation of semi-IPN or fully-IPN gels through the intricate interpenetration between single networks and polymer chains or between two networks, respectively. The resultant IPN gels stand as paragons of excellence, characterized by their homogeneity, dense network structures, superior textural properties (e.g., hardness, elasticity, adhesion, cohesion, and chewability), outstanding water-holding capacity, and heightened thermal stability, along with guaranteed biosafety (e.g., nontoxicity and biocompatibility) and biodegradability. Therefore, a judicious selection of polymer combinations allows for the development of IPN gels with customized functional properties, adept at meeting precise application requirements.</p

Affirmative action in education and Black Economic Empowerment in the workplace in South Africa since 1994: policies, strengths and limitations

This paper explains the concepts of Affirmative Action (AA) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and the policies developed in post-Apartheid South Africa. It compares it to similar policies adopted in different contexts in Malaysia, India and the U.S.A. It explains and critiques the South African policies on AA and BEE, its history since 1994 and how class has replaced race as the determinant of who succeeds in education and the workplace. It analyses why these policies were essential to address the massive racial divide in education and the workplace at the arrival of democracy in 1994, but also why it has been controversial and racially divisive. The strengths and limitations of these policies are juxtaposed, the way it has benefitted the black and white elites, bolstered the black middle-class but has had little success in addressing the education and job futures of poor, working class black citizens in South Africa. The views of a number of key social analysts in the field are stated to explain the moral, racial, divisive aspects of AA in relation to the international experience and how South Africa is grappling with limited success to bridge the divide between the rich and poor

UniBrain: Universal Brain MRI Diagnosis with Hierarchical Knowledge-enhanced Pre-training

Magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) have played a crucial role in brain disease diagnosis, with which a range of computer-aided artificial intelligence methods have been proposed. However, the early explorations usually focus on the limited types of brain diseases in one study and train the model on the data in a small scale, yielding the bottleneck of generalization. Towards a more effective and scalable paradigm, we propose a hierarchical knowledge-enhanced pre-training framework for the universal brain MRI diagnosis, termed as UniBrain. Specifically, UniBrain leverages a large-scale dataset of 24,770 imaging-report pairs from routine diagnostics. Different from previous pre-training techniques for the unitary vision or textual feature, or with the brute-force alignment between vision and language information, we leverage the unique characteristic of report information in different granularity to build a hierarchical alignment mechanism, which strengthens the efficiency in feature learning. Our UniBrain is validated on three real world datasets with severe class imbalance and the public BraTS2019 dataset. It not only consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art diagnostic methods by a large margin and provides a superior grounding performance but also shows comparable performance compared to expert radiologists on certain disease types

HECT, UBA and WWE domain containing 1 represses cholesterol efflux during CD4+ T cell activation in Sjögren’s syndrome

Introduction: Sjögren’s syndrome (SS) is a chronic autoimmune disorder characterized by exocrine gland dysfunction, leading to loss of salivary function. Histological analysis of salivary glands from SS patients reveals a high infiltration of immune cells, particularly activated CD4+ T cells. Thus, interventions targeting abnormal activation of CD4+ T cells may provide promising therapeutic strategies for SS. Here, we demonstrate that Hect, uba, and wwe domain containing 1 (HUWE1), a member of the eukaryotic Hect E3 ubiquitin ligase family, plays a critical role in CD4+ T-cell activation and SS pathophysiology.Methods: In the context of HUWE1 inhibition, we investigated the impact of the HUWE1 inhibitor BI8626 and sh-Huwe1 on CD4+ T cells in mice, focusing on the assessment of activation levels, proliferation capacity, and cholesterol abundance. Furthermore, we examined the therapeutic potential of BI8626 in NOD/ShiLtj mice and evaluated its efficacy as a treatment strategy.Results: Inhibition of HUWE1 reduces ABCA1 ubiquitination and promotes cholesterol efflux, decreasing intracellular cholesterol and reducing the expression of phosphorylated ZAP-70, CD25, and other activation markers, culminating in the suppressed proliferation of CD4+ T cells. Moreover, pharmacological inhibition of HUWE1 significantly reduces CD4+ T-cell infiltration in the submandibular glands and improves salivary flow rate in NOD/ShiLtj mice.Conclusion: These findings suggest that HUWE1 may regulate CD4+ T-cell activation and SS development by modulating ABCA1-mediated cholesterol efflux and presents a promising target for SS treatment

Assessment of a Novel VEGF Targeted Agent Using Patient-Derived Tumor Tissue Xenograft Models of Colon Carcinoma with Lymphatic and Hepatic Metastases

The lack of appropriate tumor models of primary tumors and corresponding metastases that can reliably predict for response to anticancer agents remains a major deficiency in the clinical practice of cancer therapy. It was the aim of our study to establish patient-derived tumor tissue (PDTT) xenograft models of colon carcinoma with lymphatic and hepatic metastases useful for testing of novel molecularly targeted agents. PDTT of primary colon carcinoma, lymphatic and hepatic metastases were used to create xenograft models. Hematoxylin and eosin staining, immunohistochemical staining, genome-wide gene expression analysis, pyrosequencing, qRT-PCR, and western blotting were used to determine the biological stability of the xenografts during serial transplantation compared with the original tumor tissues. Early passages of the PDTT xenograft models of primary colon carcinoma, lymphatic and hepatic metastases revealed a high degree of similarity with the original clinical tumor samples with regard to histology, immunohistochemistry, genes expression, and mutation status as well as mRNA expression. After we have ascertained that these xenografts models retained similar histopathological features and molecular signatures as the original tumors, drug sensitivities of the xenografts to a novel VEGF targeted agent, FP3 was evaluated. In this study, PDTT xenograft models of colon carcinoma with lymphatic and hepatic metastasis have been successfully established. They provide appropriate models for testing of novel molecularly targeted agents

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Towards superior biopolymer gels by enabling interpenetrating network structures:A review on types, applications, and gelation strategies

Gels derived from single networks of natural polymers (biopolymers) typically exhibit limited physical properties and thus have seen constrained applications in areas like food and medicine. In contrast, gels founded on a synergy of multiple biopolymers, specifically polysaccharides and proteins, with intricate interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) structures, represent a promising avenue for the creation of novel gel materials with significantly enhanced properties and combined advantages. This review begins with the scrutiny of newly devised IPN gels formed through a medley of polysaccharides and/or proteins, alongside an introduction of their practical applications in the realm of food, medicine, and environmentally friendly solutions. Finally, based on the fact that the IPN gelation process and mechanism are driven by different inducing factors entwined with a diverse amalgamation of polysaccharides and proteins, our survey underscores the potency of physical, chemical, and enzymatic triggers in orchestrating the construction of crosslinked networks within these biomacromolecules. In these mixed systems, each specific inducer aligns with distinct polysaccharides and proteins, culminating in the generation of semi-IPN or fully-IPN gels through the intricate interpenetration between single networks and polymer chains or between two networks, respectively. The resultant IPN gels stand as paragons of excellence, characterized by their homogeneity, dense network structures, superior textural properties (e.g., hardness, elasticity, adhesion, cohesion, and chewability), outstanding water-holding capacity, and heightened thermal stability, along with guaranteed biosafety (e.g., nontoxicity and biocompatibility) and biodegradability. Therefore, a judicious selection of polymer combinations allows for the development of IPN gels with customized functional properties, adept at meeting precise application requirements.</p

Revision of Immersaria and a new lecanorine genus in Lecideaceae (lichenised Ascomycota, Lecanoromycetes)

The species Immersaria cupreoatra has been included in Bellemerea. This caused us to reconsider the relationships between Bellemerea and the lecanorine species of Immersaria and to question the monophyly of Immersaria. Amongst 25 genera of the family Lecideaceae, most have lecideine apothecia, the exceptions being Bellemerea and Koerberiella, which have lecanorine apothecia. According to previous classifications, Immersaria included species with both lecanorine and lecideine apothecia. A five-loci phylogenetic tree (nrITS, nrLSU, RPB1, RPB2, and mtSSU) for Lecideaceae showed that Immersaria was split into two clades: firstly, all the lecideine apotheciate species and secondly, all the lecanorine apotheciate species. The latter clade was closely related to the remaining lecanorine apotheciate genera: Bellemerea and Koerberiella. Therefore, the genus concept of Immersaria is revised accordingly and a new lecanorine genus Lecaimmeria is proposed. Furthermore, four new species for Immersaria and seven new species and three new combinations for the new genus Lecaimmeria are proposed. Keys to Immersaria and the new genus Lecaimmeria are provided