Microfluidic Engineering of Exosomes: Editing Cellular Messages for Precision Therapeutics

Studying extracellular vesicle (EV), particularly exosomes, is holding great promise, yet technically challenging in defining such small and molecularly diverse nanovesicles. With intrinsic molecular payload and biodegradability, molecular engineering of exosomes opens new avenues for mediating cellular responses and developing novel nano-delivery systems in precision therapeutics. Microfluidic lab-on-chip technology is taking pivotal roles in such emerging field. This review examines scientific advancements of microfluidic technology for engineering exosomes and assesses future applications and perspectives in developing precision therapeutics, which could serve the community by identifying potential new research areas or technologies that are urgently needed in precision therapeutics

The Influence of Main Bearing Parameters on The Bearing Wear in Rotary Compressor

The main bearing and sub bearing which support the crankshaft rotation often have wear in the rotary compressor, and the exceptional wear will cause a series of problems which contain the vibration, noises, frictional power rising and reliability reduced. The process of improving the actual exceptional wear problems of bearings is analyzed. And based on the finite element method (FEM), the results of the original and improved bearings are compared with each other; contact stress is chosen to be used to evaluate the wear condition of bearings. Then the influence of height, diameter and clearance of main bearing on the wear of the bearing is analyzed by the accelerated life test and the FEM simulation, and the feasibility of the bearing contact stress to evaluate the wear condition of bearings is further verified, at the same time it provides a theoretical basis for the design of compressor bearing

Oxidative stress mediates hippocampal neuronal apoptosis through ROS/JNK/P53 pathway in rats with PTSD triggered by high-voltage electrical burn

Background: The pathogenesis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) triggered by high-voltage electrical burn (HVEB) remains unclear and the oxidative stress plays a role in this process. The purpose of this study is to investigate the underlying mechanism of oxidative stress mediates hippocampal neuronal apoptosis in rats with PTSD triggered by HVEB. Materials and methods: The PTSD rat model was developed by stimulating with high voltage electricity and screened using behavioral performance including Morris water maze (MWM), elevated plus-maze (EPM) and open-field test (OFT). The reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation was measured by DHE fluorescence staining or flow cytometry. Western blotting assay was used to detect the proteins of p-JNK, JNK, P53, PUMA, Bcl-2 and Bax in hippocampal tissue or HT22 cells treated with electrical stimulation. Results: The serum MDA and 8-OHdG levels were increased (P < 0.001), while the activities of SOD and CAT were decreased (P < 0.001) significantly in patients with HVEB. Behavioral test results showed that high-voltage electric stimulation induced the PTSD-like symptoms and the ROS-JNK-P53 pathway was involved in the neuronal apoptosis in rats with PTSD induced by HVEB. In vitro experiments further confirmed the electrical stimulation induced neuronal apoptosis through ROS/JNK/P53 signaling pathway and the antioxidant NAC could rescued the ROS generation, activation of JNK/P53 proteins and improved the cell apoptosis rate in HT22 cells. Finally, the JNK inhibitor SP600125 could significantly inhibited the percentage of HT22 cell apoptosis induced by electrical stimulation (P < 0.001). Conclusions: These results indicated that oxidative stress mediates hippocampal neuronal apoptosis through ROS/JNK/P53 pathway in rats with PTSD triggered by HVEB

Prognostic role of Wnt and Fzd gene families in acute myeloid leukaemia

Wnt-Fzd signalling pathway plays a critical role in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) progression and oncogenicity. There is no study to investigate the prognostic value of Wnt and Fzd gene families in AML. Our study screened 84 AML patients receiving chemotherapy only and 71 also undergoing allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. We found that some Wnt and Fzd genes had significant positive correlations. The expression levels of Fzd gene family were independent of survival in AML patients. In the chemotherapy group, AML patients with high Wnt2B or Wnt11 expression had significantly shorter event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS); high Wnt10A expressers had significantly longer OS than the low expressers (all P < .05), whereas, in the allo-HSCT group, the expression levels of Wnt gene family were independent of survival. We further found that high expression of Wnt10A and Wnt11 had independent prognostic value, and the patients with high Wnt10A and low Wnt11 expression had the longest EFS and OS in the chemotherapy group. Pathway enrichment analysis showed that genes related to Wnt10A, Wnt11 and Wnt 2B were mainly enriched in 'cell morphogenesis involved in differentiation', 'haematopoietic cell lineage', 'platelet activation, signalling and aggregation' and 'mitochondrial RNA metabolic process' signalling pathways. Our results indicate that high Wnt2B and Wnt11 expression predict poor prognosis, and high Wnt10A expression predicts favourable prognosis in AML, but their prognostic effects could be neutralized by allo-HSCT. Combined Wnt10A and Wnt11 may be a novel prognostic marker in AML

Distributed evolutionary algorithms and their models: A survey of the state-of-the-art

The increasing complexity of real-world optimization problems raises new challenges to evolutionary computation. Responding to these challenges, distributed evolutionary computation has received considerable attention over the past decade. This article provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art distributed evolutionary algorithms and models, which have been classified into two groups according to their task division mechanism. Population-distributed models are presented with master-slave, island, cellular, hierarchical, and pool architectures, which parallelize an evolution task at population, individual, or operation levels. Dimension-distributed models include coevolution and multi-agent models, which focus on dimension reduction. Insights into the models, such as synchronization, homogeneity, communication, topology, speedup, advantages and disadvantages are also presented and discussed. The study of these models helps guide future development of different and/or improved algorithms. Also highlighted are recent hotspots in this area, including the cloud and MapReduce-based implementations, GPU and CUDA-based implementations, distributed evolutionary multiobjective optimization, and real-world applications. Further, a number of future research directions have been discussed, with a conclusion that the development of distributed evolutionary computation will continue to flourish

Enhanced particle swarm optimization based on principal component analysis and line search

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) guides its search direction by a linear learning strategy, in which each particle updates its velocity through a linear combination among its present status, historical best experience and the swarm best experience. The current position of each particle can be seen as a velocity accumulator. Such a storage strategy is easy to achieve, however, it is inefficient when searching in a complex space and has a great restriction on the achieved heuristic information for the promising solutions. Therefore, a new PSO searching mechanism (PCA-PSO) is proposed based on principal component analysis (PCA) and Line Search (LS), in which PCA is mainly used to efficiently mine population information for the promising principal component directions and then LS strategy is utilized on them. PCA-PSO can inherit most of the velocity information of all the particles to guide them to the most promising directions, which have great difference in learning mechanism with usual PSOs. Experimental results and extensive comparisons with hybrid PSOs, pPSA, PCPSO, CLPSO, GL-25, and CoDE show that PCA-PSO consistently and significantly outperforms some PSO variants and is competitive for other state-of-the-art algorithms. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

How Willing Are Herders to Participate in Carbon Sequestration and Mitigation? An Inner Mongolian Grassland Case

Reasonable carbon sequestration and mitigation measures play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emission and realizing regional sustainable development. How willing herders are to participate in carbon sequestration and mitigation directly determines the corresponding implementation effect. Relevant studies mostly focus on forest households and peasant households, but great uncertainty remains regarding herdsman households. Based on a survey of 404 herdsman households in Inner Mongolian grasslands, this study assessed the cognitive level and participation willingness of herders on carbon sequestration and mitigation of grasslands, and investigated the factors influencing their willingness to participate in the activity. We found that the cognitive level of herders on carbon sequestration and mitigation in Inner Mongolian grasslands was relatively low, with 83% of herdsman households having low cognition and 17% in the state of medium cognition. However, herders are mostly willing to take grassland carbon sequestration and mitigation measures, with 60% of herdsman households being willing to participate, 28% moderately willing to do so, and 12% of unwillingness. This pattern was mainly influenced by the impact of carbon sequestration and mitigation on household income, the economic subsidies and the call for ecological environment protection from the government. The herders tend to be willing to participate when they think that the government calls for ecological environment protection are essential. In contrast, they tend to be unwilling to participate if they think the subsidies too low and the negative effect of sequestration measure on income is essential. We found that the family financial income of herders is a key factor limiting the improvement of participation willingness in this area. It is necessary to improve the cognition of herders for the development of carbon sequestration and mitigation projects

Remote light-responsive nanocarriers for controlled drug delivery: advances and perspectives

Engineering of smart photoactivated nanomaterials for targeted drug delivery systems (DDS) has recently attracted considerable research interest as light enables precise and accurate controlled release of drug molecules in specific diseased cells and/or tissues in a highly spatial and temporal manner. In general, the development of appropriate light-triggered DDS relies on processes of photolysis, photoisomerization, photo-cross-linking/un-cross-linking, and photoreduction, which are normally sensitive to ultraviolet (UV) or visible (Vis) light irradiation. Considering the issues of poor tissue penetration and high phototoxicity of these high-energy photons of UV/Vis light, recently nanocarriers have been developed based on light-response to low-energy photon irradiation, in particular for the light wavelengths located in the near infrared (NIR) range. NIR light-triggered drug release systems are normally achieved by using two-photon absorption and photon upconversion processes. Herein, recent advances of light-responsive nanoplatforms for controlled drug release are reviewed, covering the mechanism of light responsive small molecules and polymers, UV and Vis light responsive nanocarriers, and NIR light responsive nanocarriers. NIR-light triggered drug delivery by two-photon excitation and upconversion luminescence strategies is also included. In addition, the challenges and future perspectives for the development of light triggered DDS are highlighted

Paraplegia after Gastrectomy in a Patient with Cervical Disc Herniation: A Case Report and Review of Literature

Paraplegia is a rare postoperative complication. We present a case of acute paraplegia after elective gastrectomy surgery because of cervical disc herniation. The 73-year-old man has the medical history of cervical spondylitis with only symptom of temporary pain in neck and shoulder. Although the patient’s neck was cautiously preserved by using the Discopo, an acute paraplegia emerged at about 10 hours after the operation. Severe compression of the spinal cord by herniation of the C4-C5 cervical disc was diagnosed and emergency surgical decompression was performed immediately. Unfortunately the patient showed limited improvement in neurologic deficits even after 11 months