Serum level of A-kinase anchoring protein 1, negatively correlated with insulin resistance and body mass index, decreases slightly in patients with newly diagnosed T2DM

Introduction: At present, the number of people suffering from diabetes and obesity is increasing in China, and also all over the world. Researchers found that decreased expression of A-kinase anchoring protein 1 (AKAP1), which was thought to regulate the function and structure of mitochondria, might be related to these two diseases. However, as far as we know, there is no study about the changes of serum AKAP1 protein in these two diseases. Hence we conducted this experiment to study the relationship between serum levels of AKAP1 with T2DM and obesity. Material and methods: There were 261 subjects involved in the experiment, including 130 patients with newly diagnosed T2DM and 131 individuals with normal glucose tolerance (NGT). They were further divided into four groups as follows. Subjects with NGT and normal weight (NW) were assigned to the NGT+NW group, those with NGT but with overweight (OW) or obesity (OB) were assigned to the NGT+OW/OB group, and so on; the rest were divided into the T2DM+NW group and the T2DM+OW/OB group. Serum AKAP1 levels were tested by ELISA method and compared by T-test. Linear regression was applied to discuss independent factors of AKAP1. Multiple logistic regression was used to analyse the relationship between AKAP1 and the prevalence of T2DM. Results: Serum AKAP1 in the NGT+NW group was 1.74 ± 0.42 ng/mL, higher than that in the NGT+OW/OB group, at 1.59 ± 0.41 ng/mL (t = 2.114, p = 0.036), and the T2DM+OW/OB group, at 1.52 ± 0.36 ng/ml (t = 3.219, p = 0.002). A-kinase anchoring protein 1 in 130 subjects with T2DM was lower than that in subjects with NGT, 1.57 ± 0.35 ng/mL vs. 1.67 ± 0.42 ng/mL, t = 2.036, p = 0.043. Liner regression showed that insulin resistance (IR) and body mass index (BMI) were independent factors negatively related to AKAP1: b = –0.019 and –0.032, respectively. Compared to the highest tertile of AKAP1, the prevalence of T2DM was higher in the other two tertiles; OR was 2.207 (1.203, 4.050) and 2.051 (1.121, 3.753), respectively. Conclusions: Serum AKAP1 level decreases slightly in patients with T2DM and obesity. Subjects with lower leve1s of serum AKAP1 are susceptible to T2DM.

Hydrogen sensing performance of silica microfiber elaborated with Pd nanoparticles

A hydrogen sensor has been proposed by coating Pd nanoparticles-PMMA composite organic sol on silica microfiber independent on any expensive or complex chemical process. The thickness of cladding layer and the diameter of elaborated microfiber were determined as ∼20 μm and ∼57.93 μm, respectively. Due to the evanescent wave excited by silica microfiber and the amorphous structure of PMMA film, the Pd nanoparticles effectively absorbed the hydrogen molecules and resulted in the shift of resonance wavelength. The experimental results match well with an exponential curve with an average sensitivity of 5.58 nm/%, which is comparable to other electrochemical hydrogen sensors reported recently.The authors thank the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grants (61405032, 61403074, 61605031); and Doctoral Scientific Research Startup Foundation of Liaoning Province under Grant (201501144); and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grants (N150404022, N150401001); and China Scholarship Council (201606085023)

Influence of Fe 3

The magnetic electrospinning (MES) method has been applied to generate aligned nanofibers. But researchers have different viewpoints on the usage of magnetic particles in the polymeric solutions. In order to investigate the effect of magnetic particles in forming the ordered fibers, the poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) solutions with or without Fe3O4 nanoparticles were electrospun via MES. The fibers were compared at different voltages (13.5, 15.5, 17.5, and 19.5 kV) and flow rates (0.6, 0.9, 1.2, and 1.8 mL/h). It is shown that the well-aligned fibers can be fabricated by both magnetic and nonmagnetic solutions. The doping of Fe3O4 nanoparticles can increase the aligned fibers in some degree, especially at high applied voltage and flow rate. The diameters of fibers electrospun by MES were smaller than those by conventional electrospinning, and the diameter of fibers by MES without magnet particles was the smallest

Virosome, a hybrid vehicle for efficient and safe drug delivery and its emerging application in cancer treatment

A virosome is an innovative hybrid drug delivery system with advantages of both viral and non-viral vectors. Studies have shown that a virosome can carry various biologically active molecules, such as nucleic acids, peptides, proteins and small organic molecules. Targeted drug delivery using virosome-based systems can be achieved through surface modifications of virosomes. A number of virosome-based prophylactic and therapeutic products with high safety profiles are currently available in the market. Cancer treatment is a big battlefield for virosome-based drug delivery systems. This review provides an overview of the general concept, preparation procedures, working mechanisms, preclinical studies and clinical applications of virosomes in cancer treatment

Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg-Majorana interference in a 3D transmon driven by a chirped microwave

By driving a 3D transmon with microwave fields, we generate an effective avoided energy-level crossing. Then we chirp microwave frequency, which is equivalent to driving the system through the avoided energy-level crossing by sweeping the avoided crossing. A double-passage chirp produces Landau-Zener-St\"uckelberg-Majorana interference that agree well with the numerical results. Our method is fully applicable to other quantum systems that contain no intrinsic avoided level crossing, providing an alternative approach for quantum control and quantum simulation

Reduced Striatal Dopamine Transporters in People with Internet Addiction Disorder

In recent years, internet addiction disorder (IAD) has become more prevalent worldwide and the recognition of its devastating impact on the users and society has rapidly increased. However, the neurobiological mechanism of IAD has not bee fully expressed. The present study was designed to determine if the striatal dopamine transporter (DAT) levels measured by 99mTc-TRODAT-1 single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) brain scans were altered in individuals with IAD. SPECT brain scans were acquired on 5 male IAD subjects and 9 healthy age-matched controls. The volume (V) and weight (W) of bilateral corpus striatum as well as the 99mTc-TRODAT-1 uptake ratio of corpus striatum/the whole brain (Ra) were calculated using mathematical models. It was displayed that DAT expression level of striatum was significantly decreased and the V, W, and Ra were greatly reduced in the individuals with IAD compared to controls. Taken together, these results suggest that IAD may cause serious damages to the brain and the neuroimaging findings further illustrate IAD is associated with dysfunctions in the dopaminergic brain systems. Our findings also support the claim that IAD may share similar neurobiological abnormalities with other addictive disorders

Helix-MO: Sample-Efficient Molecular Optimization on Scene-Sensitive Latent Space

Efficient exploration of the chemical space to search the candidate drugs that satisfy various constraints is a fundamental task of drug discovery. Although many excellent deep molecular generative methods have been proposed to produce promising molecules, applying these methods in practice is still challenging since a great number of assessed molecules (samples) are required to provide the optimization direction, which is a considerable expense for drug discovery. To this end, we design a sample-efficient molecular generative method, namely Helix-MO, which can fast adapt to particular optimization scenes with only a small number of assessed samples. Helix-MO explores the chemical space in a scene-sensitive latent space, dynamically fine-tuned by multiple kinds of learning tasks from multiple perspectives. The learning tasks encourage the model to focus on modeling the more promising molecules during the optimization process to promote sample efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Helix-MO can achieve competitive performance with only a few assessed samples on four molecular optimization scenes. Ablation studies verify the impact of the learning tasks in the scene-specific latent space, efficiently identifying the critical characters of the satisfactory molecules. We also deployed Helix-MO on the website PaddleHelix (https://paddlehelix.baidu.com/app/drug/drugdesign/forecast) to provide drug design service and apply it to produce inhibitors of a kinase to demonstrate its practicability