Integrated Metagenomic and Transcriptomic Analyses Reveal the Dietary Dependent Recovery of Host Metabolism From Antibiotic Exposure

The balance of gut microbiome is essential for maintaining host metabolism homeostasis. Despite widespread antibiotic use, the potential long-term detrimental consequences of antibiotics for host health are getting more and more attention. However, it remains unclear whether diet affects the post-antibiotic recovery of gut microbiome and host metabolism. In this study, through metagenomic sequencing and hepatic transcriptome analysis, we investigated the divergent impacts of short-term vancomycin (Vac), or combination of ciprofloxacin and metronidazole (CM) treatment on gut microbiome and host metabolism, as well as their recovery extent from antibiotic exposure on chow diet (CD) and high-fat diet (HFD). Our results showed that short-term Vac intervention affected insulin signaling, while CM induced more functional changes in the microbiome. However, Vac-induced long-term (45 days) changes of species were more apparent when recovered on CD than HFD. The effects of antibiotic intervention on host metabolism were long-lasting, antibiotic-specific, and diet-dependent. The number of differentially expressed gene was doubled by Vac than CM, but was comparable after recovery on CD as revealed by the hepatic transcriptomic analysis. In contrast, HFD intake during recovery could worsen the extent of post-antibiotic recovery by altering infection, immunity, and cancer-related pathways in short-term Vac-exposed rats and by shifting endocrine system-associated pathways in CM-exposed rats. Together, the presented data demonstrated the long-term recovery extent after different antibiotic exposure was diet-related, highlighting the importance of dietary management during post-antibiotic recovery

OK-432 (Sapylin) Reduces Seroma Formation After Axillary Lymphadenectomy in Breast Cancer

Purpose/aim: Modified radical mastectomy is the standard surgery for breast cancer in developing countries. However, seroma formation regarded as the most frequent postoperative complication limits the therapeutic benefit of mastectomy and axillary surgery. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of OK-432 in reducing seroma formation after axillary dissection. Methods: This prospective cohort study included 80 patients with advanced breast cancer who underwent modified radical mastectomy. Patients were randomized into two groups, which differed with the OK-432 administration. N = 40 patients per group were treated with either OK-432 plus closed suction drainage or drainage-only. Result: In comparison with the drainage-only group, we found that patients in the OK-432 group had a lower drainage volume (p = .030) and a shorter duration of axillary drainage (p < .01). Besides, the use of OK-432 could reduce the incidence of seroma formation (p < .01) and the volume of seroma (p = .040). There were also significant differences in reducing the chance of evacuative punctures (p = .036) and the healing time (p < .01) between control and OK-432 group. Conclusion: OK-432 not only shortened the suction drainage duration, but also significantly reduced seroma formation as well as the needs for aspiration punctures after modified radical mastectomy

Effect of the Annealing Process on the Microstructure and Performance of 5056 Aluminum Alloy Wires

Recrystallization can affect the mechanical properties of aluminum alloys by changing the grain structure, and even the secondary recrystallization will cause a sudden change in the grain size in the alloy. In this work, by choosing different annealing treatments on the cold-drawn 5056 aluminum wire, the microstructure evolution in the alloy homogenized at different annealing processes was discussed, and its influence on the mechanical properties was tested. The results demonstrated that the different annealing treatments had a great effect on the recrystallized structure in the 5056 aluminum alloy. During the annealing, it was observed that the recrystallization started at 250 °C and completed at 310 °C, leading to a significant decrease in the mechanical properties. When the temperature was further increased to 530 °C, the secondary recrystallization occurred, and the grain size of the secondary recrystallization was larger than that when the annealing temperature was 560 °C. However, there was only a minor decrease in the mechanical properties. The reasons and laws of the secondary recrystallization are analyzed and discussed in this paper

Cold exposure promotes coronavirus infection by altering the gut microbiota and lipid metabolism to reduce host immunity

Cold exposure has been suggested to be advantageous for the spread and infection of the coronavirus, and the gut microbiota influences the severity of the infection by modulating host inflammatory and immune responses. However, it remains unclear whether the promotion of viral infection through cold exposure is linked to the gut microbiota

Optimizing ex vivo culture conditions to study human gut microbiome

Abstract The inter-individual variations of gut microbiome contribute to the different responses toward drug therapy among populations, developing a reliable ex vivo culture method for mixed bacteria is the urgent need for predicting personal reaction to drug therapy. Unfortunately, very few attentions have been paid to the bias that could be introduced during the culture process for mixed bacteria. Here we systemically evaluated the factors that may affect the outcomes of cultured bacteria from human feces. We demonstrated that inter-individual difference of host gut microbiome was the main factor affecting the outcomes of cultured bacteria, followed by the culture medium and time point. We further optimized a new medium termed GB based on our established multi-dimensional evaluation method, which could mimic the status of in situ host gut microbiome to the highest extent. Finally, we assessed the inter-individual metabolism by host gut microbiome from 10 donors on three frequently used clinical drugs (aspirin, levodopa and doxifluridine) based on the optimized GB medium. Our results revealed obvious variation in drug metabolism by microbiome from different donors, especially levodopa and doxifluridine. This work suggested the optimized culture medium had the potential for exploring the inter-individual impacts of host gut microbiome on drug metabolism

Chiral 1D perovskite microwire arrays for circularly polarized light detection

Detection of circularly polarized light (CPL) accelerates the development of various optical technologies, but the additional quarter-wave plate and linear polarizer are required for conventional polarized light detectors, resulting in tremendous difficulty in integration and miniaturization of the devices. Herein, we fabricate pure (010)-orientated chiral one-dimensional (1D) perovskite microwire arrays with high crystallinity, strict alignment, and homogeneous size by a capillary-bridge-manipulated method. By the synergy of the excellent crystallinity and pure crystallographic orientation, high-performance CPL photodetectors are fabricated, with a maximum anisotropy factor of 0.23, responsivity exceeding 26 mA W −1, and detectivity exceeding 2.2 × 1011 Jones. Furthermore, the CPL photodetectors based on microwire arrays also exhibit impressive environmental stability under ambient conditions.Published versionThis work was supported by Ji Hua Laboratory Science Program (grant no. X190251UZ190), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China (2017YFA0204504, 2018YFA0208502, and 2018YFA0704803), the National Natural Science Foundation (51922012, 52103238 and 21633014), Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2018034), and Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021TQ0289 and 2021M700128)

A self-monitoring microneedle patch for light-controlled synergistic treatment of melanoma

Melanoma is the most aggressive and malignant form of skin cancer. Current melanoma treatment methods generally suffer from frequent drug administration as well as difficulty in direct monitoring of drug release. Here, a self-monitoring microneedle (MN)-based drug delivery system, which integrates a dissolving MN patch with aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active PATC microparticles, is designed to achieve light-controlled pulsatile chemo-photothermal synergistic therapy of melanoma. The PATC polymeric particles, termed D/I@PATC, encapsulate both of chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin (DOX) and the photothermal agent indocyanine green (ICG). Upon light illumination, PATC gradually dissociates into smaller particles, causing the release of encapsulated DOX and subsequent fluorescence intensity change of PATC particles, thereby not only enabling direct observation of the drug release process under light stimuli, but also facilitating verification of drug release by fluorescence recovery after light trigger. Moreover, encapsulation of ICG in PATC particles displays significant improvement of its photothermal stability both in vitro and in vivo. In a tumor-bearing mouse, the application of one D/I@PATC MN patch combining with two cycles of light irradiation showed excellent controllable chemo-photothermal efficacy and exhibited ∼97% melanoma inhibition rate without inducing any evident systemic toxicity, suggesting a great potential for skin cancer treatment in clinics