Publications by authors named "Shuo Lu"

Here are described the dilution-driven gel-sol-gel-sol transitions in aromatic hydrotrope/zwitterionic surfactant bi-component aqueous mixtures. Long and entangled wormlike micelles (WLMs) of concentrated erucyl dimethyl amidopropyl betaine (EAPB) solutions sequentially transform into hexagonal liquid crystal phase (H), highly concentrated spherical micelles (HCSMs), and finally hexagonal close packed micellar phase (HCP) upon gradual introducing an aromatic hydrotrope, sodium salicylate (NaSal). The HCP then successively converts into HCSMs, WLMs, and spherical micelles (SMs) upon further dilution with water, corresponding to a gel-sol-gel-sol transition.

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Brain tumors provide unique insights into brain plasticity due to their slow growth compared to acute cerebrovascular diseases. Despite relying on sophisticated functional networks, patients with brain tumors exhibit minimal deficits in higher language functions and demonstrate positive post-injury plasticity; however, the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. We utilized high-density electroencephalography to investigate language network plasticity in brain tumor patients without evident language deficits.

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Vacuolar-type H+-ATPase (V-ATPase) is a crucial proton pump that plays an essential role in maintaining intracellular pH homeostasis and a variety of physiological processes. This review provides an in-depth exploration of the structural components, functional mechanisms, and regulatory modes of V-ATPase in cancer cells. Comprising two main domains, V and V, V-ATPase drives the proton pump through ATP hydrolysis, sustaining the pH balance within the cell and organelles.

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Speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) directly translate brain activity into speech sound and text. Despite successful applications in non-tonal languages, the distinct syllabic structures and pivotal lexical information conveyed through tonal nuances present challenges in BCI decoding for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese. Here, we designed a brain-to-text framework to decode Mandarin sentences from invasive neural recordings.

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Refractory temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is one of the most frequently observed subtypes of epilepsy and endangers more than 50 million people world-wide. Although electroencephalogram (EEG) had been widely recognized as a classic tool to screen and diagnose epilepsy, for many years it heavily relied on identifying epileptic discharges and epileptogenic zone localization, which however, limits the understanding of refractory epilepsy due to the network nature of this disease. This work hypothesizes that the microstate dynamics based on resting-state scalp EEG can offer an additional network depiction of the disease and provide potential complementary evaluation tool for the TLE even without detectable epileptic discharges on EEG.

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The indole moiety is ubiquitous in natural products and pharmaceuticals. C-H borylation of the benzenoid moiety of indoles is a challenging task, especially at the C5 position. We have combined computational and experimental studies to introduce multiple noncovalent interactions, especially dispersion, between the substrate and catalytic ligand to realize C5-borylation of indoles with high reactivity and selectivity.

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Purpose: The purpose of this study was to thoroughly analyze postoperative consonant errors by tongue cancer (TC) patients with speech disorders and also to investigate the correlation between the pathological factors and the speech performance using our Consonant-based Articulation Assessment Battery (CAAB).

Method: The participants were 57 monolingual Mandarin TC patients (26 women, 31 men) after surgery (aged 20-80 years). All participants were literate and had normal vision and hearing, enabling them to comprehend and comply with our instructions.

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Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra (SN). Activation of the neuroinflammatory response has a pivotal role in PD. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have emerged as a promising therapeutic approach for various nerve injuries, but there are limited reports on their use in PD and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear.

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Resource-based cities (RBCs) worldwide with a single industrial structure face the double pressures of sustainable development to promote development (i.e., industrial upgrading) and mitigating carbon emissions.

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Natural poetic speeches (i.e., proverbs, nursery rhymes, and commercial ads) with strong prosodic regularities are easily memorized by children and the harmonious acoustic patterns are suggested to facilitate their integrated sentence processing.

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The advanced electrolyte of liquid metal battery should have low melting point, low ionic solubility, low viscosity, high electric and thermal conductivities, and a suitable density between anode and cathode for declining the operating temperature and realizing the goal of saving-energy. In this study, an excellent quaternary LiF-LiCl-LiBr-LiI (9.1 : 30.

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Abdominal adhesion occurs commonly in clinical practice, causing unfavorable symptoms and readmission. The ileostomy operation is a common surgical procedure and we utilized this model to evaluate abdominal adhesion. Adhesion grade score was calculated in 35 patients (Cohort 1) and subjected to correlation and receiver operating characteristic analysis.

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Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) was used to measure resting-state cerebral blood flow (CBF) in temporal lobes of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) children. Twenty-two children with ASD and 34 age-matched TD children were recruited to participate in the experiment. DCS signals were recorded with 3 long source-detector (SD) channels (SD distance = 22.

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The development of SARS-CoV-2 main protease (M) inhibitors for the treatment of COVID-19 has mostly benefitted from X-ray structures and preexisting knowledge of inhibitors; however, an efficient method to generate M inhibitors, which circumvents such information would be advantageous. As an alternative approach, we show here that DNA-encoded chemistry technology (DEC-Tec) can be used to discover inhibitors of M. An affinity selection of a 4-billion-membered DNA-encoded chemical library (DECL) using M as bait produces novel non-covalent and non-peptide-based small molecule inhibitors of M with low nanomolar K values.

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Purpose: To probe the dynamic alternations of neural networks in real-time visual processing after visual deprivation (VD) removal.

Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted. Twenty children with a history of early binocular VD caused by congenital cataracts and 20 matched typically developing (TD) children were enrolled.

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Ca is an important signaling messenger. In microorganisms, fungi, and plants, H/Ca antiporters (CAX) are known to play key roles in the homeostasis of intracellular Ca by catalyzing its efflux across the cell membrane. Here, we reveal that the bacterial CAX homolog YfkE transports Ca in two distinct modes: a low-flux H/Ca exchange mode and a high-flux mode in which Ca and phosphate ions are co-transported (1:1) in exchange for H.

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CTX-M β-lactamases are a widespread source of resistance to β-lactam antibiotics in Gram-negative bacteria. These enzymes readily hydrolyze penicillins and cephalosporins, including oxyimino-cephalosporins such as cefotaxime. To investigate the preference of CTX-M enzymes for cephalosporins, we examined eleven active-site residues in the CTX-M-14 β-lactamase model system by alanine mutagenesis to assess the contribution of the residues to catalysis and specificity for the hydrolysis of the penicillin, ampicillin, and the cephalosporins cephalothin and cefotaxime.

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Article Synopsis
  • Ultra-long tailed zwitterionic surfactants create elastic wormlike micelles in water, while shorter ones typically form spherical micelles; anionic surfactants help transition the micelle shapes from spherical to wormlike.
  • The study involved anionic/zwitterionic hybrid micelles made from sodium alkylsulfate and a hydroxyl sulfobetaine, using various analytical techniques to examine their structure and viscosity under different conditions.
  • Results showed that longer-chain SAS compounds enhanced viscosity and led to elastic wormlike micelles with unique thermal properties, with longer hydrophobic tails being key in determining the size of these micelles.
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Article Synopsis
  • β-lactamases inactivate β-lactam antibiotics, leading to drug resistance, but inhibitors like β-lactamase inhibitory protein (BLIP) can counteract this resistance.
  • The study found that BLIP weakly inhibits CTX-M-14 but strongly inhibits CTX-M-15, revealing a conformational change in the active site loop of the enzyme upon binding.
  • A mutation (N106S) in CTX-M-14 significantly enhances BLIP's inhibition potency, suggesting that variations in the active site loop structure influence both the effectiveness of inhibitors and the hydrolysis of antibiotics.
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Kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) represents one of the most fatal cancers, usually showing malignant progression and a high tumor recurrence rate. The urokinase-type plasminogen activator receptor (PLAUR) plays a critical role in the initiation and progression of several cancers, including KIRC. However, the function and mechanism of PLAUR in patients with KIRC are still unclear and require further investigation.

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Introduction: Cell cycle-associated cyclin-dependent kinases (ccCDKs) are essential regulators known to control cell division and facilitate tumorigenesis and progression. However, there is currently no comprehensive study of distinct ccCDKs in prostate cancer (PCa). The purpose of this study was to determine the value of ccCDK expression in predicting the prognosis of patients with PCa and to identify the gene functions of ccCDK in PCa.

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Catchy utterances, such as proverbs, verses, and nursery rhymes (i.e., "No pain, no gain" in English), contain strong-prosodic (SP) features and are child-friendly in repeating and memorizing; yet the way those prosodic features encoded by neural activity and their influence on speech development in children are still largely unknown.

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Aryl sulfones and aryl sulfonamides are of great importance in organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry. Although ortho-C-H functionalization of aryl sulfonyl compounds has been extensively explored, the functionalization of remote meta- and para-C-H bonds is very rare. Herein, we report a tunable meta- and para-selective C-H borylation of aryl sulfonyl compounds enabled by computationally designed ligands and iridium catalyst.

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