Bilirubin is widely recognized to possess antioxidant and anti-inflammatory characteristics. However, the relationship between bilirubin and coronary artery disease (CAD) remains controversial, particularly in individuals receiving Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI). Given that statins may enhance the production of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) and bilirubin, we investigated the long-term cardiovascular prognostic role of bilirubin levels elevated by statin use in patients undergoing PCI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: of Medical History: A male infant, 8 months old, was admitted to hospital with cough and fever. The clinical symptoms were found to be mental retardation, obesity, dystonia, movement limitation, and visual retardation. Early development was normal, but after 6 months, the child developed upright head instability, difficulty grasping, and seizures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Chronic kidney disease is a growing health issue, and the options of prevention and therapy remain limited. Although a number of observational studies have linked higher Lp(a) [lipoprotein(a)] levels to the kidney impairment, the causal relationship remains to be determined. The purpose of this study was to assess the causal association between Lp(a) levels and CKD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCuproptosis is a recently discovered programmed cell death pattern that affects the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle by disrupting the lipoylation of pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) complex components. However, the role of cuproptosis in the progression of ischemic heart failure (IHF) has not been investigated. In this study, we investigated the expression of 10 cuproptosis-related genes in samples from both healthy individuals and those with IHF.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report a sub-diffraction resolution imaging of non-fluorescent samples through quantitative phase imaging. This is achieved through a novel application of structured illumination microscopy (SIM), a super-resolution imaging technique established primarily for fluorescence microscopy. Utilizing our contrast transfer function formalism with SIM, we extract the high spatial frequency components of the phase profile from the defocused intensity images, enabling the reconstruction of a quantitative phase image with a frequency spectrum that surpasses the diffraction limit imposed by the imaging system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Appl Mater Interfaces
September 2023
Ability to stimulate antimicrobial immunity has proven to be a useful therapeutic strategy in treating infections, especially in the face of increasing antibiotic resistance. Natural antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) exhibiting immunomodulatory functions normally encompass complex activities, which make it difficult to optimize their therapeutic benefits. Here, a chemotactic motif was harnessed as a template to design a series of AMPs with immunostimulatory activities plus bacteria-killing activities ("AMP plus").
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hypoxia is a major cause and promoter of pulmonary hypertension (PH), a representative vascular remodeling disease with poor prognosis and high mortality. However, the mechanism underlying how pulmonary arterial system responds to hypoxic stress during PH remains unclear. Endothelial mitochondria are considered signaling organelles on oxygen tension.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcotoxicol Environ Saf
September 2023
Aldehydes are recognized environmental toxicants that may affect lipid metabolism. For instance, acrolein has been found to increase serum triglyceride (TG) levels exclusively. However, it remains unclear whether other aldehydes are also associated with hypertriglyceridemia (HTG), and what mechanisms may be involved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThree new isoquinoline alkaloids including a morphine derivative (1), two aporphine alkaloids (2-3), together with five known alkaloids (4-8) were obtained from the extract of Dactylicapnos scandens (D.Don) Hutch. (D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNon-interferometric quantitative phase imaging based on Transport of Intensity Equation (TIE) has been widely used in bio-medical imaging. However, analytic TIE phase retrieval is prone to low-spatial frequency noise amplification, which is caused by the illposedness of inversion at the origin of the spectrum. There are also retrieval ambiguities resulting from the lack of sensitivity to the curl component of the Poynting vector occurring with strong absorption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Physical activity and sedentary behavior are independently related to the risk of cardiovascular disease. Physical activity is recognized as having a protective effect, while being sedentary seems to be adverse. Nonetheless, the interactions between physical activity and sedentary behavior and the combined effect on the prognosis of heart failure patients remain unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to their low damage tolerance, engineering ceramic foams are often limited to non-structural usages. In this work, we report that stereom, a bioceramic cellular solid (relative density, 0.2-0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColor-saturated green-emitting molecules with high Commission Internationale de L'Eclairage (CIE) y values have great potential applications for displays and imaging. Here, we linked the outer phenyl groups in multiple-resonance (MR)-type blue-emitting B (boron)-N (nitrogen) molecules through bonding and spiro-carbon bridges, resulting in rigid green emitters with thermally activated delayed fluorescence. The MR effect and multiple interlocking strategy greatly suppressed the high-frequency vibrations in the molecules, which emit green light with a full-width at half-maximum of 14 nm and a CIE y value of 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectronic cigarettes (E-cigarettes) use is an emerging public health problem. Trying to assess the independent associations between E-cigarettes use and whole blood cell in a nationally representative sample of the US adults is very important for the smoking population. Using E-cigarettes data from NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) 2013-2018, 17,180 adults were included in this cross-sectional analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
June 2022
Angiogenesis contributes fundamentally to embryonic development, tissue homeostasis, and wound healing. Basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF2) is recognized as the first proangiogenic molecule discovered, and it facilitates angiogenesis by activating FGF receptor 1 (FGFR1) signaling in endothelial cells. However, the precise roles of FGFR and the FGF/FGFR signaling axis in angiogenesis remain unclear, especially because of the contradictory phenotypes of in vivo FGF and FGFR gene deficiency models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to the alarming developing rate of multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens, the development and modification of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are unprecedentedly active. Despite the fact that considerable efforts have been expended on the discovery and design strategies of AMPs, the clinical translation of peptide antibiotics remains inadequate. A large number of articles and reviews credited the limited success of AMPs to their poor stability in the biological environment, particularly their poor proteolytic stability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEleven undescribed isoquinoline alkaloids corybungines A-K including a protoberberine-type alkaloid, an isoquinoline alkaloid with a unique 6-norprotoberberine skeleton, one 13,14-seco-protoberberine-type alkaloid, two 1a,14-seco-protoberberine-type alkaloids with a 4-(hydroxymethyl)phenoxy moiety and six aporphine alkaloids, together with seven known alkaloids, have been isolated from the whole herb extract of Corydalis bungeana Turcz. Their structures and absolute configurations were elucidated based on an analysis of spectroscopic data and electronic circular dichroism (ECD) spectra. (R)-stephanine displayed high antagonistic activity against the dopamine D2 receptor with an IC value of 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe objective of this study was to determine the effect of dietary lycopene supplementation on the growth performance, antioxidant enzyme activity of serum and liver, and gene expressions associated with Kelch-like ech-associated protein-1 ()/Nuclear Factor E2-related factor 2 () pathway in liver of Arbor Acres broilers. A total of 288 1-day-old male broilers were randomly divided into 4 treatments with 6 replicates and 12 chickens for each replicate. The control group was fed with the basal diet, while the treated groups were fed with the basal diet with 10, 20, and 30 mg/kg lycopene in powder.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTreatment of microbial-associated infections continues to be hampered by impaired antibacterial efficiency and the variability in nanomedicines. Herein, an octapeptide library with a double-layered zipper, constructed via a systematic arrangement, simplifying the sequence and optimizing the structure (diverse motifs including surfactant-like, central-bola, and end-bola), is assessed in terms of biological efficiency and self-assembly properties. The results indicate that peptides with double-layered Trp zipper exhibit significant antimicrobial activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInflammation and the gut-brain axis have been implicated in the pathogenesis of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). To further understand the relationship between aberrant immune responses and dysbiotic features of the gut microbiome in ASD, we enrolled 45 ASD individuals and 41 healthy control subjects with ages ranging from 2 to 19 years. We found that ASD group subjects have significantly higher plasma levels of IL-2, IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α, TNF-β, and IFN-γ when compared to healthy controls (FDR-adjusted < 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectrochemiluminescence (ECL) based on conjugated polymers or oligomers is persistently being pursued owing to its huge application scope ranging from ultra-sensitive bioanalysis to ultra-resolution imaging and spectroscopy. Because of the theoretical limit in radiative exciton generation yield (typically ∼25 %) of those polymers or oligomers, the corresponding ECL efficiency is still limited, which hampers its ECL performance and its related applications. Herein, we report ECL based on a thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) polymer scaffold, which is characteristic of all-exciton harvesting in the ECL process, and thus potentially capable of achieving ∼100 % ECL efficiency.
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