Enhanced effect of ferrous sulfate on nitrogen retention and PBAT degradation during co-composting by combing with biochar-loaded FN1 bacterial composites.

The treatment of biodegradable plastics through composting has garnered increasing attention. This study aimed to investigate the effects of Biochar FN1 bacteria and ferrous sulfate on nitrogen retention, greenhouse gas emissions, and degradable plastics during composting and to elucidate their synergistic mechanisms on microbial communities. Compared with the control, applying biochar-loaded FN1 bacteria composites combined with Ferrous sulfate (SGC) markedly accelerated organic matter degradation and reduced cumulative CO and NH emissions.

Suspended sediment (SPS) triggers nitrogen retention by altering microbial network stability and electron transport behavior during the aerobic-anoxic transition.

NO-N transformation, the vital biological process, determines nitrogen removal and retention in aquatic environment. Suspended sediment (SPS) ubiquitous in freshwater ecosystems can accelerate the transitions from aerobic to anoxic states, inevitably impacting NO-N transformation. To elaborate on the microbial mechanism by which SPS content affected NO-N transformation, we explored nitrogen removal and retention, microbial communities, co-occurrence networks, and electron transfer behavior under different SPS content during the aerobic-anoxic transition.

The influence of enterprise ESG performance on overseas business income - Evidence from China.

As an emerging information disclosure system, enterprise ESG performance holds substantial importance for the international expansion of Chinese enterprises. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of literature examining the relationship between the ESG performance of Chinese enterprises and their overseas business income. This research utilizes data from Chinese A-share listed companies spanning from 2009 to 2022 to explore the causal link between ESG performance and overseas business income.

Using eddy covariance data to detect nuclear reactor operational status.

Monitoring nuclear reactor operations is vital for nuclear safeguards as it ensures that reactors are in compliance with international legal agreements. Validating nuclear facilities and activities, including potential clandestine activities, is currently accomplished by using remotely sensed data from satellites and aircrafts and on-site sampling. However, these techniques are temporally-limited as sampling and interpretation of environmental releases frequently involve labor-intensive, on-site collections.

Identifying priority conservation areas for threatened amphibian habitats in the Yangtze river Delta region to maintain regional biodiversity.

The complex life cycle traits of amphibians make them especially sensitive to environmental change, and their ongoing conservation requires the maintenance of suitable habitat that accounts for such life cycle characteristics which may impacted by local environmental dynamics arising from climate change and human disturbance. Many existing studies on amphibian habitats disregard this important issue, leading to uncertainty in managing critical habitats. The application of appropriate conservation practices is therefore constrained by the fact that the major factors influencing amphibian habitats, and their spatio-temporal dynamics at different life stages, are poorly understood.

Exposure to titanium dioxide nanoparticles disrupts the BTB by interfering with the assembly of stress granules in germ cells.

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO NPs) are among the most prevalent nanomaterials utilized in industrial and medical fields. However, their impact on spermatogenesis and male fertility remains insufficiently characterized. This study addresses the reproductive toxicity of TiO NPs and elucidates the underlying molecular mechanisms involved.

Efficacy and safety of antibody-drug conjugates in pretreated HER2-low metastatic breast cancer: A systematic review and network meta-analysis.

Introduction: Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) trastuzumab-deruxtecan (T-DXd) and sacituzumab-govitecan (SG) provided significant progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) improvements over chemotherapy (CT) in pretreated hormone receptor-positive (HR+) and triple-negative (TN)/HER2-low metastatic breast cancer (MBC). However, no direct comparison between the two exists, nor with the more recent datopotamab-deruxtecan (Dato-DXd).

Methods: We conducted a network meta-analysis (NMA) to compare efficacy and safety of T-DXd and SG in CT-pretreated HR+ and TN/HER2-low MBC and assess their benefit over standard CT, exploring also a comparison with Dato-DXd.

A bimodal closed-loop neuromodulation implant integrated with ultraflexible probes to treat epilepsy.

Anti-seizure medications and deep brain stimulation are widely used therapies to treat seizures; however, both face limitations such as resistance and the unpredictable nature of seizures. Recent advancements, including responsive neural stimulation and on-demand drug release, have been developed to address these challenges. However, a gap remains, as electrical stimulation provides only transient effects while medication has a delayed onset.

Perioperative immunotherapy plus chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone for patients with resectable pulmonary lymphoepithelioma-like carcinoma.

Background: Primary pulmonary lymphoepithelioma-like carcinoma (PLELC) is a rare subtype of non-small-cell lung cancer. This study aims to compare the efficacy and safety of perioperative PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitor plus chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone in stage II-IIIB PLELC patients.

Patients And Methods: This retrospective study included stage II-IIIB PLELC patients.

STK11 mutations correlate with poor prognosis for advanced NSCLC treated with first-line immunotherapy or chemo-immunotherapy according to KRAS, TP53, KEAP1, and SMARCA4 status.

Background: The upfront treatment of non-oncogene-addicted NSCLC relies on immunotherapy alone (ICI) or in combination with chemotherapy (CT-ICI). Genomic aberrations such as KRAS, TP53, KEAP1, SMARCA4, or STK11 may impact survival outcomes.

Methods: We performed an observational study of 145 patients treated with first-line IO or CT-ICI for advanced non-squamous (nsq) NSCLC at our institution tested with an extensive lab-developed NGS panel.

Stearic acid metabolism in human health and disease.

Named after the Greek term for "hard fat", stearic acid has gradually entered people's field of vision. As an important component of various physiological cellular functions, stearic acid plays a regulatory role in diverse aspects of energy metabolism and signal transduction. Its applications range from serving as a bodily energy source to participating in endogenous biosynthesis.

Astrocyte regulation of critical period plasticity across neural circuits.

Critical periods are brief windows of heightened neural circuit plasticity that allow circuits to permanently reset their structure and function to facilitate robust organismal behavior. Understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that instruct critical period timing is of broad clinical interest, as altered developmental plasticity is linked to multiple neurodevelopmental disorders. While intrinsic, neuronal mechanisms shape both neural circuit remodeling and critical period timing, recent data indicate that signaling from astrocytes and surrounding glia can both promote and limit critical period plasticity.

Accelerated quadratic penalty dynamic approaches with applications to distributed optimization.

In this paper, we explore accelerated continuous-time dynamic approaches with a vanishing damping α/t, driven by a quadratic penalty function designed for linearly constrained convex optimization problems. We replace these linear constraints with penalty terms incorporated into the objective function, where the penalty coefficient grows to +∞ as t tends to infinity. With appropriate penalty coefficients, we establish convergence rates of O(1/t) for the objective residual and the feasibility violation when α>0, and demonstrate the robustness of these convergence rates against external perturbation.

Explicitly diverse visual question generation.

Visual question generation involves the generation of meaningful questions about an image. Although we have made significant progress in automatically generating a single high-quality question related to an image, existing methods often ignore the diversity and interpretability of generated questions, which are important for various daily tasks that require clear question sources. In this paper, we propose an explicitly diverse visual question generation model that aims to generate diverse questions based on interpretable question sources.

CMFX: Cross-modal fusion network for RGB-X crowd counting.

Currently, for obtaining more accurate counts, existing methods primarily utilize RGB images combined with features of complementary modality (X-modality) for counting. However, designing a model that can adapt to various sensors is still an unsolved issue due to the differences in features between different modalities. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified fusion framework called CMFX for RGB-X crowd counting.

A sparse and wide neural network model for DNA sequences.

Accurate modeling of DNA sequences requires capturing distant semantic relationships between the nucleotide acid bases. Most existing deep neural network models face two challenges: (1) they are limited to short DNA fragments and cannot capture long-range interactions, and (2) they require many supervised labels, which is often expensive in practice. We propose a new neural network model called SwanDNA to address the above challenges.

Increased nuclear factor I-mediated chromatin access drives transition to androgen receptor splice variant dependence in prostate cancer.

Androgen receptor (AR) splice variants, of which ARv7 is the most common, are increased in castration-resistant prostate cancer, but the extent to which they drive AR activity is unclear. We generated a subline of VCaP cells (VCaP16) that is resistant to the AR inhibitor enzalutamide (ENZ). AR activity in VCaP16 is driven by ARv7, independently of full-length AR (ARfl), and its cistrome and transcriptome mirror those of ARfl in VCaP cells.

Symmetry breaking and mismatch in the torsional mechanism of ATP synthesis by FF-ATP synthase: mathematical number theory proof and its chemical and biological implications.

Can mathematical proofs be employed for the solution of fundamental molecular-level problems in biology? Recently, I mathematically tackled complex mechanistic problems arising during the synthesis of the universal biological currency, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) by the FF-ATP synthase, nature's smallest rotary molecular motor, using graph-theoretical and combinatorial approaches for the membrane-bound F and water-soluble F domains of this fascinating molecule (see Nath in Theory Biosci 141:249‒260, 2022 and Theory Biosci 143:217‒227, 2024). In the third part of this trilogy, I investigate another critical aspect of the molecular mechanism-that of coupling between the F and F domains of the ATP synthase mediated by the central γ-subunit of nanometer diameter. According to Nath's torsional mechanism of energy transduction and ATP synthesis the γ-subunit twists during ATP synthesis and the release of stored torsional energy in the central γ-stalk causes conformational changes in the catalytic sites that lead to ATP synthesis, with 1 ATP molecule synthesized per discrete 120° rotation.

[The Drosophila Zinc Finger Proteins Aef1 and CG10543 Are Co-Localized with SAGA, SWI/SNF, and ORC Complexes on Gene Promoters and Involved in Transcription Regulation].

In previous studies, we purified the DUB-module of the Drosophila SAGA complex and showed that a number of zinc proteins interact with it, including Aef1 and CG10543. In this work, we conducted a genome-wide study of the Aef1 and CG10543 proteins and showed that they are localized predominantly on the promoters of active genes. The binding sites of these proteins co-localize with the SAGA and dSWI/SNF chromatin modification and remodeling complexes, as well as with the ORC replication complex.

[Methods to Increase the Efficiency of Knock-in of a Construct Encoding the HIV-1 Fusion Inhibitor, MT-C34 Peptide, into the CXCR4 Locus in the CEM/R5 T Cell Line].

The low knock-in efficiency, especially in primary human cells, limits the use of the genome editing technology for therapeutic purposes, rendering it important to develop approaches for increasing the knock-in levels. In this work, the efficiencies of several approaches were studied using a model of knock-in of a construct coding for the peptide HIV fusion inhibitor MT-C34 into the human CXCR4 locus in the CEM/R5 T cell line. First, donor DNA modification was evaluated as a means to improve the efficiency of plasmid transport into the nucleus.

Energetic activity for depression in young people aged 13-17 years: the READY feasibility RCT.

Background: Prevalence of depression is increasing in young people. Behaviour change interventions providing benefits equal to or greater than talking therapies or pharmacological alternatives are needed. Exercise could be beneficial for young people with depression, but we lack robust trials of its effectiveness.

PI-RADS in Predicting csPCa: A Comparison Between Academic and Nonacademic Centers.

Introduction: The introduction of multiparametric prostate magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) has revolutionized prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis, enhancing the localization of clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa) and guiding targeted biopsies. However, significant disparities in the execution, interpretation, and reporting of prostate MRI examinations across centers necessitate greater standardization and accuracy. This study compares the diagnostic efficacy of mpMRI from academic and nonacademic centers in detecting csPCa and identifies factors associated with csPCa detection.

Experimental Murine Periodontitis Increases Salivary Gland IgA-Producing B Cells Following Oral Dysbiosis.

The oral microbiome is closely involved in the maintenance of host health and the development of systemic diseases. The salivary glands play an essential role in homeostasis in the oral cavity. Here, we investigated the effects of periodontal inflammation on salivary gland function and the oral microbiome.