Latest ArticlesResearch into environmentally friendly strategies for hydrogen transfer reduction is increasing, along with the need for more elaborate heterocyclic platforms. Within this context, we develop a new approach for substituted dihydrobenzo[c]carbazoles and indoles. These compounds were synthesized through an iron-catalyzed hydrogen transfer reduction of nitroarenes, followed by intramolecular cyclization. This transformation involves using a Knölker-type catalyst, Cs2CO3 as the base, and benzyl alcohol as the non-expensive and low volatile hydrogen donor. We synthesize 30 examples of aza-heterocycles with moderate to excellent yields by applying this strategy. Additionally, DFT calculations demonstrated that the pathway reaction could follow an anionic mechanism.
β-Cyclodextrin (β-CD) based materials have attracted great attention in the separation of hydrophilic glycopeptides due to the abundant hydroxyl groups in its exterior. However, the current materials based on β-CD generally has complex synthesis process and harsh experimental conditions, on the other hand, the interior cavity of β-CD is hydrophobic and is harmful to capture glycopeptides. Herein, a novel hydrophilic material based on β-CD was engineered via a self-assembly process utilizing l-cysteine (l-Cys) or glutathione (GSH) derived adamantane for highly efficient glycopeptide enrichment. It is the first attempt to make use of the hydrophobic interior cavity of β-CD for hydrophilic glycopeptide capture. Taking advantages of strong hydrophilicity and superparamagnetism, the as-prepared materials possess low detection limit, high selectively, and excellent reusability when employed to glycopeptide enrichment. In addition, the feasibility of the hydrophilic material based on β-CD was verified by enriching glycopeptides from human serum and saliva samples. This study provides a heuristic strategy for the application of β-CD-based self-assembly materials in the enrichment of glycopeptides. Importantly, this strategy certified a possible that the change of glycopeptide enrichment sites through host-guest interaction between β-CD and adamantane derivatives with different functional groups.
Corneal neovascularization (CNV) is one of the major factors for vision impairment and blindness worldwide. The current treatment for CNV focuses primarily on topical eyedrops of glucocorticoids, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, electro-coagulation and laser photo-coagulation. Unfortunately, coagulation-based treatment is restricted by corneal hemorrhage and iris atrophy. And drug treatments have limited therapeutic effects and a short duration of action. Nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems are widely applied due to their improved pharmacokinetics, optimized drug targeting and enhanced biocompatibility. In this article, we provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of the CNV nanodrug system, highlighting some of the recent advances in nanodrug design, preparation, and functional modification. Moreover, we discuss the challenges in the clinical translation and potential risks in CNV treatment. A greater effort is needed for the potential applications of nanotechnology in the field of ophthalmology.
Lipid droplet (LD) fluorescent imaging plays an important role in the detection of lipid-related diseases. Due to their poor photostability and low hydrophobicity of currently available LD imaging fluorophores, LD imaging is limited by its short imaging period and low imaging contrast. Herein, we reasonably designed a highly lipophilic compound Cou-Flu with excellent photostability and excimer-monomer transition property. It exhibited weak excimer emission in cytoplasm, but strong monomer emission in LDs, enabling high contrast LD imaging and LD movement tracing in cells. Zebrafish imaging study demonstrated that Cou-Flu was also suitable for in vivo LD detection with excellent sensitivity. We anticipate that Cou-Flu could be widely applied to understand LD-related intracellular activities and even LD-related diseases in the future.
We demonstrate a synaptic transistor that uses a thermally crosslinked three-dimensional network to accommodate ionic liquid to form an ion gel layer. The synaptic transistor successfully emulated important synaptic plasticity, such as paired-pulse facilitation, spike-number dependent plasticity, spike-voltage dependent plasticity, and spike-rate dependent plasticity; these responses imply successful use of the ion gel. Moreover, the device realized "OR" and "AND" logic operations, and high-pass filtering behavior. Energy consumption of the device can be reduced to sub-femtojoule level, which is below that of biological synapses. Compared with traditional physical cross-linking using block copolymers, this method provides a facile strategy to prepare ion gels with tunable properties by altering the polymers and crosslinkers, and to enormously reduce the price by replacing expensive block copolymers or eliminating additional synthesis processes. This report provides a versatile strategy for design of synaptic transistors and their applications in neuromorphic electronics.
Sepsis is the leading cause of death in intensive care unit (ICU), which is caused by deregulated immune responses to pathogens infection. Clinically, sepsis treatment is limited to antibiotics and supportive care, while there still lacks of specific molecular therapy. As a type of immune dysfunction disease, macrophages have been recognized as the key immune cells precipitating in the whole process of sepsis, which is activated into M1-like to trigger various inflammatory responses at early stage whereas polarized into M2-like to cause immunosuppression in later stage. Therefore, great attention has been paid on the design of nanomedicines to regulate the functions of macrophages for etiological treatment of sepsis, by virtue of the unique advantages of nano-drug delivery systems, such as enhanced drug bioavailability, targetability, reduced side-effects. This critical review aims to summarize the recent progress of macrophages-regulating nanoparticles for sepsis therapy. First, the essential roles of macrophages in the development and progression of sepsis have been introduced, including the positive roles of macrophages to combat infections and dysfunction of macrophages to cause body damages. We then focus our main attention to discuss the nanomedicines with different therapeutic mechanisms corresponding to each stage of sepsis, such as infection blockage, inflammation inhibition, immune functions recovery, as well as multifunctional nanomedicines. Finally, a few limitations of current nanomedicines are highlighted, and future perspective are speculated for potential clinical translation, which might pave the way for the development of macrophages-centered nanomedicines for more effective sepsis therapy.
A cobalt-catalyzed ring-opening/hydroxylation cascade of highly strained cyclopropanols has been developed for the first time. The reaction was conducted under open-air atmosphere to afford a broad series of structurally diverse β-hydroxy ketones in moderate to good yields with high regioselectivity. The protocol features mild reaction conditions, simple operation, high-functional-group tolerance, facile scalability, and heterocycle compatibility.
Highly branched poly(β-amino ester)s (HPAEs) have shown their great promise in gene delivery. However, their broad molecular weight distribution (MWD) poses an additional challenge to the mechanistic understanding of the influence of molecular weight (MW) on their gene transfection activity. Using a stepwise precipitation strategy, HPAEs were fractionated. It is shown that MW has a significant effect on the transfection activity and cytotoxicity of HPAEs. The intermediate MW mediates higher transfection efficiency while maintaining high cell viability. Mechanistic studies show that the intermediate MW confers stronger DNA binding affinity to HPAEs, leading to the formulation of polyplexes with a relatively smaller size and more positive zeta potential. This study not only suggests a simple strategy to fractionate HPAEs with narrow MWD but also provides new insights into understanding the structure-property relationship, which would facilitate the clinical translation of HPAEs in gene therapy.
A nickel-catalyzed direct hydromonofluoromethylation of unactivated olefins with industrial raw fluoroiodomethane is developed, furnishing various primary alkyl fluorides in a step-economic manner. The key factor to success is the use of pyridine-oxazoline as ligand and (MeO)2MeSiH as the hydrogen source. This transformation demonstrates high efficiency, mild conditions, good functional-group compatibility and great potential in the drug discovery.
Various structures of G-quadruplex in biosystems play an important role in different diseases and are often regulated by a variety of molecular crowding environments induced by internal and even external factors (e.g., a solvent). Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a universal solvent, has been widely used in biological studies and for drug therapy, but little is known regarding its effect on G-quadruplex structure and stability. Here, we report the influence of molecular crowding environment induced by DMSO on the conformation and stability of G-quadruplex structure. We show that the G-quadruplex-forming sequences such as human telomeric sequence, which may have diverse conformations in different environments, tend to convert their topologies to parallel structures under the molecular crowding stimulated by DMSO. Moreover, DMSO can increase the stability of the parallel and antiparallel topologies, especially the parallel G-quadruplex sequence c-kit, but not the hybrid topologies. Further analysis of c-kit using the CD and NMR technique, combined with the unique structural characteristics of c-kit, reveals that the crowding, dehydration and interaction of DMSO are conductive to the formation and stability of the parallel G-quadruplex. The present study suggests that, DMSO, a common solvent used in DNA experiments, may have a nonnegligible influence on the structure and stability of G-quadruplex.
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