Latest ArticlesThe treatment of skin wounds, especially chronic wounds, remains a critical clinical challenge and places a heavy burden on patients and healthcare systems. In recent years, the engineering strategy of using biomaterial-assisted exosomes has emerged as a powerful tool for skin repair. Compared to treatments such as debridement and regular dressing changes, the design of biomaterial-assisted exosomes not only maintains the bioactivity of exosomes at the wound site but also provides an appropriate microenvironment for the repair of complex tissues, thereby accelerating wound healing. This review systematically introduces the general characteristics of exosomes and their functions in skin wound healing, highlights recent advances in classification of natural exosomes and engineering methods which enriching their functions in intercellular communication. Then, various emerging and innovative approaches based on biomaterials delivery of exosomes are comprehensively discussed. The review seeks to bring an in-depth understanding of bioactive dressings based on exosomes therapeutic strategies, aiming to facilitate new clinical application value.
Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent joint disease and icariin is a promising drug for its treatment. However, the clinical use of icariin is hindered by poor water solubility, low bioavailability, and non-specific release and biological distribution. Herein, sulfonated azocalix[4]arene (SAC4A) with enhanced water solubility, recognition capacity, and designed responsiveness was used to improve the efficiency of icariin for OA therapy. SAC4A, a macrocycle with well-defined molecular weight and structure, could encapsulate and enhance water solubility of various drugs. In addition, SAC4A enables hypoxia-responsive release of loaded drug. Compared with icariin treatment, supramolecular complex icariin@SAC4A significantly relieved OA symptoms of rats, including more regular bone morphology and structure, and lower degree of cartilage damage. Moreover, the supramolecular formulation demonstrated various advantages, including easy preparation, hypoxia-triggered release, and small size that conducive to drug penetration.
Aflatoxins B1 (AFB1) contamination in agro-food holds great threaten to human and animal health. Conventional test strips for rapid AFB1 visualized monitoring remains challenged by improvement of sensitivity and matrix interference resistance. In this case, we developed a portable electrochemiluminescence (ECL) imaging test strip with dual-signal outputs for AFB1 quantification in corn samples. Ru-PEI@SiO2@Au nanospheres were synthesized for bonding with anti-AFB1 antibody and then colorimetrical signal-reported on test line through the capillary flow at strips. Meanwhile, ECL imaging signal of the constructed carbon-ink-based working electrode on polyvinyl chloride substrate of strips was exported under an applied potential of 1.25 V. The whole ECL test strips not only endowed convenient colorimetric responses but guaranteed quick-witted ECL image distinguishment even at extremely low AFB1 content. The detection limit of this ECL imaging-integrated mode was 10-fold lower than that of only colorimetric mode. Furthermore, satisfactory selectivity, reliability and practicability of the as-proposed ECL test strips were demonstrated. This work offered a promising platform for on-site, accurate and sensitive detection of pollutants in foods.
Ag2CO3-promoted dehydroxymethylative fluorination of aliphatic alcohols has been achieved with Selectfluor as both oxidant and fluorine source. The reaction involves β-fragmentation of primary alkoxy radicals, followed by the fluorination of the resulting C-centered radical intermediates. The transformation proceeds under mild reaction conditions and exhibits a broad substrate scope, thus opening up a new entrance to the synthesis of fluorinated constructs including α-fluoroimides and 1-fluoroalkyl benzoates as well as secondary and tertiary alkyl fluorides like versatile 2-fluoro-2-alkyl 1,3-propandiol derivatives. The divergent functionalization of the obtained α-fluoroimides enables an efficient access to amine derivatives through C–F bond activation under the action of BF3·OEt2.
Herein, vacancy engineering is utilized reasonably to explore molybdenum tungsten oxide nanowires (W4MoO3 NWs) rich in O-vacancies as an advanced electrochemical nitrogen reduction reaction (eNRR) electrocatalyst, realizing further enhancement of NRR performance. In 0.1 mol/L Na2SO4, W4MoO3 NWs rich in O vacancies (CTAB-D-W4MoO3) achieve a large NH3 yield of 60.77 µg h-1 mg-1cat. at -0.70 V vs. RHE and a high faradaic efficiency of 56.42% at -0.60 V, much superior to the W4MoO3 NWs deficient in oxygen vacancies (20.26 µg h-1 mg-1cat. and 17.1% at -0.70 V vs. RHE). Meanwhile, W4MoO3 NWs rich in O-vacancies also show high electrochemical stability. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations present that O vacancies in CTAB-D-W4MoO3 reduce the energy barrier formed by the intermediate of *N-NH, facilitate the activation and further hydrogenation of *N-N, promote the NRR process, and improve NRR activity.
Early diagnosis and accurate boundary delineation are the key steps of tumor precision medicine. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) detection of liquid biopsy can provide abundant information for early diagnosis of cancer. High detection specificity and good enrichment features are two key factors for CTCs accurate identification in peripheral blood sample. For this purpose, iron oxide (IO)-based surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) bioprobes with good biocompatibility, high detection sensitivity, remarkable detection specificity, and good enrichment efficiency, were developed for detecting different types of CTCs. Magnetic SERS bioprobes combined with programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) antibody are regarded as an effective way to boost the targeting ability and detection specificity, benefiting for accurately capturing and identifying rare CTCs. Four types of CTCs with different PD-L1 expression were accurately distinguished among white blood cells via high-resolution SERS mapping images and stable Raman signals. Subsequently, CTCs blood samples obtained from the triple negative breast cancer patients were also successfully recognized compared to that of health people, indicating IO@AR@PDA-aPD-L1 SERS bioprobe possessed great potential for CTCs detection in liquid biopsy. Additionally, IO-based bioprobe exhibited excellent dual-modal imaging abilities of high-resolution SERS imaging mode and microimaging magnetic resonance imaging mode. These two highly complementary imaging modes endowed IO-based bioprobes unrivalled capacity in tumor boundary differentiation, supporting tumor accurate resection and precise surgery. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that biocompatible IO-based SERS bioprobes without noble metal element were reported not only for CTCs accurate detection, but also for precise tumor boundary delineation, showing great advantages in tumor diagnosis and treatment.
Ethylene carbonate (EC) is the conventional and promising solvent to achieve high energy lithium metal battery. However, the innate low energy level of lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) in EC makes it incompatible with lithium metal, causing uncontrolled lithium growth and low Coulombic efficiency (CE). Herein, we introduced bis(2,2,2-trifluoroethyl) carbonate (TFEC), a carbonate with a strong electron-withdrawing effect (-CF3), which enhances the stability of EC at electrode interface by reducing ion-dipole interactions between Li+ and EC. As the interaction between Li and EC weakens, TFEC and more PF6− anions coordinate with Li+, promoting the formation of contact ion pairs (CIPs) and aggregates (AGGs), thereby increasing the inorganic composition within the solid electrolyte interphase. Additionally, the distinct solvated sheath structure favors the decomposition of fluorinated solvents and PF6− anions, forming inorganic-rich electrode-electrolyte interfaces (SEI and CEI), thereby ensuring high stability for both the Li anode and high-voltage cathode. Hence, when applied in the full-cell LiLiMn0.8Fe0.2PO4, it displays consistent cycling performance, exhibiting minimal capacity decay with a retention rate of 62.5% after 800 cycles, substantially surpassing that of cells using base electrolytes (29.8%).
Deep learning neural network incorporating surface enhancement Raman scattering technique (SERS) is becoming as a powerful tool for the precise classifications and diagnosis of bacterial infections. However, the large amount of sample requirement and time-consuming sample collection severely hinder its applications. We herein propose a spectral concatenation strategy for residual neural network using non-specific and specific SERS spectra for the training data augmentation, which is accessible to acquiring larger training dataset with same number of SERS spectra or same size of training dataset with fewer SERS spectra, compared with pure non-specific SERS spectra. With this strategy, the training loss exhibit rapid convergence, and an average accuracy up to 100% in bacteria classifications was achieved with 50 SERS spectra for each kind of bacterium; even reduced to 20 SERS spectra per kind of bacterium, classification accuracy is still > 95%, demonstrating marked advantage over the results without spectra concatenation. This method can markedly improve the classification accuracy under fewer samples and reduce the data collection workload, and can evidently enhance the performance when used in different machine learning models with high generalization ability. Therefore, this strategy is beneficial for rapid and accurate bacteria classifications with residual neural network.
Poly(butylene adipate-terephthalate) (PBAT), as one of the most common and promising biodegradable plastics, has been widely used in agriculture, packaging, and other industries due to its strong biodegradability properties. It is well known that PBAT suffers a series of natural weathering, mechanical wear, hydrolysis, photochemical transformation, and other abiotic degradation processes before being biodegraded. Therefore, it is particularly important to understand the role of abiotic degradation in the life cycle of PBAT. Since the abiotic degradation of PBAT has not been systematically summarized, this review aims to summarize the mechanisms and main factors of the three major abiotic degradation pathways (hydrolysis, photochemical transformation, and thermochemical degradation) of PBAT. It was found that all of them preferentially destroy the chemical bonds with higher energy (especially C-O and C=O) of PBAT, which eventually leads to the shortening of the polymer chain and then leads to reduction in molecular weight. The main factors affecting these abiotic degradations are closely related to the energy or PBAT structure. These findings provide important theoretical and practical guidance for identifying effective methods for PBAT waste management and proposing advanced schemes to regulate the degradation rate of PBAT.
Membrane distillation (MD) has gained extensive attention for treating highly saline wastewater. However, membrane scaling during the MD process has hindered the rapid development of this technology. Current approaches to mitigate scaling in membrane distillation focus primarily on achieving enhanced hydrophobicity and even superhydrophobicity via utilizing fluorinated fibrous membrane or introducing perfluorosilane modification. Considering the environmental hazards posed by fluorinated compounds, it is highly desirable to develop non-fluorinated membranes with enhanced anti-scaling properties for effective membrane distillation. In this study, we present a non-fluorinated liquid-like MD membrane with exceptional anti-scaling performance. This membrane was facilely fabricated by grafting linear polydimethylsiloxane (LPDMS) onto a hydrophilic polyether sulfone (PES) membrane pre-coated with the intermediate layers of polydopamine and silica (denoted as LPDMS-PES). Remarkably, LPDMS-PES manifested a drastically improved scaling resistance in continuous MD tests than its perfluorinated counterpart, i.e., 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorooctyltrichlorosilane-modified PES membrane (PFOS-PES), in both heterogeneous nucleation-dominated and crystal deposition-dominated scaling processes, despite the latter having a smaller surface energy. LPDMS-PES demonstrated a reduction of crystal accumulation of approximately 85% for NaCl and 73% for CaSO4 in the heterogeneous nucleation-dominated scaling process compared to PFOS-PES. Additionally, in the crystal deposition-dominated scaling process LPDMS-PES exhibited a reduction of about 70% in scale accumulation. These results explicitly evidenced the great potential of the liquid-like membrane to minimize scaling in membrane distillation by inhibiting both scale nucleation and adhesion onto the membrane. We believe the findings of this study have important implications for the design of high-performance MD membranes, particularly in the quest for environmentally sustainable alternatives to perfluorinated materials.
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