Three-gene signature revealing the dynamics of lymphocyte infiltration in subchondral bone during osteoarthritis progression.

Osteoarthritis (OA), a degenerative joint disorder, has an unclear immune infiltration mechanism in subchondral bone (SCB). Thus, this study aims to discern immune infiltration variations in SCB between early- and late-stages of OA and identify pertinent biomarkers. Utilizing the GSE515188 bulk-seq profile from the Gene Expression Omnibus database, we performed single-sample gene-set enrichment analysis alongside weighted gene co-expression network analysis to identify key cells and immune-related genes (IRGs) involved in SCB at both stages. At the meanwhile, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in the same dataset and intersected with IRGs to find IR-DEGs. Protein-protein interaction network and enrichment analyses and further gene filtering using LASSO regression led to the discovery of potential biomarkers, which were then validated by ROC curve analysis, single-cell RNA sequencing, qRT-PCR, western blot and immunofluorescence. ScRNA-seq analysis using GSE196678, qRT-PCR, western blot and immunofluorescence results confirmed the upregulation of their expression levels in early-stage OA SCB samples. Our comprehensive analysis revealed lymphocytes infiltration as a major feature in early OA SCB. A total of 13 IR-DEGs were identified, showing significant enrichment in T- or B-cell activation pathways. Three of them (CD247, POU2AF1, and TNFRSF13B) were selected via the LASSO regression analysis, and results from the ROC curve analyses indicated the diagnostic efficacy of these 3 genes as biomarkers. These findings may aid in investigating the mechanisms of SCB immune infiltration in OA, stratifying OA progression, and identifying relevant therapeutic targets.

From waste plastics to layered porous nitrogen-doped carbon materials with excellent HER performance.

Herein, layered porous nitrogen-doped carbon sheets (LPNCS) prepared from waste plastics are employed as an electrocatalytic carrier for the HER under alkaline conditions. The N-doped coral-like nanostructure with abundant meso- and macropores would shorten the proton diffusion pathway, reduce the mass transfer resistance and promote Ru dispersion. The prepared Ru/LPNCS shows an excellent performance with an overpotential of 15 mV at 10 mA cm-2, even lower than that of most reported Ru-based catalysts and the commercial Pt/C catalyst (17 mV), which provides a potential application for converting waste plastics into highly efficient HER catalysts.

Deep Bi-LSTM Networks for Sequential Recommendation.

Recent years have seen a surge in approaches that combine deep learning and recommendation systems to capture user preference or item interaction evolution over time. However, the most related work only consider the sequential similarity between the items and neglects the item content feature information and the impact difference of interacted items on the next items. This paper introduces the deep bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) and self-attention mechanism into the sequential recommender while fusing the information of item sequences and contents. Specifically, we deal with the issues in a three-pronged attack: the improved item embedding, weight update, and the deep bidirectional LSTM preference learning. First, the user-item sequences are embedded into a low-dimensional item vector space representation via Item2vec, and the class label vectors are concatenated for each embedded item vector. Second, the embedded item vectors learn different impact weights of each item to achieve item awareness via self-attention mechanism; the embedded item vectors and corresponding weights are then fed into the bidirectional LSTM model to learn the user preference vectors. Finally, the top similar items in the preference vector space are evaluated to generate the recommendation list for users. By conducting comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our model outperforms the traditional recommendation algorithms on Recall@20 and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR@20).

Antioxidant activity and oxidative stress protection of duck proteins hydrolysates in SK-N-SH cells.

Studies have found that natural antioxidants, which are free-radical scavengers, can reduce the risk of diseases caused by free radicals. This work investigated the antioxidant properties of duck proteins hydrolysates. The free-radical scavenging function of CP-1 (M(r) > 10 kDa), CP-2 (5 kDa < M(r) < 10 kDa) and CP-3 (M(r) < 5 kDa), obtained through ultrafiltration and gel filtration were evaluated. The results showed that the lower molecular weight fraction exhibited a stronger free-radical scavenging ability. The highest free-radical scavenging activity was detected in the fraction of p4 purified from CP-3 using Sephadex G-15 column chromatography. The 50% inhibitory value (IC(50)) of p4 for scavenging radicals of superoxide, hydroxyl and 1,1-diphenyl-2-pycrylhydrazyl (DPPH) were, respectively, 0.97 mg mL(-1), 0.84 mg mL(-1) and 1.84 mg mL(-1). Furthermore, the p4 fraction at a concentration of 10 µg mL(-1) increased cell viability from 84.8% to 94% under antioxidative stress in neuroblastoma SK-N-SH cells.

Benefit assessment of soil and water conservation from cropland to forest in hilly Loess Plateau at Qinghai.

The information of slope and vegetation coverage of the monitoring region were extracted, based on DEM (Digital Evaluation Model) and Spot5 Satellite data images, and fishnet grid was generated using GIS (Geographic Information System) and RS (Remote Sensing) technique. Applying the information of slop and vegetation coverage layers into the corresponding space grid by using the function of zonal statistics and analysis, it can realize overlay analysis based on Standards for Classification and Gradation of Soil Erosion (SL190-2007), and obtains the map of soil erosion intensity of the monitoring region. Finally, according to Specifications for Assessment of Forest Ecosystem Services (LY/T1721-2008) and monitoring data of typical plot, the soil and water conservation value from cropland to forest was evaluated quantitatively in 2009. The results showed that the area, on and below the moderate level, was 93600 ha, taking up 50.03% of total conversion of farmland to forest area (185100 ha), which indicates a 14.64 million (t/a) of soil conversion, and a 1520 million Yuan for erosion control. The results of the study showed that the soil and water conservation was very effective.