Abiotic transformation of atrazine in aqueous phase by biogenic bixbyite-type Mn2O3 produced by a soil-derived Mn(II)-oxidizing bacterium of Providencia sp.

Recently, biogenic Mn oxides (BioMnOx) are considered as the promising degradation agents for environmental organic contaminants. However, little information is available for the degradation of atrazine by BioMnOx. In this work, BioMnOx, generated by a soil-derived Mn(II)-oxidizing bacterium, Providencia sp. LLDRA6, was explored to degrade atrazine. To begin with, collective results from mineral characterization analyses demonstrated that this BioMnOx was biogenic bixbyite-type Mn2O3. After that, purified biogenic Mn2O3 was found to exhibit a much higher removal efficiency for atrazine in aqueous phase, as compared to unpurified biogenic Mn2O3 and LLDRA6 biomass. During the atrazine removal by biogenic Mn2O3, six intermediate degradation products were discovered, comprising deethylatrazine (DEA), hydroxylatrazine (HA), deethylhydroxyatrazine (DEHA), ammeline, cyanuric acid, and 5-methylhexahydro-1,3,5-triazine-2-thione (MTT). Particularly, the intermediate, MTT, was considered as a new degradation product of atrazine, which was not described previously. Meanwhile, Mn(II) ions were released from biogenic Mn2O3, and on the surface of biogenic Mn2O3, the content of hydroxyl O species increased at the expense of that of lattice and water O species, but the fundamental crystalline structure of this Mn oxide remained unchanged. Additionally, no dissociative Mn(III) was found to involve in atrazine degradation. In summary, these results demonstrated that both the non-oxidative and oxidative reactions underlay the degradation of atrazine by biogenic Mn2O3.

A soil-borne Mn(II)-oxidizing bacterium of Providencia sp. exploits a strategy of superoxide production coupled to hydrogen peroxide consumption to generate Mn oxides.

Bacterial non-enzymatic Mn(II) oxidation involving reactive oxygen species (ROS) (i.e., indirect oxidation), initially discovered from a marine alpha-proteobacterium, is believed to be of importance in controlling biogeochemical cycles. For soil-borne bacteria, however, evidence of indirect Mn(II) oxidation remains unclear. In this study, the indirect Mn(II) oxidation was evidenced in a soil-borne bacterium, Providencia sp. LLDRA6. First, with and without 50 mM of Mn(II) exposure for LLDRA6, 300 differentially expressed genes were found to be linked to Mn(II) exposure via transcriptome sequencing. Among them, an operon, responsible for phenylacetic acid catabolism, was sharply upregulated in transcription, drawing us a special attention, since its transcriptional upregulation has recently shown to be important for withstanding ROS. Next, a fluorometric probe, 2',7'-Dichlorofluorescin diacetate (DCFDA), was used to qualitatively detect ROS from cells, showing a distinct increase in fluorescence intensities of ROS during Mn(II) exposure. Furthermore, concentrations of superoxide and hydrogen peroxide from cells were detected, respectively, with and without Mn(II) exposure, exhibiting that when Mn(II) oxidation occurred, superoxide concentration significantly increased but hydrogen peroxide concentration significantly decreased. Particularly, superoxide produced by LLDRA6 was proven to be the oxidant for Mn(II) in the formation of Mn oxides. Finally, we predicted links between phenylacetic acid metabolism pathway and ROS during Mn(II) exposure, proposing that the excessive ROS, generated in response to Mn(II) exposure, transcriptionally activate phenylacetic acid catabolism presumably by increasing concentrations of highly reactive oxepins.

Clinical nursing pathway improves disease cognition and quality of life of elderly patients with hypertension and cerebral infarction.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore the application effect of clinical nursing pathway model in elderly patients with hypertension and cerebral infarction. METHODS: A total of 106 elderly patients with hypertension and cerebral infarction were recruited and divided into a control group (n=51) and a test group (n=55). Both groups of patients received conventional care, and the test group was given additional care if clinical nursing pathway. The blood pressure indexes, knowledge of stroke, nursing satisfaction, neurological deficit, and activity of daily living (ADL) of the two groups of patients were observed. RESULTS: After nursing care, the scores of Stroke Knowledge Questionnaire (SKQ) and Barthel index (BI) increased in both groups, and they were significantly higher in the test group than in the control group. The scores of systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) decreased significantly in both groups after nursing, and they were lower in the test group than the control group. In addition, patients in the test group exhibited higher nursing satisfaction than the control group, as well as higher rates of blood pressure control at discharge, two months, four months and six months after discharge. CONCLUSION: The application of clinical nursing pathway can improve the disease cognition and quality of life of elderly patients with hypertension and cerebral infarction, and promote their recovery.

Removal of Pb(II) Ions from Aqueous Solutions by Spherical Nanocomposites Synthesized Through Immobilization of Paecilomyces lilacinus in Silica Nanoparticles Coated with Ca-Alginate.

In the present study, a novel microbial nanocomposite "Paecilomyces lilacinus-silica nanoparticlescalcium-alginate beads" (P. lilacinus-SN-Cal-Alg) were synthesized and their high efficiency for removing Pb(II) ions was demonstrated in aqueous solution. P. lilacinus-SN-Cal-Alg beads before and after the adsorption of Pb(II) were characterized by FT-IR, SEM-EDS, and XPS analyses. The adsorption capacity of Pb(II) by P. lilacinus-SN-Cal-Alg beads was analyzed in aqueous solution. For comparison, the adsorption capacity of Pb(II) by another type of microbial composites, namely, P. lilacinus-Cal-Alg beads, without addition of silica nanoparticles, was also studied in parallel. Lastly, the equilibrium data in adsorption process were examined by both Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models to evaluate adsorption mechanism. The results showed that an excellent removal efficiency of Pb(II) in aqueous solution (85.54%) was obtained at initial concentration of 200 mg/L by using the P. lilacinus-SN-Cal-Alg beads. Meanwhile, they exhibited the better adsorption capacity for Pb(II) than P. lilacinus-Cal-Alg beads. The adsorption process by P. lilacinus-SN-Cal-Alg beads was best described by the Langmuir model indicating that monolayer adsorption of Pb(II) ions takes place on the beads surfaces and showed that its maximum adsorption capacity was 282.49 mg/g.

Discovery of a novel native bacterium of Providencia sp. with high biosorption and oxidation ability of manganese for bioleaching of heavy metal contaminated soils.

Heavy metal removal from contaminated soils is a long-term challenging problem important for global economics, environment, and human health. Marine and freshwater-originated Mn(II)-oxidizing bacteria are considered as the promising bioremediation agents for environmental applications. However, practical application of soil-originated Mn(II)-oxidizing bacteria remains to be developed for contaminated soil remediation. In this work, the Mn(II) biosorption/oxidation mechanism of a new soil-originated bacterium and its bioleaching efficiency of heavy metals from soils was studied in detail. First, we found, isolated and identified a new highly Mn(II)-tolerant bacterial strain Providencia sp. LLDRA6 from heavy metal-contaminated soils. Next, strain LLDRA6 demonstrated its high Mn(II) biosorption capacity in aqueous solution. Then, Mn(II) adsorption by LLDRA6 was largely proven to be a synergistic effect of (i) Mn(II) precipitation on the cell surface, (ii) oxidation of Mn(II) into BioMnOx on the cell surface, and (iii) intracellular accumulation of insoluble MnCO3. Finally, combination bioleaching by the bacterium of Providencia sp. LLDRA6 and its formed BioMnOx was proposed to develop a potential environment-friendly and cost-effective technique to remediate severely heavy metal-contaminated soils. The bioleaching tests demonstrated that the combination of Providencia sp. LLDRA6 and BioMnOx exhibited an excellent removal efficiency for heavy metals of Pb (81.72%), Cr (88.29%), Cd (90.34%), Cu (91.25%), Mn (56.13%), and Zn (59.83%) from contaminated soils, resulting in an increase of removal efficiency in the range of 1.68-26.4% compared to Providencia sp. LLDRA6 alone. Moreover, the bacterial leachate facilitated the residual fraction of metals to transform into the easily migratory fractions in soils. These findings have demonstrated that strain LLDRA6 has high adsorption ability to remove heavy metals from contaminated soils, thus providing a promising bio-adsorbent for environmental bioremediation.

Suppressing Ku70/Ku80 expression elevates homology-directed repair efficiency in primary fibroblasts.

The main DNA repair pathways, nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) and homology-directed repair (HDR), are complementary to each other; hence, interruptions of the NHEJ pathway can favor HDR. Improving HDR efficiency in animal primary fibroblasts can facilitate the generation of gene knock-in animals with agricultural and biomedical values by somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this study, we used siRNA to suppress the expression of Ku70 and Ku80, which are the key factors in NHEJ pathway, to investigate the effect of Ku silencing on the HDR efficiency in pig fetal fibroblasts. Down-regulation of Ku70 and Ku80 resulted in the promotion of the frequencies of multiple HDR pathways, including homologous recombination, single strand annealing, and single-stranded oligonucleotide-mediated DNA repair. We further evaluated the effects of Ku70 and Ku80 silencing on promoting HR-mediated knock-in efficiency in two porcine endogenous genes and found a significant increase in the amount of knock-in cells in Ku-silenced fibroblasts compared with control. The RNA interference strategy will benefit the generation of cell lines and organisms with precise genetic modifications.

Prediction of CCR5 receptor binding affinity of substituted 1-(3,3-diphenylpropyl)-piperidinyl amides and ureas based on the heuristic method, support vector machine and projection pursuit regression.

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models were developed to predict for CCR5 binding affinity of substituted 1-(3,3-diphenylpropyl)-piperidinyl amides and ureas using linear free energy relationship (LFER). Eight molecular descriptors selected by the heuristic method (HM) in CODESSA were used as inputs to perform multiple linear regression (MLR), support vector machine (SVM) and projection pursuit regression (PPR) studies. Compared with MLR model, the SVM and PPR models give better results with the predicted correlation coefficient (R(2)) of 0.867 and 0.834 and the squared standard error (s(2)) of 0.095 and 0.119 for the training set and R(2) of 0.732 and 0.726 and s(2) of 0.210 and 0.207 for the test set, respectively. It indicates that the SVM and PPR approaches are more adapted to the set of molecules we studied. In addition, methods used in this paper are simple, practical and effective for chemists to predict the human CCR5 chemokine receptor.

[Quantitative relationship between gas chromatographic retention time and structural parameters of alkylphenols].

Alkylphenols are a group of permanent pollutants in the environment and could adversely disturb the human endocrine system. It is therefore important to effectively separate and measure the alkylphenols. To guide the chromatographic analysis of these compounds in practice, the development of quantitative relationship between the molecular structure and the retention time of alkylphenols becomes necessary. In this study, topological, constitutional, geometrical, electrostatic and quantum-chemical descriptors of 44 alkylphenols were calculated using a software, CODESSA, and these descriptors were pre-selected using the heuristic method. As a result, three-descriptor linear model (LM) was developed to describe the relationship between the molecular structure and the retention time of alkylphenols. Meanwhile, the non-linear regression model was also developed based on support vector machine (SVM) using the same three descriptors. The correlation coefficient (R(2)) for the LM and SVM was 0.98 and 0. 92, and the corresponding root-mean-square error was 0. 99 and 2. 77, respectively. By comparing the stability and prediction ability of the two models, it was found that the linear model was a better method for describing the quantitative relationship between the retention time of alkylphenols and the molecular structure. The results obtained suggested that the linear model could be applied for the chromatographic analysis of alkylphenols with known molecular structural parameters.