Fabrication of Nb2O5/C nanocomposites as a high performance anode for lithium ion battery

Nb₂O₅/C nanosheets are successfully prepared through a mixing process and followed by heating treatment.Such Nb₂O₅/C based electrode exhibits high rate performance and remarkable cycling ability, showing a high and stable specific capacity of ~380 mAh g^-1 at the current density of 50 mA g^-1(much higher than the theoretical capacity of Nb₂O₅).Further more,at a current density of 500 mA g^-1,the nanocomposites electrode still exhibits a specific capacity of above 150 mAh g^-1 after 100 cycles.These results suggest the Nb₂O₅/C nanocomposite is a high performance anode material for lithium-ion batteries.     

An inverse backward problem for degenerate parabolic equations

This work studies the inverse problem of reconstructing an initial value function in the degenerate parabolic equation using the final measurement data. Problems of this type have important applications in the field of financial engineering. Being different from other inverse backward parabolic problems, the mathematical model in our article may be allowed to degenerate at some part of boundaries, which may lead to the corresponding boundary conditions missing. The conditional stability of the solution is obtained using the logarithmic convexity method. A finite difference scheme is constructed to solve the direct problem and the corresponding stability and convergence are proved. The Landweber iteration algorithm is applied to the inverse problem and some typical numerical experiments are also performed in the paper. The numerical results show that the proposed method is stable and the unknown initial value is recovered very well.© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 33: 1900–1923, 2017     

自紧身管临界裂纹尺寸的概率断裂力学研究

基于概率断裂力学理论和Mome Caflo模拟方法，本文进行了自紧身管临界裂纹尺寸的可靠性研究。自紧身管内表面的疲劳裂纹考虑为半椭圆形式。裂纹尖端处的应力强度因子由内压和自紧残余应力共同产生。自紧残余应力采用了符合身管材料具有强化和包辛格效应性能推导的公式计算，它产生的应力强度因子通过权函数方法得到。根据断裂准则，可计算出自紧身管的临界裂纹尺寸。实例分析表明，对数正态分布为临界裂纹尺寸的最佳分布，同时给出了在各种置信度和可靠度下自紧身管的临界裂纹尺寸。     

Antioxidant encapsulated porous poly(lactide-co-glycolide) microparticles for developing long acting inhalation system

The purpose of this study was to fabricate porous poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) microparticles for efficient pulmonary deposition and increased therapeutic duration of the antioxidant anthocyanin (ATH). These microparticles were prepared by a water-in-oil-in-water (W(1)/O/W(2)) multi-emulsion method with vaporizing ammonium bicarbonate (AB) as a porogen and starch as a viscous additive. High porosity achieved by the decomposition reaction of AB to the base of ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water vapor at 50°C enabled efficient deposition of ATH throughout the entire lung in BALB/c mice. In addition, the porous microparticles incorporating starch showed sustained ATH release characteristics (up to 5 days) and protracted antioxidant activity (up to 5 days) for 2,2-diphenyl-1-pikryl-hydrazyl (DPPH) radicals, which was comparable to that of the porous microparticles without starch which completely released ATH in 2h. Furthermore, these porous microparticles incorporating starch led to longer ATH residence (up to 20 days) in in vivo lung epithelium. We believe that this system has great pharmaceutical potential as a long-acting antioxidant for continuously relieving oxidative stress in pulmonary diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).     

Microbiosensors based on DNA modified single-walled carbon nanotube and Pt black nanocomposites

Glucose and ATP biosensors have important applications in diagnostics and research. Biosensors based on conventional materials suffer from low sensitivity and low spatial resolution. Our previous work has shown that combining single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with Pt nanoparticles can significantly enhance the performance of electrochemical biosensors. The immobilization of SWCNTs on biosensors remains challenging due to the aqueous insolubility originating from van der Waals forces. In this study, we used single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) to modify SWCNTs to increase solubility in water. This allowed us to explore new schemes of combining ssDNA-SWCNT and Pt black in aqueous media systems. The result is a nanocomposite with enhanced biosensor performance. The surface morphology, electroactive surface area, and electrocatalytic performance of different fabrication protocols were studied and compared. The ssDNA-SWCNT/Pt black nanocomposite constructed by a layered scheme proved most effective in terms of biosensor activity. The key feature of this protocol is the exploitation of ssDNA-SWCNTs as molecular templates for Pt black electrodeposition. The glucose and ATP microbiosensors fabricated on this platform exhibited high sensitivity (817.3 nA/mM and 45.6 nA/mM, respectively), wide linear range (up to 7 mM and 510 μM), low limit of detection (1 μM and 2 μM) and desirable selectivity. This work is significant to biosensor development because this is the first demonstration of ssDNA-SWCNT/Pt black nanocomposite as a platform for constructing both single-enzyme and multi-enzyme biosensors for physiological applications.     

Microproteomic analysis of 10,000 laser captured microdissected breast tumor cells using short-range sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and porous layer open tubular liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

Precise proteomic profiling of limited levels of disease tissue represents an extremely challenging task. Here, we present an effective and reproducible microproteomic workflow for sample sizes of only 10,000 cells that integrates selective sample procurement via laser capture microdissection (LCM), sample clean-up and protein level fractionation using short-range SDS-PAGE, followed by ultrasensitive LC-MS/MS analysis using a 10 μm i.d. porous layer open tubular (PLOT) column. With 10,000 LCM captured mouse hepatocytes for method development and performance assessment, only 10% of the in-gel digest, equivalent to ～1000 cells, was needed per LC-MS/MS analysis. The optimized workflow was applied to the differential proteomic analysis of 10,000 LCM collected primary and metastatic breast cancer cells from the same patient. More than 1100 proteins were identified from each injection with >1700 proteins identified from three LCM samples of 10,000 cells from the same patient (1123 with at least two unique peptides). Label free quantitation (spectral counting) was performed to identify differential protein expression between the primary and metastatic cell populations. Informatics analysis of the resulting data indicated that vesicular transport and extracellular remodeling processes were significantly altered between the two cell types. The ability to extract meaningful biological information from limited, but highly informative cell populations demonstrates the significant benefits of the described microproteomic workflow.     

The effect of conjugating RGD into 3D alginate hydrogels on adipogenic differentiation of human adipose-derived stromal cells

The effects of RGD peptide conjugation to alginate hydrogel on the adipogenic differentiation of ASCs was investigated. After 3 d of culture, RGD-modified alginate hydrogels significantly stimulated FAK and integrin α1 gene expressions and vinculin expression in ASCs. In addition, RGD-modified alginate hydrogels significantly enhanced the adipogenic differentiation of human ASCs to exhibit higher expression levels of oil red O staining and adipogenic genes compared to those of the control group (unmodified gels). These results suggest potential applications of RGD-modified alginate gels for adipose tissue regeneration.