Non-Fully Conjugated Dimerized Giant Acceptors with Different Alkyl-Linked Sites for Stable and 19.13 % Efficiency Organic Solar Cells

Achieving both high power conversion efficiency (PCE) and device stability is a major challenge for the practical development of organic solar cells (OSCs). Herein, three non-fully conjugated dimerized giant acceptors (named 2Y-sites, including wing-site-linked 2Y-wing, core-site-linked 2Y-core, and end-site-linked 2Y-end) are developed. They share the similar monomer precursors but have different alkyl-linked sites, offering the fine-tuned molecular absorption, packing, glass transition temperature, and carrier mobility. Among their binary active layers, D18/2Y-wing has better miscibility, leading to optimized morphology and more efficient charge transfer compared to D18/2Y-core and D18/2Y-end. Therefore, the D18/2Y-wing-based OSCs achieve a superior PCE of 17.73 %, attributed to enhanced photocurrent and fill factor. Furthermore, the D18/2Y-wing-based OSCs exhibit a balance of high PCE and improved stability, distinguishing them within the 2Y-sites. Building on the success of 2Y-wing in binary systems, we extend its application to ternary OSCs by pairing it with the near-infrared absorbing D18/BS3TSe-4F host. Thanks to the complementary absorption within 300-970 nm and further optimized morphology, ternary OSCs obtain a higher PCE of 19.13 %, setting a new efficiency benchmark for the dimer-derived OSCs. This approach of alkyl-linked site engineering for constructing dimerized giant acceptors presents a promising pathway to improve both PCE and stability of OSCs.

Transcription factor OsMYB30 increases trehalose content to inhibit α-amylase and seed germination at low temperature

Low-temperature germination (LTG) is an important agronomic trait for direct-seeding cultivation of rice (Oryza sativa). Both OsMYB30 and OsTPP1 regulate the cold stress response in rice, but the function of OsMYB30 and OsTPP1 in regulating LTG and the underlying molecular mechanism remains unknown. Employing transcriptomics and functional studies revealed a sugar signaling pathway that regulates seed germination in response to low temperature (LT). Expression of OsMYB30 and OsTPP1 was induced by LT during seed germination, and overexpressing either OsMYB30 or OsTPP1 delayed seed germination and increased sensitivity to LT during seed germination. Transcriptomics and qPCR revealed that expression of OsTPP1 was upregulated in OsMYB30-overexpressing lines but downregulated in OsMYB30-knockout lines. In vitro and in vivo experiments revealed that OsMYB30 bound to the promoter of OsTPP1 and regulated the abundance of OsTPP1 transcripts. Overaccumulation of trehalose (Tre) was found in both OsMYB30- and OsTPP1-overexpressing lines, resulting in inhibition of α-amylase 1a (OsAMY1a) gene during seed germination. Both LT and exogenous Tre treatments suppressed the expression of OsAMY1a, and the osamy1a mutant was not sensitive to exogenous Tre during seed germination. Overall, we concluded that OsMYB30 expression was induced by LT to activate the expression of OsTPP1 and increase Tre content, which thus inhibited α-amylase activity and seed germination. This study identified a phytohormone-independent pathway that integrates environmental cues with internal factors to control seed germination.

Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone Induced "Confinement Effect" on PbI2 and the Improvement on Crystallization and Thermal Stability of Perovskite

Polyvinyl pyrrolidone is blended in PbI2 with varied concentration, so as to study the coarsening dynamics of perovskite during the two-step growth method. It is observed that polyvinyl pyrrolidone hinders the crystallization of PbI2 and helps to form a more amorphous PbI2 matrix, which then improves perovskite crystallization. As the blending concentration increases from 0 to 2 mM, average crystallite/grain size of perovskite increases from 40.29 nm/0.79 µm to 84.35 nm/1.02 µm while surface fluctuation decreases slightly from 25.64 to 23.96 nm. The observations are caused by the "confinement effect" brought by polyvinyl pyrrolidone on PbI2 . Elevating blending concentration of polyvinyl pyrrolidone results in smaller PbI2 crystallites and more amorphous PbI2 matrix, thus reducing the diffusion/reaction barrier between PbI2 and organic salt and favoring perovskite crystallization. As blending concentration increases from 0 to 2 mM, the device efficiency rises from 19.76 (± 0.60) % to 20.50 (± 0.89) %, with the optimized value up to 22.05%, which is further improved to 24.48% after n-Octylammonium iodide (OAI)-basing surface modification. The study enlarges the scope of "confinement effect" brought by polymer molecules, which is beneficial for efficient and stable perovskite solar cell fabrication.

Temperature-humidity evolution and radon exhalation mechanism of red clay-bentonite covering layer in uranium mill tailings pond

To ensure the safety and stability of the beach surface of the decommissioned uranium mill tailings pond, this paper uses red clay-bentonite and red clay (1:1) to carry out covering layer radon reduction simulation experiments to study the temperature, humidity, and radon reduction effect of the covering layer under natural conditions. The results show that the radon exhalation rate of red clay-bentonite cover layer is only 0.32 times that of red clay, which has a better radon reduction effect. The red clay-bentonite cover layer has better water retention and comparable heat preservation effect than red clay cover layer. The red clay-bentonite and red clay temperature curves follow the same evolution trend and were close together in the same outdoor conditions, and the humidity curves showed a difference of 1% to 3%. Soil temperature is the dominant factor affecting the variation of radon exhalation of red clay-bentonite and red clay covering layer with unsaturated water content.

The important role of miR-1-3p in cancers

Cancer is a malignant tumor that seriously threatens human life and health. At present, the main treatment methods include surgical resection, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and immunotherapy. However, the mechanism of tumor occurrence and development is complex, and it produces resistance to some traditional treatment methods, leading to treatment failure and a high mortality rate for patients. Therefore, exploring the molecular mechanisms of tumor occurrence, development, and drug resistance is a very important task. MiRNAs are a type of non-coding small RNA that regulate a series of biological effects by binding to the 3'-UTR of the target mRNA, degrading the mRNA, or inhibiting its translation. MiR-1-3p is an important member of them, which is abnormally expressed in various tumors and closely related to the occurrence and development of tumors. This article introduces miR-1-3p from multiple aspects, including its production and regulation, role in tumor occurrence and development, clinical significance, role in drug resistance, and approaches for targeting miR-1-3p. Intended to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the important role of miR-1-3p in tumors.

Sequential inspiratory muscle exercise-noninvasive positive pressure ventilation alleviates oxidative stress in COPD by mediating SOCS5/JAK2/STAT3 pathway

BACKGROUND

Pulmonary rehabilitation training is of great significance for the prognosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate the therapeutic effect and pathway of a new sequential noninvasive positive pressure ventilation (NIPPV) + inspiratory muscle training (IMT) therapy.

METHODS

A total of 100 COPD patients were enrolled and randomly divided into oxygen therapy (OT), NIPPV, IMT and sequential (NIPPV + IMT) group. Lung function, exercise endurance, quality of life, and dyspnea symptoms were examined and recorded. Then, reactive oxygen species (ROS), malonaldehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione (GSH) levels were detected by enzyme-linked immunoassay, and suppressor of cytokine signaling 5 (SOCS5)/janus kinase 2 (JAK2)/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) pathway expression changes were detected by quantitative real time-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and western blot. A mouse model of COPD was then established to further verify the effects of SOCS5/JAK2/STAT3 pathways on lung function and oxidative stress.

RESULTS

After 8 weeks of treatment, NIPPV, IMT or sequential (NIPPV + IMT) significantly improved exercise endurance, quality of life and dyspnea, reduced oxidative stress, promoted SOCS5 expression and inhibited the activation of JAK2/STAT3 pathway, and no significant effect was observed on lung function of COPD patients. Notably, sequential (NIPPV + IMT) showed better therapeutic outcomes than either IMT or NIPPV alone. Moreover, results at the animal level showed that overexpression of SOCS5 significantly reduced pulmonary inflammatory infiltration, pathological changes and oxidative stress levels in COPD mice, enhanced lung function, and inhibited the activation of JAK2/STAT3 pathway.

CONCLUSION

Our results elucidated that sequential (NIPPV + IMT) significantly relieved COPD development by regulating SOCS5/JAK2/STAT3 signaling-mediated oxidative stress.

Octylammonium Iodide Induced In-situ Healing at "perovskite/Carbon" Interface to Achieve 85% RH-moisture Stable, Hole-Conductor-Free Perovskite Solar Cells with Power Conversion Efficiency >19

"Perovskite/carbon" interface is a bottle-neck for hole-conductor-free, carbon-electrode basing perovskite solar cells due to the energy mismatch and concentrated defects. In this article, in-situ healing strategy is proposed by doping octylammonium iodide into carbon paste that used to prepare carbon-electrode on perovskite layer. This strategy is found to strengthen interfacial contact and reduce interfacial defects on one hand, and slightly elevate the work function of the carbon-electrode on other hand. Due to this effect, charge extraction is accelerated, while recombination is obviously reduced. Accordingly, power conversion efficiency of the hole-conductor-free, planar perovskite solar cells is upgraded by ≈50%, or from 11.65 (± 1.59) % to 17.97 (± 0.32) % (AM1.5G, 100 mW cm-2 ). The optimized device shows efficiency of 19.42% and open-circuit voltage of 1.11 V. Meanwhile, moisture-stability is tested by keeping the unsealed devices in closed chamber with relative humidity of 85%. The "in-situ healing" strategy helps to obtain T80 time of >450 h for the carbon-electrode basing devices, which is four times of the reference ones. Thus, a kind of "internal encapsulation effect" has also been reached. The "in situ healing" strategy facilitates the fabrication of efficient and stable hole-conductor-free devices basing on carbon-electrode.

HSSNet: A End-to-End Network for Detecting Tiny Targets of Apple Leaf Diseases in Complex Backgrounds

Apple leaf diseases are one of the most important factors that reduce apple quality and yield. The object detection technology based on deep learning can detect diseases in a timely manner and help automate disease control, thereby reducing economic losses. In the natural environment, tiny apple leaf disease targets (a resolution is less than 32 × 32 pixel2) are easily overlooked. To address the problems of complex background interference, difficult detection of tiny targets and biased detection of prediction boxes that exist in standard detectors, in this paper, we constructed a tiny target dataset TTALDD-4 containing four types of diseases, which include Alternaria leaf spot, Frogeye leaf spot, Grey spot and Rust, and proposed the HSSNet detector based on the YOLOv7-tiny benchmark for professional detection of apple leaf disease tiny targets. Firstly, the H-SimAM attention mechanism is proposed to focus on the foreground lesions in the complex background of the image. Secondly, SP-BiFormer Block is proposed to enhance the ability of the model to perceive tiny targets of leaf diseases. Finally, we use the SIOU loss to improve the case of prediction box bias. The experimental results show that HSSNet achieves 85.04% mAP (mean average precision), 67.53% AR (average recall), and 83 FPS (frames per second). Compared with other standard detectors, HSSNet maintains high real-time detection speed with higher detection accuracy. This provides a reference for the automated control of apple leaf diseases.

An Accurate Classification of Rice Diseases Based on ICAI-V4

Rice is a crucial food crop, but it is frequently affected by diseases during its growth process. Some of the most common diseases include rice blast, flax leaf spot, and bacterial blight. These diseases are widespread, highly infectious, and cause significant damage, posing a major challenge to agricultural development. The main problems in rice disease classification are as follows: (1) The images of rice diseases that were collected contain noise and blurred edges, which can hinder the network's ability to accurately extract features of the diseases. (2) The classification of disease images is a challenging task due to the high intra-class diversity and inter-class similarity of rice leaf diseases. This paper proposes the Candy algorithm, an image enhancement technique that utilizes improved Canny operator filtering (the gravitational edge detection algorithm) to emphasize the edge features of rice images and minimize the noise present in the images. Additionally, a new neural network (ICAI-V4) is designed based on the Inception-V4 backbone structure, with a coordinate attention mechanism added to enhance feature capture and overall model performance. The INCV backbone structure incorporates Inception-iv and Reduction-iv structures, with the addition of involution to enhance the network's feature extraction capabilities from a channel perspective. This enables the network to better classify similar images of rice diseases. To address the issue of neuron death caused by the ReLU activation function and improve model robustness, Leaky ReLU is utilized. Our experiments, conducted using the 10-fold cross-validation method and 10,241 images, show that ICAI-V4 has an average classification accuracy of 95.57%. These results indicate the method's strong performance and feasibility for rice disease classification in real-life scenarios.

Weighted gene coexpression correlation network analysis reveals the potential molecular regulatory mechanism of citrate and anthocyanin accumulation between postharvest 'Bingtangcheng' and 'Tarocco' blood orange fruit

BACKGROUND

Organic acids and anthocyanins are the most important compounds for the flavor and nutritional quality of citrus fruit. However, there are few reports on the involvement of co-regulation of citrate and anthocyanin metabolism. Here, we performed a comparative transcriptome analysis to elucidate the genes and pathways involved in both citrate and anthocyanin accumulation in postharvest citrus fruit with 'Tarocco' blood orange (TBO; high accumulation) and 'Bingtangcheng' sweet orange (BTSO; low accumulation).

RESULTS

A robust core set of 825 DEGs were found to be temporally associated with citrate and anthocyanin accumulation throughout the storage period through transcriptome analysis. Further according to the results of weighted gene coexpression correlation network analysis (WGCNA), the turquoise and brown module was highly positively correlated with both of the content of citrate and anthocyanin, and p-type ATPase (PH8), phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase kinase (PEPCK), chalcone isomerase (CHI), flavanone 3-hydroxylase (F3H), flavonoid 3'-hydroxylase (F3'H) and glutathione S transferase (GST) were considered key structural genes. Moreover, MYB family transcription factor (PH4), Zinc finger PHD-type transcription factor (CHR4, HAC12), Zinc finger SWIM-type transcription factor (FAR1) and Zinc finger C3H1-type transcription factor (ATC3H64) were considered hub genes related to these structural genes. Further qRT-PCR analysis verified that these transcription factors were highly expressed in TBO fruit and their expression profiles were significantly positively correlated with the structural genes of citrate and anthocyanin metabolism as well as the content of citrate and anthocyanin content.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest that the CHR4, FAR1, ATC3H64 and HAC12 may be the new transcription regulators participate in controlling the level of citrate and anthocyanin in postharvest TBO fruit in addition to PH4. These results may providing new insight into the regulation mechanism of citrate and anthocyanin accumulation in citrus fruit.

Seismic design of rectangular/square columns in SDOF systems based on their damage performance

The quantitative relationship between the energy dissipation capacity of RC members and displacement deformation, cumulative energy dissipation and structural design parameters were established by the research group in the early stage, and then the damage index based on energy dissipation capacity and performance index limits were proposed. Based on the existing research, the seismic design method of RC square/rectangular column members for SDOF systems based on damage performance is proposed, and the method is introduced by an example. It is found that the seismic design method establishes a quantitative relationship between the structural design parameters and seismic parameters, which is convenient to guide the structural design. The increase in the ratio of transverse reinforcement can reduce the damage to RC column members, but when the ratio of transverse reinforcement exceeds a certain threshold value, the damage reduction effect is not obvious. The increase of the earthquake duration can aggravate the development of the damage to the RC column members, and the increasing effect is first fast and then slow. This seismic design method can make up for the deficiency that the duration effect is not considered in the current seismic code.

A novel miRNA-disease association prediction model using dual random walk with restart and space projection federated method

A large number of studies have shown that the variation and disorder of miRNAs are important causes of diseases. The recognition of disease-related miRNAs has become an important topic in the field of biological research. However, the identification of disease-related miRNAs by biological experiments is expensive and time consuming. Thus, computational prediction models that predict disease-related miRNAs must be developed. A novel network projection-based dual random walk with restart (NPRWR) was used to predict potential disease-related miRNAs. The NPRWR model aims to estimate and accurately predict miRNA-disease associations by using dual random walk with restart and network projection technology, respectively. The leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) was adopted to evaluate the prediction performance of NPRWR. The results show that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve(AUC) of NPRWR was 0.9029, which is superior to that of other advanced miRNA-disease associated prediction methods. In addition, lung and kidney neoplasms were selected to present a case study. Among the first 50 miRNAs predicted, 50 and 49 miRNAs have been proven by in databases or relevant literature. Moreover, NPRWR can be used to predict isolated diseases and new miRNAs. LOOCV and the case study achieved good prediction results. Thus, NPRWR will become an effective and accurate disease-miRNA association prediction model.

Assembly of Copolymer and Metal-Organic Framework HKUST-1 to Form Cu2-xS/CNFs Intertwining Network for Efficient Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution

The construction of complex intertwined networks that provide fast transport pathways for ions/electrons is very important for electrochemical systems such as water splitting, but a challenge. Herein, a three dimensional (3-D) intertwined network of Cu2-xS/CNFs (x = 0 or 0.04) has been synthesized through the morphology-preserved thermal transformation of the intertwined PEG-b-P4VP/ HKUST-1 hybrid networks. The strong interaction between PEG chains and Cu2+ is the key to the successful assembly of PEG-b-P4VP nanofibers and HKUST-1, which inhibits the HKUST-1 to form individual crystalline particles. The obtained Cu2-xS/CNFs composites possess several merits, such as highly exposed active sites, high-speed electronic transmission pathways, open pore structure, etc. Therefore, the 3-D intertwined hierarchical network of Cu2-xS/CNFs displays an excellent electrocatalytic activity for HER, with a low overpotential (η) of 276 mV to reach current densities of 10 mA cm-2, and a smaller Tafel slope of 59 mV dec-1 in alkaline solution.