Clarifying the regulatory mechanisms of embryonic stem cell (ESC) neural differentiation is helpful not only for understanding neural development but also for obtaining high-quality neural progenitor cells required by stem cell therapy of neurodegenerative diseases. Here, we found that long noncoding RNA 1604 (lncRNA-1604) was highly expressed in cytoplasm during neural differentiation, and knockdown of lncRNA-1604 significantly repressed neural differentiation of mouse ESCs both in vitro and in vivo. Bioinformatics prediction and mechanistic analysis revealed that lncRNA-1604 functioned as a novel competing endogenous RNA of miR-200c and regulated the core transcription factors ZEB1 and ZEB2 during neural differentiation. Furthermore, we also demonstrated the critical role of miR-200c and ZEB1/2 in mouse neural differentiation. Either introduction of miR-200c sponge or overexpression of ZEB1/2 significantly reversed the lncRNA-1604 knockdown-induced repression of mouse ESC neural differentiation. Collectively, these findings not only identified a previously unknown role of lncRNA-1604 and ZEB1/2 but also elucidated a new regulatory lncRNA-1604/miR-200c/ZEB axis in neural differentiation. Stem Cells 2018;36:325-336.
Water-immersed gold nanoparticles irradiated by a laser can trigger the nucleation of plasmonic bubbles after a delay time of a few microseconds [Wang et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 122, 9253 (2018)]. Here we systematically investigated the light-vapor conversion efficiency, η, of these plasmonic bubbles as a function of the ambient pressure. The efficiency of the formation of these initial-phase and mainly water-vapor containing bubbles, which is defined as the ratio of the energy that is required to form the vapor bubbles and the total energy dumped in the gold nanoparticles before nucleation of the bubble by the laser, can be as high as 25%. The amount of vaporized water first scales linearly with the total laser energy dumped in the gold nanoparticles before nucleation, but for larger energies the amount of vaporized water levels off. The efficiency η decreases with increasing ambient pressure. The experimental observations can be quantitatively understood within a theoretical framework based on the thermal diffusion equation and the thermal dynamics of the phase transition.
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