Flexible and wearable electronics are attracting wide attention due to their potential applications in wearable human health monitoring and care systems. Carbon materials have combined superiorities such as good electrical conductivity, intrinsic and structural flexibility, light weight, high chemical and thermal stability, ease of chemical functionalization, as well as potential mass production, enabling them to be promising candidate materials for flexible and wearable electronics. Consequently, great efforts are devoted to the controlled fabrication of carbon materials with rationally designed structures for applications in next‐generation electronics. Herein, the latest advances in the rational design and controlled fabrication of carbon materials toward applications in flexible and wearable electronics are reviewed. Various carbon materials (carbon nanotubes, graphene, natural‐biomaterial‐derived carbon, etc.) with controlled micro/nanostructures and designed macroscopic morphologies for high‐performance flexible electronics are introduced. The fabrication strategies, working mechanism, performance, and applications of carbon‐based flexible devices are reviewed and discussed, including strain/pressure sensors, temperature/humidity sensors, electrochemical sensors, flexible conductive electrodes/wires, and flexible power devices. Furthermore, the integration of multiple devices toward multifunctional wearable systems is briefly reviewed. Finally, the existing challenges and future opportunities in this field are summarized.
The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO 2 , water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.
The rational design of high‐performance flexible pressure sensors attracts attention because of the potential applications in wearable electronics and human–machine interfacing. For practical applications, pressure sensors with high sensitivity and low detection limit are desired. Here, ta simple process to fabricate high‐performance pressure sensors based on biomimetic hierarchical structures and highly conductive active membranes is presented. Aligned carbon nanotubes/graphene (ACNT/G) is used as the active material and microstructured polydimethylsiloxane (m‐PDMS) molded from natural leaves is used as the flexible matrix. The highly conductive ACNT/G films with unique coalescent structures, which are directly grown using chemical vapor deposition, can be conformably coated on the m‐PDMS films with hierarchical protuberances. Flexible ACNT/G pressure sensors are then constructed by putting two ACNT/G/PDMS films face to face with the orientation of the ACNTs in the two films perpendicular to each other. Due to the unique hierarchical structures of both the ACNT/G and m‐PDMS films, the obtained pressure sensors demonstrate high sensitivity (19.8 kPa−1, <0.3 kPa), low detection limit (0.6 Pa), fast response time (<16.7 ms), low operating voltage (0.03 V), and excellent stability for more than 35 000 loading–unloading cycles, thus promising potential applications in wearable electronics.
Electronic tattoos (E-tattoos), which can be intimately mounted on human skin for noninvasive and high-fidelity sensing, have attracted the attention of researchers in the field of wearable electronics. However, fabricating E-tattoos that are capable of self-healing and sensing multistimuli, similar to the inherent attributes of human skin, is still challenging. Herein, a healable and multifunctional E-tattoo based on a graphene/silk fibroin/Ca 2+ (Gr/SF/Ca 2+ ) combination is reported. The highly flexible E-tattoos are prepared through printing or writing using Gr/SF/Ca 2+ suspension. The graphene flakes distributed in the matrix form an electrically conductive path that is responsive to environmental changes, such as strain, humidity, and temperature variations, endowing the E-tattoo with high sensitivity to multistimuli. The performance of the E-tattoo is investigated as a strain, humidity, and temperature sensor that shows high sensitivity, a fast response, and long-term stability. The E-tattoo is remarkably healed after damage by water because of the reformation of hydrogen and coordination bonds at the fractured interface. The healing efficiency is 100% in only 0.3 s. Finally, as proof of concept, its applications for monitoring of electrocardiograms, breathing, and temperature are shown. Based on its unique properties and superior performance, the Gr/SF/Ca 2+ E-tattoo may be a promising candidate material for epidermal electronics.
DNAzymes have been recognized as potent therapeutic agents for gene therapy, while their inefficient intracellular delivery and insufficient cofactor supply precludes their practical biological applications.M etal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as promising drug carriers without in-depth consideration of their disassembled ingredients.Herein, we report aself-sufficient MOF-based chlorin e6modified DNAzyme (Ce6-DNAzyme) therapeutic nanosystem for combined gene therapyand photodynamic therapy(PDT). The ZIF-8 nanoparticles (NPs) could efficiently deliver the therapeutic DNAzyme without degradation into cancer cells. The pH-responsive ZIF-8 NPs disassemble with the concomitant release of the guest DNAzyme payloads and the host Zn 2+ ions that serve,respectively,asmessenger RNA-targeting agent and required DNAzyme cofactors for activating gene therapy. The auxiliary photosensitizer Ce6 could produce reactive oxygen species (ROS) and provide afluorescence signal for the imaging-guided gene therapy/PDT.
Due to its excellent flexibility, graphene has an important application prospect in epidermal electronic sensors. However, there are drawbacks in current devices, such as sensitivity, range, lamination, and artistry. In this work, we have demonstrated a multilayer graphene epidermal electronic skin based on laser scribing graphene, whose patterns are programmable. A process has been developed to remove the unreduced graphene oxide. This method makes the epidermal electronic skin not only transferable to butterflies, human bodies, and any other objects inseparably and elegantly, merely with the assistance of water, but also have better sensitivity and stability. Therefore, pattern electronic skin could attach to every object like artwork. When packed in Ecoflex, electronic skin exhibits excellent performance, including ultrahigh sensitivity (gauge factor up to 673), large strain range (as high as 10%), and long-term stability. Therefore, many subtle physiological signals can be detected based on epidermal electronic skin with a single graphene line. Electronic skin with multiple graphene lines is employed to detect large-range human motion. To provide a deeper understanding of the resistance variation mechanism, a physical model is established to explain the relationship between the crack directions and electrical characteristics. These results show that graphene epidermal electronic skin has huge potential in health care and intelligent systems.
The breakage/reunion reaction of DNA topoisomerase II (TOP2) can be interrupted by DNA intercalators (e.g., doxorubicin), enzyme binders (e.g., etoposide), or DNA lesions (e.g., abasic sites) to produce TOP2-mediated DNA damage. Here, we demonstrate that thiol alkylation of TOP2 can also produce TOP2-mediated DNA damage. This conclusion is supported by the following observations using purified TOP2: (1) Thiol-reactive quinones were shown to induce TOP2-mediated DNA cleavage. (2) Thiol-reactive compounds such as N-ethylmaleimide (NEM), disulfiram, and organic disulfides [e.g., 2,2'-dithiobis(5-nitropyridine)] were also shown to induce TOP2-mediated DNA cleavage with similar reaction characteristics as thiol-reactive quinones. (3) TOP2-mediated DNA cleavage induced by thiol-reactive quinones was completely abolished using mutant yeast TOP2 with all cysteine residues replaced with alanine (cysteineless TOP2). These results suggest the possibility that cellular DNA damage could occur indirectly through thiolation of a nuclear protein, TOP2. The implications of this reaction in carcinogenesis and apoptotic cell death are discussed.
By integrating convergent protein engineering and rational inhibitor design, we have developed an in vivo conditional protein knockout and͞or manipulation technology. This method is based on the creation of a specific interaction interface between a modified protein domain and sensitized inhibitors. By introducing this system into genetically modified mice, we can readily manipulate the activity of a targeted protein, such as ␣-Ca 2؉ ͞calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (␣CAMKII), on the time scale of minutes in specific brain subregions of freely behaving mice. With this inducible and regionspecific protein knockout technique, we analyzed the temporal stages of memory consolidation process and revealed the first postlearning week as the critical time window during which a precise level of CaMKII reactivation is essential for the consolidation of long-term memories in the brain. C urrent-inducible and region-specific gene knockout techniques are powerful for molecular and temporal analysis of biological processes (1, 2). However, because the inactivation event occurs at the DNA level, manifestation of any phenotype depends on the turnover rate of the existing protein, which takes days or weeks. This inherently slow process has excluded precise investigation of many in vivo biological processes that occur within minutes and hours. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop new types of techniques that can direct the knockout event at the protein level, rather than at the DNA level, for achieving almost instantaneous effects. Furthermore, the molecular specificity of such a knockout should surpass the conventional pharmacological inhibitors. We decided to explore methods to integrate the molecular and regional specificity of genetics with the high temporal resolution of chemical inhibition for the development of an inducible, reversible, and regionspecific protein knockout technique.Such a technique would be valuable for elucidation of molecular mechanisms underlying various temporal stages of brain function such as memory processes. The N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor has been established as a crucial molecular switch for synaptic plasticity (3, 4) and for memory formation (1,(5)(6)(7)(8). At the molecular level, long-term memory was widely assumed to be stored in the form of synaptic structural changes resulting from a single molecular cascade triggered by learning. However, this ''single cascade hypothesis'' has its conceptual difficulties in accounting for long-term memory formation in the brain. For example, the time scale of a single molecular cascade (typically between hours to days) is too short for describing the hippocampus-mediated consolidation process that is known to occur over a timescale of week(s) in rodents (9-12) and years in humans (13-15). Moreover, synaptic structures in the adult brain are dynamic, and synaptic proteins such as the NMDA receptor are known to be degraded within 5 days in the brain of freely behaving animals (1). Thus, it raises fundamental concerns whether any struc...
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