Manipulating a quantum state via electrostatic gating has been of great importance for many model systems in nanoelectronics. Until now, however, controlling the electron spins or, more specifically, the magnetism of a system by electric-field tuning has proven challenging. Recently, atomically thin magnetic semiconductors have attracted significant attention due to their emerging new physical phenomena. However, many issues are yet to be resolved to convincingly demonstrate gate-controllable magnetism in these two-dimensional materials. Here, we show that, via electrostatic gating, a strong field effect can be observed in devices based on few-layered ferromagnetic semiconducting CrGeTe. At different gate doping, micro-area Kerr measurements in the studied devices demonstrate bipolar tunable magnetization loops below the Curie temperature, which is tentatively attributed to the moment rebalance in the spin-polarized band structure. Our findings of electric-field-controlled magnetism in van der Waals magnets show possibilities for potential applications in new-generation magnetic memory storage, sensors and spintronics.

Room temperature ferromagnetism (RTF) is observed in pure copper oxide (CuO) nanoparticles which were prepared by precipitation method with the postannealing in air without any ferromagnetic dopant. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) result indicates that the mixture valence states of Cu 1? and Cu 2? ions exist at the surface of the particles. Vacuum annealing enhances the ferromagnetism (FM) of CuO nanoparticles, while oxygen atmosphere annealing reduces it. The origin of FM is suggested to the oxygen vacancies at the surface/or interface of the particles. Such a ferromagnet without the presence of any transition metal could be a very good option for a class of spintronics.

The room-temperature ferromagnetism of Zn1−x Al x O nanoparticles synthesized by a sol−gel method is reported in this paper. X-ray diffraction and selected area electron diffraction results show that the Al atoms have successfully substituted for some of the Zn atoms in the ZnO lattice without forming other new phases. The results also show that the samples possess a typical wurtzite structure. Declaration of ferromagnetism at room temperature has been established with the observed hysteresis and the coercive field in hysteresis loops. Magnetic measurements indicate that the saturation magnetization of the samples is sensitive to the content of Al dopants and that, for Zn0.97Al0.03O, the saturation magnetization reaches the maximum of 0.012 emu/g. Combining with the results of Raman, photoluminescence, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopies, it is suggested that the observed ferromagnetic ordering of the Zn1−x Al x O nanoparticles is related to the doping-induced oxygen vacancies.

A growing amount of evidence supports that microRNA (miRNA) dysregulation is involved in cancer progression by directly downregulating multiple targets. Elucidating the underlying mechanism of miRNA in carcinogenesis may improve diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for malignancy. In the current study, we found that miR-105 expression was markedly downregulated in both hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell lines and clinical HCC tissues, compared with normal human hepatocyte and adjacent non-cancerous tissues, respectively. Ectopic miR-105 expression suppressed, whereas inhibiting miR-105 promoted the proliferation and tumorigenicity of HCC cells both in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, we demonstrated that miR-105 could deactivated the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT signaling pathway by downregulating insulin receptor substrate-1, 3-phosphoinositide-dependent protein kinase-1 and AKT1 directly, resulting in increasing cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors 1A and 1B (p21(Cip1) and p27(Kip1)) and decreasing cyclin D1 expression in HCC. Therefore, our results suggest that miR-105 functions as a potential tumor suppressor by inhibiting the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway and might represent a potential therapeutic target for HCC patients.

Amorphous and crystalline Al2O3 nanoparticles were synthesized by a sol–gel method with postannealing at different temperatures. Magnetism measurements have indicated that all Al2O3 nanoparticles exhibit intrinsic room temperature ferromagnetism, and the saturation magnetism of the samples increases after vacuum annealing, whereas bulk Al2O3 presents paramagnetism. Electron spin resonance and fitting results of O 1s X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveal that the origin of the ferromagnetism in Al2O3 nanoparticles could be attributed to the singly charged oxygen vacancies (F+ centers). The variation of the relative area of oxygen vacancies and the number of free electrons is consistent with the change of saturation magnetization for the samples. Combined with these results, a direct correlation of ferromagnetism with F+ centers exchange mechanism is established.

BackgroundMetastasis is responsible for the rapid recurrence and poor survival of malignancies. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) has a critical role in metastasis. Increasing evidence indicates that EMT can be regulated by microRNAs (miRNAs). The aim of this study was to investigate the role of miR-26b in modulating epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), as well as to identify its underlying mechanism of action.MethodsThe expression level of miR-26b was assessed in multiple HCC cell lines (HepG2, MHCC97H, Hep3B, MHCC97L, HCCC9810, BEL-7402, Huh7 and QGY-7703), as well as in liver tissue from patients with HCC. Follow-up studies examined the effects of a miR-26b mimic (increased expression) and a miR-26b inhibitor (decreased expression) on markers of EMT, wound healing and cell migration. The molecular target of miR-26b was also identified using a computer algorithm and confirmed experimentally.ResultsMiR-26b expression was decreased in HCC cell lines and was inversely correlated with the grade of HCC. Increased expression of miR-26b inhibited the migration and invasiveness of HCC cell lines, which was accompanied by decreased expression of the epithelial marker E-cadherin and increased expression of the mesenchymal marker vimentin, at both the mRNA and protein expression levels. A binding site for miR-26b was theoretically identified in the 3′UTR of USP9X. Further studies revealed that overexpression of miR-26b repressed the endogenous level of USP9X protein expression. Overexpression of miR-26b also repressed Smad4 expression, whereas its inhibition elevated Smad4 expression.ConclusionsTaken together, our results indicate that miR-26b were inhibited in HCC. In HCC cell lines, miR-26b targeted the 3′UTR of USP9X, which in turn affects EMT through Smad4 and the TGF-β signaling pathway. Our analysis of clinical HCC samples verifies that miR-26b also targets USP9X expression to inhibit the EMT of hepatocytes. Thus, miR-26b may have some effects on the EMT of HCC cells.

Single-crystalline CoO nanospheres with the size distribution between 40 and 250 nm were prepared by a solvothermal method. Magnetic measurements indicate that the vacuum-annealed samples show room temperature ferromagnetism except for the CoO nanospheres of 250 nm, which still exhibit paramagnetism after being postannealed in vacuum atmosphere (10−3 Pa) at 250 °C as others. The saturation magnetization of all postannealed samples monotonically increases with the decrease of nanosphere diameter. No other impurity phases are observed for the postannealed samples, indicating that the revealed ferromagnetism is an intrinsic property. The fitted XPS results of O 1s spectra indicate that the variations of oxygen vacancies concentration are consistent with the variations of saturation magnetization for the vacuum-annealed samples, suggesting that the formed oxygen vacancies at the surface of the CoO nanospheres during the vacuum-annealing process account for the observed ferromagnetism.

We report the sulfur vacancies-related d 0 ferromagnetism in undoped sphalerite ZnS nanoparticles. Systematically tune of sulfur deficiency in ZnS nanoparticles was done by selecting different synthesized temperatures and varying the ratio of hydrogen and argon in post-annealing processes. Our study suggests that such sulfur vacancies can induce the room temperature ferromagnetism. Importantly, the ferromagnetism can be modulated by changing the concentration of sulfur vacancies in the samples. This finding should be the focus of future electronic and spintronic devices. V