A highly ordered gold nanodot array was fabricated by vacuum evaporation using an anodic porous alumina membrane with through-holes of nanometer scale as a mask. This technique resulted in an orderly arrangement of Au dots with a diameter of approximately 40 nm over a large area on a Si substrate.
The development of the ordered channel array in the anodic porous alumina was initiated by the textured pattern of the surface made by the molding process, and growth of an almost defect-free channel array can be achieved throughout the textured area. The long-range-ordered channel array with dimensions on the order of millimeters with a channel density of 1010 cm−2 was obtained, and the aspect ratio was over 150. The master for molding could be used many times, which makes it possible to overcome problems in the conventional nanolithographic technique, such as low through-put and high cost.
Pressure overload induces a transition from cardiac hypertrophy to heart failure, but its underlying mechanisms remain elusive. Here we reconstruct a trajectory of cardiomyocyte remodeling and clarify distinct cardiomyocyte gene programs encoding morphological and functional signatures in cardiac hypertrophy and failure, by integrating single-cardiomyocyte transcriptome with cell morphology, epigenomic state and heart function. During early hypertrophy, cardiomyocytes activate mitochondrial translation/metabolism genes, whose expression is correlated with cell size and linked to ERK1/2 and NRF1/2 transcriptional networks. Persistent overload leads to a bifurcation into adaptive and failing cardiomyocytes, and p53 signaling is specifically activated in late hypertrophy. Cardiomyocyte-specific p53 deletion shows that cardiomyocyte remodeling is initiated by p53-independent mitochondrial activation and morphological hypertrophy, followed by p53-dependent mitochondrial inhibition, morphological elongation, and heart failure gene program activation. Human single-cardiomyocyte analysis validates the conservation of the pathogenic transcriptional signatures. Collectively, cardiomyocyte identity is encoded in transcriptional programs that orchestrate morphological and functional phenotypes.
Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) are genetically and phenotypically heterogeneous. Cardiac function is improved after treatment in some cardiomyopathy patients, but little is known about genetic predictors of long-term outcomes and myocardial recovery following medical treatment. To elucidate the genetic basis of cardiomyopathy in Japan and the genotypes involved in prognosis and left ventricular reverse remodeling (LVRR), we performed targeted sequencing on 120 DCM (70 sporadic and 50 familial) and 52 HCM (15 sporadic and 37 familial) patients and integrated their genotypes with clinical phenotypes. Among the 120 DCM patients, 20 (16.7%) had TTN truncating variants and 13 (10.8%) had LMNA variants. TTN truncating variants were the major cause of sporadic DCM (21.4% of sporadic cases) as with Caucasians, whereas LMNA variants, which include a novel recurrent LMNA E115M variant, were the most frequent in familial DCM (24.0% of familial cases) unlike Caucasians. Of the 52 HCM patients, MYH7 and MYBPC3 variants were the most common (12 (23.1%) had MYH7 variants and 11 (21.2%) had MYBPC3 variants) as with Caucasians. DCM patients harboring TTN truncating variants had better prognosis than those with LMNA variants. Most patients with TTN truncating variants achieved LVRR, unlike most patients with LMNA variants.
Interpenetrating polymer networks (IPNs) belong to a class of molecular composites that consisted of two different networks mutually entangled by cross-link during the polymerization process. In the past decades, a large number of IPNs have been synthesized by using various techniques with the expectation that superior mechanical properties may emerge from their unique networking structures. 1 However, except for some limited cases, 2 phase separation occurs when the yields of polymerization or cross-link density reach a threshold. Nevertheless, these two-phase materials have found their wide applications in specialty materials such as those with high impact strength, sound, or vibration damping or with controllability of gas transport. 3 Since the physical properties of IPNs strongly depend on morphology, it would be very useful to develop a convenient method to generate and control their phaseseparated structures.From the viewpoint of pattern formation process, IPN is a chemical system driven by two competing antagonistic interactions: cross-linking reactions vs phase separation. This competition is controlled by the socalled activator-inhibitor principle 4 where phase separation corresponds to an activator and cross-linking reaction plays the role of an inhibitor. It has been shown that such the competition process can result in a wide variety of morphologies. 5 Morphology control of IPNs using thermally activated reactions is generally limited because the heat used to induce chemical reactions also affects the miscibility of the mixture. As a consequence, some alternative methods are expected to efficiently manipulate the competition between phase separation and the chemical reaction. In this study, we demonstrate that photochemical reactions can provide a tool to generate and control hierarchical morphologies of IPNs in the micrometer ranges.We have utilized photo-cross-linking reactions to freeze the spinodal structure developing in polymer blends undergoing phase separation. 6 Though the cocontinuous morphology could be generated and controlled by this particular method, the development of the characteristic length scales in these experiments was quite limited because of the drastic increase in viscosity associated with the cross-linking reaction in the bulk state of polymer. Here, to remove this constraint on the morphological length scales, we performed experiments using an IPN system containing a photocross-linkable polymer dissolved in a photopolymerizable monomer of the second polymer. The rates of the cross-linking reactions as well as the photopolymerization were controlled by varying the light intensity. Furthermore, the mobility of polymer in the reacting mixture was regulated by changing the polymer molecular weight using different concentrations of photoinitiator. We show below that by simply changing the light intensity and/or the concentration of photoinitiator a variety of morphologies with different length scales as well as structural hierarchies can be generated and manipulated by irradiati...
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