The metabolic change of patients (Crohn's disease (CD)/active CD (aCD)/inactive CD (iCD)) and healthy controls (HC) could be identified by measuring urine with surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).

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Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a pandemic disease chiefly characterized by hyperglycemia. In this study, the combination of serum lipidomic and metabolomic approach was employed to investigate the effect of arabinoxylan on type 2 diabetic rats and identify the critical biomarkers of T2D. Metabolomics analysis revealed that branched-chain amino acids, 12αhydroxylated bile acids, ketone bodies, and several short-and long-chain acylcarnitines were significantly increased in T2D, whereas lysophosphatidylcholines (LPCs) were significantly decreased. Lipidomics analysis indicated T2D-related dyslipidemia was mainly associated with the increased levels of acetylcarnitine, free fatty acids (FFA), diacylglycerols, triacylglycerols, and cholesteryl esters and the decreased levels of some unsaturated phosphatidylcholines (less than 22 carbons). These variations indicated the disturbed amino acid and lipid metabolism in T2D, and the accumulation of incompletely oxidized lipid species might eventually contribute to impaired insulin action and glucose homeostasis. Arabinoxylan treatment decreased the concentrations of 12α-hydroxylated bile acids, carnitines, and FFAs and increased the levels of LPCs. The improved bile acid and lipid metabolism by arabinoxylan might be involved in the alleviation of hypercholesterolemia and hyperlipidemia in T2D.

Ce dopping in CuO crystalline led to the distinguished existence and modulated distribution of Cu+ on the surface of samples, which was responsible for the outstanding SO2-resistant NH3-SCR-NO performance.

Phyto-estrogens are plant-derived compounds that can exert various estrogenic and anti-estrogenic effects, and are usually used as a natural alternative to estrogen replacement due to their health benefits, including a lowered risk of osteoporosis, heart disease, breast cancer, and menopausal symptoms. Phyto-estrogens are also considered as endocrine disruptors due to their structure similar to human female hormone 17-β oestradiol. However, the issue of whether phyto-estrogens are beneficial or harmful to human health remains unknown, as this may depend on the dose, form, level and duration of administration of phyto-estrogens, and influence by genetics, metabolism, gut physiology, age, diet, and the health status of individuals. Clarification on this issue is necessary for the sake of their two-side effects on human health and rapidly increasing global consumption of phyto-estrogens. This review mainly includes the metabolism of phyto-estrogens and weighs the evidence for and against the purported health benefits and adverse effects of phyto-estrogens.

The invention of defect‐engineering motivated Z‐scheme photocatalytic complexes has been treated as an emerging opportunity to accomplish effective carrier separation and electron transfer in hybrid heterojunctions, contributing a novel approach to accomplish modified visible‐light driven photocatalytic performance compared to traditional nanocomposites. Exploring a desired carrier medium is crucial to support impressive electron transportation in Z‐scheme photocatalytic nanocomposites. Here, the role that the Sn2+/Sn4+ redox couple plays in the photocatalytic process is systematically studied by taking the flower‐like SnO2/layered g‐C3N4 with deficient Sn2+ reactive sites as an example, where the defect‐engineering can be introduced by heat treatment. The experimental results and computational simulations demonstrate that the deficient Sn2+ reactive sites can facilitate small molecule adsorption and boost the interfacial carrier separation and transfer in the photocatalytic procedure by bringing in the Sn2+/Sn4+ redox couple. This work provides a more in‐depth exploration of Z‐scheme photocatalytic‐system construction and is helpful to the development of defect‐engineering approaches with high photocatalysis performance.

Deliberately engineering oxide composites on constructing and manipulating interactive structures particularly in surface layers was highly desirable for heterogeneous catalysis. Herein, upon the redox replacement reaction between Ce(IV) precursor (Ce(NO[Formula: see text] and Cu2O nano-substrate, an attempt to directly engineer the surface structure of Cu-based substrate was performed by the Ce(IV)–Cu2O etching-embedding process, then the obtained powders were thermo-treated to get a series of Ce–O–Cu catalysts with different Ce:Cu molar ratios for NH3 selective catalytic reduction (NH3-SCR) of NO. Characterized by ICP-OES, XRD, Raman, XPS, SEM, BET, H2-TPR, NO- and NH3-TPD measurements, it was demonstrated that the Cu–O–Ce catalysts were structured as CuO matrix with an interactive surface composed by co-present Cu(I)–Cu(II) and Ce(III)–Ce(IV) species, even the introduction of Ce was confined in a quite low loading range (0.83–2.3[Formula: see text]wt.%); such a surface exhibited the distinct synergistic effect with positively manipulated physical-chemistry properties such as active site distributions, redox features and surface reactivity compared to pure CuO and traditional Cu–Ce composite catalyst, leading to attractive catalytic performance such as [Formula: see text]% NO conversion with [Formula: see text]% N2 selectivity and the two-fold TOF enhancement versus traditional catalysts, even SO2 was present in reactant mixture on well-manipulated catalyst (Ce loading at 1.6[Formula: see text]wt.%) These results indicated that the etching-embedding strategy illuminated in this work could be referred as a feasible method to directly engineer and construct interactive oxide composite surface for advanced application as well as current efficient Ce–O–Cu catalytic interface for heterogeneous catalysis.

Purpose: Crohn's disease (CD) is a chronic recurrent intestinal inflammatory disease that requires repeated invasive examinations. Convenient and noninvasive diagnostic tools for CD are lacking. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) can rapidly provide specific metabolite information in various samples. Our previous study has showed urine Raman spectrum can distinguish CD patients from healthy controls noninvasively. In this study, we further investigated the value of urine Raman spectra on identifying the disease characterizations in patients with CD. Patients and Methods: Urine samples were analyzed by SERS to acquire specific changes of the spectra from 100 active CD (aCD) patients and 88 inactive CD (iCD) patients. The accuracy of classifier models yielded by SERS was assessed by principal component analysis and support vector machine (PCA-SVM) to investigate spectral differences and disease characterizations. Results: Given a panel of 16 specific Raman spectra, the classifier model was established to predict disease activity between patients with aCD and iCD and achieved higher efficacy than fecal calprotectin (AUC value, 0.864 vs 0.596, P=0.02). After leave-one-patientout cross-validation, the classifier model still obtained 75.5% of accuracy. The correlation analysis showed it had negative correlation with endoscopic results (r=−0.616, P<0.0001). We further established the classifier model in identifying disease location to discriminate colonic-type from ileal-type CD with 63.6% of accuracy with the significantly increased intensity of 1643 cm −1 band, and the model to predict the spectra changes of before and after treatment in tumor necrosis factor inhibitor responders with 91.2% of accuracy with a panel of 11 specific spectra. The metabolic changes of amino acids, proteins, lipids, and other compounds in urine levels were noted by SERS in patients with CD. Conclusion:The specific changes of urine Raman spectra can reflect changes in urine metabolism. It has the potential value on being the promising diagnostic tool for disease characterizations in CD patients by a convenient and noninvasive way.