Members of the genus Paeonia, which consists of globally renowned ornamentals and traditional medicinal plants with a rich history spanning over 1500 years, are widely distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Since 1900, over 2200 new horticultural Paeonia cultivars have been created by the discovery and breeding of wild species. However, information pertaining to Paeonia breeding is considerably fragmented, with fundamental gaps in knowledge, creating a bottleneck in effective breeding strategies. This review systematically introduces Paeonia germplasm resources, including wild species and cultivars, summarizes the breeding strategy and results of each Paeonia cultivar group, and focuses on recent progress in the isolation and functional characterization of structural and regulatory genes related to important horticultural traits. Perspectives pertaining to the resource protection and utilization, breeding and industrialization of Paeonia in the future are also briefly discussed.

No abstract

Introducing nonvolatile liquid acids into porous solids is a promising solution to construct anhydrous proton-conducting electrolytes, but due to weak coordination or covalent bonds building these solids, they often suffer from structural instability in acidic environments. Herein, we report a series of steady conjugated microporous polymers (CMPs) linked by robust alkynyl bonds and functionalized with perfluoroalkyl groups and incorporate them with phosphoric acid. The resulting composite electrolyte exhibits high anhydrous proton conductivity at 30−120 °C (up to 4.39 × 10 −3 S cm −1 ), and the activation energy is less than 0.4 eV. The excellent proton conductivity is attributed to the hydrophobic pores that provide nanospace for continuous proton transport, and the hydrogen bonding between phosphoric acid and perfluoroalkyl chains of CMPs promotes short-distance proton hopping from one side to the other.

Although transition metal phosphide anodes possess high theoretical capacities, their inferior electronic conductivities and drastic volume variations during cycling lead to poor rate capability and rapid capacity fading. To simultaneously overcome these issues, we report a hierarchical heterostructure consisting of isolated Mn2P nanoparticles embedded into nitrogen- and phosphorus-codoped porous carbon nanosheets (denoted as Mn2P@NPC) as a viable anode for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). The resulting Mn2P@NPC design manifests outstanding electrochemical performances, namely, high reversible capacity (598 mA h g-1 after 300 cycles at 0.1 A g-1 ), exceptional rate capability (347 mA h g–1 at 4 A g–1), and excellent cycling stability (99% capacity retention at 4 A g–1 after 2000 cycles). The robust structure stability of Mn2P@NPC electrode during cycling has been revealed by the in situ and ex situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) characterizations, giving rise to long-term cyclability. Using in situ selected area electron diffraction and ex situ high-resolution TEM studies, we have unraveled the dominant lithium storage mechanism and confirmed that the superior lithium storage performance of Mn2P@NPC originated from the reversible conversion reaction. Furthermore, the prelithiated Mn2P@NPC∥LiFePO4 full cell exhibits impressive rate capability and cycling stability. This work introduces the potential for engineering high-performance anodes for next-generation high-energy-density LIBs.

No abstract

Sialic acid‐binding immunoglobulin‐like lectin‐15 (Siglec‐15) has been identified as a novel potential target for cancer immunotherapy. Here, we explored the role of Siglec‐15 in human hepatoma cells. In this study, we found that the expression of Siglec‐15 is substantially upregulated in liver cancer tissues in comparison with the nontumor tissues. Functionally, in vitro experiments show that Siglec‐15 promotes the migration of hepatoma cells. Furthermore, the data demonstrated an interaction between Siglec‐15 and CD44, a transmembrane glycoprotein that mediates tumor progression and metastasis. In addition, we show that CD44 is modified by α2,6‐linked sialic acids on N‐glycans in hepatoma cells and that CD44 sialylation affects its interaction with Siglec‐15. Removal of the sialic acid residues from CD44 resulted in suppressed interaction between Siglec‐15 and CD44. We further demonstrate that Siglec‐15 interacts and promotes the stability of CD44 by preventing its lysosomal‐mediated degradation. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that Siglec‐15 promotes the migration of hepatoma cells by regulating the CD44 protein stability.

No abstract

Purpose To investigate whether lung function in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can be directly predicted using CT densitometric measures and assess the underlying prediction errors as compared with the traditional spirometry-based measures. Materials and Methods A total of 600 CT examinations were collected from a COPD study. In addition to the entire lung volume, the extent of emphysema depicted in each CT examination was quantified using density mask analysis (densitometry). The partial least square regression (PLS regression) was used for constructing the prediction model, where a repeated random split-sample validation was employed. For each split, we randomly selected 400 CT exams for training (regression) purpose and the remaining 200 exams for assessing performance in prediction of lung function (e.g., FEV1 and FEV1/FVC) and disease severity. The absolute and percentage errors as well as their standard deviations were computed. Results The averaged percentage errors in prediction of FEV1, FEV1/FVC%, TLC, RV/TLC% and DLco% predicted were 33%, 17%, 9%, 18% and 23%, respectively. When classifying the exams in terms of disease severity grades using the CT measures, 37% of the subjects were correctly classified with no error and 83% of the exams were either correctly classified or classified into immediate neighboring categories. The linear weighted kappa and quadratic weighted kappa were 0.54 (moderate agreement) and 0.72 (substantial agreement), respectively. Conclusion Despite the existence of certain prediction errors in quantitative assessment of lung function, the CT densitometric measures could be used to relatively reliably classify disease severity grade of COPD patients in terms of GOLD.