The conformational changes of bovine serum albumin (BSA) in the albumin:gold nanoparticle bioconjugates were investigated in detail by various spectroscopic techniques including UV-vis absorption, fluorescence, circular dichroism, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopies. Our studies suggested that albumin in the bioconjugates that was prepared by the common adsorption method underwent substantial conformational changes at both secondary and tertiary structure levels. BSA was found to adopt a more flexible conformational state on the boundary surface of gold nanoparticles as a result of the conformational changes in the bioconjugates. The conformational changes at pH 3.8, 7.0, and 9.0, which corresponded to different isomeric forms of albumin, were investigated, respectively, to probe the pH effect on the conformational changes of BSA in the bioconjugates. The results showed that the pH of the medium influenced the changes greatly and that fluorescence and circular dichroism studies further indicated that the changes were larger at higher pH.

Automatic Non-rigid Histological Image Registration (ANHIR) challenge was organized to compare the performance of image registration algorithms on several kinds of microscopy histology images in a fair and independent manner. We have assembled 8 datasets, containing 355 images with 18 different stains, resulting in 481 image pairs to be registered. Registration accuracy was evaluated using manually placed landmarks. In total, 256 teams registered for the challenge, 10 submitted the results, and 6 participated in the workshop. Here, we present the results of 7 wellperforming methods from the challenge together with 6 well-known existing methods. The best methods used coarse but robust initial alignment, followed by non-rigid registration, used multiresolution, and were carefully tuned for the data at hand. They outperformed off-the-shelf methods, mostly by being more robust. The best methods could successfully register over 98% of all landmarks and their mean landmark registration accuracy (TRE) was 0.44% of the image diagonal. The challenge remains open to submissions and all images are available for download.

No abstract

We are the first to examine the role of graphene host structure/chemistry in plating-stripping in lithium metal anodes employed for lithium metal batteries (LMBs). Structural and chemical defects are bad since highly defective graphene promotes unstable solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) growth. This consumes the FEC additive in the carbonate electrolyte and is correlated with rapid decay in CE and formation of filament-like Li dendrites. A unique flow-aided sonication exfoliation method is employed to synthesize "defect-free" graphene (df-G), allowing for a direct performance comparison with conventional reduced graphene oxide (r-GO). At cycle 1, the r-GO is better electrochemically wetted by Li than df-G, indicating that initially it is more lithiophilic. With cycling, the nucleation overpotential with r-GO becomes higher than with df-G, indicating less facile plating reactions. The df-G yields state-of-the-art electrochemical performance, with the post cycled metal surface being relatively-smooth and dendrite-free. Conversely, r-GO templates have CE rapidly degrade from the onset, with extensive dendrites after cycling. Severe SEI growth and associated FEC depletion with r-This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. 2GO are further confirmed by electrochemical impedance analysis (EIS) and surface science methods (XPS). We provide a new design rule for Li metal templates: An ideal host must be non-catalytic towards SEI formation per se.

No abstract

No abstract

Urea electrolysis has prospects for urea-containing wastewater purification and hydrogen (H 2 ) production, but the shortage of cost-effective catalysts restricts its development. In this work, the tomentum-like FeNi 3 -MoO 2 heterojunction nanosheets array self-supported on nickel foam (NF) as bifunctional catalyst is prepared by facile hydrothermal and annealing method. Only 1.29 V and −50.8 mV is required to obtain ±10 mA cm −2 for urea oxidation and hydrogen evolution reaction (UOR and HER), respectively, showing great bifunctional catalytic activity. For overall urea electrolysis, it only needs 1.37 V to reach 10 mA cm −2 and can last at 100 mA cm −2 for 70 h without obvious activity attenuation, showing outstanding durability. Coupling interface constructions of FeNi 3 -MoO 2 heterostructures, novel morphology with a mesoporous and self-supporting structure could be the reason for this good performance. This work thus proposes a promising catalyst for boosting UOR and HER to realize efficient overall urea electrolysis.

No abstract