Nanoparticles (NPs) of gallium-based liquid metal (LM) alloys have potential applications in flexible electronics, drug delivery, and molecular imaging. They can be readily produced using top-down methods such as sonication. However, the sonication process generates heat that can cause dealloying of NPs through hydrolysis and oxidation of gallium. This limits the sonication power and period that can be applied for disrupting LM into smaller particles with high concentrations. Also, it remains challenging to achieve long-term colloidal stability of NPs in biological buffers. Here, we develop a dynamic temperature control system for improving the production performance of LM NPs. The enhanced performance is reflected by the significantly increased particle concentration, the decreased overall particle size, the prevention of the formation of oxide nanorods, and the versatility of producing NPs of different types of alloys. In addition, we design a brushed polyethylene glycol polymer with multiple phosphonic acid groups for effectively anchoring the NPs. More importantly, we discover that phosphate can effectively passivate the surface of NPs to further improve their stability. Using these strategies, the produced NPs remain stable in biological buffers for at least six months. Thus, the proposed methods can unleash the vast potential of LM NPs for biomedical applications.

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Potentiometric sensors based on ion-selective membrane electrodes have continued to get great attention from the scientific community. These sensors have been employed in several applications including medicine, forensic analysis, environmental assessment, industry, agriculture, and pharmaceutical drug analysis. Indeed these sensors possess several advantages for example simple design, fabrication, and manipulation, rapid response time, good selectivity, applicability to colored and turbid solutions, and possible interfacing with automated and computerized systems. On the other hand, therapeutic drug monitoring and detection of pharmaceutical drugs in their pharmaceutical formulations and biological matrices are highly significant from a medical point of view especially for drugs with a narrow therapeutic index such as anticancer drugs which can cause fatal side effects for patients. Interestingly, potentiometric sensors have been broadly employed as one of the most important electrochemical approaches for pharmaceutical drug analysis. Moreover, the breakthroughs in potentiometric sensors based on ion-selective electrodes (ISEs) make them superior to the other reported methods for pharmaceutical drug analysis in terms of many performance parameters such as sensitivity, selectivity, low detection limit, and low cost. In this review, we try to offer a summary prologue to the applicability and merits of the potentiometric sensors that have been employed for pharmaceutical drug analysis emphasizing their application for the assay of pharmaceutical drugs in their dosage forms and the in-vivo assay of pharmaceutical drugs in different biological samples such as milk, water, plasma, and urine.

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Intracellular protein delivery is emerging as a potential strategy to revolutionize therapeutics in the field of biomedicine, aiming at treating a wide range of diseases including cancer, inflammatory diseases and other oxidative stress-related disorders with high specificity. However, the current challenges and limitations are addressed to either synthetically or biologically through multipotency of engineering, such as protein modification, insufficient delivery of large-size proteins, deficiency or mutation of proteins, and high cytotoxicity. Methods: We prepared the nanocomposites by mixing protein with PEI1200 at a certain molar ratio and demonstrated that it can deliver proteins into living cells in high efficiency and safety through the following experiments, such as dynamic light scattering, fluorescent detection, agarose gel electrophoresis, ß-Galactosidase activity detection, immunofluorescence staining, digital fluorescent detection, cell viability assay and flow cytometry. Results: The self-assembly of PEI1200/protein nanocomposites with appropriate molar ratio (4:1 and 8:1) could provide efficiently delivery of active proteins to a variety of cell types in the presence of serum. The nanocomposites could continuously release protein up to 96 h in their desired intracellular locations. In addition, these nanocomposites were able to preserve protein activity while maintain low cytotoxicity (when final concentration <1 μg/mL). Conclusion:Collectively, PEI1200-based delivery system provided an alternative strategy to direct protein delivery in high efficiency and safety, offering increased potential applications in clinical biomedicine.

Work-family conflict has been shown to be associated with employee’s job satisfaction. However, there is little research regarding the potential mechanisms of this relationship as well as in education field. In this study, we examined the effect of work-family conflict on job satisfaction in teachers, and whether this effect is mediated by burnout and moderated by professional identity.