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Now showing 1 - 10 of 115
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    EMT-Induced Cell-Mechanical Changes Enhance Mitotic Rounding Strength
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2020) Hosseini, Kamran; Taubenberger, Anna; Werner, Carsten; Fischer-Friedrich, Elisabeth
    To undergo mitosis successfully, most animal cells need to acquire a round shape to provide space for the mitotic spindle. This mitotic rounding relies on mechanical deformation of surrounding tissue and is driven by forces emanating from actomyosin contractility. Cancer cells are able to maintain successful mitosis in mechanically challenging environments such as the increasingly crowded environment of a growing tumor, thus, suggesting an enhanced ability of mitotic rounding in cancer. Here, it is shown that the epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT), a hallmark of cancer progression and metastasis, gives rise to cell-mechanical changes in breast epithelial cells. These changes are opposite in interphase and mitosis and correspond to an enhanced mitotic rounding strength. Furthermore, it is shown that cell-mechanical changes correlate with a strong EMT-induced change in the activity of Rho GTPases RhoA and Rac1. Accordingly, it is found that Rac1 inhibition rescues the EMT-induced cortex-mechanical phenotype. The findings hint at a new role of EMT in successful mitotic rounding and division in mechanically confined environments such as a growing tumor.
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    High-Quality Graphene Using Boudouard Reaction
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2022) Grebenko, Artem K.; Krasnikov, Dmitry V.; Bubis, Anton V.; Stolyarov, Vasily S.; Vyalikh, Denis V.; Makarova, Anna A.; Fedorov, Alexander; Aitkulova, Aisuluu; Alekseeva, Alena A.; Gilshtein, Evgeniia; Bedran, Zakhar; Shmakov, Alexander N.; Alyabyeva, Liudmila; Mozhchil, Rais N.; Ionov, Andrey M.; Gorshunov, Boris P.; Laasonen, Kari; Podzorov, Vitaly; Nasibulin, Albert G.
    Following the game-changing high-pressure CO (HiPco) process that established the first facile route toward large-scale production of single-walled carbon nanotubes, CO synthesis of cm-sized graphene crystals of ultra-high purity grown during tens of minutes is proposed. The Boudouard reaction serves for the first time to produce individual monolayer structures on the surface of a metal catalyst, thereby providing a chemical vapor deposition technique free from molecular and atomic hydrogen as well as vacuum conditions. This approach facilitates inhibition of the graphene nucleation from the CO/CO2 mixture and maintains a high growth rate of graphene seeds reaching large-scale monocrystals. Unique features of the Boudouard reaction coupled with CO-driven catalyst engineering ensure not only suppression of the second layer growth but also provide a simple and reliable technique for surface cleaning. Aside from being a novel carbon source, carbon monoxide ensures peculiar modification of catalyst and in general opens avenues for breakthrough graphene-catalyst composite production.
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    Medical Gas Plasma Jet Technology Targets Murine Melanoma in an Immunogenic Fashion
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2020) Bekeschus, Sander; Clemen, Ramona; Nießner, Felix; Sagwal, Sanjeev Kumar; Freund, Eric; Schmidt, Anke
    Medical technologies from physics are imperative in the diagnosis and therapy of many types of diseases. In 2013, a novel cold physical plasma treatment concept was accredited for clinical therapy. This gas plasma jet technology generates large amounts of different reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS). Using a melanoma model, gas plasma technology is tested as a novel anticancer agent. Plasma technology derived ROS diminish tumor growth in vitro and in vivo. Varying the feed gas mixture modifies the composition of ROS. Conditions rich in atomic oxygen correlate with killing activity and elevate intratumoral immune-infiltrates of CD8+ cytotoxic T-cells and dendritic cells. T-cells from secondary lymphoid organs of these mice stimulated with B16 melanoma cells ex vivo show higher activation levels as well. This correlates with immunogenic cancer cell death and higher calreticulin and heat-shock protein 90 expressions induced by gas plasma treatment in melanoma cells. To test the immunogenicity of gas plasma treated melanoma cells, 50% of mice vaccinated with these cells are protected from tumor growth compared to 1/6 and 5/6 mice negative control (mitomycin C) and positive control (mitoxantrone), respectively. Gas plasma jet technology is concluded to provide immunoprotection against malignant melanoma both in vitro and in vivo.
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    Tailoring Intermolecular Interactions Towards High‐Performance Thermoelectric Ionogels at Low Humidity
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2022) Zhao, Wei; Sun, Tingting; Zheng, Yiwei; Zhang, Qihao; Huang, Aibin; Wang, Lianjun; Jiang, Wan
    Development of ionic thermoelectric (iTE) materials is of immense interest for efficient heat-to-electricity conversion due to their giant ionic Seebeck coefficient (Si), but challenges remain in terms of relatively small Si at low humidity, poor stretchability, and ambiguous interaction mechanism in ionogels. Herein, a novel ionogel is reported consisting of polyethylene oxide (PEO), polyethylene oxide-polypropylene oxide-polyethylene oxide (P123), and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (Emim:OAC). By delicately designing the interactions between ions and polymers, the migration of anions is restricted due to their strong binding with the hydroxyl groups of polymers, while the transport of cations is facilitated through segmental motions due to the increased amorphous regions, thereby leading to enlarged diffusion difference between the cations and anions. Moreover, the plasticizing effect of P123 and Emim:OAC can increase the elongation at break. As a consequence, the ionogel exhibits excellent properties including high Si (18 mV K−1 at relative humidity of 60%), good ionic conductivity (1.1 mS cm−1), superior stretchability (787%), and high stability (over 80% retention after 600 h). These findings show a promising strategy to obtain multifunctional iTE materials by engineering the intermolecular interactions and demonstrate the great potential of ionogels for harvesting low-grade heat in human-comfortable humidity environments.
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    Beyond Janus Geometry: Characterization of Flow Fields around Nonspherical Photocatalytic Microswimmers
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2022) Heckel, Sandra; Bilsing, Clemens; Wittmann, Martin; Gemming, Thomas; Büttner, Lars; Czarske, Jürgen; Simmchen, Juliane
    Catalytic microswimmers that move by a phoretic mechanism in response to a self-induced chemical gradient are often obtained by the design of spherical janus microparticles, which suffer from multi-step fabrication and low yields. Approaches that circumvent laborious multi-step fabrication include the exploitation of the possibility of nonuniform catalytic activity along the surface of irregular particle shapes, local excitation or intrinsic asymmetry. Unfortunately, the effects on the generation of motion remain poorly understood. In this work, single crystalline BiVO4 microswimmers are presented that rely on a strict inherent asymmetry of charge-carrier distribution under illumination. The origin of the asymmetrical flow pattern is elucidated because of the high spatial resolution of measured flow fields around pinned BiVO4 colloids. As a result the flow from oxidative to reductive particle sides is confirmed. Distribution of oxidation and reduction reactions suggests a dominant self-electrophoretic motion mechanism with a source quadrupole as the origin of the induced flows. It is shown that the symmetry of the flow fields is broken by self-shadowing of the particles and synthetic surface defects that impact the photocatalytic activity of the microswimmers. The results demonstrate the complexity of symmetry breaking in nonspherical microswimmers and emphasize the role of self-shadowing for photocatalytic microswimmers. The findings are leading the way toward understanding of propulsion mechanisms of phoretic colloids of various shapes.
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    Regulating Bacterial Behavior within Hydrogels of Tunable Viscoelasticity
    (Weinheim : Wiley-VCH, 2022) Bhusari, Shardul; Sankaran, Shrikrishnan; del Campo, Aránzazu
    Engineered living materials (ELMs) are a new class of materials in which living organism incorporated into diffusive matrices uptake a fundamental role in material's composition and function. Understanding how the spatial confinement in 3D can regulate the behavior of the embedded cells is crucial to design and predict ELM's function, minimize their environmental impact and facilitate their translation into applied materials. This study investigates the growth and metabolic activity of bacteria within an associative hydrogel network (Pluronic-based) with mechanical properties that can be tuned by introducing a variable degree of acrylate crosslinks. Individual bacteria distributed in the hydrogel matrix at low density form functional colonies whose size is controlled by the extent of permanent crosslinks. With increasing stiffness and elastic response to deformation of the matrix, a decrease in colony volumes and an increase in their sphericity are observed. Protein production follows a different pattern with higher production yields occurring in networks with intermediate permanent crosslinking degrees. These results demonstrate that matrix design can be used to control and regulate the composition and function of ELMs containing microorganisms. Interestingly, design parameters for matrices to regulate bacteria behavior show similarities to those elucidated for 3D culture of mammalian cells.
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    Call to action for global access to and harmonization of quality information of individual earth science datasets
    (Paris : CODATA, 2021) Peng, Ge; Downs, Robert R.; Lacagnina, Carlo; Ramapriyan, Hampapuram; Ivánová, Ivana; Moroni, David; Wei, Yaxing; Larnicol, Gilles; Wyborn, Lesley; Goldberg, Mitch; Schulz, Jörg; Bastrakova, Irina; Ganske, Anette; Bastin, Lucy; Khalsa, Siri Jodha S.; Wu, Mingfang; Shie, Chung-Lin; Ritchey, Nancy; Jones, Dave; Habermann, Ted; Lief, Christina; Maggio, Iolanda; Albani, Mirko; Stall, Shelley; Zhou, Lihang; Drévillon, Marie; Champion, Sarah; Hou, C. Sophie; Doblas-Reyes, Francisco; Lehnert, Kerstin; Robinson, Erin; Bugbee, Kaylin
    Knowledge about the quality of data and metadata is important to support informed decisions on the (re)use of individual datasets and is an essential part of the ecosystem that supports open science. Quality assessments reflect the reliability and usability of data. They need to be consistently curated, fully traceable, and adequately documented, as these are crucial for sound decision- and policy-making efforts that rely on data. Quality assessments also need to be consistently represented and readily integrated across systems and tools to allow for improved sharing of information on quality at the dataset level for individual quality attribute or dimension. Although the need for assessing the quality of data and associated information is well recognized, methodologies for an evaluation framework and presentation of resultant quality information to end users may not have been comprehensively addressed within and across disciplines. Global interdisciplinary domain experts have come together to systematically explore needs, challenges and impacts of consistently curating and representing quality information through the entire lifecycle of a dataset. This paper describes the findings of that effort, argues the importance of sharing dataset quality information, calls for community action to develop practical guidelines, and outlines community recommendations for developing such guidelines. Practical guidelines will allow for global access to and harmonization of quality information at the level of individual Earth science datasets, which in turn will support open science.
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    Global Community Guidelines for Documenting, Sharing, and Reusing Quality Information of Individual Digital Datasets
    (Paris : CODATA, 2022) Peng, Ge; Lacagnina, Carlo; Downs, Robert R.; Ganske, Anette; Ramapriyan, Hampapuram K.; Ivánová, Ivana; Wyborn, Lesley; Jones, Dave; Bastin, Lucy; Shie, Chung-lin; Moroni, David F.
    Open-source science builds on open and free resources that include data, metadata, software, and workflows. Informed decisions on whether and how to (re)use digital datasets are dependent on an understanding about the quality of the underpinning data and relevant information. However, quality information, being difficult to curate and often context specific, is currently not readily available for sharing within and across disciplines. To help address this challenge and promote the creation and (re)use of freely and openly shared information about the quality of individual datasets, members of several groups around the world have undertaken an effort to develop international community guidelines with practical recommendations for the Earth science community, collaborating with international domain experts. The guidelines were inspired by the guiding principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Use of the FAIR dataset quality information guidelines is intended to help stakeholders, such as scientific data centers, digital data repositories, and producers, publishers, stewards and managers of data, to: i) capture, describe, and represent quality information of their datasets in a manner that is consistent with the FAIR Guiding Principles; ii) allow for the maximum discovery, trust, sharing, and reuse of their datasets; and iii) enable international access to and integration of dataset quality information. This article describes the processes that developed the guidelines that are aligned with the FAIR principles, presents a generic quality assessment workflow, describes the guidelines for preparing and disseminating dataset quality information, and outlines a path forward to improve their disciplinary diversity.
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    Persistent Identification for Conferences
    (Paris : CODATA, 2022) Franken, Julian; Birukou, Aliaksandr; Eckert, Kai; Fahl, Wolfgang; Hauschke, Christian; Lange, Christoph
    Persistent identification of entities plays a major role in the progress of digitization of many fields. In the scholarly publishing realm there are already persistent identifiers (PID) for papers (DOI), people (ORCID), organisation (GRID, ROR), books (ISBN) but there is no generally accepted PID system for scholarly events such as conferences or workshops yet. This article describes the relevant use cases that motivate the introduction of persistent identifiers for conferences. The use cases were mainly derived from interviews, discussions with experts and their previous work. As primary stakeholders who are involved in the typical conference event life cycle researchers, conference organizers, and data consumers were identified. The resulting list of use cases illustrates how PIDs for conference events will improve the current situation for these stakeholders and help with problems they are facing today.
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    The relationship between the language of scientific publication and its impact in the field of public and collective health
    ([S.l.] : SciBiolMed. Org, 2021) Dos Santos, Solange Maria; Fraumann Grischa; Belli, Simone; Mugnaini, Rogerio
    The language of scientific publications is a crucial factor when seeking to reach an international audience, because it affects linguistic accessibility and the geographical reach of research results. English is the language of science and the fact that it can be understood by most readers represents an undeniable advantage. Moreover, the fact that a large proportion of Ibero-American research has been published in national languages, is often cited as one of the reasons for its limited exposure. The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between scientific output published in a native language and its degree of exposure and impact in the field of Public and Collective Health. This bibliometric study was carried out based on the scientific output data obtained from the most prolific countries that are members of the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) Network in Public and Collective Health, in the 2011-2018 period. The data was collected from the SciELO Citation Index database (SciELO CI), which was integrated into the larger WoS platform in 2014 and was chosen on account of its importance as one of the few regional indexes that is still scarcely used in studies of this nature. The data shows that Brazilian articles in Portuguese had the greatest citation impact on publications in its own language (48.7%), while its articles in English present practically the same impact (48.5%) on Portuguese publications, followed by 34.5% on Spanish publications. The impact on the national language is also significant in the case of both Mexican and Spanish publications, to whom the percentage of citing articles in Spanish, for documents cited in the same language, is higher than for documents cited in English (respectively 1.6 and 1.8). The same applies to Portuguese and US-American articles where, respectively 56.6% and 43.9% of the citing articles are in their native language. Cuban and Peruvian articles have more than 90% of their citing articles in the national language. In contrast, the USA and Brazil are countries that have a greater citation impact on other languages, especially when published in Spanish. The extent of exposure of a given language of the scientific publication varies per the country´s scientific output. In the case of Brazilian and US-American publications, including publications in the national languages of these countries, the effects on audiences in other languages can be measured by the citation impact. Furthermore, the degree of exposure of certain publications suggests that SciELO CI represents a useful database for evaluating local scientific output, and this can be observed, particularly, for publications in the national language.