Search Results (1,718)

Studying protein structure dynamics is key to understanding protein function modulation. Alternative protein conformations are well discriminated from each other by nanoESI mass spectrometry and ion mobility measurements. Experimentally determined collisional cross-sections were compared to calculated collisional cross-sections of fifteen peptides, single-domain proteins, and protein complexes. The multi-domain proteins investigated here, four immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies and protein G, are present as compacted/folded “native” conformations in neutral buffered solutions, and they are identified by molecular ions with narrow charge-state distributions, relatively few charges, and small collisional cross-sections. Simultaneously present extended/folded but nevertheless “native” conformations produced additional ions with higher charge states, different charge-state distributions, and larger collisional cross-sections. Computed collisional cross-sections from compacted “o-shape” and extended “l-shape” protein G three-dimensional (3D) structures match experimental data, indicating equilibrium, and suggest a dynamic “o2l” flip process. Likewise, “m-shape” (compacted) and “Y-shape” (extended) IgGs are regarded as two supposedly reversibly adopted antibody conformations which may interchange by an “m2Y” flip. Adopting an m-shape would prevent an antibody-based initiation of humoral and cellular immune system responses, such as opsonophagocytosis, prior to antigen contact, which stands in line with the rearrangement hypothesis. Full article

Engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) are being used with increasing frequency in industrial and consumer products across applications in industry, agriculture, ecology, and biomedicine. The unique physicochemical characteristics that make nanoparticles desirable in product design also affect their fate in the environment, interactions with living systems, and mechanisms of toxicity. Traditional testing methods and toxicological paradigms based on dissolved chemicals are poorly suited to understand ENP risks, primarily due to their small size, large SA:Vs, increased reactivity, and a surface chemistry that can be tuned during synthesis. Nanoparticle toxicity is dependent on complex relationships between particle characteristics, transformations in the environment, resulting exposure scenarios, and biological effects. Here we review ENP toxicity across a property → transformation → exposure → toxicity continuum, with a focus on how particle properties affect environmental and biological transformations relevant to toxicity. Properties such as size, shape, surface chemistry, dissolution, redox activity, and aggregation propensity are reviewed with respect to effects on transport and bioavailability, cellular uptake, biodistribution, and toxicity mechanisms. Transformations including aggregation, oxidation, dissolution/sulfidation, aging and eco-corona formation are discussed with regard to impacts on exposure and risk. Finally, major mechanisms of toxicity including oxidative stress, ion toxicity, membrane damage, inflammation, and genotoxicity are discussed with regard to nano–bio interactions. Analytical challenges associated with studying ENPs, shortcomings of the current risk assessment methods, and emerging Safe-by-Design approaches are also reviewed. Furthermore, connections between the fields of engineered nanoparticle toxicology and microplastics/nanoplastics are discussed, with particular focus on overlapping physicochemical properties, transformations, exposures, and biological mechanisms. Full article

To address the deployment bottleneck of high-capacity detectors on edge hardware, this study proposes MAC-Lite, an optimized architecture that integrates the Multi-Scale Pyramid Pooling (MSPP) and Asymmetric Padding Convolution (APC) modules to capture fine-grained lesion edges, reinforced by a CDSA spatial-position attention mechanism to suppress complex canopy noise. Instead of aggressive backbone pruning, the framework adopts GSConv-Neck fusion and CDSA-guided distillation to transfer these multi-module priors into a compact student model. Evaluated on an 11-class self-built maize disease dataset, MAC-Lite compresses parameters by 53.1% and FLOPs by 40.9% while retaining 92.7% Precision, 93.4% mAP50, 89.1% Recall and 82.0% mAP50:95. Deployed on a Jetson Nano, the FP16 engine achieves sub-23 ms inference under intense foliar occlusion and the GPU temperature stabilizes at approximately 68 °C during a 30 min full-load stress test, effectively reconciling high-fidelity attention-driven detection with battery-constrained edge deployment. Full article

Rolling bearings are critical components in rotating machinery, and their failures may cause unexpected downtime and safety risks. However, conventional deep diagnostic models are often difficult to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices because of their high computational cost and memory consumption. This paper proposes a lightweight time–frequency attention network (LTFANet) for multi-fault diagnosis of rolling bearings on an edge platform. The proposed model directly processes one-dimensional vibration signals and employs multi-scale depthwise separable convolutions to capture impact and periodic fault features with low computational complexity. A lightweight frequency branch is introduced to enhance fault-frequency representation, while an efficient channel attention module adaptively emphasizes fault-sensitive features. Moreover, a severity-aware multi-task extension is introduced to jointly identify the fault location and degradation level. To further improve edge inference efficiency, knowledge distillation, structured pruning, and TensorRT-based acceleration are integrated into the deployment pipeline. Experiments on CWRU-10 and Paderborn achieve 97.20% and 90.25% accuracy, respectively, while LTFANet contains only 0.020 M parameters and requires 0.610 M FLOPs. Knowledge distillation increases the CWRU-10 accuracy to 98.50%, and the severity-aware extension achieves 95.18% severity accuracy. On the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, the pruned TensorRT FP16 implementation achieves an average inference latency of 0.520 ms and a throughput of 1923.08 samples/s. The framework provides an effective solution for real-time and low-cost bearing condition monitoring at the edge. Full article

A hard protein corona was engineered onto tannic acid-modified magnetic nanoparticles (SAMN@TA), a magnetic and luminescent core–shell nano-carrier, using bovine serum amine oxidase (BSAO), an enzyme catalyzing the oxidation of polyamines and producing the corresponding aldehydes and hydrogen peroxide. The absorption and intracellular bioactivity of the self-assembled multimodal SAMN@TA@BSAO were investigated on an intestinal barrier model built with human colorectal adenocarcinoma (Caco-2) cells. The tailored BSAO corona possessed fouling resistance and, at the same time, was able to activate the clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) mechanism. Despite its size and intrinsic complexity, the nano-vehicle was effectively transported across the cell layer, safely transiting across the cell cytoplasm and reaching the lumen. As a function of intracellular polyamine concentration, the system’s biological activity induced intracellular oxidative stress, leading to the activation of the Keap1/Nrf2 oxidative protection pathway. The SAMN@TA@BSAO effect was well described by a dose–response curve with an EC₅₀ of around 30 µg mL⁻¹ and a programmable killing efficiency (>50.0%), recalling the feasibility of a low molecular weight drug administration. The present study contributes to the nascent knowledge on engineering protein corona as a key to rationally design nanomaterials for biomedical applications. Full article

Gene delivery with cationic polymers requires balancing DNA compaction, colloidal stability, and intracellular release, yet for imine-linked low-molecular-weight polyethyleneimine (PEI) vectors, quantitative relationships connecting the N/P ratio with the full property–transfection cascade remain undefined. Here, two amphiphilic non-viral vectors were prepared by linking a hydrophobic benzene–siloxane core (TAS) to hyperbranched PEI (800 or 2000 Da) through reversible imine bonds and complexed with DNA across a broad N/P range (10–600). Polyplexes were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), ζ-potential, agarose gel electrophoresis, transfection via green fluorescent protein (GFP) imaging and luciferase assay in HeLa cells. Both vectors formed spherical nano-entities (AFM diameters ~30 nm for TAS-PEI800; ~100 nm for TAS-PEI2000). TAS-PEI2000 achieved complete DNA retardation at N/P ≈ 30 versus N/P ≈ 150 for TAS-PEI800, consistent with its higher charge density (ζ = +37.59 vs. +18.35 mV). Transfection efficiency was superior for TAS-PEI2000 across most N/P ratios; however, TAS-PEI2000 displayed an optimal transfection efficiency at N/P ≈ 100 (ζ ≈ 3.84 mV), beyond which efficiency declined, indicating a binding–release trade-off. Cell viability remained >77% across the N/P range for TAS-PEI800, but dropped below 25% at N/P ≥ 400 for TAS-PEI2000. A phenomenological logistic model identified characteristic transition thresholds (θ ≈ 60 for TAS-PEI800; θ ≈ 40 for TAS-PEI2000), capturing the onset of cooperative self-assembly; however, the post-optimum decline observed for TAS-PEI2000 requires additional inhibitory terms. These findings demonstrate that PEI molecular weight governs both the N/P threshold required for efficient transfection and the width of the therapeutic window, thereby providing structure–activity descriptors for the rational design of imine-linked polyplex systems. Full article

Various wafer defects appear inevitably, due to the highly complex and precise semiconductor fabrication processes. Thus, precise and rapid detection of patterned wafer surface defects is essential to prevent circuit failures and ensure product quality. Accordingly, a novel lightweight detection network termed PWDD-Net is proposed in this work, by introducing several modifications on YOLO11-nano. First, a novel LGE block, incorporating spatial and channel transformation with adaptive gated mechanism, is developed to enhance fine-grained feature extraction and representation. Second, by integrating a self-calibration block, a lightweight SC-C3k2 module is proposed to improve global feature capture while preserving network efficiency. Finally, the Slide loss is employed to distinguish easy and hard instances, thereby mitigating the imbalanced class distribution and improving classification precision. Experimental results show that PWDD-Net achieves a mAP@0.5 of 74.4% and a mAP@0.5:0.95 of 46.5%, yielding remarkable increments of 4.2% and 2.1% over the YOLO11-nano baseline, respectively. In addition, the network maintains a comparable parameter scale to the baseline and performs an inference speed of 78 FPS using an NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti GPU. These results demonstrate the model’s potential for real-time industrial wafer defect inspection applications. Full article

Small-object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing imagery is challenged by dense target distributions, substantial scale variation, complex ground backgrounds, and limited edge-computing resources. To address these challenges, we propose CDF-DETR, an end-to-end detector derived from the Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR). First, a Cross-Stage Partial Single-Head Attention Transformer (CSP-SHAT) backbone combines efficient local feature extraction with partial-channel global interaction to improve multi-scale representation while reducing the parameter count of the backbone. Second, a dual-scale feature calibration (DSFC) module sequentially performs contextual aggregation and deformable spatial alignment, thereby improving the consistency of shallow localization features and deep semantic features. Third, Focaler-MPDIoU integrates coordinate-sensitive regression with IoU-quality-based sample reweighting for dense small-object localization. Experiments on the VisDrone-2019 test set and the UAVDT and HIT-UAV validation sets demonstrate ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50}$ improvements of 3.1, 1.4, and 3.0 percentage points, respectively, over the RT-DETR-R18 baseline. On the VisDrone-2019 validation set, CDF-DETR improves ${\mathrm{mAP}}_{50–95}$ from 26.20% to 28.52%, corresponding to a gain of 2.32 percentage points, while reducing the parameter count by 25.7%. A compressed INT8 variant achieves 20.84 FPS for an offline image-level pipeline on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano using ONNX and TensorRT. These results demonstrate improved detection accuracy with a reduced parameter footprint for UAV remote sensing image analysis. Full article

With the continuous expansion of ultra-deep and deep well drilling toward complex geological formations, the performance stability of water-based drilling fluids and wellbore stability under ultra-high temperature and high-salinity conditions have become critical challenges. High temperature and salt contamination can induce the degradation or failure of drilling fluid additives, while the development of pores and fractures in complex formations further increases the risk of filtrate invasion. Conventional polymer and inorganic plugging agents often suffer from insufficient thermal stability, poor salt tolerance, or limited adaptability to complex pore structures. In this study, an organic–inorganic hybrid gel microsphere plugging agent (HGP) with a core–shell structure was developed by in situ polymerization of AMPS, styrene (St), and sodium styrene sulfonate (SSS) on KH570-modified nano-SiO₂. The hybrid microspheres consisted of a rigid SiO₂ core and a flexible polymer shell, providing synergistic thermal stability, mechanical strength, and deformation capability. Structural characterization confirmed the successful formation of the designed organic–inorganic hybrid structure. After aging at 240 °C, HGP maintained stable morphology and dispersion characteristics, while exerting minimal influence on drilling fluid rheological properties. The addition of 3 wt% HGP reduced API fluid loss by approximately 30% and decreased sand bed invasion by approximately 50% after high-temperature aging. Under 35 wt% NaCl and 5 wt% CaCl₂ contamination, HGP maintained effective filtration control, reducing fluid loss by more than 50% compared with the base fluid. Furthermore, HGP achieved core plugging efficiencies above 94% and reduced mud cake permeability by over 70%, demonstrating superior plugging performance compared with polymer microspheres NF-1 and SiO₂ particles. The enhanced performance was considered to arise from the synergistic effects of stable dispersion, pore-throat bridging, deformation filling, and structural stabilization. This study provides a rigid–flexible hybrid strategy for designing high-performance plugging agents for ultra-high temperature and high-salinity water-based drilling fluids. Full article

Selenium (Se) is an essential trace element for humans and animals, with nutritional functions and abiotic stress regulation capacity, and has been confirmed to alleviate heavy metal toxicity and inhibit its accumulation in crops. Soil lead contamination has become a prominent environmental safety problem in agricultural production, particularly in South China, and lead over-standard in edible crops poses irreversible threats to the human nervous system and blood circulation through food chain transmission. As an efficient exogenous antagonist, Se can comprehensively regulate the absorption, translocation, and compartmentalization of lead in soil–plant systems. This review systematically summarizes the interactive effects of soil physicochemical properties, crop genotypes, and Se speciation on plant lead uptake, and focuses on phytochelatin synthase (PCS), the core rate-limiting enzyme for intracellular heavy metal chelation, to elucidate the molecular cascade of Se-mediated PCS-dependent lead detoxification. We further outline multi-pathway agronomic Se applications for lead reduction; analyze key limiting factors, including Se concentration, application method, and rhizosphere microbial community; and discuss contradictory results and unresolved questions in existing studies. Current evidence confirms that appropriate Se treatment increases glutathione (GSH) content via antioxidant system regulation, upregulates PCS gene transcription and activity, promotes phytochelatins (PCs) polymerization, and forms stable PC-Pb complexes sequestered in vacuoles to reduce cytoplasmic lead mobility. Additionally, Se reshapes rhizosphere microbial community composition to lower soil Pb²⁺ bioavailability and enhances lignin and pectin biosynthesis in root cell walls to physically block root Pb²⁺ influx. Nevertheless, critical knowledge gaps remain unaddressed: (1) upstream signal transduction cascades triggering Se-induced differential PCS expression; (2) precise Pb²⁺ binding sites and affinity of PC oligomers; (3) valence-dependent disparities in selenate, selenite, and nano-Se (SeNPs) modulating PCS activity; and (4) standardized field Se fertilization protocols tailored to staple and tropical tuber crops such as cassava. This review provides systematic theoretical reference and technical foundations for dissecting Se-Pb antagonistic molecular networks, developing Se-enriched low Pb²⁺ functional fertilizers, and mitigating Pb²⁺ contamination risk in agricultural commodities. Full article

Accurate multi-object tracking and metric localization support traffic monitoring and cooperative intelligent transportation at complex intersections. This study presents a fixed-camera vision-map fusion framework that addresses two practical difficulties: axis-aligned boxes poorly represent turning vehicles, and unconstrained image-plane tracking can produce physically implausible trajectories. A map-aided frontend first generates candidate detections using improved You Only Look Once version 8 nano (YOLOv8n) horizontal bounding box (HBB) branch and an improved YOLOv8 oriented bounding box (OBB) branch. A high-definition (HD) map selector then retains the candidate geometry consistent with the straight-driving or turning region and converts it into a unified detection record. The selected reference point is projected to the ground plane through an offline-estimated homography, whereas the appearance feature bypasses the homography and is passed directly to the association stage. The tracking backend uses a 12-dimensional joint image/metric state, symmetric central-difference evaluations of the process and measurement functions, appearance-motion association, and a feasible-road projection derived from HD-map lane polygons. On the evaluated public sequences, the complete configuration achieved a multiple object tracking accuracy (MOTA) of 74.5%, an identification F1 score (IDF1) of 82.6%, 614 identity switches, and a throughput of 26.8 frames per second (FPS) on an RTX 4090 workstation. In a descriptive Vehicle-in-the-Loop case study involving one instrumented vehicle at one intersection, the overall localization mean absolute error (MAE) was 0.180 m, compared with 0.208 m for the baseline end-to-end configuration. These results indicate the feasibility of combining branch-specific vehicle geometry with map-constrained tracking; controlled same-detector comparisons, repeated multi-vehicle trials, and embedded-device latency and power profiling remain necessary for broader claims. Full article

Plant anthracnose, caused by Colletotrichum spp., is a class of significant diseases that severely threatens global crop production. Traditional management strategies, including chemical control, are hindered by inherent limitations such as the frequent emergence of pathogen resistance, low pesticide utilization efficiency, high environmental residue risks, and inconsistent field efficacy. Moreover, achieving further improvements in control efficacy is constrained by the complex biological characteristics of Colletotrichum species, particularly their hemibiotrophic lifestyle and latent infection strategies. In recent years, nanotechnology has emerged as a potential approach for the management of anthracnose. This review summarizes the research progress of various nanomaterials in the control of plant anthracnose. It analyzes the proposed multi-mechanism modes of action of nanomaterials tailored to the specific infection traits of Colletotrichum. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the theoretical mechanisms and preliminary in vitro evidence of nano-enabled controlled-release systems in addressing asymptomatic latent infections and achieving targeted, precise delivery. However, it must be emphasized that most current findings are derived from laboratory or controlled-environment studies, and the actual field-scale effectiveness, long-term environmental behavior, and multi-trophic safety of many nanomaterials remain insufficiently confirmed. Building upon these insights, this review thoroughly evaluates the critical challenges facing the agricultural field application of nanomaterials, such as ecotoxicity, formulation stability, scalable industrial production, and regulatory gaps. This review aims to provide objective theoretical support and technical references for achieving safe, efficient, and sustainable nano-enabled green management of plant anthracnose. Full article

Diffractive optical elements (DOEs) have become core components for converting Gaussian beams into flat-top beams due to their advantages of flexible design, compact size, and precise control over light field distribution. However, during the fabrication of multi-step DOEs, some processes such as ion beam etching tend to produce etching depth errors, which cause deviations of the surface micro–nano phase structures from the designed values and thus severely degrade the beam shaping performance. This paper proposes a focusing DOE for flat-top beam shaping, which combines the focusing phase with the phase optimized by the weighted constraint iterative algorithm to establish a phase distribution resilient to etching depth errors. Thus, the proposed focusing DOE exhibits significantly improved robustness to etching depth errors and effectively reduces the structural complexity of laser optical systems. Our experimental results show that the designed DOE can stably convert the incident Gaussian beam into flat-top beams within the etching depth error range of ±30 nm, with both the flat-top beam uniformity and diffraction efficiency above 95%, and the maximum tolerable etching depth error reaches ±90 nm. Full article

Background/Objectives: Oxford Nanopore sequencing produces long reads quickly, but most functional profiling tools were developed for short reads or rely on assembly pipelines that are computationally costly and sensitive to long-read error rates. We present NanoPrism, a taxonomy-guided pipeline for rapid functional profiling of long-read metagenomes. Methods: NanoPrism (i) identifies sample composition with Kraken2, (ii) constructs compact species-specific coding sequence (CDS)–KEGG ortholog databases, and (iii) estimates ortholog abundances by direct minimap2 alignment of nanopore reads with single-copy marker normalization. We evaluated NanoPrism on simulated Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 and PA14 reads and on ZymoBIOMICS mock-community datasets sequenced on GridION and PromethION platforms. Results: On the Zymo long-read datasets, NanoPrism achieved Pearson correlations of 0.917–0.922 against independent expected ortholog profiles under unit-sum normalization. On matched one-million-read subsets, NanoPrism achieved higher correlations and lower Jensen–Shannon distances and mean absolute errors than the evaluated DIAMOND-based MEGAN-LR workflow. Experiments that omitted one species at a time from the reference database showed that omission of low-abundance community members had limited effects on the aggregate KO profile, whereas omission of the dominant Listeria monocytogenes reference from the Log community reduced Pearson correlation from approximately 0.92 to 0.29. Conclusions: NanoPrism offers a computationally efficient option for taxonomy-guided functional profiling of bacterial isolates and defined microbial communities. Validation on complex clinical and environmental metagenomes, broader forms of taxonomic-classification error, and dedicated fungal benchmarks remain necessary. Full article

High-throughput metagenomic sequencing and advances in mucosal immunology have refuted the traditional physiological concept of a sterile respiratory tract. The oral cavity has been recognized as a dynamic determinant of systemic health. As in other parts of the body, recent studies also suggest that pulmonary health may be linked to oral health. Under eubiotic conditions, the oral microbiome maintains local immunological homeostasis and colonization resistance. Oral dysbiosis, characterized by sequential shifts in microbial communities and the proliferation of the pathogenic red complex (Porphyromonas gingivalis, Treponema denticola, and Tannerella forsythia), induces a state of chronic systemic inflammation, potentially involved in an infectious axis between the oral cavity and the lung. This review evaluates the tripartite systemic pathways of metastatic infection, metastatic injury, and metastatic inflammation that govern the translocation of oral pathobionts and their bioactive components, including lipopolysaccharides, outer membrane vesicles, and matrix metalloproteinases, to the lower respiratory tract via microaspiration and hematogenous circulation. The clinical implications across the chronic respiratory disease spectrum are examined, with a focus on how deficits in oral microbial diversity influence chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) pathogenesis, modulate the pulmonary virome and mycobiome, and stimulate maladaptive trained immunity. Furthermore, the contribution of biological aging is assessed, highlighting the roles of immunosenescence, inflammaging, and physiological reflex decline within the broader mucosal continuum. Finally, the clinical translation of this axis is analyzed, emphasizing the integration of saliva-based point-of-care nano-theranostics, metatranscriptomic profiling, and targeted interventions—such as professional oral biofilm management in intensive care settings and precision microbiome engineering—to preserve respiratory function and restore immune homeostasis. Full article