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Comparative attenuation of TiO₂ nanoparticle dose-dependent toxicities in lung, spleen, and blood by nanoencapsulated wheat germ oil in male rats
Abstract This study aimed to prepare and characterize nanoencapsulated wheat germ oil (WGO), to evaluate the dose-dependent toxicity of titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO 2 NPs) in rat lungs, blood, and spleen, and to investigate the protective efficacy of both free and nanoencapsulated WGO, with particular emphasis on oxidative stress, immunotoxicity, and genotoxicity. WGO was nanoencapsulated and characterized for its colloidal properties, revealing desirable physicochemical attributes (spherical nanoparticles; size 173.9 ± 0.51 nm; zeta potential 14.4 ± 0.23 mV; PDI 0.39 ± 0.01) and strong in vitro antioxidant activity. To evaluate tissue injury, hematological parameters, oxidative stress biomarkers, and antioxidant enzyme activities were assessed. TiO 2 NPs accumulated primarily in the lung and spleen, causing dose-dependent biochemical changes and immunomodulatory disruptions, such as increased TBARS and NO levels, DNA damage, and depletion of antioxidant enzymes. Histological and immunohistochemical analyses confirmed significant tissue damage. Co-administration of WGO mitigated these effects, with the nanoencapsulated form showing superior protection over the free form. Thus, nanoencapsulated WGO effectively counters TiO 2 NP-induced pulmonary and splenic toxicity, likely via enhanced antioxidant and immunomodulatory actions, highlighting its promise as a therapeutic approach in nanotoxicology, occupational health, and food safety.
Molecular Dipole Engineering in Layered Perovskite Ferroelectrics Enables Large Rashba-Dresselhaus Spin Splitting and Persistent Spin Texture for UV Circularly Polarized Light Detection
Theory-Guided Synthesis of Stable Low-Nuclearity Cluster Catalysts via Atom-Stabilizer Locking
Leveraging a vendor-neutral deep learning reconstruction algorithm to reduce scan time and enhance image quality in T2-weighted liver MRI
Abstract This study evaluated whether a vendor-neutral deep learning reconstruction (DLR) can improve image quality in accelerated T2-weighted imaging (T2WI) of the liver MRI acquired in a single breath-hold compared with routine T2WI. In this retrospective study, 86 patients who underwent nonenhanced 3-T liver MRI in August 2024 were included. Two board-certified radiologists independently assessed T2WI obtained using three protocols: (1) routine T2WI acquired with two breath-holds (Routine-2BH); (2) accelerated T2WI reconstructed with DLR acquired in a single breath-hold (SwiftMR-1BH); and (3) accelerated T2WI reconstructed with DLR acquired with two breath-holds (SwiftMR-2BH). Quantitative signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and qualitative image quality, including sharpness, motion artifacts, spatial mismatch, and lesion conspicuity, were evaluated. The SwiftMR protocols reduced acquisition time by approximately 9 s compared with the routine protocol. Compared with Routine-2BH protocol, both SwiftMR protocols showed significantly higher sharpness and SNR ( p < 0.001), although motion artifacts were more pronounced. Spatial mismatch scores were significantly lower with SwiftMR-1BH than with Routine-2BH and SwiftMR-2BH ( p < 0.05). Among 49 patients with focal liver lesions, lesion conspicuity was generally higher with SwiftMR protocols, although not consistently significant. Overall, vendor-neutral DLR using SwiftMR restored the image quality of accelerated single-breath-hold T2WI for liver MRI, resulting in a higher SNR and overall image quality than routine two-breath-hold T2WI.
Seaweed biostimulant enhances freezing tolerance in citrus via coordinated redox regulation and metabolic adjustment
A Guanine Ribonucleotide Atypically Adaptive to the <i>Syn</i> Glycosidic Conformation in a Human Telomeric DNA–TERRA RNA Hybrid G-Quadruplex with (3 + 1) Mixed Strand Orientations Studied by NMR
Mechanistic studies of tyrosine phosphatase SHP2 in hypoxic environment to promote angiogenesis in HCC by modulating the ROS/Src pathway
Polymeric Hydrogel Interphase Enables Transport-Compatible Fe Stabilization for Hectowatt-Scale Alkaline Water Electrolysis
Decoding cytokine interactions for psoriasis therapy through computational repurposing of antihypertensive drugs
Heat waves impair foraging initiation and directional movement toward a floral scent in the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris)
Abstract Global climate change is disrupting key ecological processes and species interactions. In particular, the frequency and severity of heat waves have increased dramatically over the last decade. Bumblebees are key pollinators in natural and agricultural systems, representing great economic and biodiversity value. However, these insects are particularly vulnerable to heat stress, because they are exceptionally well adapted to cold environments. Previous studies showed that heat stress has negatively impacted bumblebee foraging in terms of flight performance and foraging success, but its effect on chemosensory orientation is still unknown. In this study, we experimentally investigated if heat wave-treated bumblebees have difficulties in sensing or locating the source of a synthetic floral blend. We found that the proportion of individuals that initiated foraging was significantly lower in the heat wave-treated group than in the control group. Moreover, heat wave-treated bees started foraging later and approached scent sources randomly, although they reached the first scent source with a latency comparable to that of control individuals. Contrary to our initial expectations, the heat wave treatment influenced the antennal response of bumblebees only in a body size-dependent manner. Our findings provide evidence that heat waves can reduce foraging activity and impair directional movements toward floral scents in buff-tailed bumblebees, and support the idea that climate change may be one of the most harmful anthropogenic factors affecting the foraging performance of this pollinator species.
From Oxo to Oxyl to Biradical: Systematic Multireference Calculations of Methane Activation at MOF Nodes
Role of theobromine and caffeine in resistance to Phytophthora spp. in Theobroma cacao
Bioorthogonal Activation of Protein Function through a retro-Cope/Cope Elimination Cascade
Prioritizing dairy cattle dystocia risk factors using a comparative fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making algorithms
Revealing the Hydrophobic Interactions between Annular Lipids and Transmembrane Peptides via Photo-Tagging and Mass Spectrometry
Arginine decarboxylase activity in the cattle tick Rhipicephalus microplus suggests an alternative polyamine biosynthetic pathway
Visualizing Electrochemical Oxidation and Dissolution of Platinum Surfaces at the Atomic Scale
A fault diagnosis method for aero-engine inter-shaft bearings based on 1DCNN-Transformer-BiGRU
Abstract To address the challenges of difficult fault feature extraction and feature aliasing in aero-engine inter-shaft bearings under strong noise conditions, this paper proposes a fusion diagnostic method that integrates a dual-scale one-dimensional convolutional neural network, a multi-head self-attention Transformer, and a bidirectional gated recurrent unit. The method employs a three-stage progressive network architecture for end-to-end fault diagnosis. The dual-scale 1DCNN extracts local temporal features from vibration signals, and batch normalization and dropout are applied to stabilize training and reduce potential overfitting. The Transformer encoder models dependencies among the extracted feature representations, supporting the representation of fault-sensitive features. The BiGRU captures bidirectional temporal dependencies in the fault evolution process. Experimental validation on the Harbin Institute of Technology aero-engine inter-shaft bearing dataset shows that the proposed model achieves 97% diagnostic accuracy under extreme noise conditions (SNR = −5 dB). Compared with existing methods, these results indicate that the proposed network effectively maintains diagnostic performance under controlled noise conditions.