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Hereditary genetic diseases, cancer, and infectious diseases are affecting global health and become major health issues, but the treatment development remains challenging. Gene therapies using DNA plasmid, RNAi, miRNA, mRNA, and gene editing hold great promise. Lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery technology has been a revolutionary development, which has been granted for clinical applications, including mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 infections. Due to the success of LNP systems, understanding the structure, formulation, and function relationship of the lipid components in LNP systems is crucial for design more effective LNP. Here, we highlight the key considerations for developing an LNP system. The evolution of structure and function of lipids as well as their LNP formulation from the early-stage simple formulations to multi-components LNP and multifunctional ionizable lipids have been discussed. The flexibility and platform nature of LNP enable efficient intracellular delivery of a variety of therapeutic nucleic acids and provide many novel treatment options for the diseases that are previously untreatable.

During the past decade, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has been rapidly developing and widely applied in the food industry by virtue of the use of chemometric techniques in which wavelength selection methods play an important role. This paper is a review of such variable selection methods and their limitations, describing the basic taxonomy of the methods and their respective advantages and disadvantages. Special attention is paid to recent developments in wavelength selection techniques for HSI in the field of food quality and safety evaluations. Typical and commonly used methods in HSI, such as partial least squares regression, stepwise regression and spectrum analysis, are described in detail. Some sophisticated methods, such as successive projections algorithm, uninformative variable elimination, simulated annealing, artificial neural network and genetic algorithm methods, are also discussed. Finally, new methods not currently used but that could have substantial impact on the field are presented. In short, this review provides an overview of wavelength selection methods in food-related areas and offers a thoughtful perspective on future potentials and challenges in the development of HSI systems.

Plasma-functionalized liquids (PFL) emerge as an effective sanitizer with great potential to be against a variety of microorganisms but their applications on seafood products are limited. In the current study, the physicochemical properties of plasma-functionalized water (PFW) and plasma-functionalized buffer (PFB), and their antimicrobial activities on grass carp, were investigated under different conditions of applied voltage, plasma exposure time and immersion time. Results indicated that increasing voltage and exposure time led to an increase in levels of reactive species in PFW and PFB, while the presence of citric acid in the buffer accelerated possible reactions of active species and enhanced acidification, electrical conductivity (EC) and oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) as compared with PFW. Results also showed that the decontamination efficiency depended on voltage and exposure time, which could be up to 1.21 and 1.52 log reductions for L. monocytogenes, and 1.44 and 1.75 log reductions for S. Typhimurium for PFW and PFB, respectively. Immersing fish fillet samples in both solutions also led to a reduced pH and increased total acidity level in the samples with no significant difference (p > 0.05) between PFW and PFB, while PFB greatly affected the colour change in fish fillets. This study provided a basis for the potential development of novel sanitizers to decontaminate microorganism in fish and seafood products.Key points• Cold plasma induced a time-dependent change of active species in water and buffer.• Ionic equilibria of conjugate base and weak acid in buffer enhanced RNS and ROS.• Decontamination depended on voltage and exposure time of liquids to cold plasma.• Reduced pH, increased acidity and colour change were noticed in treated fish.• A basis for developing potential sanitizers for seafood products is provided.

Previous studies have shown the great potential of using plasma-activated water (PAW) on improving agriculture seed germination, however, information on the influence of PAW on crop plantlet juice remains scanty. In this research, the effect of PAW generated by atmosphere pressure Ar–O 2 plasma jet for 1–5 min on wheat seed germination, seedling growth and nutritional properties of wheat plantlet juice was investigated. Results revealed that all PAWs could enhance wheat seed germination and seedling growth in 7 days by improving the germination rate, germination index, fresh weight, dry weight and vigour index, and especially that PAW activated for 3 min (PAW-3) showed the best overall performance. In addition, the application of PAWs enhanced the nutritional properties of wheat plantlet juice from those grown for 14 days by improving total soluble solids, protein content, photosynthetic pigments, total phenolic content, antioxidant activity, enzyme activity, free amino acids and minerals content, and the best enhancement was also observed in PAW-3. It was concluded that PAWs would be an effective technique to enhance the growth and nutritional properties of crop sprouts, which could be served as functional foods in many forms.

The aim of this work was to investigate the effect of chemical oxidation on the emulsifying properties of myofibrillar proteins. Myofibrillar proteins were oxidized by a hydroxyl radical generating system (Fenton reaction). Structural changes of oxidized or non-oxidized myofibrillar proteins were determined using surface hydrophobicity (H 0 ) and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. The results suggested that H 0 increased ( p  < 0.05) after treatment with oxidizing agent. Result from FTIR suggested that protein aggregation occurred and there was an increase in β-sheet structure accompanied by a decrease in turns, alpha helix, and random structures with the increase of oxidizing agent. Changes in zeta potential of the test emulsions suggested that protein oxidation could alter the electric charge of myofibrillar proteins. The analysis of the emulsions showed that protein oxidation had a negative effect on the emulsifying properties of myofibrillar proteins due to changes in electric charge, surface active properties, and protein molecular flexibility.

Recently, Roy et al. proposed a physically unclonable function (PUF)-based authentication and key exchange protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The PUF protocol is efficient, because it integrates both the Node-to-Node (N2N) authentication and the Node-to-Server (N2S) authentication into a standalone protocol. In this paper, we therefore examine the security of the PUF protocol under the assumption of an insider attack. Our cryptanalysis findings are the following. (1) A legitimate but malicious IoT node can monitor the secure communication among the server and any other IoT nodes in both N2N authentication and N2S authentication. (2) A legitimate but malicious IoT node is able to impersonate a target IoT node to cheat the server and any other IoT nodes in N2N authentication and the server in N2S authentication, respectively. (3) A legitimate but malicious IoT node can masquerade as the server to cheat any other target IoT nodes in both N2N authentication and N2S authentication. To the best of our knowledge, our work gives the first non-trivial concrete security analysis for the PUF protocol. In addition, we employ the automatic verification tool of security protocols, i.e., Scyther, to confirm the weaknesses found in the PUF protocol. We finally consider how to prevent weaknesses in the PUF protocol.

Hyperspectral imaging is built with the aggregation of imaging, spectroscopy and radiometric techniques. This technique observes the sample behaviour when it is exposed to light and interprets the properties of the biological samples. As hyperspectral imaging helps in interpreting the sample at the molecular level, it can distinguish very minute changes in the sample composition from its scatter properties. Hyperspectral data collection depends on several parameters such as electromagnetic spectrum wavelength range, imaging mode and imaging system. Spectral data acquired using a hyperspectral imaging system contain variations due to external factors and imaging components. Moreover, food samples are complex matrices with conditions of surface and internal heterogeneities, which may lead to variations in acquired data. Hence, before extracting information, these variations and noises must be reduced from the data using reference-dependent or reference-independent spectral pre-processing techniques. Using of the entire hyperspectral data for information extraction is tedious and time-consuming. In order to overcome this, exploratory data analysis techniques are used to select crucial wavelengths from the excessive hyperspectral data. Using appropriate chemometric techniques (supervised or unsupervised learning techniques) on this pre-processed hyperspectral data, qualitative or quantitative information from sample can be obtained. Qualitative information for analysing of the chemical composition, detecting of the defects and determining the purity of the food product can be extracted using discriminant analysis techniques. Quantitative information including variation in chemical constituents and contamination levels in food and agricultural sample can be extracted using categorical regression techniques. In combination with appropriate spectra pre-processing and chemometric technique, hyperspectral imaging stands out as an advanced quality evaluation system for food and agricultural products.

Hepatitis B protein x (HBx) has been reported to promote tumorigenesis in hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the mechanism awaits further investigation. In this study, we found that cFAM210A (a circular RNA derived from the third exon of transcript NM_001098801 of the FAM210A gene; CircBase ID: hsa_circ_0003979) can be silenced by HBx. cFAM210A expression was downregulated and negatively correlated with tumorigenesis in patients with HBV-related HCC. Furthermore, cFAM210A reduced the proliferation, stemness, and tumorigenicity of HCC cells. Mechanistically, HBx increased the N6-methyladenosine (m6A) level of cFAM210A by promoting the expression of RBM15 (an m6A methyltransferase), thus inducing the degradation of cFAM210A via the YTHDF2-HRSP12-RNase P/MRP pathway. cFAM210A bound to YBX1 and inhibited its phosphorylation, suppressing its transactivation function toward MET. These findings suggest the important role of circular RNAs in HBx-induced hepatocarcinogenesis and identify cFAM210A a potential target in the prevention and treatment of HBV-related HCC. Circular RNA cFAM210A: a new hope in HBV-related HCC treatment A study has identified a circular RNA, cFAM210A, that inhibits the growth and stemness of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. Researchers found that the hepatitis B virus (HBV) protein HBx promotes the degradation of cFAM210A through a process called N6-methyladenosine modification. This leads to increased tumour growth and stemness in HCC cells. By inhibiting the transactivation function of a protein called YBX1 on another protein called MET, cFAM210A suppresses tumour progression. These findings highlight the potential of cFAM210A as a target for the prevention and treatment of HBV-related HCC.

Bluetooth devices are widely employed in the home network systems. It is important to secure the home members’ Bluetooth devices, because they always store and transmit personal sensitive information. In the Bluetooth standard, Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) is an essential security mechanism for Bluetooth devices. We examine the security of SSP in the recent Bluetooth standard V5.0. The passkey entry association model in SSP is analyzed under the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Our contribution is twofold. (1) We demonstrate that the passkey entry association model is vulnerable to the MITM attack, once the host reuses the passkey. (2) An improved passkey entry protocol is therefore designed to fix the reusing passkey defect in the passkey entry association model. The improved passkey entry protocol can be easily adapted to the Bluetooth standard, because it only uses the basic cryptographic components existed in the Bluetooth standard. Our research results are beneficial to the security enhancement of Bluetooth devices in the home network systems.

Objective Provide an updated and comprehensive evaluation of the prognostic value of the albumin-fibrinogen ratio (AFR) and the fibrinogen-prealbumin ratio (FPR) for patients with cancer. Materials and methods Four databases (PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and WanFang) were searched. The primary endpoints were overall survival (OS), disease-free survival (DFS), and progression-free survival (PFS). Pooled data were synthesized using StataMP 14 and expressed as hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results This update examined 19 studies (7282 cases) that assessed the correlation of AFR with cancer prognosis. Pooled univariate and multivariate analyses indicated significant correlations of low AFR with poor OS (HR 2.18, 95%CI 1.87–2.55 and HR 1.75, 95%CI 1.54–2.00, respectively), poor DFS (HR 1.89, 95%CI 1.54–2.32 and HR 1.51, 95%CI 1.29–1.76, respectively), and poor PFS (HR 1.68, 95%CI 1.42–1.99 and HR 1.48, 95%CI 1.16–1.88, respectively). Pooled univariate and multivariate analyses of 6 studies (2232 cases) indicated high FPR significantly correlated with poor OS (HR 2.37, 95%CI 2.03–2.77 and HR 1.97, 95%CI 1.41–2.77, respectively). One study reported that high FPR correlated with poor DFS (univariate analysis: HR 2.20, 95%CI 1.35–3.57; multivariate analysis: HR 1.77, 95%CI 1.04–2.99) and one study reported a correlation of high FPR with poor PFS in univariate analysis alone (HR 1.79, 95%CI 1.11–2.88). Conclusion A low AFR and a high FPR correlated with increased risk of cancer mortality and recurrence. AFR and FPR may be promising prognostic markers for cancers.