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Wild animals and plants have developed a variety of adaptive traits driven by adaptive evolution, an important strategy for species survival and persistence. Uncovering the molecular mechanisms of adaptive evolution is the key to understanding species diversification, phenotypic convergence, and inter-species interaction. As the genome sequences of more and more non-model organisms are becoming available, the focus of studies on molecular mechanisms of adaptive evolution has shifted from the candidate gene method to genetic mapping based on genome-wide scanning. In this study, we reviewed the latest research advances in wild animals and plants, focusing on adaptive traits, convergent evolution, and coevolution. Firstly, we focused on the adaptive evolution of morphological, behavioral, and physiological traits. Secondly, we reviewed the phenotypic convergences of life history traits and responding to environmental pressures, and the underlying molecular convergence mechanisms. Thirdly, we summarized the advances of coevolution, including the four main types: mutualism, parasitism, predation and competition. Overall, these latest advances greatly increase our understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms for diverse adaptive traits and species interaction, demonstrating that the development of evolutionary biology has been greatly accelerated by multi-omics technologies. Finally, we highlighted the emerging trends and future prospects around the above three aspects of adaptive evolution.

Nanopore-based sequencing has emerged as a revolutionary tool for animal pathogen genomics, offering capabilities unattainable with Sanger and next-generation sequencing (NGS). Despite rapid technical progress, routine veterinary deployment still faces uncertainty in study design, sample preparation, and interpretation thresholds across diverse hosts and sample matrices. Accordingly, this review consolidates recent evidence and provides workflow-oriented guidance for veterinary diagnostics and One Health surveillance. Its portability, ability to generate real-time long-read data, and minimal infrastructure requirements enable rapid, on-site sequencing for veterinary diagnostics and surveillance. This review examines the principles of nanopore sequencing and its advantages over conventional methods, surveying recent applications across viral, bacterial (including antimicrobial resistance, AMR), and parasitic pathogen detection in animals. In viral diagnostics, it facilitates rapid whole-genome sequencing and outbreak tracing in field settings. For bacterial pathogens, it enables near-complete genome assembly and identification of plasmid-borne AMR genes. Emerging studies also demonstrate its utility in parasitology, from high-resolution species identification to whole-genome assemblies. We compare these advancements with traditional diagnostics, highlighting strengths in speed and comprehensiveness while addressing current limitations in accuracy and host-DNA interference. As technology matures through improvements in chemistry and adaptive sampling, nanopore sequencing is poised to transform veterinary pathogen detection and bolster One Health surveillance of emerging zoonoses.

Developing highly active and durable electrocatalysts for acidic oxygen evolution reaction remains a great challenge due to the sluggish kinetics of the four-electron transfer reaction and severe catalyst dissolution. Here we report an electrochemical lithium intercalation method to improve both the activity and stability of RuO 2 for acidic oxygen evolution reaction. The lithium intercalates into the lattice interstices of RuO 2 , donates electrons and distorts the local structure. Therefore, the Ru valence state is lowered with formation of stable Li-O-Ru local structure, and the Ru–O covalency is weakened, which suppresses the dissolution of Ru, resulting in greatly enhanced durability. Meanwhile, the inherent lattice strain results in the surface structural distortion of Li x RuO 2 and activates the dangling O atom near the Ru active site as a proton acceptor, which stabilizes the OOH* and dramatically enhances the activity. This work provides an effective strategy to develop highly efficient catalyst towards water splitting. While water splitting in acid offers higher operational performances than in alkaline conditions, there are few high-activity, acid-stable oxygen evolution electrocatalysts. Here, authors examine electrochemical Li intercalation to improve the activity and stability of RuO 2 for acidic water oxidation.

AbstractsProton-conducting ceramics (PCCs) are of considerable interest for use in energy conversion and storage applications, electrochemical sensors, and separation membranes. PCCs that combine performance, efficiency, stability, and an ability to operate at low temperatures are particularly attractive. This review summarizes the recent progress made in the development of low-temperature proton-conducting ceramics (LT-PCCs), which are defined as operating in the temperature range of 25–400 °C. The structure of these ceramic materials, the characteristics of proton transport mechanisms, and the potential applications for LT-PCCs will be summarized with an emphasis on protonic conduction occurring at interfaces. Three temperature zones are defined in the LT-PCC operating regime based on the predominant proton transfer mechanism occurring in each zone. The variation in material properties, such as crystal structure, conductivity, microstructure, fabrication methods required to achieve the requisite grain size distribution, along with typical strategies pursued to enhance the proton conduction, is addressed. Finally, a perspective regarding applications of these materials to low-temperature solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen separation membranes, and emerging areas in the nuclear industry including off-gas capture and isotopic separations is presented.

The increasing density and complexity of electromagnetic signals have brought new challenges to multi-component radar signal recognition. To address the problem of low recognition accuracy under low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) in adapting the common recognition framework of combining time–frequency transformations (TFTs) with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), this paper proposes a new dual-component radar signal recognition framework (TFGM-RMNet) that combines a deep time–frequency generation module with a Transformer-based residual network. First, the received noisy signal is preprocessed. Then, the deep time–frequency generation module is used to learn the complete basis function to obtain various TF features of the time signal, and the corresponding time–frequency representation (TFR) is output under the supervision of high-quality images. Next, a ResNet combined with cascaded multi-head attention (MHSA) is applied to extract local and global features from the TFR. Finally, modulation format prediction is achieved through multi-label classification. The proposed framework does not require explicit TFT during testing, and the TFT process is built into TFGM to replace the traditional TFT. The classification results and ideal TFR are obtained during testing, realizing an end-to-end deep learning (DL) framework. The simulation results show that, when SNR > −8 dB, this method can achieve an average recognition accuracy close to 100%. It achieves 97% accuracy even at an SNR of −10 dB. At the same time, under low SNR, the recognition performance is better than the existing algorithms including DCNN-RAMIML, DCNN-MLL, and DCNN-MIML.

Two cobalt(II) complexes [CoL1](OTf)2 (1, L1 = 6,6′′-di(anilino)-4′-phenyl-2,2′:6′,2′′-terpyridine) and [CoL2](OTf)2·MeOH (2, L2 = 6,6′′-di(N,N-dimethylamino)-4′-phenyl-2,2′:6′,2′′-terpyridine) were synthesized and characterized. Crystal structure analyses showed that the spin carries were coordinated by five N atoms from the neutral pentaaza ligands, forming distorted trigonal bipyramidal coordination environments. Ab initio calculations revealed large easy-axial anisotropy in complexes 1 and 2. Magnetic measurements suggest that complexes 1 and 2 are field-induced single-molecule magnets, whose relaxations are mainly predominated by Raman and direct processes.

As an immune-mediated skin disease, psoriasis encounters therapeutic challenges on topical drug development due to the unclear mechanism, and complicated morphological and physiological changes in the skin. In this study, imiquimod-induced psoriatic mouse skin (IMQ-psoriatic skin) was chosen as the in vitro pathological model to explore the penetration behaviors of drugs and nanoparticles (NPs). Compared with normal skin, significantly higher penetration and skin accumulation were observed in IMQ-psoriatic skin for all the three model drugs. When poorly water-soluble curcumin was formulated as NPs that were subsequently loaded in gel, the drug's penetration and accumulation in both normal and IMQ-psoriatic skins were significantly improved, in comparison with that of the curcumin suspension. Interestingly, the NPs' size effect, in terms of their penetration and accumulation behaviors, was more pronounced for IMQ-psoriatic skin. Furthermore, by taking three sized FluoSpheres as model NPs, confocal laser scanning microscopy demonstrated that the penetration pathways of NPs no longer followed the hair follicles channels, instead they were more widely distributed in the IMQ-psoriatic skin. In conclusion, the alternation of the IMQ-psoriatic skin structure will lead to the enhanced penetration of drug and NPs, and should be considered in topical drug formulation and further clinical practice for psoriasis therapy.

Epidemiological studies have reported conflicting results regarding the association between maternal folic acid supplementation and the risk of congenital heart defects (CHDs). However, a meta-analysis of the association between maternal folic acid supplementation and CHDs in offspring has not been conducted. We searched the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases for articles cataloged between their inceptions and October 10, 2014 and identified relevant published studies that assessed the association between maternal folate supplementation and the risk of CHDs. Study-specific relative risk estimates were pooled using random-effects or fixed-effects models. Out of the 1,606 articles found in our initial literature searches, a total of 1 randomized controlled trial, 1 cohort study and 16 case-control studies were included in our final meta-analysis. The overall results of this meta-analysis provide evidence that maternal folate supplementation is associated with a significantly decreased risk of CHDs (RR = 0.72, 95% CI: 0.63–0.82). Statistically significant heterogeneity was detected ( Q = 82.48, P < 0.001, I 2 = 79.4%). We conducted stratified and meta-regression analyses to identify the origin of the heterogeneity among the studies and a Galbraith plot was generated to graphically assess the sources of heterogeneity. This meta-analysis provides a robust estimate of the positive association between maternal folate supplementation and a decreased risk of CHDs.

In a trial conducted in China, patients with large cerebral infarctions as determined by imaging criteria within 24 hours after onset had better outcomes with endovascular therapy than with medical therapy alone.

Osteoporosis (OP) is among the most prevalent systemic skeletal disorders worldwide and is characterized by decreased bone mass and microarchitectural deterioration, leading to increased fracture risk and significant impairment of quality of life, particularly among elderly individuals. Recently, exosomes derived from bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs), termed BMSC-exosomes, have emerged as promising therapeutic agents for OP because of their regenerative and immunomodulatory potential. In this study, we used senescence-accelerated mouse prone 6 (SAMP6) mice, MC3T3-E1 osteoblastic cells, and CD4(+) T cells to investigate the effects of BMSC-exosomes on osteogenesis and to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanisms. Our results demonstrate that BMSC-derived exosomes enhance osteogenic differentiation in vitro and ameliorate age-related bone loss in vivo. We identified miR-21-5p as a highly enriched microRNA within BMSC-exosomes, which plays a central role in mediating their pro-osteogenic effects and protecting against OP progression. Flow cytometry analysis revealed that BMSC-exosome treatment effectively restored the imbalance between T helper 17 cells (Th17) and regulatory T cells (Treg cells)—a key immune dysregulation observed in OP—in both SAMP6 mice and cultured CD4(+) T cells. Through integrated bioinformatics analysis and experimental validation, we showed that BMSC-derived miR-21-5p directly targeted S-phase kinase-associated protein 2 (SKP2), leading to its downregulation. SKP2 then promotes the ubiquitination and subsequent degradation of Forkhead Box O1 (FoxO1), a transcription factor essential for maintaining Th17/Treg homeostasis. By suppressing SKP2, miR-21-5p stabilizes FoxO1, thereby promoting immune balance and enhancing osteogenic activity. Collectively, these findings indicate that miR-21-5p-enriched BMSC-exosomes alleviate OP by modulating the SKP2/ubiquitination/FoxO1 signalling axis and restoring the Th17/Treg balance. This dual action—promoting bone formation and correcting immune dysfunction—highlights the therapeutic potential of BMSC-exosomes. Thus, the use of miR-21-5p-loaded BMSC-exosomes represents a novel and promising strategy for the prevention and treatment of OP.