Abstract In this study, shear‐induced crystallization of short carbon fiber (SCF)‐reinforced isotactic polypropylene (iPP) composite was investigated using polarized optical microscopy (POM) and rheometry. Although the SCF exhibited no nucleation ability to iPP in the quiescent melt under the chosen conditions, different interfacial morphologies were observed after shear was applied. The POM results revealed that the crystallite morphologies along the SCF strongly depended on the shear rate () and shear duration. A nucleation kinetics model was proposed to determine how shear affects the fraction of SCF covered with transcrystalline. The nucleation rate on the SCF was proportional to . The dependence of the nucleation rate corresponded well with the change in the shear‐induced free energy of the melt, indicating that the interactions between SCF and iPP were insignificant. The rheological results demonstrated that conformational ordering directly affected the nucleation rate. The helical content near the SCF increased rapidly owing to the enhancement of shear. Therefore, the nucleation kinetics on the SCF surface accelerated significantly.
Abstract Extracellular vesicles (EVs) derived from tumor cells have the potential to provide a much-needed source of non-invasive molecular biomarkers for liquid biopsies. However, current methods for EV isolation have limited specificity towards tumor-derived EVs that limit their clinical use. Here, we present an approach called immunomagnetic sequential ultrafiltration (iSUF) that consists of sequential stages of purification and enrichment of EVs (nonspecifically and specifically) in approximately 2 h. In iSUF, EVs present in different volumes of biofluids (0.5 mL to 100 mL) can be significantly enriched (up to 1000 times), with up to 99 % removal of contaminating proteins (e.g., albumin). The EV recovery rate by iSUF for cell culture media (CCM), serum, and urine corresponded to 98.0% ± 3.6%, 96.0% ± 2.0% and 94.0% ± 1.9%, respectively (p > 0.05). The final step of iSUF enables the separation of tumor-specific EVs by incorporating immunomagnetic beads specific to a target subpopulation of EVs. Serum from a small cohort of clinical samples from metastatic breast cancer (BC) patients and healthy donors were processed by the iSUF platform and the isolated EVs from patients showed significantly higher expression levels of BC biomarkers (i.e., HER2, CD24, and miR21).
Virion-mediated outbreaks are imminent and despite rapid responses, continue to cause adverse symptoms and death. Therefore, tunable, sensitive, high-throughput assays are needed to help diagnose future virion-mediated outbreaks. Herein, it is developed a tunable in situ assay to selectively enrich virions and extracellular vesicles (EVs) and simultaneously detect antigens and nucleic acids at a single-particle resolution. The Biochip Antigen and RNA Assay (BARA) enhanced sensitivities compared to quantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), enabling the detection of virions in asymptomatic patients, genetic mutations in single virions, and enabling the continued long-term expression of viral RNA in the EV-enriched subpopulation in the plasma of patients with post-acute sequelae of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19). BARA revealed highly accurate diagnoses of COVID-19 by simultaneously detecting the spike glycoprotein and nucleocapsid-encoding RNA in saliva and nasopharyngeal swab samples. Altogether, the single-particle detection of antigens and viral RNA provides a tunable framework for the diagnosis, monitoring, and mutation screening of current and future outbreaks.
Finite element methods based on cut-cells are becoming increasingly popular because of their advantages over formulations based on body-fitted meshes for problems with moving interfaces. In such methods, the cells (or elements) which are cut by the interface between two different domains need to be integrated using special techniques in order to obtain optimal convergence rates and accurate fluxes across the interface. The adaptive integration technique in which the cells are recursively subdivided is one of the popular techniques for the numerical integration of cut-cells due to its advantages over tessellation, particularly for problems involving complex geometries in three dimensions. Although adaptive integration does not impose any limitations on the representation of the geometry of immersed solids as it requires only point location algorithms, it becomes computationally expensive for recovering optimal convergence rates. This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the adaptive integration of cut-cells for applications in computational fluid dynamics and fluid-structure interaction. We assess the effect of the accuracy of integration of cut cells on convergence rates in velocity and pressure fields, and then on forces and displacements for fluid-structure interaction problems by studying several examples in two and three dimensions. By taking the computational cost and the accuracy of forces and displacements into account, we demonstrate that numerical results of acceptable accuracy for FSI problems involving laminar flows can be obtained with only fewer levels of refinement. In particular, we show that three levels of adaptive refinement are sufficient for obtaining force and displacement values of acceptable accuracy for laminar fluid-structure interaction problems.
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