Objectives: This study aims to assess the prevalence of the mcr-1 gene among carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) isolated from clinical specimens and to further investigate the clinical significance and microbiological characteristics of CRE carrying the mcr-1 gene. Methods: Four hundred and twenty-three CRE isolates were screened for the presence of the mcr-1 gene. After identification, their clinical significance, antibiotic susceptibility, and antibiotic resistance mechanisms including the ESBL gene, carbapenemase gene, outer membrane protein (OMP), and plasmid sequencing were assessed. Results: Only four (0.9%) isolates of carbapenem-resistant Escherichia coli (E. coli) were found to carry the mcr-1 gene and demonstrated different pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns and sequence types (ST). While one patient was considered as having mcr-1-positive carbapenem-resistant E. coli (CREC) colonization, the other three mcr-1-positive CREC-related infections were classified as nosocomial infections. Only amikacin and tigecycline showed good in vitro activity against these four isolates, and three of them had a minimum inhibitory concentration with colistin of ≥4 mg/L. In the colistin-susceptible isolate, mcr-1 was nonfunctional due to the insertion of another gene. In addition, all of the mcr-1-positive CREC contained various resistant genes, such as AmpC_CMY, bla_NDM, bla_TEM, bla_SHV, and bla_CTX. In addition, one strain (EC1037) had loss of the OMP. Conclusions: The emergence of the mcr-1 gene among CRE, especially E. coli, remains worth our attention due to its resistance to most antibiotics, and a further national survey is warranted.

Due to the increasing incidence of malignant gliomas, particularly glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a simple and reliable GBM diagnosis is needed to screen early the death-threaten patients. This study aimed to identify a protein that can be used to discriminate GBM from low-grade astrocytoma and elucidate further that it has a functional role during malignant glioma progressions. To identify proteins that display low or no expression in low-grade astrocytoma but elevated levels in GBM, glycoprotein fibronectin (FN) was particularly examined according to the mining of the Human Protein Atlas. Web-based open megadata minings revealed that FN was mainly mutated in the cBio Cancer Genomic Portal but dominantly overexpressed in the ONCOMINE (a cancer microarray database and integrated data-mining platform) in distinct tumor types. Furthermore, numerous different cancer patients with high FN indeed exhibited a poor prognosis in the PrognoScan mining, indicating that FN involves in tumor malignancy. To investigate further the significance of FN expression in glioma progression, tumor specimens from five malignant gliomas with recurrences that received at least two surgeries were enrolled and examined. The immunohistochemical staining showed that FN expression indeed determined the distinct progressions of malignant gliomas. Furthermore, the expression of vimentin (VIM), a mesenchymal protein that is strongly expressed in malignant cancers, was similar to the FN pattern. Moreover, the level of epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) inducer transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β) was almost recapitulated with the FN expression. Together, this study identifies a protein FN that can be used to diagnose GBM from low-grade astrocytoma; moreover, its expression functionally determines the malignant glioma progressions via TGF-β-induced EMT pathway.

In this paper, we used two mass-produced industrial technologies, namely, thermal spraying and anodization methods, to enhance the surface characteristics of AISI 1045 medium carbon steel for use in special environments or products. The anodic film can effectively improve the surface properties of carbon steel. A sequence of treatments of the carbon steel substrate surface that consist of sandblasting, spraying the aluminum film, annealing, hot rolling, cleaning, grinding, and polishing can increase the quality of the anodized film. This paper proposes an anodization process for the surface of carbon steel to increase the corrosion resistance, hardness, color diversification, and electrical resistance. The resulting surface improves the hardness (from 170 HV to 524 HV), surface roughness (from 1.26 to 0.15 μm), coloring (from metal color to various colors), and corrosion resistance (from rusty to corrosion resistant). The electrochemical corrosion studies showed that the AISI 1045 steel surface with a hard anodized film had a lower corrosion current density of 10^−5.9 A/cm² and a higher impedance of 9000 ohm than those of naked AISI 1045 steel (10^−4.2 A/cm² and 150 ohm) in HCl gas.

A hole array was fabricated via photolithography to wet the bottoms of holes using oxygen plasma. Amide-terminated silane, a water immiscible compound before hydrolysis, was evaporated for deposition on the plasma-treated hole template surface. The silane compound was hydrolyzed along the edges of circular sides of the hole bottom to form a ring of an initiator after halogenation. Poly(methacrylic acid) (PMAA) was grafted from the ring of the initiator to attract Ag clusters (AgCs) as AgC–PMAA hybrid ring (SPHR) arrays via alternate phase transition cycles. The SPHR arrays were modified with a Yersinia pestis antibody (abY) to detect the antigen of Yersinia pestis (agY) for plague diagnosis. The binding of the agY onto the abY-anchored SPHR array resulted in a geometrical change from a ring to a two-humped structure. The reflectance spectra could be used to analyze the AgC attachment and the agY binding onto the abY-anchored SPHR array. The linear range between the wavelength shift and agY concentration from 30 to 270 pg mL⁻¹ was established to obtain the detection limit of ~12.3 pg mL⁻¹. Our proposed method provides a novel pathway to efficiently fabricate a ring array with a scale of less than 100 nm, which demonstrates excellent performance in preclinical trials.