Blood exosomal micro ribonucleic acid profiling reveals the complexity of hepatocellular carcinoma and identifies potential biomarkers for differential diagnosis

BACKGROUND Hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC)is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide,but there is a shortage of effective biomarkers for its diagnosis.AIM To explore blood exosomal micro ribonucleic acids(miRNAs)as potential biomarkers for HCC diagnosis.RESULTS The principal component analysis suggested that daily alcohol consumption could alter the blood exosomal miRNA profiles of hepatitis B virus positive non-HCC patients through miR-3168 and miR-223-3p.The miRNA profiles also revealed the tumor stages of HCC patients.High expression of miR-455-5p and miR-30c-5p,which significantly correlated with better overall survival in tumor tissues,could also be detected in blood exosomes.Two pairs of miRNAs(miR-584-5p/miR-106-3p and miR-628-3p/miR-941)showed a 94.1%sensitivity and 68.4%specificity to differentiate HCC patients from non-HCC patients.The specificity of the combination was substantially influenced by alcohol consumption habits.CONCLUSION This study suggested that blood exosomal miRNAs can be used as new noninvasive diagnostic tools for HCC.However,their accuracy could be affected by tumor stage and alcohol consumption habits.

Topological boundary states transport in synthetic four-dimensional acoustic system

Topological phase is an important development and unexplored degree of freedom of traditional band theory[1].Generally,it manifests in physics through the boundary states revealed by the bulkedge correspondence.Kaleidoscopic bulk topology implies various low-dimensional states at the boundary,giving extraordinary approaches to manipulate waves.Another structure that encodes the band topology is the system associated with space–time evolution,such as Floquet topological insulator[2,3].Its quasistatic limit involves time-dependent dynamic adiabatic evolution[4,5].However,dynamic evolution is challenging as it requires fast modulation to overcome the dissipation of state before it is pumped from one edge to another[6].An alternative approach is to use an additional degree of freedom to replace the role of time,and an illuminating system is the weakly coupled waveguides,whose governing equation can be directly mapped to Schrodinger equation with time modulation replaced by wave propagation along the waveguides.Recently,such strategy has been largely explored to realize the pumping of topological boundary states in optics[7,8]and elastic wave[9,10].However,the strategy for acoustics is subtly different as the coupling of the acoustic waveguides is not weak for the fundamental waveguide mode.Thus exploring the possibility to realize two-dimensional(2D)topological acoustic pumping in a continuous regime remains an open question.

Multi-dimensional wave steering with higher-order topological phononic crystal

The recent discovery and realizations of higher-order topological insulators enrich the fundamental studies on topological phases.Here,we report three-dimensional(3D)wave-steering capabilities enabled by topological boundary states at three different orders in a 3D phononic crystal with nontrivial bulk topology originated from the synergy of mirror symmetry of the unit cell and a non-symmorphic glide symmetry of the lattice.The multitude of topological states brings diverse possibilities of wave manipulations.Through judicious engineering of the boundary modes,we experimentally demonstrate two functionalities at different dimensions:2D negative refraction of sound wave enabled by a firstorder topological surface state with negative dispersion,and a 3D acoustic interferometer leveraging on second-order topological hinge states.Our work showcases that topological modes at different orders promise diverse wave steering applications across different dimensions.

Various topological phases and their abnormal effects of topological acoustic metamaterials

The last 20 years have witnessed growing impacts of the topological concept on the branches of physics,including materials,electronics,photonics,and acoustics.Topology describes objects with some global invariant property under continuous deformation,which in mathematics could date back to the 17th century and mature in the 20th century.In physics,it successfully underpinned the physics of the Quantum Hall effect in 1984.To date,topology has been extensively applied to describe topological phases in acoustic metamaterials.As artificial structures,acoustic metamaterials could be well theoretically analyzed,on-demand designed,and easily fabricated by modern techniques,such as three-dimensional printing.Some new theoretical topological models were first discovered in acoustic metamaterials analogous to electronic counterparts,associated with novel effects for acoustics closer to applications.In this review,we focused on the concept of topology and its realization in airborne acoustic crystals,solid elastic phononic crystals,and surface acoustic wave systems.We also introduced emerging concepts of non-Hermitian,higher-order,and Floquet topological insulators in acoustics.It has been shown that the topology theory has such a powerful generality that among the disciplines from electron to photon and phonon,from electronic to photonics and acoustics,from acoustic topological theory to acoustic devices,could interact and be analogous to fertilize fantastic new ideas and prototype devices,which might find applications in acoustic engineering and noisevibration control engineering in the near future.