The traditional approach with nutritional supplements is “one size fits all,” which has its limitations due to a lack of consideration of individual variations, including genetic background, health condition, lifestyle, and dietary intake. Depending on individual characteristics, the exact same nutritional supplementation could be beneficial, have no effect, or even be harmful. Precision nutrition has emerged as a new horizon, with the aim of carefully assessing individual nutritional and health needs and designing individually tailored diet and nutritional supplements. Engineering may play a significant role in each step of precision nutrition research and translation, including big data collection and management, nutritional and environmental assessment, data analyses, prediction, biomedical engineering, and nutritional engineering. The integration of precision nutrition and engineering could enhance our ability to best serve all people’s nutritional and health needs.
Investigation of patient-derived primary tissues is of great importance in the biomedical field, but recent tissue slicing and cultivation techniques still have difficulties in satisfying clinical requirements. Here, we propose a controllable histotomy strategy that utilizes hierarchical magnetic microneedle array robots to tailor primary tissues and establish the desired high-throughput tissue-on-a-chip. This histotomy is performed using a three-dimensional printed, mortise-tenon-structured slicing device coupled with a magnetic-particle-loaded and pagoda-shaped microneedle array scaffold. Due to the multilayered structure of these microneedles, tissue specimens can be fixed onto the microneedle scaffold via mechanical interlocking, thereby effectively avoiding tissue slipping during the slicing process. Owing to the encapsulation of magnetic microneedle fragments, these tissue pieces can act as magnetically responsive biohybrid microrobots and can be easily manipulated by magnetic fields, facilitating their separation, transportation, and dynamic culture. Using this strategy, we demonstrate that primary pancreatic cancer tissues can be tailored into tiny pieces and cultured in multilayered microfluidic chips for efficient high-throughput drug screening, indicating the promising future of this technique’s application in clinical settings.
Zearalenone (ZEA), a mycotoxin, poses a significant global hazard to human and animal health. Natural products (NPs) have shown promise for mitigating the adverse effects of ZEA owing to their diverse functional activities. However, the current challenge lies in the absence of an efficient strategy for systematic screening and identification of NPs that can effectively protect against ZEA-induced toxicity. This study describes a phenotype-based screening strategy for screening NP libraries and discovering more effective compounds to mitigate or counteract the adverse consequences of ZEA exposure in animals. Using this strategy, we initially identified 96 NPs and evaluated the potency and efficacy of two effective candidate compounds, fraxetin, and hydroxytyrosol, based on embryonic phenotype and locomotor activity using a scoring system and the TCMacro method. Furthermore, we performed transcriptome and protein−protein interaction (PPI) network analyses to extract two mRNA signatures to query the Connectivity Map (CMap) database and predict NPs. The predicted NPs showed the potential to reverse the gene expression profiles associated with ZEA toxicity. Consequently, we further screened these compounds using our model, which indicated that hispidin, daphnetin, and riboflavin exhibit promising in vivo efficacy in zebrafish. Notably, throughout the process, fraxetin consistently stood out as the most promising NP. Biological pathway analysis and functional verification revealed that fraxetin completely reversed the toxic effects of ZEA at very low doses. This was achieved by repairing damaged cell apoptosis, modifying the cell cycle pathway, and preventing senescence induction, indicating good application potential. Overall, we demonstrated that this integration strategy can be successfully applied to effectively discover potential antidotes.
Concerns about the durability of transportation infrastructure due to freeze-thaw (F-T) cycles are particularly significant in the Chinese plateau region, where concrete aging and performance deterioration pose substantial challenges. The current national standards for the frost resistance design of concrete structures are based predominantly on the coldest monthly average temperature and do not adequately address the comprehensive effects of the spatiotemporal variance, amplitude, and frequency of F-T cycles. To address this issue, this study introduced a spatiotemporal distribution model to analyze the long-term impact of F-T action on concrete structures by employing statistical analysis and spatial interpolation techniques. Cluster analysis was applied to create a nationwide zonation of F-T action level from data on the freezing temperature, temperature difference, and the number of F-T cycles. Furthermore, this study explored the similarity between natural environmental conditions and laboratory-accelerated tests using hydraulic pressure and cumulative damage theories. A visualization platform that incorporates tools for meteorological data queries, environmental characteristic analyses, and F-T action similarity calculations was designed. This research lays theoretical groundwork and provides technical guidance for assessing service life and enhancing the quantitative durability design of concrete structures in the Chinese plateau region.