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Background: Data on clinical outcomes in psychotic depression remain limited. We examined hospitalization, suicide, and treatment patterns in Swedish patients with psychotic depression.

Methods: This nationwide register-based study included patients with an index diagnosis of psychotic unipolar depression during 2012-2020. Post-index psychiatric hospitalizations and suicide deaths were examined descriptively and using logistic regression adjusted for sex, age, prior admissions, psychiatric comorbidity, index care setting (inpatient or outpatient), and pharmacological treatment. For patients treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) during 2012-2020, the outcomes of response and remission according to the Clinical Global Impressions Scale were assessed by logistic regression.

Results: Of 8048 patients, 54.8% were women, median age was 47 years (interquartile range 30-63), and 51.8% were diagnosed in specialized outpatient care. A total of 25.1% were hospitalized and 0.8% died by suicide within 36 weeks. Index diagnosis in inpatient care, prior admissions, comorbid alcohol or substance use disorder, antipsychotic treatment, and younger age (≤25 years) were associated with increased odds of post-index hospitalization. Younger age was associated with decreased odds of suicide. Among ECT-treated patients, 89.8% achieved response and 48.4% achieved remission. Younger age and prior admissions were associated with decreased odds of remission. Age 51-75 years, compared with ≤25 years, was associated with increased odds of response.

Conclusions: Psychotic depression carries a high risk of psychiatric hospitalization and suicide shortly after index diagnosis. Increased odds of hospitalization associated with antipsychotic treatment likely reflect confounding by indication. Among ECT-treated patients, response and remission rates were high.

Background: Childhood trauma (CT) is robustly associated with suicide ideation (SI) and attempts (SA) in individuals with depressive and/or anxiety disorders. However, pathways underlying these associations and whether they differ between suicide ideation only (SI+SA-) and suicide ideation with attempt (SI+SA+) remain unclear. Variables that may statistically account for CT-SI+SA- and CT-SI+SA+ associations were examined.

Methods: Data from 1572 respondents with a 12-month depressive and/or anxiety disorder from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety were used. The NEMESIS childhood trauma interview (0-8 score) measured CT severity. Single and multiple-mediator models via generalized structural equation modeling (GSEM) were used to investigate whether psychosocial, personality, lifestyle and biological variables showed indirect associations consistent with mediation of the association between CT and suicide outcomes.

Results: Higher CT scores were associated with SI+SA- (OR = 1.51, 95% CI: 1.32-1.73) and SI+SA+ (OR = 2.68, 95% CI: 2.21-3.27). In single mediator models, personality traits, insomnia, low social support and loneliness statistically accounted for a part of the association between CT and both outcomes. Interleukin-6 statistically accounted for a small portion of the CT-SI+SA+ link. In multiple-mediator models, direct effects reduced by 65.6% (SI+SA-) and 39.1% (SI+SA+) and aggression, insomnia, social support (both outcomes), neuroticism, introversion, hopelessness (SI+SA-) and locus of control (SI+SA+) remained significant.

Limitations: The cross-sectional design limits causal inferences.

Conclusion: Multiple personality traits, insomnia and lower social support statistically accounted for a portion of the association between CT and suicide outcomes. Especially aggression, insomnia and social support may represent actionable suicide prevention targets, pending longitudinal validation.

Background: Night-shift work in nurses is associated with circadian disruption, sleep disturbance, and increased vulnerability to affective symptoms. However, the neural and metabolic correlates of these alterations remain insufficiently understood.

Methods: A total of 121 female nurses, including 59 day-shift nurses (DSN) and 62 night-shift nurses (NSN), underwent resting-state functional MRI. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) was calculated to assess local functional synchronization. Between-group ReHo differences were examined, followed by transcriptomic and neurotransmitter decoding analyses. Untargeted serum metabolomics was performed to assess peripheral metabolic differences and their associations with ReHo.

Results: Compared with DSN, NSN showed decreased ReHo in the left superior temporal cortex and left anterior hippocampus, and increased ReHo in the right medial amygdala and right superior parietal lobule. The cortical ReHo pattern was associated with gene expression profiles enriched for cellular responses to stress, protein phosphorylation, and mitochondrion organization, and showed spatial correspondence with dopamine D1 receptor distribution. Serum metabolomics revealed widespread between-group metabolic differences. In NSN, metabolite PC1 was positively associated with right medial amygdala ReHo, and an exploratory indirect association between metabolite PC1 and Beck Depression Inventory scores through right medial amygdala ReHo was observed.

Conclusions: Night-shift work in nurses is associated with alterations in peripheral metabolism, local functional synchronization, and depressive symptoms. Right medial amygdala ReHo may represent a neural correlate associated with peripheral metabolic variation and affective symptom burden.

Background: Frailty is a potentially reversible risk factor for dementia. Whether frailty reversal actively reduces dementia risk across diverse populations, and the extent to which depressive symptoms mediate this pathway, remains unclear.

Methods: We included 59,331 adults aged ≥50 from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). A harmonized 25-item FI defined frailty (FI ≥ 0.25). Primary exposures were baseline frailty status and frailty transitions between the first two waves, evaluated within baseline strata as worsening versus stable non-frail status and improvement versus stable frail status. Mean FI and FI change were also examined.

Results: Over 7.51 ± 2.09 years, 5629 participants (9.49%) developed dementia. Baseline frailty was associated with higher risk (HRs, 1.35-2.23), as was frailty worsening (HRs, 1.43-2.53). Frailty reversal was associated with lower risk in SHARE (HR, 0.55) and CHARLS (HR, 0.70); associations in ELSA and HRS were not statistically significant. Estimated mediation proportions for depressive symptoms ranged from 29.29% to 44.78%. CLPN analyses showed cross-lagged associations in three cohorts for walking limitations, difficulty managing finances, and psychiatric problems.

Conclusion: Frailty worsening was associated with higher dementia risk, whereas frailty improvement was associated with lower risk in some cohorts. Depressive symptoms showed indirect associations with incident dementia for both baseline frailty and frailty worsening. However, whether interventions targeting frailty and depressive symptoms can reduce dementia incidence remains to be determined in future interventional studies.

Escherichia coli is a dominant host for recombinant protein production due to its well-characterized genetics and low cultivation cost, yet high-level intracellular expression frequently leads to insoluble inclusion bodies. Targeting proteins to the periplasm represents an effective strategy for improving soluble expression, but the efficiency of conventional signal peptides is highly protein-specific, restricting their universal utility. This study investigates an artificially engineered peptide, Vesicle Nucleating peptide 6 (VNp6), and systematically evaluates its capacity to mediate recombinant protein expression with green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a reporter. Results revealed that VNp6 markedly enhanced intracellular soluble GFP expression at 37 ℃, 25 ℃, and 16 ℃. Its intracellular fluorescence intensity was 128-fold and 220-fold higher than that of PelB and OmpA at 37 ℃, 82-fold and 113-fold at 25 ℃, and 107-fold and 160-fold at 16 ℃, respectively. Subcellular localization confirmed predominant periplasmic localization and improved solubility of the protein. Relative to the native periplasmic signal peptides FimH and PhoA, VNp6 improved solubility by 4‑fold and 14‑fold, respectively. For SacB, TVE, and amylase, solubility was enhanced by 27%, 30% and 17% at 16 ℃, respectively. Although extracellular protein accumulation was partially attributable to cell lysis, VNp6 consistently promoted periplasmic protein accumulation and enhanced soluble protein production across multiple recombinant proteins. Collectively, these results demonstrate that VNp6 serves as a powerful tool for improving periplasmic protein accumulation and soluble expression in E. coli expression systems.

In recent decades, nanobubble technology has emerged as a disruptive approach with potential applications across a wide range of scientific and industrial fields. Although several theories have been proposed to explain the extraordinary longevity of nanobubbles-a behavior not predicted by classical models-this phenomenon remains the subject of active debate. Nevertheless, there is broad consensus that nanobubble stability primarily arises from strong surface electric charge associated with interfacial phenomena, leading to localized water dissociation in the vicinity of the nanobubble. The water dissociation driven by nanobubbles has prompted speculation regarding the possibility of power generation through a hydroelectric cell, potentially enabling an alternative long-term, large-scale energy storage pathway that has not yet been explored. However, despite its conceptual appeal, any quantitative estimation of the efficiency of such a system, if feasible at all, has not been established. Here, utilizing the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann (Debye-Hückel) approximation and first-order perturbations in the nanobubble surface potential, an analytical expression for the maximum efficiency of a hydroelectric nanobubble-driven cell is derived. It is shown that a maximum efficiency of  ≃ 12% can be achieved at best, with predicted current densities remaining within the same order of magnitude as those reported for conventional hydroelectric-cell systems based on nanoporous ferrites. The resulting efficiencies are sufficiently non-negligible to warrant further theoretical and experimental investigation.

Light-activatable CRISPR-Cas systems offer an effective strategy to overcome the kinetic incompatibility in one-pot nucleic acid assays; however, their practical application remains limited by high reagent cost, the lack of compatible reaction buffers, and reliance on instrument-dependent readout. In this work, we developed a cost-effective light-controlled one-pot ERA/CRISPR-Cas12a platform for rapid hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA detection. NPOM-caged crRNA was employed to temporarily suppress Cas12a activity during amplification and to trigger target-dependent trans-cleavage by a brief 30 s UV irradiation. By replacing RPA with ERA, the per-reaction reagent cost of the one-pot assay was reduced from approximately US$6.0 to US$2.0, corresponding to a reduction of approximately 66.7%, while maintaining comparable analytical performance. In addition, a PEG-free unified buffer was established through systematic optimization, enabling efficient integration of ERA and Cas12a reactions in a sealed single-tube format. The proposed platform provided dual-mode readout through fluorescence and lateral flow assay (LFA), with a limit of detection of 1 copy μL^-1 and a total assay time of 30 min. Clinical evaluation using 79 serum samples showed a sensitivity of 100% for fluorescence readout and 96.3% for LFA, with excellent agreement with qPCR (Cohen's κ = 0.94 - 1.00). Owing to its low cost, high sensitivity, and operational simplicity, this platform represents a promising tool for rapid HBV molecular diagnosis in both centralized laboratories and resource-limited settings.

The polar environment harbors extremely rich and valuable natural product resources. In this study, a strain of Antarctic fungus, Geomyces sp. wnf-18c, in Antarctic soil was isolated in a laboratory. This fungus produces a purplish-red pigment whose hue closely resembles that of the high-end pigment carminic acid. However, approximately 50 % of the pigment remains within the fungal hyphae, restricting subsequent separation and extraction. In this study, the deletion of the key cell wall protein-encoding genes CHS3 and AGS1 enhanced pigment secretion. It also considerably inhibited the strain's growth, making it difficult to substantially increase the total pigment yield. To overcome these hurdles, the xylose-inducible system from Trichoderma reesei was heterologously expressed in Antarctic fungi, and the CRISPR-Cas9 system was placed under the control of this induction system. The exogenous addition of xylose as a signal to initiate genetic editing achieved the spatiotemporal regulation of the target gene-activating gene editing that restricts growth only after the completion of the strain's growth phase. The spatiotemporal regulation of key cell wall proteins significantly mitigated growth inhibition, greatly enhanced pigment secretion, and raised the total pigment yield. This discovery advances our understanding of the spatiotemporal specificity and dynamic regulation of microorganisms, offering novel strategies for exploiting polar microbial resources and reducing industrial production costs.

Negative biases in emotional processing are central to cognitive models of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), yet it remains unclear whether negatively biased valence attribution covaries with depressive symptoms or represents a more stable vulnerability. In this longitudinal study, we examined emotional valence ratings during a subliminal affective priming task in n = 232 MDD patients and n = 496 healthy controls (HC's) across multiple follow-up assessments, yielding 1395 observations. Multilevel models tested effects of depressive symptom severity, diagnostic group (MDD vs. HC), affective prime (happy, sad, neutral), and their interactions. To separate within-person fluctuations from between-person differences, depressive symptom severity was decomposed (Mundlak within-between specification). Exploratory analyses examined whether long-term symptom trajectory clusters were associated with emotional bias. Greater depressive symptom severity was associated with more negative valence ratings. Within-between analyses indicated that this association was primarily driven by within-person symptom fluctuations, indicating more negative ratings when symptom severity exceeded individual average. In contrast, diagnostic group, prime condition, and symptom severity × prime interactions did not significantly predict valence ratings, and no group differences emerged between HC's and remitted MDD patients. Exploratory trajectory analyses suggested that patients with recurrent symptom patterns may show more negative valence ratings, although cluster stability was limited and findings should be interpreted cautiously. Overall, the results suggest that negative valence attribution in MDD is more closely linked to current depressive symptom severity than to diagnostic status alone. Longitudinal approaches separating within- and between-person processes may help clarify when negative biases emerge and persist during depression progression.