Multi-scale structure, pasting and digestibility of adlay (Coixlachryma-jobi L.) seed starch

peer-reviewedThe hierarchical structure, pasting and digestibility of adlay seed starch (ASS) were investigated compared with maize starch (MS) and potato starch (PS). ASS exhibited round or polyglonal morphology with apparent pores/channels on the surface. It had a lower amylose content, a looser and more heterogeneous C-type crystalline structure, a higher crystallinity, and a thinner crystalline lamellae. Accordingly, ASS showed a higher slowly digestible starch content combined with less resistant starch fractions, and a decreased pasting temperature, a weakened tendency to retrogradation and an increased pasting stability compared with those of MS and PS. The ASS structure-functionality relationship indicated that the amylose content, double helical orders, crystalline lamellar structure, and surface pinholes should be responsible for ASS specific functionalities including pasting behaviors and in vitro digestibility. ASS showed potential applications in health-promoting foods which required low rearrangement during storage and sustainable energy-providing starch fractions

Bis[1-hydroxy­ethyl­idenediphosphon­ato(1−)](1,10-phenanthroline)nickel(II) mono­hydrate

In the mononuclear title compound, [Ni(C2H6O7P2)2(C12H8N2)]·H2O, the NiII atom (site symmetry 2) is bonded to two phosphate-based O,O′-bidentate chelate ligands and one N,N′-bidentate 1,10-phenanthroline ligand, resulting in a slightly distorted cis-NiN2O4 octa­hedral geometry. In the crystal structure, pairs of complexes are linked by double hydrogen bonds, forming a one-dimensional chain-like structure. Aromatic π–π stacking inter­actions [centroid–centroid separation = 3.768 (2) Å] and further hydrogen bonds generate a two-dimensional structure. The water O atom also lies on a crystallographic twofold axis

Matrine inhibits hepatocellular carcinoma cell malignancy through the circ_0013290/miR-139-5p/MMP16 pathway

Background. Previous studies have shown the anticancer effect of Matrine on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC); however, the underlying mechanism is still indistinct. Methods. The expression of circular RNA_0013290 (circ_0013290), microRNA-139-5p (miR-139-5p), matrix metallopeptidase 16 (MMP16), CyclinD1 and N-cadherin was analyzed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, Western blotting or immuno-histochemistry assay. Cell viability, proliferation, apoptosis, invasion and tube formation were analyzed by cell counting kit-8, 5-Ethynyl-2’-deoxyuridine, flow cytometry analysis, transwell invasion and tube formation assays, respectively. The associations among circ_0013290, miR-139-5p and MMP16 were predicted by starbase online database, and identified by dual-luciferase reporter and RNA pull-down assays. A xenograft mouse model assay was conducted to disclose the effects of circ_0013290 and Matrine on tumor tumorigenesis in vivo. Results. Circ_0013290 and MMP16 expression were significantly upregulated, while miR-139-5p was downregulated in HCC tissues and cells compared with the matched normal liver tissues and cells. Matrine treatment inhibited HCC cell proliferation, invasion and tube formation but induced cell apoptosis, accompanied by the decrease of CyclinD1 and N-cadherin expression; however, these effects were counteracted when circ_0013290 expression was increased. MiR-139-5p depletion or MMP16 introduction relieved Matrine-induced effects in HCC cells. The regulation of circ_0013290 toward HCC cell processes involved MMP16. With respect to the mechanism, circ_0013290 acted as a miR-139-5p sponge, and miR-139-5p targeted MMP16 in HCC cells. Besides, circ_0013290 regulated MMP16 expression through miR-139-5p. Further, circ_0013290 depletion enhanced the inhibitory effects of Matrine on tumor tumorigenesis. Conclusion. Matrine inhibited HCC cell malignancy through the circ_0013290/miR-139-5p/MMP16 pathway, suggesting that Matrine is a potential therapeutic agent for HC

Imatinib plus Granulocyte Colony-Stimulating Factor in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Patients Who Have Achieved Partial or Complete Cytogenetic Response while on Imatinib

Background: The BCR/ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitor imatinib is highly effective in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) but fails to eliminate all leukemia cells. In this study, we investigated whether the addition of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) could reduce the level of residual disease in patients with Ph-positive CML who appeared to have achieved a suboptimal response to imatinib alone. Methods: Eleven patients with CML who had achieved ≧35% Ph-negativity on imatinib were enrolled. The starting dose of imatinib was 400 mg or 600 mg orally daily, and of G-CSF 5 µg/kg s.c. daily. The administration of G-CSF was postponed or interrupted in the event of leukocytosis (≧30 ×109 leukocytes/l) until the white blood cell count fell below 20 × 109/l. Efficacy was assessed by serial monitoring of blood levels of BCR-ABL transcripts. Results: Of 11 evaluable patients, 9 had an appreciable decline in BCR-ABL transcript levels; in 7 cases the reduction was greater than 1 log. Conclusions: We conclude that the addition of G-CSF should be considered for patients on imatinib who fail to obtain optimal response to imatinib alone and that this approach deserves further evaluation as frontline therapy for newly diagnosed CML.Baijun Fang and Ling Mai are equal contributors

PO-296 Sex differences in the change of amino acid and cortisol concentration after marathon race

Objective As we all know, marathon exercise can induce dramatic changes in amino acid and hormone concentration in the plasma. However, little attention has been given to the role of sex in metabolic changes. Methods We compared the changing rates of amino acid and hormone after marathon running in male and female runners. Twenty-seven female (mean age: 41±15 years) and 66 male (mean age: 40±16 years) non-professional runners performed a marathon race. Amino acid and cortisol levels were assessed before and at 1h after race. Results At pre-race and post-race, cortisol concentrations in female runners were lower than in males. Cortisol increased in all subjects at post-race but the rising rate was substantially higher (P<0.05) in females [median (range): 3.5 (21~ -0.25)] than in males [median (range): 2.09 (14.3~-0.43)]. Post-race, the glycogenic amino acid concentrations of Arg, Asn, Gly, Ile, Met, Ser and Thr were significantly decreased in females and males. But females have higher decreased rate (P<0.02) [median (range):Arg -45% (12%~ -69%), Asn -42% (25%~ -72%), Gly -45% (5%~ -73%), Ile -35% (16%~ -64%), Met -28% (48%~ -62%), Ser -34% (17%~ -58%), Thr -33%(32%~ -52%)] than males [median (range):Arg -35% (65%~ -64%), Asn -29%(46% ~ -59%), Gly -33% (13%~ -64%), Ile -23% (37%~ -57%), Met -14% (92%~ -52%), Ser -23% ( 21%~ -56%), Thr -17% ( 84%~ -58%)]. This is because, during exercise, cortisol has the function of inducing gluconeogenesis to maintain plasma glucose supply. Conclusions There is significant sex differences in the change of cortisol and some glycogenic amino acid concentration before and after marathon race, which has potential value for training and nutrition supplement in marathon running

Efficient and Accurate Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection with Pixel Aggregation Network

Scene text detection, an important step of scene text reading systems, has witnessed rapid development with convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, two main challenges still exist and hamper its deployment to real-world applications. The first problem is the trade-off between speed and accuracy. The second one is to model the arbitrary-shaped text instance. Recently, some methods have been proposed to tackle arbitrary-shaped text detection, but they rarely take the speed of the entire pipeline into consideration, which may fall short in practical applications.In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate arbitrary-shaped text detector, termed Pixel Aggregation Network (PAN), which is equipped with a low computational-cost segmentation head and a learnable post-processing. More specifically, the segmentation head is made up of Feature Pyramid Enhancement Module (FPEM) and Feature Fusion Module (FFM). FPEM is a cascadable U-shaped module, which can introduce multi-level information to guide the better segmentation. FFM can gather the features given by the FPEMs of different depths into a final feature for segmentation. The learnable post-processing is implemented by Pixel Aggregation (PA), which can precisely aggregate text pixels by predicted similarity vectors. Experiments on several standard benchmarks validate the superiority of the proposed PAN. It is worth noting that our method can achieve a competitive F-measure of 79.9% at 84.2 FPS on CTW1500.Comment: Accept by ICCV 201

GPU-based Fast Low-dose Cone Beam CT Reconstruction via Total Variation

Cone-beam CT (CBCT) has been widely used in image guided radiation therapy (IGRT) to acquire updated volumetric anatomical information before treatment fractions for accurate patient alignment purpose. However, the excessive x-ray imaging dose from serial CBCT scans raises a clinical concern in most IGRT procedures. The excessive imaging dose can be effectively reduced by reducing the number of x-ray projections and/or lowering mAs levels in a CBCT scan. The goal of this work is to develop a fast GPU-based algorithm to reconstruct high quality CBCT images from undersampled and noisy projection data so as to lower the imaging dose. The CBCT is reconstructed by minimizing an energy functional consisting of a data fidelity term and a total variation regularization term. We developed a GPU-friendly version of the forward-backward splitting algorithm to solve this model. A multi-grid technique is also employed. We test our CBCT reconstruction algorithm on a digital NCAT phantom and a head-and-neck patient case. The performance under low mAs is also validated using a physical Catphan phantom and a head-and-neck Rando phantom. It is found that 40 x-ray projections are sufficient to reconstruct CBCT images with satisfactory quality for IGRT patient alignment purpose. Phantom experiments indicated that CBCT images can be successfully reconstructed with our algorithm under as low as 0.1 mAs/projection level. Comparing with currently widely used full-fan head-and-neck scanning protocol of about 360 projections with 0.4 mAs/projection, it is estimated that an overall 36 times dose reduction has been achieved with our algorithm. Moreover, the reconstruction time is about 130 sec on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card, which is estimated ~100 times faster than similar iterative reconstruction approaches.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, Paper was revised and more testing cases were added