Natural bioactive peptides to beat exercise-induced fatigue: A review

Exercise-induced fatigue is charactered by the feeling of tiredness and a decrease in muscle performance resulting from intense and prolonged exercise. With the development of modern society, exercise-induced fatigue has become a widespread problem besetting people's daily life. Over the years, increasing attention has been paid to the study of anti-fatigue peptides. Several animal models have been developed to mimic exercise-induced fatigue, which could be employed to measure the activities of anti-fatigue peptides isolated from a wide range of sources. A number of natural bioactive peptides were identified with ability to prevent and alleviate exercise-induced fatigue via various complex biological reactions, with possible molecular mechanisms being also explored extensively. In this review, we summarize the major research findings on anti-fatigue peptides, including the isolation and preparation of anti-fatigue peptides, the widely adopted methods for evaluation of anti-fatigue activities, and possible anti-fatigue mechanisms. Current evidence strongly supports that anti-fatigue peptides may relieve exercise-induced fatigue via multiple mechanisms, including participation and regulation of energy metabolism; inhibition of inflammatory responses; reduction of reactive oxygen species content; and regulation of neurotransmitters, etc. In conclusion, the review provides key research perspectives to inform further research on anti-fatigue peptides for the food industry

An efficient method for K-Means clustering

The existing K-Means clustering methods directly act on multidimensional datasets. Hence, these methods are extremely inefficient as the cardinality of input data and the number of clustering attributes increase. Motivated by the above fact, in this paper, an efficient approach for K-Means clustering based on the structure of regular grid, called KMCRG (K-Means Clustering based on Regular Grid), is proposed. This method effectively implements K-Means clustering by taking cell as handling object. Especially, this method uses the tactics of grid weighted iteration to effectively gain the final K classes. The experiment results show that the algorithm can quickly gain the clustering results without losing clustering precision

Privacy-aware secure anonymous communication protocol in CPSS

Cloud computing has emerged as a promising paradigm for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS). However, the problem of how to ensure the security of data transmission and data storage in CPSS is a key issue to address. We need to protect the confidentiality and privacy of users’ data and users’ identity during the transmission and storage process in CPSS. In order to avoid users’ personal information leakage from IoT devices during the process of data processing and transmitting, we propose a certificateless encryption scheme, and conduct a security analysis under the assumption of Computational Diffie-Hellman(CDH) Problem. Furthermore, based on the proposed cryptography mechanism, we achieve a novel anonymous communication protocol to protect the identity privacy of communicating units in CPSS. In the new protocol, an anonymous communication link establishment method and an anonymous communication packet encapsulation format are proposed. The Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm is used to construct the anonymous keys distribution method in the new link establishment method. And in the new onion routing packet encapsulation format, the session data are firstly separated from the authentication data to decrease the number of cryptography operations. That is, by using the new onion routing packet we greatly reduces the encryption operations and promotes the forwarding efficiency of anonymous messages, implementing the privacy, security and efficiency in anonymous communication in cyber-physical-social systems

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Blockchain-Based Trust Management in Distributed Internet of things

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has led to close cooperation between electronic devices. It requires strong reliability and trustworthiness of the devices involved in the communication. However, current trust mechanisms have the following issues: (1) heavily relying on a trusted third party, which may incur severe security issues if it is corrupted, and (2) malicious evaluations on the involved devices which may bias the trustrank of the devices. By introducing the concepts of risk management and blockchain into the trust mechanism, we here propose a blockchain-based trust mechanism for distributed IoT devices in this paper. In the proposed trust mechanism, trustrank is quantified by normative trust and risk measures, and a new storage structure is designed for the domain administration manager to identify and delete the malicious evaluations of the devices. Evidence shows that the proposed trust mechanism can ensure data sharing and integrity, in addition to its resistance against malicious attacks to the IoT devices

Novel splice variants of Rat CaV2.1 that lack much of the synaptic protein interaction site are expressed in neuroendocrine cells

Voltage-gated Ca(2+) channels are responsible for the activation of the Ca(2+) influx that triggers exocytotic secretion. The synaptic protein interaction (synprint) site found in the II-III loop of Ca(V)2.1 and Ca(V)2.2 mediates a physical association with synaptic proteins that may be crucial for fast neurotransmission and axonal targeting. We report here the use of nested PCR to identify two novel splice variants of rat Ca(V)2.1 that lack much of the synprint site. Furthermore, we compare immunofluorescence data derived from antibodies directed against sequences in the Ca(V)2.1 synprint site and carboxyl terminus to show that channel variants lacking a portion of the synprint site are expressed in two types of neuroendocrine cells. Immunofluorescence data also suggest that such variants are properly targeted to neuroendocrine terminals. When expressed in a mammalian cell line, both splice variants yielded Ca(2+) currents, but the variant containing the larger of the two deletions displayed a reduced current density and a marked shift in the voltage dependence of inactivation. These results have important implications for Ca(V)2.1 function and for the mechanisms of Ca(V)2.1 targeting in neurons and neuroendocrine cells

Gene Polymorphisms are Associated with Eggshell Ultrastructure Organization in Hens

<div><p>ABSTRACT Background: Eggshell ultrastructure organization, including effective layer thickness, mammillary layer thickness, and average size of mammillary cones, is important for breeding and significantly influences eggshell mechanical properties. Several matrix proteins were known to be important in eggshell formation. However, the proteins and variations that determine eggshell ultrastructure organization are not known. Results: In this study, 17 single-nucleotide polymorphisms of three major genes in a hen population using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Five single-nucleotide polymorphisms with a very low minor allele frequency (< 1%) were excluded from further analysis. The remaining 12 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were used for analysis of associations with eggshell ultrastructure organization. Associations were found for (i) ovocleidin-116 with effective layer thickness (EFF), mammillary layer thickness (MAM), and average size of mammillary cones (SMAM); (ii) ovalbumin with eggshell thickness (ESH), effective layer thickness, and density of the mammillary cone (DMAM); and (iii) calmodulin1 with density of the mammillary cone. Conclusions: The single-nucleotide polymorphisms identified in the present study may be used as potential markers to improve eggshell quality.</p></div

Application of curcumin-mediated antibacterial photodynamic technology for preservation of fresh Tremella Fuciformis

Tremella Fuciformis is an edible fungus with high water content and nutritional values. However, fresh T. Fuciformis can quickly lose its quality by physical damage, water loss and microbial degradation during storage. Herein, we evaluated the effects of curcumin-mediated photodynamic technology (PDT) using light-emitting diode (LED) light to preserve fresh T. Fuciformis. Changes in bacterial counts and community, physicochemical properties, and sensory attributes of curcumin-mediated PDT-treated fresh T. Fuciformis were assessed. The results indicated that treatment with 30 μmol/L curcumin and 30 min of LED light exposure could reduce bacterial counts by ~1.99 ± 0.06 log (CFU/g) in fresh T. Fuciformis upon 5 days storage. The bacterial microbiota in T. Fuciformis during storage was also altered upon PDT treatment. PDT treatment also retained the color, water content, hardness, tactility, and appearance of fresh T. Fuciformis. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that curcumin-mediated PDT could be a viable and promising non-thermal technology for preserving the quality of fresh T. Fuciformis

Controllable image captioning with feature refinement and multilayer fusion

Image captioning is the task of automatically generating a description of an image. Traditional image captioning models tend to generate a sentence describing the most conspicuous objects, but fail to describe a desired region or object as human. In order to generate sentences based on a given target, understanding the relationships between particular objects and describing them accurately is central to this task. In detail, information-augmented embedding is used to add prior information to each object, and a new Multi-Relational Weighted Graph Convolutional Network (MR-WGCN) is designed for fusing the information of adjacent objects. Then, a dynamic attention decoder module selectively focuses on particular objects or semantic contents. Finally, the model is optimized by similarity loss. The experiment on MSCOCO Entities demonstrates that IANR obtains, to date, the best published CIDEr performance of 124.52% on the Karpathy test split. Extensive experiments and ablations on both the MSCOCO Entities and the Flickr30k Entities demonstrate the effectiveness of each module. Meanwhile, IANR achieves better accuracy and controllability than the state-of-the-art models under the widely used evaluation metric.</p

Molecular control of nitric oxide synthesis through eNOS and caveolin-1 interaction regulates osteogenic differentiation of adipose-derived stem cells by modulation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling.

BACKGROUND: Nitric oxide (NO) plays a role in a number of physiological processes including stem cell differentiation and osteogenesis. Endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), one of three NO-producing enzymes, is located in a close conformation with the caveolin-1 (CAV-1(WT)) membrane protein which is inhibitory to NO production. Modification of this interaction through mutation of the caveolin scaffold domain can increase NO release. In this study, we genetically modified equine adipose-derived stem cells (eASCs) with eNOS, CAV-1(WT), and a CAV-1(F92A) (CAV-1(WT) mutant) and assessed NO-mediated osteogenic differentiation and the relationship with the Wnt signaling pathway. METHODS: NO production was enhanced by lentiviral vector co-delivery of eNOS and CAV-1(F92A) to eASCs, and osteogenesis and Wnt signaling was assessed by gene expression analysis and activity of a novel Runx2-GFP reporter. Cells were also exposed to a NO donor (NONOate) and the eNOS inhibitor, L-NAME. RESULTS: NO production as measured by nitrite was significantly increased in eNOS and CAV-1(F92A) transduced eASCs +(5.59 ± 0.22 μM) compared to eNOS alone (4.81 ± 0.59 μM) and un-transduced control cells (0.91 ± 0.23 μM) (p < 0.05). During osteogenic differentiation, higher NO correlated with increased calcium deposition, Runx2, and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) gene expression and the activity of a Runx2-eGFP reporter. Co-expression of eNOS and CAV-1(WT) transgenes resulted in lower NO production. Canonical Wnt signaling pathway-associated Wnt3a and Wnt8a gene expressions were increased in eNOS-CAV-1(F92A) cells undergoing osteogenesis whilst non-canonical Wnt5a was decreased and similar results were seen with NONOate treatment. Treatment of osteogenic cultures with 2 mM L-NAME resulted in reduced Runx2, ALP, and Wnt3a expressions, whilst Wnt5a expression was increased in eNOS-delivered cells. Co-transduction of eASCs with a Wnt pathway responsive lenti-TCF/LEF-dGFP reporter only showed activity in osteogenic cultures co-transduced with a doxycycline inducible eNOS. Lentiviral vector expression of canonical Wnt3a and non-canonical Wnt5a in eASCs was associated with induced and suppressed osteogenic differentiation, respectively, whilst treatment of eNOS-osteogenic cells with the Wnt inhibitor Dkk-1 significantly reduced expressions of Runx2 and ALP. CONCLUSIONS: This study identifies NO as a regulator of canonical Wnt/β-catenin signaling to promote osteogenesis in eASCs which may contribute to novel bone regeneration strategies

Schools’ air quality monitoring for health and education: methods and protocols of the SAMHE initiative and project

Background: Children spend significant amounts of time at school, making the school environment a potentially important contributor to air quality exposure.  Aim: The SAMHE initiative has a dual aim: 1) to develop and test a bespoke citizen science framework for collecting environment and indoor air quality data in classrooms, alongside contextual data capable of enriching analysis, at an unprecedented scale; and, 2) to simultaneously use these methods to raise awareness among communities regarding their exposure to air pollution in the school environment.  Methodology: To achieve this dual aim, the SAMHE project was initiated to deploy more than 2 000 low-cost indoor air quality monitors in school classrooms. A Web App has been co-designed with schools to support collecting a large comprehensive dataset (including school buildings characteristics, operation, and behavioural patterns) and to enable students and teachers to interact with the data gathered in their school. Results and outlook: We present the design of the interface and visuals that have been co-designed with 20+ schools and tested with 120+ schools. Within one week of the SAMHE launch week, 537 schools had registered to join the project, and at the time of writing (just seven weeks later) this number had grown to around 800 schools. This highlights the potential for this novel initiative to provide a step-change in the way that indoor air quality datasets are gathered at a national and, potentially, international level while simultaneously enabling schools to better manage their indoor environment and empowering students and teachers to reduce their environmental health risks.</p