Puerarin mitigates acute liver injury in septic rats by regulating proinflammatory factors and oxidative stress levels

Purpose: To determine the protective effect of puerarin against acute liver injury in septic rats, and the mechanism involved.Methods: Eighty-seven Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were assigned to control, sepsis and puerarin groups (each having 29 rats). Serum levels of NF-kB, TNF-α, IL-1 β, IL-6, ALT and AST were assayed. Liver lesions and levels of NO, SOD, iNOS and malondialdehyde (MDA) were measured using standard procedures.Results: Compared with the control group, the levels of NF-kB, TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, AST, ALT, NO, MDA and iNOS significantly increased in the sepsis group, while SOD level decreased significantly. In contrast, there were marked decreases in NF-kB, TNF-α, IL-1β, AST, ALT, NO, MDA and iNOS in puerarin group, relative to the sepsis group, while SOD expression level was significantly increased (p <0.05). The level of p-p38 in liver of septic rats was up-regulated, relative to control rats, while Nrf2 significantly decreased (p < 0.05). The expression level of p-p38 in the puerarin group was significantly decreased, relative to the sepsis group, while the expression level of Nrf2 significantly increased (p < 0.05).Conclusion: Puerarin mitigates acute liver injury in septic rats by inhibiting NF-kB and p38 signaling pathway, down-regulating proinflammatory factors, and suppressing oxidative stress. Thus, puerarin may be developed for use in the treatment liver injury

Analysis of plant secondary metabolites from specialized organs, tissue and cells

In Chapter 3, HPLC-SPE-NMR was successfully applied to elucidate structures of secondary metabolites from different plant materials. Twelve C-methylated chalcones and flavonoids were identified from Myrica gale seeds. Eleven and ten phenylphenalenone-type compounds were identified from aerial parts and roots of Wachendorfia thyrsiflora plant, respectively, and four others from both parts. Twelve of them are new compounds. Among the 25 phenylphenalenone-type compounds from W. thyrsiflora, the phenylphenalenones occurred exclusively in roots, oxa-phenylphenalenones were found in both aerial part and roots, and most aza-phenylphenalenones were detected in aerial parts. Eight phenylphenalenones including a new one and a corresponding dimer were elucidated from W. thyrsiflora seeds. Seventeen phenylphenalenones, oxa-phenylphenalenones and aza-phenylphenalenones, including five new ones, and three flavonoids were identified from Xiphidium caeruleum flowers. In Chapter 4, eleven glucosinolates and eighteen phenolics including seven new lignans were characterized from rapeseed (Brassica napus) cultivar “Emerald”. Further study on the organ-specific distribution of these compounds in rapeseed was conducted. As a result, glucosinolates and sinapine were proven to be accumulated evenly in rapeseed embryo, while a cyclic spermidine conjugate was exclusively found in hypocotyl and/or radicle, and the major amount of flavonoids was detected in cotyledons of rapeseed embryo. Chapter 5 was dedicated to explore spatio-temporal formation and accumulation of the predominant lignan, secoisolariciresinol diglucoside (SDG), in flaxseed (Linum usitatissimum). SDG was detectable in developing flaxseed around six days after flowering, and its biosynthesis ceased before the seeds browned and desiccated. SDG accumulates predominantly in parenchymatous cells in mature flaxseed coat. This finding is different from previous reports of SDG accumulation in sclerified cells of the seeds coat

Multi-Plant Production and Transportation Planning Based on Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper proposes a methodology for developing a coordinated aggregate production plan for manufacturers producing multiple products at multiple plants simultaneously, in a centralized environment via data envelopment analysis (DEA). Based on demand forecast of the planning horizon, the central decision maker (DM) specifies the optimal combination of input resources required by the optimal output targets for each plant to keep the supply and demand in balance, and the accompanying transportation trips and volumes among distribution centers (DCs) or warehouse facilities. In this paper, we focus on an integrated production-transportation problem since production and transportation are two fundamental ingredients in the whole operation chain. We deal with multiple products manufactured in multiple plants.The proposed mixed integer DEA models minimize both production costs and transportation costs. The capacity constraint for each plant is enforced by using the production possibility set theory. Finally, we validate our models by a numerical example and sensitivity analysis

A New Load Transfer Model of Skin Friction for Super-long Pile Under Axially Load

In present investigation, a new load transfer model was proposed, in which the softening and strengthening of super-long pile skin friction was considered. The influence of parameters variation on the softening load transfer model was discussed in detail. The load transfer model proposed was verified by engineering results. The nonlinear iterative calculation method of the super-long piles was improved with considering the nonlinear compression model of concrete and the weight of the pile body. Comparing calculation results and the engineering measured data, it demonstrates that the relationship between pile skin friction and the relative displacement and the settlement results are generally in good agreement with the practical engineering results. The skin friction of super-long piles increases with the increase of the depth, while decreases with the increase of the depth near the end of the pile and it has an obvious downward trend. As the load continues to increase, the skin friction near the pile end increases significantly and shows a gradual expansion of the pattern. It completely reflects the softening and strengthening properties of pile skin friction

Synthesis, characterization, and antifungal evaluation of novel 1,2,3-triazolium-functionalized starch derivative

1,2,3-Triazolium-functionalized starch derivative was obtained by straightforward quaternization of the synthesized starch derivative bearing 1,2,3-triazole with benzyl bromide by combining the robust attributes of cuprous-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition. These novel starch derivatives were characterized by FTIR, UV-vis, H-1 NMR, C-13 NMR, and elemental analysis. Their antifungal activities against Colletotrichum lagenarium, Watermelon fusarium, and Phomopsis asparagi were investigated by hypha measurement in vitro. The fungicidal assessment revealed that compared with starch and starch derivative bearing 1,2,3-triazole with inhibitory indices of below 15% at 1.0 mg/mL, 1,2,3-triazolium-functionalized starch derivative had superior antifungal activity with inhibitory rates of over 60%. Especially, the best inhibitory index of 1,2,3-triazolium-functionalized starch derivative against Colletotrichum lagenarium attained 90% above at 1.0mg/mL. The results obviously showed that quaternization of 1,2,3-triazole with benzyl bromide could effectively enhance antifungal activity of the synthesized starch derivatives. The synthetic strategy described here could be utilized for the development of starch as novel antifungal biomaterial. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

FILTER: An Enhanced Fusion Method for Cross-lingual Language Understanding

Large-scale cross-lingual language models (LM), such as mBERT, Unicoder and XLM, have achieved great success in cross-lingual representation learning. However, when applied to zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks, most existing methods use only single-language input for LM finetuning, without leveraging the intrinsic cross-lingual alignment between different languages that proves essential for multilingual tasks. In this paper, we propose FILTER, an enhanced fusion method that takes cross-lingual data as input for XLM finetuning. Specifically, FILTER first encodes text input in the source language and its translation in the target language independently in the shallow layers, then performs cross-language fusion to extract multilingual knowledge in the intermediate layers, and finally performs further language-specific encoding. During inference, the model makes predictions based on the text input in the target language and its translation in the source language. For simple tasks such as classification, translated text in the target language shares the same label as the source language. However, this shared label becomes less accurate or even unavailable for more complex tasks such as question answering, NER and POS tagging. To tackle this issue, we further propose an additional KL-divergence self-teaching loss for model training, based on auto-generated soft pseudo-labels for translated text in the target language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FILTER achieves new state of the art on two challenging multilingual multi-task benchmarks, XTREME and XGLUE.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2021; Top-1 Performance on XTREME (https://sites.research.google/xtreme, September 8, 2020) and XGLUE (https://microsoft.github.io/XGLUE, September 14, 2020) benchmar

Electrochemical Capture of CO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e from Natural Gas using a High-Temperature Ceramic-Carbonate Membrane

This study reports the first investigation of using a ceramic-carbonate dual-phase membrane to electrochemically separate CO2 from a simulated natural gas. The CO2 permeation flux density was systematically studied as a function of temperature, CO2 partial pressure and time. As expected, the flux density was observed to increase with temperature and CO2 partial pressure. Long-term stability test showed that flux density experienced an initial performance-improving “break-in” period followed by a slow decay. Post-test microstructural analysis suggested that a gradual loss of carbonate during the test could be the cause of the flux-time behavior observed

Emotional Regulation, Level of Depression, Anxiety and Stress among Alcohol Abusers and Non-Abusers

The study was to examine the levels of depression anxiety and stress, as well as emotion regulation strategies among alcohol abusers and non-abusers. One hundred and fifty alcohol abusers who were admitted in department of psychiatry ward in hospital and one hundred and fifty normal people who were in general population were enrolled in the study. Depression, anxiety and stress scale (DASS-42) and emotional regulation questionnaires were used to assesses the depression, anxiety and stress reaction and emotional regulation of alcohol abusers and non-abusers. Alcohol abusers had higher level of depression, anxiety and stress reaction, as well as lower level of cognitive reappraisal and higher level of suppression compared with normal people. Cognitive reappraisal and suppression had significantly negative correlation with depression, anxiety and stress reaction in healthy people while they had no significantly correlation with depression, anxiety and stress reaction in abuser group. Further, both cognitive reappraisal and suppression significantly predicated depression, anxiety and stress reaction in healthy people while they did not predicate depression, anxiety and stress in alcohol abusers. Alcohol abusers had obvious depression, anxiety and stress reaction, as well as inappropriate copying strategies. Both cognitive reappraisal and suppression could predicate negative emotion and stress reaction in normal population but the emotional regulation failed to predicate negative emotion and stress reaction in alcohol abusers