Retracted: Effect of Paris polyphylla extract on seconddegree burns in rats

This article previously published in Volume 15 Issue 10 of this journal in October 2016 has beenretracted in line with the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE,http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines)Retracted: Ma Z, Yin W, Hu G, Zhu Z, Huang Z. Effect of Paris polyphylla extract on second-degree burns in rats. Trop J Pharm Res 2016; 15(10):2131-2135 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tjpr.v15i10.11From the EditorOur attention was drawn to the falsification of the data published in this article which was confirmed.The corresponding author, Zhi-jian Huang, failed to respond to communication in this respect.26 January 201

Effect of Paris polyphylla extract on second-degree burns in rats

Purpose: To investigate the healing effect of Paris polyphylla extract (PPE) on second-degree burns in rats.Methods: Male Sprague Dawley (SD) rats, weighing 200 – 220 g, were subjected to deep seconddegree skin burns by electrical scald instrument. The animals were divided into three groups as follows: (1) second-degree burn model (control) group, (2) burn model treated with 1 % silver sulfadiazine (SSD) group, and (3) burn model treated with 120 mg·mL-1 PPE group. On days 3, 7 and 14 following the administration of the drug/extract, wound area and histopathological changes in rat epidermis were evaluated for the three groups. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of PPE on Staphyloccocus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli were also assessed.Results: On day 14, the mean wound area of PPE treatment group (0.21 ± 0.04 cm2) was significantly smaller than that of the control rats (2.78 ± 0.18 cm2, p < 0.01). Histological results indicate that inflammatory cells disappeared and were replaced by new granulation tissue in the group treated with 120 mg·mL-1 PPE by day 14. Compared with SSD group rats, the inflammatory cells and fibroblast and granulation tissues of burnt rats with burns and treated with 120 mg·mL-1 PPE decreased significantly. The antibacterial data revealed that the MIC of PPE against S. aureus, P. aeruginosa and E. coli was 2.35, 8.2 and 4.70 mg·mL-1, respectively.Conclusion: Paris polyphylla is an effective medicinal herb that holds promise for the treatment of second-degree burns.Keywords: Paris polyphylla, Second-degree burns, Wound healing, Antibacterial, Inflammatory cells, Granulation tissues, Silver sulfadiazin

SelfText Beyond Polygon: Unconstrained Text Detection with Box Supervision and Dynamic Self-Training

Although a polygon is a more accurate representation than an upright bounding box for text detection, the annotations of polygons are extremely expensive and challenging. Unlike existing works that employ fully-supervised training with polygon annotations, we propose a novel text detection system termed SelfText Beyond Polygon (SBP) with Bounding Box Supervision (BBS) and Dynamic Self Training (DST), where training a polygon-based text detector with only a limited set of upright bounding box annotations. For BBS, we firstly utilize the synthetic data with character-level annotations to train a Skeleton Attention Segmentation Network (SASN). Then the box-level annotations are adopted to guide the generation of high-quality polygon-liked pseudo labels, which can be used to train any detectors. In this way, our method achieves the same performance as text detectors trained with polygon annotations (i.e., both are 85.0% F-score for PSENet on ICDAR2015 ). For DST, through dynamically removing the false alarms, it is able to leverage limited labeled data as well as massive unlabeled data to further outperform the expensive baseline. We hope SBP can provide a new perspective for text detection to save huge labeling costs. Code is available at: github.com/weijiawu/SBP

Heat shock transcription factor 1 preserves cardiac angiogenesis and adaptation during pressure overload

To examine how heat shock transcription factor 1 (HSF1) protects against maladaptive hypertrophy during pressure overload, we subjected HSF1 transgenic (TG), knockout (KO) and wild type (WT) mice to a constriction of transverse aorta (TAC), and found that cardiac hypertrophy, functions and angiogenesis were well preserved in TG mice but were decreased in KO mice compared to WT ones at 4 weeks, which was related to HIF-1 and p53 expression. Inhibition of angiogenesis suppressed cardiac adaptation in TG mice while overexpression of angiogenesis factors improved maladaptive hypertrophy in KO mice. In vitro formation of vasculatures by microvascular endothelial cells was higher in TG mice but lower in KO mice than in WT ones. A siRNA of p53 but not a HIF-1 gene significantly reversed maladaptive hypertrophy in KO mice whereas a siRNA of HIF-1 but not a p53 gene induced maladaptive hypertrophy in TG mice. Heart microRNA analysis showed that miR-378 and miR-379 were differently changed among the three mice after TAC, and miR-378 or siRNA of miR-379 could maintain cardiac adaptation in WT mice. These results indicate that HSF1 preserves cardiac adaptation during pressure overload through p53-HIF-1-associated angiogenesis, which is controlled by miR-378 and miR-379

MiR-181d-5p Targets KLF6 to Improve Ischemia/Reperfusion-Induced AKI Through Effects on Renal Function, Apoptosis, and Inflammation

Renal tubular epithelial cell (RTEC) death and renal interstitial inflammation are the most crucial pathophysiological changes in acute kidney ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI). The microRNA (miR)-181d family plays diverse roles in cell proliferation, apoptosis and inflammation, but its renal target and potential role in IRI are unknown. Here, we showed that the expression of miR-181d-5p decreased and Krueppel-like factor 6 (KLF6) increased in a renal cell (HK-2) model of hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R) injury and a mouse model of renal IRI. They were mainly distributed in the renal tubules. After renal IRI, miR-181d-5p overexpression significantly inhibited inflammatory mediators, reduced apoptosis and further improved renal function. KLF6 exacerbated RTEC damage and acted as a NF-κB co-activator to aggravate the renal IRI inflammatory response. Mechanistically, KLF6 was predicted as a new potential target gene of miR-181d-5p through bioinformatic analysis and luciferase reporter assay verification. After overexpressing miR-181d-5p and inhibiting KLF6, the role of miR-181d-5p was weakened on the renal damage improvement. In conclusion, miR-181d-5p upregulation produced protective antiapoptotic and anti-inflammatory effects against IRI in kidneys in vivo and H/R injury in HK-2 cells in vitro, and these effects were achieved by targeted inhibition of KLF6. Thus, our results provide novel insights into the molecular mechanisms associated with IRI and a potential novel therapeutic target

Simultaneous determination of seawater trimethylamine and methanol by purge and trap gas chromatography using dual nitrogen-phosphorus detector and flame-ionization detector

Compounds containing one carbon atom or no carbon-carbon bond (C1 compounds), such as trimethylamine and methanol, are important climate relevant gases in the atmosphere and play key roles in global warming. The ocean is a significant source or sink of such compounds, while the concentrations of trimethylamine and methanol in seawater remain largely unconstrained due to the analytical challenges involved. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a continuous, rapid and sensitive method for the determination of these compounds with high polarity, volatility or solubility at low seawater concentrations. Here we developed a purge and trap system, coupled to a gas chromatography equipped with dual nitrogen phosphorus detector (NPD) and flame ionization detector (FID) for the simultaneous online analysis of trimethylamine and methanol at nanomolar range using a small sample volume (~ 10 mL). The dual detection of trimethylamine and methanol with NPD or FID was achieved by installing a capillary flow splitter between the capillary column and detectors. After modification and optimization of the setup and conditions, excellent linearity (R2 > 0.99) and repeatability (< 6%) were obtained for both compounds; the detection limits for trimethylamine and methanol were 0.3 nM and 17.6 nM, respectively. Using this method, water samples collected from coastal and open ocean were analyzed; trimethylamine and methanol concentrations ranged from 0.6 to 18.8 nM and 26.0 to 256.2 nM, respectively. Collectively, this method allowed for online, rapid, sensitive and simultaneous quantification of trace trimethylamine and methanol concentrations with low-cost instrumentation and small sample volume, which makes it promising for further application in volatile compounds analysis in marine environments