Mychonastes afer HSO-3-1 as a potential new source of biodiesel

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Biodiesel is considered to be a promising future substitute for fossil fuels, and microalgae are one source of biodiesel. The ratios of lipid, carbohydrates and proteins are different in different microalgal species, and finding a good strain for oil production remains a difficult prospect. Strains producing valuable co-products would improve the viability of biofuel production.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study, we performed sequence analysis of the 18S rRNA gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of an algal strain designated HSO-3-1, and found that it was closely related to the <it>Mychonastes afer </it>strain CCAP 260/6. Morphology and cellular structure observation also supported the identification of strain HSO-3-1 as <it>M. afer</it>. We also investigated the effects of nitrogen on the growth and lipid accumulation of the naturally occurring <it>M. afer </it>HSO-3-1, and its potential for biodiesel production. In total, 17 fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) were identified in <it>M. afer </it>HSO-3-1, using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. The total lipid content of <it>M. afer </it>HSO-3-1 was 53.9% of the dry cell weight, and we also detected nervonic acid (C24:1), which has biomedical applications, making up 3.8% of total fatty acids. The highest biomass and lipid yields achieved were 3.29 g/l and 1.62 g/l, respectively, under optimized conditions.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The presence of octadecenoic and hexadecanoic acids as major components, with the presence of a high-value component, nervonic acid, renders <it>M. afer </it>HSO-3-1 biomass an economic feedstock for biodiesel production.</p

Bioactivities of EF24, a Novel Curcumin Analog: A Review

Curcumin is an attractive agent due to its multiple bioactivities. However, the low oral bioavailability and efficacy profile hinders its clinical application. To improve the bioavailability, many analogs of curcumin have been developed, among which EF24 is an excellent representative. EF24 has enhanced bioavailability over curcumin and shows more potent bioactivity, including anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, and anti-bacterial. EF24 inhibits tumor growth by inducing cell cycle arrest and apoptosis, mainly through its inhibitory effect on the nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) pathway and by regulating key genes through microRNA (miRNA) or the proteosomal pathway. Based on the current structure, more potent EF24 analogs have been designed and synthesized. However, some roles of EF24 remain unclear, such as whether it induces or inhibits reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and whether it stimulates or inhibits the mitogen activated kinase-like protein (MAPK) pathway. This review summarizes the known biological and pharmacological activities and mechanisms of action of EF24

Revealing missing human protein isoforms based on Ab initio prediction, RNA-seq and proteomics

Biological and biomedical research relies on comprehensive understanding of protein-coding transcripts. However, the total number of human proteins is still unknown due to the prevalence of alternative splicing. In this paper, we detected 31,566 novel transcripts with coding potential by filtering our ab initio predictions with 50 RNA-seq datasets from diverse tissues/cell lines. PCR followed by MiSeq sequencing showed that at least 84.1% of these predicted novel splice sites could be validated. In contrast to known transcripts, the expression of these novel transcripts were highly tissue-specific. Based on these novel transcripts, at least 36 novel proteins were detected from shotgun proteomics data of 41 breast samples. We also showed L1 retrotransposons have a more significant impact on the origin of new transcripts/genes than previously thought. Furthermore, we found that alternative splicing is extraordinarily widespread for genes involved in specific biological functions like protein binding, nucleoside binding, neuron projection, membrane organization and cell adhesion. In the end, the total number of human transcripts with protein-coding potential was estimated to be at least 204,950.publishedVersio

Protective effect of Saussurea involucrata polysaccharide against skin dryness induced by ultraviolet radiation

Background: Exposure to ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation can damage the epidermis barrier function and eventually result in skin dryness. At present, little work is being devoted to skin dryness. Searching for active ingredients that can protect the skin against UVB-induced dryness will have scientific significance.Methods:Saussurea involucrata polysaccharide (SIP) has been shown to have significant antioxidant and anti-photodamage effects on the skin following UVB irradiation. To evaluate the effect of SIP on UVB-induced skin dryness ex vivo, SIP-containing hydrogel was applied in a mouse model following exposure to UVB and the levels of histopathological changes, DNA damage, inflammation, keratinocyte differentiation, lipid content were then evaluated. The underlying mechanisms of SIP to protect the cells against UVB induced-dryness were determined in HaCaT cells.Results: SIP was found to lower UVB-induced oxidative stress and DNA damage while increasing keratinocyte differentiation and lipid production. Western blot analysis of UVB-irradiated skin tissue revealed a significant increase in peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-α (PPAR-α) levels, indicating that the underlying mechanism may be related to PPAR-α signaling pathway activation.Conclusions: By activating the PPAR-α pathway, SIP could alleviate UVB-induced oxidative stress and inhibit the inflammatory response, regulate proliferation and differentiation of keratinocytes, and mitigate lipid synthesis disorder. These findings could provide candidate active ingredients with relatively clear mechanistic actions for the development of skin sunscreen moisturizers

Mining undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature based on automatic semantic pruning

Presented at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing, Beijing, China.The problem of mining undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature was exemplified by Swanson's pioneering work on Raynaud disease/fish-oil discovery in 1986. Since then, there have been many approaches to mine undiscovered public knowledge from biomedical literature. This paper presents a semantic-based approach for mining undiscovered public knowledge from bio-medical literature. The method takes advantages of the biomedical ontologies, MeSH and UMLS, as the source of semantic knowledge. A prototype system Biomedical Semantic-based Knowledge Discovery System (Bio-SbKDS) is designed to uncover novel hypothe-sis/connections hidden in the biomedical literature. Using the semantic types and semantic relations of the bio-medical concepts, Bio-SbKDS can identify the relevant concepts collected from Medline and generate the novel hypothesis between these concepts. Bio-SbKDS suc-cessfully replicates Dr. Swanson's two famous discover-ies: Raynaud disease/fish oil and migraine/magnesium. Compared with previous approaches, our method searches much less articles, generates much less but more relevant novel hypotheses, requires much less human in-tervention in the discovery procedure

China's transport and its energy use

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Remote Monitoring System Based on GPRS - A Case Study for Water Withdrawal

In order to realize supervision of water withdrawal, it is necessary to establish a modern monitoring system. This study focuses on the design of a remote monitoring terminal system that is operating in a south province in China. This terminal system adopts GPRS mode to establish communication with monitoring center. Detailed hardware design is provided, as well as its software functions. This terminal device finishes the basic function of water quantity collection. At the meantime, remote upgrade function and picture collection function are proposed in order to perfect the overall function of the system. Kinds of tests were conducted to verify its performances and functionalities. We conclude that the proposed remote monitoring terminal might become a useful tool for supervision of water withdrawal in the dispersed areas