Danshen-Chuanxiong-Honghua Ameliorates Cerebral Impairment and Improves Spatial Cognitive Deficits after Transient Focal Ischemia and Identification of Active Compounds.

Previously, we only apply a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) Danshen-Chuanxiong-Honghua (DCH) for cardioprotection via anti-inflammation in rats of acute myocardial infarction by occluding coronary artery. Presently, we select not only DCH but also its main absorbed compound ferulic acid (FA) for cerebra protection via similar action of mechanism above in animals of the transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (tMCAO). We investigated whether oral administration of DCH and FA could ameliorate MCAO-induced brain lesions in animals. By using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), we analyzed four compounds, including tanshinol, salvianolic acid B, hydroxysafflor yellow A and especially FA as the putative active components of DCH extract in the plasma, cerebrospinal fluid and injured hippocampus of rats with MCAO. In our study, it was assumed that FA played a similar neuroprotective role to DCH. We found that oral pretreatment with DCH (10 or 20 g/kg) and FA (100 mg/kg) improved neurological function and alleviated the infarct volume as well as brain edema in a dose-dependent manner. These changes were accompanied by improved ischemia-induced apoptosis and decreased the inflammatory response. Additionally, chronic treatment with DCH reversed MCAO-induced spatial cognitive deficits in a manner associated with enhanced neurogenesis and increased the expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in lesions of the hippocampus. These findings suggest that DCH has the ability to recover cognitive impairment and offer neuroprotection against cerebral ischemic injury via inhibiting microenvironmental inflammation and triggering of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. FA could be one of the potential active compounds

Identify submitochondria and subchloroplast locations with pseudo amino acid composition: Approach from the strategy of discrete wavelet transform feature extraction

AbstractIt is very challenging and complicated to predict protein locations at the sub-subcellular level. The key to enhancing the prediction quality for protein sub-subcellular locations is to grasp the core features of a protein that can discriminate among proteins with different subcompartment locations. In this study, a different formulation of pseudoamino acid composition by the approach of discrete wavelet transform feature extraction was developed to predict submitochondria and subchloroplast locations. As a result of jackknife cross-validation, with our method, it can efficiently distinguish mitochondrial proteins from chloroplast proteins with total accuracy of 98.8% and obtained a promising total accuracy of 93.38% for predicting submitochondria locations. Especially the predictive accuracy for mitochondrial outer membrane and chloroplast thylakoid lumen were 82.93% and 82.22%, respectively, showing an improvement of 4.88% and 27.22% when other existing methods were compared. The results indicated that the proposed method might be employed as a useful assistant technique for identifying sub-subcellular locations. We have implemented our algorithm as an online service called SubIdent (http://bioinfo.ncu.edu.cn/services.aspx)

Towards harmonious East-West educational partnerships: a study of cultural differences between Taiwanese and Norwegian engineering students

The collaboration activities between educational institutions in the East and the West are on the increase as an increasingly globalized economy requires graduates to have the skills to work across cultural divides. Such collaborations are difficult and require patience. One challenge is that students or teachers may have misconceptions about aspects of the other culture that may cause problems. This study sets out to identify what values students in typical Eastern and Western societies associate with a good student, good student behavior, good teachers and good lectures with the purpose to identify discrepancies. This study is based on the results of a pair-wise ranking questionnaire completed by 233 Taiwanese and Norwegian students of both engineering and non-technical subjects. The results confirm some established beliefs regarding culturally related differences. However, several issues were found to be culturally neutral, and cultural differences were identified for several issues that were predicted to be culturally neutral. The results of this study may be useful to educators involved in East–West internationalization

Combination and compression of multiple pulses with same or different wavelengths

Funding Information: This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61675008 and in part by Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission under Grant GJHZ20180411185015272. K. Nakkeeran wishes to thank The Royal Society Kan Tong Po International Fellowship 2018 for the financial support to visit The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.Peer reviewedPostprin