Integrating Network Pharmacology and Experimental Verification to Explore the Pharmacological Mechanisms of Cordycepin Against Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension

This study identified the potential targets of Cordycepin against PAH using network pharmacology and in vitro verification, which provided a new understanding of the pharmacological mechanisms of Cordycepin in treatment of PAH. </p

Revisiting CO2 emissions convergence in G18 countries

This study revisits whether CO2 emissions converge in G18 countries over the period of 1950–2013. To work on this empirical analysis, we employ a more powerful quantile unit root test with per capita CO2 emissions. While conventional unit root tests fail to reject convergence in CO2 emissions in these G18 countries, quantile unit root test results demonstrate CO2 emissions converged in 5 of these G18 countries (i.e., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, and India). Our empirical results have important policy implications for the governments of G18 countries to direct efficient and effective energy policies to reduce the CO2 emissions.The Hubei Provincial Department of Education, PRC [Grant No: 16D080].http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/geno202019-04-09hj2018Economic

Additional file 1 of Identification of Ferroptosis-related potential biomarkers and immunocyte characteristics in Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension via bioinformatics analysis

Additional file 1: Supplementary Material 1. Data of GSE130391

Long-Tailed Food Classification

Food classification serves as the basic step of image-based dietary assessment to predict the types of foods in each input image. However, foods in real-world scenarios are typically long-tail distributed, where a small number of food types are consumed more frequently than others, which causes a severe class imbalance issue and hinders the overall performance. In addition, none of the existing long-tailed classification methods focus on food data, which can be more challenging due to the inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity between food images. In this work, two new benchmark datasets for long-tailed food classification are introduced, including Food101-LT and VFN-LT, where the number of samples in VFN-LT exhibits real-world long-tailed food distribution. Then, a novel two-phase framework is proposed to address the problem of class imbalance by (1) undersampling the head classes to remove redundant samples along with maintaining the learned information through knowledge distillation and (2) oversampling the tail classes by performing visually aware data augmentation. By comparing our method with existing state-of-the-art long-tailed classification methods, we show the effectiveness of the proposed framework, which obtains the best performance on both Food101-LT and VFN-LT datasets. The results demonstrate the potential to apply the proposed method to related real-life applications

Research on the Cyberspace Map and Its Conceptual Model

The cyberspace map, as one of the important tools for describing cyberspace, provides a visual representation of the dynamic and elusive nature of cyberspace. It has become a research hotspot in multiple disciplinary fields. Compared with traditional maps, cyberspace maps lack the guidance of cartography theory and have not yet formed a unified understanding. Clarifying the concept of the cyberspace map and developing a conceptual model of it could enhance people’s unified understanding of cyberspace. Drawing from the perspective of cartography, this paper analyzes the current situation of cyberspace map research, first discussing the characteristics and definition of the cyberspace map and then proposing the conceptual model of a cyberspace map. This model elaborates on the types of map elements and their specific composition, the strength of their element–space association, the mapping of relationships between elements, element symbolization, and map expression. Then, based on the model proposed in this paper, typical maps are compared and analyzed, and design suggestions are provided. Finally, the entire article is summarized. This paper aims to adapt the development trend of cartography to the ternary space, clarify the basic concept of the cyberspace map, promote the development of cyberspace mapping theory, and lay the foundation for future research

Antibacterial Secondary Metabolites from Marine-Derived Fungus Aspergillus sp. IMCASMF180035

Four new secondary metabolites, including one spiro[anthracenone-xanthene] derivative aspergiloxathene A (1), one penicillide analogue, Δ2′-1′-dehydropenicillide (2), and two new phthalide derivatives, 5-methyl-3-methoxyepicoccone (3) and 7-carboxy-4-hydroxy-6-methoxy-5-methylphthalide (4), together with four known compounds, yicathin C (5), dehydropenicillide (6), 3-methoxyepicoccone (7), 4-hydroxy-6-methoxy-5-methylphthalide (8), were identified from the marine-derived fungus Aspergillus sp. IMCASMF180035. Their structures were determined by spectroscopic data, including high-resolution electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (HRESIMS), 1D and 2D nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques. Compound 1 was identified as the first jointed molecule by xanthene and anthracenone moieties possessing an unprecedented carbon skeleton with spiro-ring system. All compounds were evaluated activities against Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA), Escherichia coli, Escherichia faecium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Helicobacter pylori. Compound 1 showed significant inhibitory effects against S. aureus and MRSA, with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of 5.60 and 22.40 µM. Compounds 2 and 6 exhibited potent antibacterial activities against H. pylori, with MIC values of 21.73 and 21.61 µM, respectively

FPGA-Based Digital Implementation of Flexible Power Control for Three-Phase to Single-Phase MMC-Based Advanced Co-Phase Traction Power Supply System

A three-phase to single-phase modular multilevel converter based advanced co-phase traction power supply (MMC-ACTPS) system is an effective structure to address the concerns of phase splitting and poor power quality of the conventional electrified railway. Due to the large number of MMCACTPS system modules, I/O resources and computing speed have high requirements on processors. Moreover, the module capacitor balance is challenging because the sorting time is too long when the traditional sorting algorithm for voltage balance is used. To solve the above issues, a digital implementation scheme of flexible power control strategy for three-phase to single-phase MMC-ACTPS system based on field programmable gate array (FPGA), which has sufficient I/O resources, has been proposed. Due to the parallel execution characteristics of the FPGA, the execution time of the controller and the modulator can be greatly reduced compared with a digital signal processor (DSP) + FPGA or DSpace. In addition, an improved sorting algorithm is proposed to reduce the sorting time and the implementation steps are analyzed. Finally, simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed control strategy

NETosis promotes chronic inflammation and fibrosis in systemic lupus erythematosus and COVID-19

Pulmonary fibrosis, a serious complication of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), leads to irreversible lung damage. However, the underlying mechanism of this condition remains unclear. In this study, we revealed the landscape of transcriptional changes in lung biopsies from individuals with SLE, COVID-19-induced pulmonary fibrosis, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) using histopathology and RNA sequencing, respectively. Despite the diverse etiologies of these diseases, lung expression of matrix metalloproteinase genes in these diseases showed similar patterns. Particularly, the differentially expressed genes were significantly enriched in the pathway of neutrophil extracellular trap formation, showing similar enrichment signature between SLE and COVID-19. The abundance of Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) was much higher in the lungs of individuals with SLE and COVID-19 compared to those with IPF. In-depth transcriptome analyses revealed that NETs formation pathway promotes epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Furthermore, stimulation with NETs significantly up-regulated α-SMA, Twist, Snail protein expression, while decreasing the expression of E-cadherin protein in vitro. This indicates that NETosis promotes EMT in lung epithelial cells. Given drugs that are efficacious in degrading damaged NETs or inhibiting NETs production, we identified a few drug targets that were aberrantly expressed in both SLE and COVID-19. Among these targets, the JAK2 inhibitor Tofacitinib could effectively disrupted the process of NETs and reversed NET-induced EMT in lung epithelial cells. These findings support that the NETs/EMT axis, activated by SLE and COVID-19, contributes to the progression of pulmonary fibrosis. Our study also highlights that JAK2 as a potential target for the treatment of fibrosis in these diseases