Diverse Phytochemicals and Bioactivities in the Ancient Fruit and Modern Functional Food Pomegranate (Punica granatum).

Having served as a symbolic fruit since ancient times, pomegranate (Punica granatum) has also gained considerable recognition as a functional food in the modern era. A large body of literature has linked pomegranate polyphenols, particularly anthocyanins (ATs) and hydrolyzable tannins (HTs), to the health-promoting activities of pomegranate juice and fruit extracts. However, it remains unclear as to how, and to what extent, the numerous phytochemicals in pomegranate may interact and exert cooperative activities in humans. In this review, we examine the structural and analytical information of the diverse phytochemicals that have been identified in different pomegranate tissues, to establish a knowledge base for characterization of metabolite profiles, discovery of novel phytochemicals, and investigation of phytochemical interactions in pomegranate. We also assess recent findings on the function and molecular mechanism of ATs as well as urolithins, the intestinal microbial derivatives of pomegranate HTs, on human nutrition and health. A better understanding of the structural diversity of pomegranate phytochemicals as well as their bioconversions and bioactivities in humans will facilitate the interrogation of their synergistic/antagonistic interactions and accelerate their applications in dietary-based cancer chemoprevention and treatment in the future

Exploring the Phytochemical Landscape of the Early-Diverging Flowering Plant Amborella trichopoda Baill.

Although the evolutionary significance of the early-diverging flowering plant Amborella (Amborella trichopoda Baill.) is widely recognized, its metabolic landscape, particularly specialized metabolites, is currently underexplored. In this work, we analyzed the metabolomes of Amborella tissues using liquid chromatography high-resolution electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (LC-HR-ESI-MS). By matching the mass spectra of Amborella metabolites with those of authentic phytochemical standards in the publicly accessible libraries, 63, 39, and 21 compounds were tentatively identified in leaves, stems, and roots, respectively. Free amino acids, organic acids, simple sugars, cofactors, as well as abundant glycosylated and/or methylated phenolic specialized metabolites were observed in Amborella leaves. Diverse metabolites were also detected in stems and roots, including those that were not identified in leaves. To understand the biosynthesis of specialized metabolites with glycosyl and methyl modifications, families of small molecule UDP-dependent glycosyltransferases (UGTs) and O-methyltransferases (OMTs) were identified in the Amborella genome and the InterPro database based on conserved functional domains. Of the 17 phylogenetic groups of plant UGTs (A-Q) defined to date, Amborella UGTs are absent from groups B, N, and P, but they are highly abundant in group L. Among the 25 Amborella OMTs, 7 cluster with caffeoyl-coenzyme A (CCoA) OMTs involved in lignin and phenolic metabolism, whereas 18 form a clade with plant OMTs that methylate hydroxycinnamic acids, flavonoids, or alkaloids. Overall, this first report of metabolomes and candidate metabolic genes in Amborella provides a starting point to a better understanding of specialized metabolites and biosynthetic enzymes in this basal lineage of flowering plants

Exogenous Carbon Magnifies Mycorrhizal Effects on Growth Behaviour and Sucrose Metabolism in Trifoliate Orange

Arbuscular mycorrhizas (AMs) need the carbohydrates from host plants for its growth, whereas it is not clear whether exogenous carbon affects mycorrhizal roles. A two-chambered rootbox was divided into root + hyphae chamber and hyphae chamber (free of roots) by 37-μm nylon mesh, in which trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) seedlings and Funneliformis mosseae were applied into root + hyphae chamber, and exogenous 40 mmol/L fructose, glucose and sucrose was applied to hyphae chamber. Application of exogenous sugars dramatically elevated root mycorrhizal colonization. Sole arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) inoculation significantly promoted plant growth and root morphology than non-AMF treatment. Mycorrhiza-improved plant growth and root modification could be enlarged by exogenous carbon, especially fructose. Exogenous carbon markedly increased root fructose, glucose and sucrose accumulation in mycorrhizal plants, especially sucrose. Exogenous fructose significantly reduced leaf and root sucrose synthase (SS) activity in synthesis direction and increased them in cleavage direction in AMF seedlings. Exogenous glucose and sucrose heavily elevated root SS activity of mycorrhizal seedlings in synthesis and cleavage direction and reduced leaf SS activity in synthesis direction. Leaf acid invertase (AI) and neutral invertase (NI) activities of mycorrhizal seedlings were decreased by exogenous carbon, except sucrose in NI. Exogenous fructose significantly increased root AI and NI activity in mycorrhizal plants. These results implied that mycorrhizal inoculation represented positive effects on plant growth, root morphology, and sucrose metabolism of trifoliate orange, which could be magnified further by exogenous carbon, especially fructose

Frequent oscillatory criteria forpartial difference equations with several delays

AbstractThis paper is concerned with partial difference equations with several delays of theform aAm+1,n+bAm,n+1−dAm,n+∑i=1rpi(m,n)Am−σi,n−τi=0,m,n=0,1,2,…, where a, b, and d are three positive real constants, σi, τi, and τ are positive integers, and {pi(m,n)} are real double sequences, i = 1,2,,τ. Some new frequent oscillation criteria for this equation are derived

Theoretical investigation of the molecular nature of Ds0∗(2317)D_{s0}^*(2317) and Ds1(2460)D_{s1}(2460) and the possibility of observing the DDˉKD\bar{D}K bound state Kccˉ(4180)K_{c\bar{c}}(4180) in inclusive e+e−→ccˉe^+e^-\to c\bar{c} collisions

Searching for exotic multiquark states and elucidating their nature remains a central topic in understanding quantum chromodynamics--the underlying theory of the strong interaction. Two of the most studied such states are the charm-strange states $D_{s0}^*(2317)$ and $D_{s1}(2460)$. In this letter, we show for the first time that their prompt production yields in inclusive $e^+e^-\to c\bar{c}$ collisions near $\sqrt{s}=10.6$ GeV measured by the BABAR Collaboration, $Y(D_{s0}^*(2317))$ and $Y(D_{s1}(2460))$, in particular the ratio $R=Y(D_{s0}^*(2317))/Y(D_{s1}(2460))$, can be well explained in the molecular picture, which provide a highly nontrivial verification of their nature being $DK/D^*K$ molecules. On the contrary, treating them as pure $c\bar{s}$ $P-$wave states, the statistical model predicts a ratio $R$ smaller than unity, in contrast with the experimental central value, though in agreement with it considering its relatively large uncertainty. In addition, we predict the production yield of the $D\bar{D}K$ three-body bound state, $K_{c\bar{c}}(4180)$, in $e^+e^-\to c\bar{c}$ collisions and find that it is within the reach of the ongoing Belle II experiment. The present study demonstrates the feasibility of a novel method to unravel the nature of exotic hadrons and the potential of electron-positron collisions in this regard.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; more discussions and comparison with the statistical model adde

A Multi-task Learning Approach for Improving Product Title Compression with User Search Log Data

It is a challenging and practical research problem to obtain effective compression of lengthy product titles for E-commerce. This is particularly important as more and more users browse mobile E-commerce apps and more merchants make the original product titles redundant and lengthy for Search Engine Optimization. Traditional text summarization approaches often require a large amount of preprocessing costs and do not capture the important issue of conversion rate in E-commerce. This paper proposes a novel multi-task learning approach for improving product title compression with user search log data. In particular, a pointer network-based sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized for title compression with an attentive mechanism as an extractive method and an attentive encoder-decoder approach is utilized for generating user search queries. The encoding parameters (i.e., semantic embedding of original titles) are shared among the two tasks and the attention distributions are jointly optimized. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data and online deployment demonstrate the advantage of the proposed research for both compression qualities and online business values.Comment: 8 Pages, accepted at AAAI 201