Extraction of Polyphenols from Mentha aquatica Linn. var. crispa

Mentha aquatica Linn. var. crispa is commonly used as a spice in many Asian countries. Although its biological activities, such as its applications, antimicrobial properties, have been studied, its antioxidation properties have not been investigated. This study establishes the most suitable extraction conditions concerning the independent variables affecting the total polyphenol content (TPC) and antioxidant activity (AA) of M. aquatica extract (stem and leaf). Investigated factors include the type of solvent used; solvent concentration, the ratio of raw material to solvent, extraction time and extraction temperature. The efficiency of polyphenol extraction was evaluated by TPC and AA through the ability to neutralize the free radicals 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2\u27-azinobis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6- sulfonic acid) (ABTS), and the ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) was used as the evaluation indicator. The results have shown that acetone at a concentration of 50%, at a ratio of 1:20 (w/v), extraction time of 2 h and a temperature of 40 °C give the highest values of TPC and AA, with values of 120.92 mg GAE g-1 dw for TPC, 169.36 μmol TE g-1 dw by DPPH assay, 264.03 μmol by ABTS assay, and 425.35 μmol Fe2+ g-1 dw by FRAP assay. This study demonstrates that extracts of M. aquatica can be used for research as food antioxidant

Myosin-II proteins are involved in the growth, morphogenesis, and virulence of the human pathogenic fungus Mucor circinelloides

Mucormycosis is an emerging lethal invasive fungal infection. The infection caused by fungi belonging to the order Mucorales has been reported recently as one of the most common fungal infections among COVID-19 patients. The lack of understanding of pathogens, particularly at the molecular level, is one of the reasons for the difficulties in the management of the infection. Myosin is a diverse superfamily of actin-based motor proteins that have various cellular roles. Four families of myosin motors have been found in filamentous fungi, including myosin I, II, V, and fungus-specific chitin synthase with myosin motor domains. Our previous study on Mucor circinelloides, a common pathogen of mucormycosis, showed that the Myo5 protein (ID 51513) belonging to the myosin type V family had a critical impact on the growth and virulence of this fungus. In this study, to investigate the roles of myosin II proteins in M. circinelloides, silencing phenotypes and null mutants corresponding to myosin II encoding genes, designated mcmyo2A (ID 149958) and mcmyo2B (ID 136314), respectively, were generated. Those mutant strains featured a significantly reduced growth rate and impaired sporulation in comparison with the wild-type strain. Notably, the disruption of mcmyo2A led to an almost complete lack of sporulation. Both mutant strains displayed abnormally short, septate, and inflated hyphae with the presence of yeast-like cells and an unusual accumulation of pigment-filled vesicles. In vivo virulence assays of myosin-II mutant strains performed in the invertebrate model Galleria mellonella indicated that the mcmyo2A-knockout strain was avirulent, while the pathogenesis of the mcmyo2B null mutant was unaltered despite the low growth rate and impaired sporulation. The findings provide suggestions for critical contributions of the myosin II proteins to the polarity growth, septation, morphology, pigment transportation, and pathogenesis of M. circinelloides. The findings also implicate the myosin family as a potential target for future therapy to treat mucormycosis

Chemical Components of Essential Oils From the Leaves of Seven Species Belonging to Rutaceae Family from Binh Chau-Phuoc Buu Nature Reserve, Vietnam

Several plant species of the Rutaceae family are medicinal plants, oil bearing and food crops. To provide more information for utilization of some species of this family in Binh Chau-Phuoc Buu Nature Reserve, we extracted essential oils from the leaves of seven species of the Rutaceae family: Acronychia pedunculata (L.) Miq., Atalantia citroides Pierre ex Guillaumin, Clausena excavata Burm.f., Glycosmis pentaphylla (Retz.) DC., Luvunga scandens (Roxb.) Buch.-Ham. ex Wight & Arn, Melicope pteleifolia (Champ. ex Benth.) T.G. Hartley, and Micromelum sp., via hydrodistillation, and identified their components using GC/MS analysis. A total of 60 compounds were identified from essential oils of seven species. The main components of the essential oils isolated from five species, including A. pedunculata, C. excavata, M. pteleifolia, G. pentaphylla, and Micromelum sp., were caryophyllene (57.63% and 55.41% in A. pedunculata and C. excavata, respectively), 1,9-decadiyne (32.59%, M. pteleifolia), β-ocimene (23.10%, G. pentaphylla), and 3-carene (58.03%, Micromelum sp.). Additionally, this study revealed the chemical composition of essential oils of L. scandens and A. citroides for the first time. The main constituent of A. citroides was 7-oxabicyclo[4.1.0] heptane, 3-oxiranyl- (53.91%) and that of L. scandens was caryophyllene (34.66%). These findings provide the basis for further application of these species in medicine

Ultimate pretreatment of lignocellulose in bioethanol production by combining both acidic and alkaline pretreatment

Alkaline pretreatment has been known as the most popular method to process lignocellulosic materials for bioethanol production due to its simplicity and high efficiency. However, the waste water of the process has a very high basicity, which requires neutralization with acids upon further disposal. In this study, rubber wood saw dust (Hevea brasiliensis) was employed as lignocellulosic material and its pretreatment was inspected with both diluted H2SO4 and NaOH in different combination ways. Hereby, acid was used not only for waste water neutralization but also to contribute to lignin removal. Analysis results showed that an aqueous solution of 2.0 - 2.5 wt.% H2SO4 can be used to treat the biomass followed by alkaline pretreatment. By this so-called combo-pretreatment technique, cellulose was well preserved without significant hydrolysis while the final pretreatment efficiency was up to 63.0%, compared to 48.2% of using only the alkaline solution and 13.7% of using only the acidic solution. Finally, alkaline waste water can be mixed to be neutralized with acidic waste water from the two previous steps. This innovated technique improved the pretreatment efficiency almost without increasing in chemical cost

TextANIMAR: Text-based 3D Animal Fine-Grained Retrieval

3D object retrieval is an important yet challenging task, which has drawn more and more attention in recent years. While existing approaches have made strides in addressing this issue, they are often limited to restricted settings such as image and sketch queries, which are often unfriendly interactions for common users. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel SHREC challenge track focusing on text-based fine-grained retrieval of 3D animal models. Unlike previous SHREC challenge tracks, the proposed task is considerably more challenging, requiring participants to develop innovative approaches to tackle the problem of text-based retrieval. Despite the increased difficulty, we believe that this task has the potential to drive useful applications in practice and facilitate more intuitive interactions with 3D objects. Five groups participated in our competition, submitting a total of 114 runs. While the results obtained in our competition are satisfactory, we note that the challenges presented by this task are far from being fully solved. As such, we provide insights into potential areas for future research and improvements. We believe that we can help push the boundaries of 3D object retrieval and facilitate more user-friendly interactions via vision-language technologies.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.0573

Two plant-associated Bacillus velezensis strains selected after genome analysis, metabolite profiling, and with proved biocontrol potential, were enhancing harvest yield of coffee and black pepper in large field trials

Elimination of chemically synthesized pesticides, such as fungicides and nematicides, in agricultural products is a key to successful practice of the Vietnamese agriculture. We describe here the route for developing successful biostimulants based on members of the Bacillus subtilis species complex. A number of endospore-forming Gram-positive bacterial strains with antagonistic action against plant pathogens were isolated from Vietnamese crop plants. Based on their draft genome sequence, thirty of them were assigned to the Bacillus subtilis species complex. Most of them were assigned to the species Bacillus velezensis. Whole genome sequencing of strains BT2.4 and BP1.2A corroborated their close relatedness to B. velezensis FZB42, the model strain for Gram-positive plant growth-promoting bacteria. Genome mining revealed that at least 15 natural product biosynthesis gene clusters (BGCs) are well conserved in all B. velezensis strains. In total, 36 different BGCs were identified in the genomes of the strains representing B. velezensis, B. subtilis, Bacillus tequilensis, and Bacillus. altitudinis. In vitro and in vivo assays demonstrated the potential of the B. velezensis strains to enhance plant growth and to suppress phytopathogenic fungi and nematodes. Due to their promising potential to stimulate plant growth and to support plant health, the B. velezensis strains TL7 and S1 were selected as starting material for the development of novel biostimulants, and biocontrol agents efficient in protecting the important Vietnamese crop plants black pepper and coffee against phytopathogens. The results of the large-scale field trials performed in the Central Highlands in Vietnam corroborated that TL7 and S1 are efficient in stimulating plant growth and protecting plant health in large-scale applications. It was shown that treatment with both bioformulations resulted in prevention of the pathogenic pressure exerted by nematodes, fungi, and oomycetes, and increased harvest yield in coffee, and pepper.Peer Reviewe

Flexible interactive retrieval SysTem 3.0 for visual lifelog exploration at LSC 2022

Building a retrieval system with lifelogging data is more complicated than with ordinary data due to the redundancies, blurriness, massive amount of data, various sources of information accompanying lifelogging data, and especially the ad-hoc nature of queries. The Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) is a benchmarking challenge that encourages researchers and developers to push the boundaries in lifelog retrieval. For LSC'22, we develop FIRST 3.0, a novel and flexible system that leverages expressive cross-domain embeddings to enhance the searching process. Our system aims to adaptively capture the semantics of an image at different levels of detail. We also propose to augment our system with an external search engine to help our system with initial visual examples for unfamiliar concepts. Finally, we organize image data in hierarchical clusters based on their visual similarity and location to assist users in data exploration. Experiments show that our system is both fast and effective in handling various retrieval scenarios

An open label randomized controlled trial of tamoxifen combined with amphotericin B and fluconazole for cryptococcal meningitis

Background: Cryptococcal meningitis has high mortality. Flucytosine is a key treatment but is expensive and rarely available. The anti-cancer agent tamoxifen has synergistic anti-cryptococcal activity with amphotericin in vitro. It is off-patent, cheap, and widely available. We performed a trial to determine its therapeutic potential. Methods:Open label randomized controlled trial. Participants received standard care - amphotericin combined with fluconazole for the first two weeks - or standard care plus tamoxifen 300mg/day. The primary end point was Early Fungicidal Activity (EFA) - the rate of yeast clearance from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Trial registration https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03112031 . Results: 50 patients were enrolled, (median age 34 years, 35 male). Tamoxifen had no effect on EFA (- 0.48log10 colony-forming units/mL/CSF control arm versus -0.49 tamoxifen arm, difference - 0.005log10CFU/ml/day, 95%CI: -0.16, 0.15, P=0.95). Tamoxifen caused QTc prolongation. Conclusion: High dose tamoxifen does not increase the clearance rate of Cryptococcus from CSF. Novel, affordable therapies are needed. Funding:The trial was funded through the Wellcome Trust Asia Programme Vietnam Core Grant 106680 and a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship to JND grant number WT097147MA