Astragaloside IV inhibits pathological functions of gastric cancer-associated fibroblasts through regulation of HOXA6/ZBTB12 axis

[email protected], [email protected] Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) play critical roles in the tumor microenvironment and exert tumor-promoting or tumor-retarding effects on cancer development. Astragaloside IV has been suggested to rescue the pathological impact of CAFs in gastric cancer. This study aimed to investigate the potential mechanism of astragaloside IV in the regulation of CAF pathological functions in gastric cancer development. Homeobox A6 (HOXA6), and Zinc Finger and BTB Domain Containing 12 (ZBTB12) are highly expressed in gastric CAFs compared with normal fibroblasts (NFs) based on the GSE62740 dataset. We found that astragaloside IV-stimulated CAFs suppressed cell growth, migration, and invasiveness of gastric cancer cells. HOXA6 and ZBTB12 were downregulated after astragaloside IV treatment in CAFs. Further analysis revealed that HOXA6 or ZBTB12 knockdown in CAFs also exerted inhibitory effects on the malignant phenotypes of gastric cells. Additionally, HOXA6 or ZBTB12 overexpression in CAFs enhanced gastric cancer cell malignancy, which was reversed after astragaloside IV treatment. Moreover, based on the hTFtarget database, ZBTB12 is a target gene that may be transcriptionally regulated by HOXA6. The binding between HOXA6 and ZBTB12 promoter in 293T cells and CAFs was further confirmed. HOXA6 silencing also induced the downregulation of ZBTB12 mRNA and protein in CAFs. Astragaloside IV was demonstrated to regulate the expression of ZBTB12 by mediating the transcriptional activity of HOXA6. Our findings shed light on the therapeutic value of astragaloside IV for gastric cancer

Screening and Optimization of Microalgae Biomass and Plastic Material Coprocessing by Hydrothermal Liquefaction

In the past decade, microalgae biomass has been attracting considerable interest in valuable biocomponents and biofuel production. Meanwhile, plastic waste handling has become one of the most pressing global environmental concerns. Coprocessing of plastic waste and biomass has previously been reported to produce good quality fuel oil and high-value chemicals. In this study, we examined a coliquefaction process (co-HTL) of 2 microalgae, Chlorella vulgaris (Cv) and Nannochloropsis gaditana (Ng), with nine types of common plastics. In a first step, the co-HTL process was conducted in microautoclave reactors with a fixed algae/plastic mass ratio (50:50) at a temperature of 350 °C and a pressure of 16 MPa for a holding time of 15 min. Among the different types of plastics, positive synergistic effects between polycarbonate (PC), polystyrene (PS), and microalgae have been observed: (1) Plastics showed greater decomposition. (2) HTL crude oil yields were increased. Ng algae exhibits a higher interaction ability with plastics. Then, PC and PS were coprocessed with Ng algae using the response surface methodology to optimize the effects of temperature (300–400 °C), algae/plastic mass ratio (20:80–80:20), and holding time (5–45 min) on HTL crude oil yield. Software-based data analysis of the co-HTL experiments were conducted, and the optimal parameters were proposed, which were verified by the experiment results; Ng+PC (20:80 wt %) exhibits the highest crude oil yield of 67.2% at 300 °C with a 5 min holding time, while Ng+PS (80:20 wt %) generates 51.4 wt % crude oil yield at 400 °C and a 25 min holding time. Finally, the analytical results of elemental analysis, FTIR, 1H NMR, GPC, GC-MS, and TGA on the crude oil produced from pure microalgae HTL and co-HTL were compared, indicating that Ng+PC crude oil is more suitable for aromatic chemicals production and Ng+PS crude oil could be more favorable for biofuel applications

The Effect of Dichloromethane on Product Separation during Continuous Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Chlorella vulgaris and Aqueous Product Recycling for Algae Cultivation

Dichloromethane (DCM) is a solvent commonly used in laboratories for microalgae hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) product separation. The addition of DCM would lead to an “overestimation effect” of biocrude yield and diminish biocrude quality. However, it is currently not clear to what extent this overestimation effect will impact a continuous HTL process. In this study, Chlorella vulgaris microalgae was processed in a continuous stirred tank reactor at different temperatures (300, 325, 350, 375, and 400 °C) at 24 MPa for 15 min holding time. Two separation methods were applied to investigate the effect of using DCM in a cHTL product separation procedure in terms of product yield, biocrude elemental content, and aqueous product (AP) composition. Subsequently, the feasibility of reusing AP for algae cultivation has been evaluated. Results suggest that 350 °C is the optimal temperature for cHTL operation, leading to the highest biocrude yield, and an average increase in biocrude yield of 9 wt % was achieved when using DCM in cHTL product separation. Within the temperature range investigated, an average biocrude yield estimation can be proposed by yield$_{non-DCM}$ ≈ 0.818 × yield$_{DCM}$. The AP has been characterized by total organic carbon and total nitrogen, high-performance liquid chromatography, and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy. Results show that at 350–375 °C more nitrogen and other ions were directed into the AP, which could be advantageous in nutrient recovery. With the help of optical density testing, algae was shown to exhibit a better growth using AP with activated carbon absorption purification treatment as compared to the standard medium. The recovery of water and nutrients from the HTL-AP could improve the economics of a microalgae biorefinery process

Strategies for Searching Video Content with Text Queries or Video Examples

The large number of user-generated videos uploaded on to the Internet everyday has led to many commercial video search engines, which mainly rely on text metadata for search. However, metadata is often lacking for user-generated videos, thus these videos are unsearchable by current search engines. Therefore, content-based video retrieval (CBVR) tackles this metadata-scarcity problem by directly analyzing the visual and audio streams of each video. CBVR encompasses multiple research topics, including low-level feature design, feature fusion, semantic detector training and video search/reranking. We present novel strategies in these topics to enhance CBVR in both accuracy and speed under different query inputs, including pure textual queries and query by video examples. Our proposed strategies have been incorporated into our submission for the TRECVID 2014 Multimedia Event Detection evaluation, where our system outperformed other submissions in both text queries and video example queries, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approaches

Impact of anti-sticking coating technology on shear strength at the clay-metal interface in cohesive strata

The shield machine is clogged frequently when tunneling in cohesive strata. Shield clogging is closely linked to the shear strength exhibited at the clay-metal interface. To investigate the impact of anti-sticking coating technology on the shear strength at the clay-metal interface, a series of direct shear tests were conducted. The obtained test results revealed an initial increase in shear stress at the clay-metal interface as shear displacement increased, eventually reaching a state of stabilization. The shear strength exhibited a gradual increase initially, followed by a significant increase, and eventually reached a plateau with the rise in the consistency index. It was observed that the adhesion between the anti-adhesion coating and clay was relatively weak, but the presence of the anti-adhesion coating effectively reduced the risk of shield clogging