Phenolic compounds and its antioxidant activities in ethanolic extracts from seven cultivars of Chinese jujube

AbstractPhenolic compounds and its antioxidant activity of extracts from seven cultivars of Chinese jujubes were investigated by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with standards and different antioxidant evaluation methods, such as phosphomolybdenum assay, superoxide radical scavenging activity (SRSA), hydroxyl radical scavenging activity (HRSA), antihemolytic activity and inhibition of lipid peroxidation in rat liver homogenate, respectively. The results showed the components of the extracts are comprised of total phenols and flavonoids, and its content ranges from 454.3 to 1298.9 (GAEmg/100g dry weight). Phlorizin, catechin, gallic acid, chlorogenic acid, caffeic acid were the predominant phenolic compounds. All the extracts had significant antioxidant activities either in vitro or in vivo. Correlation analysis indicated that the antioxidant capacities of Chinese jujube extracts demonstrated a good positive relationship with some phenolic acids, which was higher in Xiao and Goutou. The results indicated that Xiao and Goutou could be attributed to a potential source of natural antioxidants for food applications

Nesiritide protects endothelial function after ballooninduced trauma in the iliac artery in rabbits

To assess the effect of nesiritide on the endothelial function of iliac arteries following endothelia trauma. Right iliac artery trauma was created with a balloon catheter. Ten rabbits were treated with a 4-week subcutaneous injection of nesiritide at a fixed daily dose of 0.1mg/kg. Ten rabbits received daily normal saline injection. Plasma endothelin 1 (ET-1), nitric oxide (NO), and Von Willebrand Factor (vWF) were measured before and after the therapies. Tissue proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) was measured after the treatment. After the treatment, in the therapeutic group, the area under internal elastic membrane and the residual lumen area were higher than in the normal saline group (P <0.05). The plasma levels of ET-1 (91.6±6.8 vs 114.9±6.3 ng/L, P =0.001), vWF (134.6±10.8% vs 188.8±10.4%, P =0.001) and the ratio of PCNA positive expression (11.7±4.2% vs 36.2±11.4%, P =0.005) in the therapeutic group was lower than in the normal saline group, while the plasma levels of NO was higher (89.7±9.3 vs 43.5±5.3 μmol/L, P =0.001). Nesiritide inhibited remodeling of rabbit iliac artery following endothelial trauma. The inhibition of vascular remodeling may be related to the alleviated endothelial dysfunction and reduced expression of tissue proliferating cell nuclear antigen

Integrative Analysis Identified IRF6 and NDST1 as Potential Causal Genes for Ischemic Stroke

Objective: To highlight potential functional variants and causal genes for ischemic stroke (IS) in genomic loci identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAS).Methods: We examined the association between m6A-SNPs and IS in large scale GWAS. Furthermore, eQTL analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of m6A-SNPs on gene expression. The top associations between m6A-SNPs and gene expressions were validated in 40 individuals from the Chinese Han population. Besides, we applied differential expression analysis and Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis to detect potential causal genes for IS.Results: We found 310 (7.39%) m6A-SNPs which were nominally associated with IS. The proportion of m6A-SNPs with P < 0.05 for IS was significantly higher than the non-m6A-SNPs (95%CI: [5.84%, 7.36%], P = 0.02). We found that the IS-associated m6A-SNP rs2013162 was associated with IRF6 expression (P = 6.30 × 10−23), meanwhile IRF6 was differentially expressed between IS cases and controls (P = 6.15 × 10−3) and showed a causal association with IS (P = 3.64 × 10−4). Similar results were found for m6A-SNP rs2273235 in the NDST1 gene which was associated with cardioembolic stroke (P = 8.47 × 10−3). The associations of rs2013162 and rs2273235 with the expression of IRF6 and NDST1 were validated in blood cells (P = 0.0247 and 0.0007), respectively.Conclusions: This study showed that m6A-SNPs may affect IS risk through altering gene expressions. The results suggested that m6A might play a role in IS etiology and gene expressions that affected by m6A may be causal factors for IS

Fairness-guided Few-shot Prompting for Large Language Models

Large language models have demonstrated surprising ability to perform in-context learning, i.e., these models can be directly applied to solve numerous downstream tasks by conditioning on a prompt constructed by a few input-output examples. However, prior research has shown that in-context learning can suffer from high instability due to variations in training examples, example order, and prompt formats. Therefore, the construction of an appropriate prompt is essential for improving the performance of in-context learning. In this paper, we revisit this problem from the view of predictive bias. Specifically, we introduce a metric to evaluate the predictive bias of a fixed prompt against labels or a given attributes. Then we empirically show that prompts with higher bias always lead to unsatisfactory predictive quality. Based on this observation, we propose a novel search strategy based on the greedy search to identify the near-optimal prompt for improving the performance of in-context learning. We perform comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art mainstream models such as GPT-3 on various downstream tasks. Our results indicate that our method can enhance the model's in-context learning performance in an effective and interpretable manner