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

The Renormalizable Three-Term Polynomial Inflation with Large Tensor-to-Scalar Ratio

We systematically study the renormalizable three-term polynomial inflation in the supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric models. The supersymmetric inflaton potentials can be realized in supergravity theory, and only have two independent parameters. We show that the general renormalizable supergravity model is equivalent to one kind of our supersymmetric models. We find that the spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio can be consistent with the Planck and BICEP2 results, but the running of spectral index is always out of the $2\sigma$ range. If we do not consider the BICEP2 experiment, these inflationary models can be highly consistent with the Planck observations and saturate its upper bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio ($r \le 0.11$). Thus, our models can be tested at the future Planck and QUBIC experiments.Comment: 38 pages, 40 figure

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

Infrared imaging investigation of temperature fluctuation and spatial distribution for a large laminated lithium ion power battery

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The present study investigates the thermal behaviors of a naturally cooled NCM-type LIB (LiNi1−x−yCoxMnyO2 as cathode) from an experimental and systematic approach. The temperature distribution was acquired for different discharge rates and Depth of Discharge (DOD) by the infrared imaging (IR) technology. Two new factors, the temperature variance ( ) and local overheating index (LOH index), were proposed to assess the temperature fluctuation and distribution. Results showed that the heat generation rate was higher on the cathode side than that on the anode side due to the different resistivity of current collectors. For a low-power discharge, the eventual stable high-temperature zone occurred in the center of the battery, while with a high-power discharge, the upper part of the battery was the high temperature region from the very beginning of discharge. It was found that the temperature variance ( ) and local overheating index (LOH index) were capable of holistically exhibiting the temperature non-uniformity both on numerical fluctuation and spatial distribution with varying discharge rates and DOD. With increasing the discharge rate and DOD, temperature distribution showed an increasingly non-uniform trend, especially at the initial and final stage of high-power discharge, the heat accumulation and concentration area increased rapidly