Soy isoflavones: database development, estrogenic activity of glycitein and hypocholesterolemic effect of daidzein

Soy isoflavones are proposed to have certain health protective activities, including prevention of cancer, lowering blood cholesterol levels and reducing postmenopausal bone loss. To evaluate the health-enhancing properties of isoflavones, a stable and inexpensive source of these compounds is necessary. Chemical synthesis is a practical way to obtain pure isoflavones. The synthesis of daidzein was modified to a simple, fast and high yield method by cyclizing 2,4,4\u27-trihydroxydeoxybenzoin (THB) with boron trifluoride etherate and methanesulphonyl chloride. The yield was \u3e86%, and the purity of synthesized daidzein was \u3e98%. The intermediate of daidzein synthesis, THB, with a similar structure to the isoflavones, proved to be an excellent internal-standard in soy isoflavone analysis;The estrogenic activity of glycitein was investigated by using in vivo mice uterine enlargement assay and in vitro estrogen receptor (ER) binding assay. Glycitein demonstrated an estrogenic response in mice uterine enlargement assay 3 times greater than genistein, but 30,000 times less than diethlstillbestrol (DES). Glycitein bound to mice uterine cytosol estrogen receptor proteins with an affinity similar to daidzein, but 20 times lower than genistein. This is the first report demonstrates that glycitein has estrogenic activity comparable to daidzein and genistein. Glycitein, although only accounts for 5 to 10% of the total isoflavones in soybeans, can not be neglected in evaluating isoflavones\u27 health enhancing properties and in development of isoflavone database in foods;The dietary effects of soy protein, with or without isoflavones, daidzein and soygerm on plasma cholesterol levels were investigated in Golden Syrian hamsters. Daidzein, soygerm or soygerm extract, when added to casein diet, lowered plasma total cholesterol by 15% to 28% (P \u3c 0.01) and LDL cholesterol by 15 to 50% (P \u3c 0.01) in both male and female hamsters compared with the casein control group. Soy protein and isoflavone-depleted soy protein, when compared with the casein control, significantly lowered total cholesterol (P \u3c 0.01) and LDL cholesterol (P \u3c 0.01) levels for both genders. These data suggest that the isoflavone daidzein, soygerm and soy protein with or without isoflavones, have the ability to lower plasma cholesterol levels in hamsters

Design and modelling of mobile thermal energy storage (M−TES) using structured composite phase change material modules

This study concerns with a modelling led-design of a novel mobile thermal energy storage (M−TES) device aimed to address off-site industrial waste heat recovery and reuse in the UK. For the first time, salt-based composite phase change material (CPCM) modules were employed as the M−TES medium, utilizing air for charging and discharging. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models were initially developed and validated against experimental data. The 2D model was used for parametric study to determine critical M−TES dimensions, followed by the 3D model for a comprehensive evaluation of thermal performance of the M−TES device. Key parameters examined included temperature uniformity within CPCM modules, evolution of air temperatures at the inlet and outlet, thermal storage capacities, charging/discharging rates, and specific efficiencies defined as heat transfer efficiencies and charging/discharging efficiencies throughout a complete cycle. The results under baseline conditions demonstrated that the M−TES device stored nearly 400 MJ of heat with a TES density of 560 kJ/kg after 10 h of charging, achieving an average CPCM temperature of 662 K. Approximately 97 % of the stored heat was released with the average outlet air temperature exceeding 468 K during the subsequent 10-hour discharging period. This work preliminarily verified the feasibility of the novel M−TES concept for integrating industrial thermal processing decarbonization with domestic heat supply

speech and noise dual-stream spectrogram refine network with speech distortion loss for robust speech recognition

In recent years, the joint training of speech enhancement front-end and automatic speech recognition (ASR) back-end has been widely used to improve the robustness of ASR systems. Traditional joint training methods only use enhanced speech as input for the backend. However, it is difficult for speech enhancement systems to directly separate speech from input due to the diverse types of noise with different intensities. Furthermore, speech distortion and residual noise are often observed in enhanced speech, and the distortion of speech and noise is different. Most existing methods focus on fusing enhanced and noisy features to address this issue. In this paper, we propose a dual-stream spectrogram refine network to simultaneously refine the speech and noise and decouple the noise from the noisy input. Our proposed method can achieve better performance with a relative 8.6% CER reduction

Monolingual Recognizers Fusion for Code-switching Speech Recognition

The bi-encoder structure has been intensively investigated in code-switching (CS) automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, most existing methods require the structures of two monolingual ASR models (MAMs) should be the same and only use the encoder of MAMs. This leads to the problem that pre-trained MAMs cannot be timely and fully used for CS ASR. In this paper, we propose a monolingual recognizers fusion method for CS ASR. It has two stages: the speech awareness (SA) stage and the language fusion (LF) stage. In the SA stage, acoustic features are mapped to two language-specific predictions by two independent MAMs. To keep the MAMs focused on their own language, we further extend the language-aware training strategy for the MAMs. In the LF stage, the BELM fuses two language-specific predictions to get the final prediction. Moreover, we propose a text simulation strategy to simplify the training process of the BELM and reduce reliance on CS data. Experiments on a Mandarin-English corpus show the efficiency of the proposed method. The mix error rate is significantly reduced on the test set after using open-source pre-trained MAMs.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP202

The mediating effect of resilience on mental health literacy and positive coping style among Chinese empty nesters: A cross-sectional study

ObjectivesEmpty nesters in China have limited mental health literacy (MHL), which may lead to poorer health outcomes. Studies demonstrate that MHL is associated with both resilience and positive coping style. However, the potential mechanism of MHL, resilience and positive coping style remain unclear. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the possible mediating role of resilience in the relationship between MHL and positive coping style.MethodIn this cross-sectional study, a total of 363 empty nesters from Huzhou, China were surveyed in 2022. The Chinese version of Mental Health Literacy Scale (C-MHLS), the Chinese version of 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10) and the Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire (SCSQ-19) were used to assess MHL, resilience, and positive coping style, respectively.ResultsPositive coping style was significantly correlated with MHL and resilience, and MHL was positively correlated with resilience (p < 0.01). MHL can significantly and positively predict the positive coping style, and resilience played a partial intermediary role between MHL and positive coping style, with the intermediary effect of 77.36%.ConclusionThis study indicates that MHL not only directly affected positive coping style, but also indirectly influences positive coping style by increasing the resilience of empty nesters. The results provide an empirical evidence for the development of intervention programs to improve positive coping style directly and indirectly. Consequently, community health servicers should take targeted measures which focus on MHL and resilience as breakthrough points to stimulate positive coping style of empty nesters, and ultimately achieve their overall well-being

SketchMate: Deep Hashing for Million-Scale Human Sketch Retrieval

We propose a deep hashing framework for sketch retrieval that, for the first time, works on a multi-million scale human sketch dataset. Leveraging on this large dataset, we explore a few sketch-specific traits that were otherwise under-studied in prior literature. Instead of following the conventional sketch recognition task, we introduce the novel problem of sketch hashing retrieval which is not only more challenging, but also offers a better testbed for large-scale sketch analysis, since: (i) more fine-grained sketch feature learning is required to accommodate the large variations in style and abstraction, and (ii) a compact binary code needs to be learned at the same time to enable efficient retrieval. Key to our network design is the embedding of unique characteristics of human sketch, where (i) a two-branch CNN-RNN architecture is adapted to explore the temporal ordering of strokes, and (ii) a novel hashing loss is specifically designed to accommodate both the temporal and abstract traits of sketches. By working with a 3.8M sketch dataset, we show that state-of-the-art hashing models specifically engineered for static images fail to perform well on temporal sketch data. Our network on the other hand not only offers the best retrieval performance on various code sizes, but also yields the best generalization performance under a zero-shot setting and when re-purposed for sketch recognition. Such superior performances effectively demonstrate the benefit of our sketch-specific design.Comment: Accepted by CVPR201

Applications of Single-Cell Omics in Tumor Immunology

The tumor microenvironment (TME) is an ecosystem that contains various cell types, including cancer cells, immune cells, stromal cells, and many others. In the TME, cancer cells aggressively proliferate, evolve, transmigrate to the circulation system and other organs, and frequently communicate with adjacent immune cells to suppress local tumor immunity. It is essential to delineate this ecosystem’s complex cellular compositions and their dynamic intercellular interactions to understand cancer biology and tumor immunology and to benefit tumor immunotherapy. But technically, this is extremely challenging due to the high complexities of the TME. The rapid developments of single-cell techniques provide us powerful means to systemically profile the multiple omics status of the TME at a single-cell resolution, shedding light on the pathogenic mechanisms of cancers and dysfunctions of tumor immunity in an unprecedently resolution. Furthermore, more advanced techniques have been developed to simultaneously characterize multi-omics and even spatial information at the single-cell level, helping us reveal the phenotypes and functionalities of disease-specific cell populations more comprehensively. Meanwhile, the connections between single-cell data and clinical characteristics are also intensively interrogated to achieve better clinical diagnosis and prognosis. In this review, we summarize recent progress in single-cell techniques, discuss their technical advantages, limitations, and applications, particularly in tumor biology and immunology, aiming to promote the research of cancer pathogenesis, clinically relevant cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and immunotherapy design with the help of single-cell techniques

Diverse Effects of the NTCP p.Ser267Phe Variant on Disease Progression During Chronic HBV Infection and on HBV preS1 Variability

The sodium taurocholate co-transporting polypeptide (NTCP) acts as a cellular receptor for the hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection on host hepatocytes. We aim to investigate how the NTCP p.Ser267Phe variant affects HBV-related disease progression and analyze viral genomic variability under a host genetic background carrying the p.Ser267Phe variant. A total of 3187 chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients were enrolled and genotyped for the p.Ser267Phe variant. The variant's association with disease progression was evaluated by logistic regression analysis. We also enrolled 83 treatment-naive CHB patients to analyze the variability of the HBV preS1 region. The frequency of the NTCP p.Ser267Phe variant was significantly lower in patients diagnosed with acute-on-chronic liver failure [OR (95% CI) = 0.33 (0.18–0.58), P = 1.34 × 10−4], cirrhosis [OR (95% CI) = 0.47 (0.31–0.72), P = 4.04 × 10−4], and hepatocellular carcinoma [OR (95% CI) = 0.54 (0.34–0.86), P = 9.83 × 10−3] as compared with CHB controls under the additive model after adjustment. Furthermore, the percentage of amino acid mutations in HBV preS1 region was significantly higher in the NTCP p.Ser267Phe heterozygote group than in the NTCP wild type homozygote group (P < 0.05). We herein demonstrate that the NTCP p.Ser267Phe variant is a protective factor reducing CHB patient risk for liver failure, cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma. A host genetic background carrying NTCP p.Ser267Phe exerts selective pressure on the virus, leading to more variability