Effect of Hydrolysis on Tannin and Carotenoid Contents, and Antioxidant Activity of Pouteria campechiana

The medicinal properties of Pouteria campechiana fruit in Vietnam currently have not been studied much. This study was conducted to evaluate hydrolysis's effect on the carotenoid, tannin, and antioxidant activity through the correlation between IC50 and TPC values of Pouteria campechiana extract. This study examined hydrolysis conditions, such as enzyme type, enzyme concentration, temperature, and hydrolysis time. Experimental results showed that at pectinase enzyme concentration of 0.6 wt%, cellulase enzyme concentration of 0.6 wt%, at hydrolysis temperature of 600C, and 65 minutes for hydrolysis, the study found carotenoid of 115.14±4.14 (µg/g) and tannin of 45.88±2.37 (mgTAE/g)in the extract. IC50 value (7.82±0.21 mg/mL) and TPC content were highly correlated (R2=0.98). This study's results contributed to the provision of valuable scientific data on Pouteria campechiana fruit, especially for the food industr

LG-Hand: Advancing 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Locally and Globally Kinematic Knowledge

3D hand pose estimation from RGB images suffers from the difficulty of obtaining the depth information. Therefore, a great deal of attention has been spent on estimating 3D hand pose from 2D hand joints. In this paper, we leverage the advantage of spatial-temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and propose LG-Hand, a powerful method for 3D hand pose estimation. Our method incorporates both spatial and temporal dependencies into a single process. We argue that kinematic information plays an important role, contributing to the performance of 3D hand pose estimation. We thereby introduce two new objective functions, Angle and Direction loss, to take the hand structure into account. While Angle loss covers locally kinematic information, Direction loss handles globally kinematic one. Our LG-Hand achieves promising results on the First-Person Hand Action Benchmark (FPHAB) dataset. We also perform an ablation study to show the efficacy of the two proposed objective functions

Clinical and virological features of acute HBV-related hepatitis in southern Vietnam

Background: Despite the availability of effective vaccines, hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is still frequent worldwide, and accounts for significant morbidity and mortality. However, data of acute HBeAg negative hepatitis still remain limited. Aims and Methods: To understand clinical pictures of acute HBV hepatitis and its natural evolution, a prospective study was conducted in adult patients. Results: Ninety patients were enrolled between March 2004 and April 2005 at Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh city. The prevalence of HBeAg negative was 53%. No significant difference was found in clinical characteristics and laboratory findings between HBeAg positive and negative patients. HBV-DNA was detected in 75% and 88% HBe negative and positive patients, respectively, where the frequency of ALT below 400 U/L was significantly higher in HBeAg negative cases (p = 0.01). Six month follow-up was available in 47 patients. HBsAg positivity was found in 16% of HBeAg negative subjects but only in 4.5% of HBeAg positive cases. Thirty two patients had neither HBsAg nor anti-HBs. Conclusions: The clinical and laboratory feature and the ou

Optimization of culture conditions of Streptomyces antibioticus strain 1083 to improve the antimicrobial activity against Aeromonas hydrophila

Fish is a healthy, high protein and low fat food that encourages the health and growth of people, especially children. However, in fact fish is very sensitive to many diseases which affects the productivity and quality of fish. Therefore, identifying the cause of the diseases and finding preventive measures become an urgent task today. In the previous study, we isolated Streptomyces antibioticus strain 1083 that has the ability to antagonize Aeromonas hydrophila - a pathogenic bacterium in fish. Based on the obtained results, we continue to perform this study to determine optimal conditions for the culture of S. antibioticus strain 1083 in order to produce antimicrobial compounds against A. hydrophila. The production of antagonists by the strain 1083 was optimized by controlling the condition of different inoculations such as media, pH, temperature and incubation period. The results indicated that International Streptomyces Project 2 (ISP2) was the best medium for S. antibioticus strain 1083 to produce the highest antimicrobial activity against A. hydrophila with 32 mm in diameter of inhibited zone. The actinomycete strain 1083 could express the maximum antimicrobial activity when they were incubated in shaker incubator (200rpm) at 40oC with pH8 in 8 days. The ability of the actinomycete strain in antagonism against A. hydrophila was evaluated by adding different culture medium volume of S. antibioticus strain 1083. With adding 10% cultured solution volume of S. antibioticus strain 1083 into the culture medium of A. hydrophila, after 1 day of inoculation the number of pathogenic bacteria cells were completely eliminated

The impact of corporate social responsibility and risk management on financial performance: The case of Vietnamese textile firm

The objective of this study is to assess the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and risk management (RM) on financial performance (FP), and evaluate the moderate role of firm size in the relationship between risk management and financial performance. The study was conducted on a re-search sample of 389 Vietnamese textile firms. The results show that corporate social responsibility (CSR) was an optimal measure to minimize risks and improves financial performance. The good CSR policy reduces corporate risk and improves financial performance. Other way, the bad CSR policy increases corporate risk and impacts negatively on financial performance. In addition, the moderate role of firm size in the relationship between risk management and financial performance is statistically significant

All-dielectric Metamaterial for Electromagnetically-induced Transparency in Optical Region

Metamaterial (MM) is emerging as a promising approach to manipulate electromagnetic waves, spanning from radio frequency to the optical region. In this paper, we employ an effect called electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) in all-dielectric MM structures to create a narrow transparent window in opaque broadband of the optical region (580-670 nm). Using dielectric materials instead of metals can mitigate the large non-radiative ohmic loss on the metal surface. The unit-cell of MM consists of Silicon (Si) bars on Silicon dioxide (SiO$_{2}$) substrate, in which two bars are directed horizontally and one bar is directed vertically. By changing the relative position and dimension of the Si bars, the EIT effect could be achieved. The optical properties of the proposed MM are investigated numerically using the finite difference method with commercial software Computer Simulation Technology (CST). Then, characteristic parameters of MM exhibiting EIT effect (EIT-MM), including Q-factor, group delay, are calculated to evaluate the applicability of EIT-MM to sensing and light confinement

Anatomical Characteristics and Variants of Prostatic Artery in Patients of Benign Hyperplasia Prostate by Digital Subtraction Angiography

AIM: This work is aimed to describe anatomical features and variants of the prostatic artery (PA) using digital subtraction angiography (DSA). METHODS: This is a descriptive statistic study. We reviewed the DSA of 348 patients, who had a PA embolisation to reduce the benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) symptoms at Radiology Department of Bach Mai Hospital from Oct – 2014 to Oct – 2018. RESULTS: PA was found at 660 pelvic halves, of which 30 pelvic halves (4.5%) had two PAs, 630 pelvic halves had one PA. In terms of the origin of PA, in total 690 PAs, the percentage of type 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 was successively 33.9%, 13.9%, 18.3%, 23.9% and 10.4%, respectively. Atherosclerosis of PA observed in 20.9%. The ‘corkscrew’ pattern was found in 30.4%. The average diameter of PA was 1.5 ± 0.34mm. The anastomosis of PA with surrounding arteries was common. PA may supply rectum (6.1%), seminal vesical (9.6%), bladder (5.2%), contralateral prostatic parenchyma (13.0%), surrounding soft-tissues (3.5%). CONCLUSION: The common trunk with SVA superior vesical artery was the most common origin of PA. Anastomoses of PA with surrounding tissues were complex

Primary and secondary somatic embryogenesis in Jatropha curcas L. From leaf transverse thin cell layers

An efficient method for plant regeneration in Jatropha curcas L. via primary and secondary somatic embryogenesis culture from ex vitro leaves of 6-month-old plants was presented in this study. Leaves were cut into transverse thin cell layers (tTCLs) and cultured on MS medium supplemented with kinetin (KIN) at 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 mg/l in combination with indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) at 0.1, 0.5, and 1.0 mg/l or 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) at 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 mg/l . The highest embryogenic callus formation rate (89.3%) was obtained on medium supplemented with 1.0 mg/l KIN and 1.5 mg/l 2,4-D. The calli were selected for the study of primary somatic embryogenesis on MS medium containing 2,4-D (0.01, 0.03, 0.05, and 0.07 mg/l) or KIN (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 mg/l). The highest primary somatic embryos formation rate (76.67%) was achieved on MS medium supplemented with 1.0 mg/l KIN. The primary embryos were cultured on medium supplemented with KIN (0.1, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 mg/l) combined with 0.2 mg/l indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) or 0.05 mg/l 2,4-D. The combination of 1.5 mg/l KIN and 0.05 mg/l 2,4-D was suitable for secondary embryos formation. Embryos proliferated rapidly, and the highest number of secondary embryos (77.5 embryos) wasobtained from a single primary embryos inoculated. Results also showed that the addition of proline (0.75 g/l) or spermidine (0.15 mM) to the culture medium increased the number of secondary embryos considerably. The fully developed plantlets exhibiting healthy roots and shoots were obtained when somatic embryos were sub-cultured onto B5 medium containing 1.5 mg/l IBA