Producing Biolipids from Lignocellulose: Cultivation of Lipid-Accumulating Bacteria and Bacteriophage-based Lipid Extraction

Biodiesel is a promising, clean, lipid-based biofuel that can be made from triacylglycerols (TAGs). However, TAG feedstocks and extraction of TAGs from the feedstocks are costly, making the price of biodiesel less competitive than petroleum-based diesel. To address these two key challenges, this study exploits potential strategies to reduce the cost of the TAGs, use lignocellulosic biomass as feedstock and develop a novel bioextraction method for TAG extraction. Lignocellulosic biomass (plant dry matter) is the most abundantly raw material on the Earth. To make this cheap and plentiful biomass accessible to the lipid-producing bacteria, pretreatment processes are necessary. However, the pretreatment generates a number of inhibitory compounds, which suppress microbial growth. The first part of this study investigates the ability of the well-known TAG-accumulating strain, Rhodococcus opacus PD630, to tolerate the inhibition of these inhibitory compounds, and use lignocellulosic biomass for TAG production. While solvent extraction is a common method for extracting lipid from oil resources, this method is relatively energy-intensive, it has the potential to generate a secondary waste stream, and it is costly. Bacteriophages, or phages, infect bacteria, replicate within the bacterial cell, and finally, cause cell lysis. Bacteriophages could potentially be used as an effective means to lyse cells for releasing intracellular lipid from TAG-accumulating Rhodococcus bacteria. Three Rhodococcus opacus phages, Smushu2, Smushu4 and Toil, were isolated and characterized in this study. Smushu2, a virulent phage, is isolated from soil against Rhodococcus opacus strain M213. Smushu4, a temperate phage originally residing within the genome of M213, can be propagated on Rhodococcus opacus strain DSM43205. A high spontaneous induction rate of the lysogen, DSM43205 (Smushu4) (1 PFU/cell), was observed. Phage Toil was isolated from soil, virulent infecting PD631, a domesticated derivative strain of PD630. Phage Toil was able to infect PD631 after lipid accumulation if nitrogen was added to promote the cell growth. Intracellular content, such as fluorescence protein, mCherry, can be released by phage infection of PD631. Partial TAGs (about 30%) were also recovered from the supernatant of phage Toil infected PD631. Further, Phage N4 lytic cassette was cloned into Rhodococcus opacus strain PD631 through E.coli-Rhodococcus shuttle vector. However, phage lysis proteins were not expressed at a sufficient level and resulted in massive PD631 cell lysis. External application of E.coli produced Lysis protein partially lysed PD631 cells, when NaCl or Alpha-L- Arabinofuranosidase was added. However, there were no additional TAGs released from PD631 with these treatments. Overall, results of this study suggest TAGs can be produced from lignocellulose by lipid-producing bacteria, potentially reducing the cost of feedstocks, and bacteriophage infection can release lipids from bacteria, and could promisingly be used for novel bioextraction to reduce or prevent the use of organic solvents

From Control to Competition: Trust Institution in E-Business

Global economy has formed a huge challenge to the trust of traditional business. It’s a important problem of all enterprise how to build a effective trust institution in the new economy. The rapid development of E-business is bringing a turning point of trust institution. In traditional trust institution, trust means that principal controls the agent in fact. The evolution of trust institution was closely related to the development of technology because of control. This paper presents, with the innovation of technology and system, precondition of trust through the method of controlling has already been out of the existence. The development of E-business will have influence on the evolution of trust institution, Advantages of E-business can promote monitor from man-made to market-made, from control to competition. It will build an effectual trust institution

Topology-Aware Latent Diffusion for 3D Shape Generation

We introduce a new generative model that combines latent diffusion with persistent homology to create 3D shapes with high diversity, with a special emphasis on their topological characteristics. Our method involves representing 3D shapes as implicit fields, then employing persistent homology to extract topological features, including Betti numbers and persistence diagrams. The shape generation process consists of two steps. Initially, we employ a transformer-based autoencoding module to embed the implicit representation of each 3D shape into a set of latent vectors. Subsequently, we navigate through the learned latent space via a diffusion model. By strategically incorporating topological features into the diffusion process, our generative module is able to produce a richer variety of 3D shapes with different topological structures. Furthermore, our framework is flexible, supporting generation tasks constrained by a variety of inputs, including sparse and partial point clouds, as well as sketches. By modifying the persistence diagrams, we can alter the topology of the shapes generated from these input modalities.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

Network pharmacology-based exploration identified the antiviral efficacy of Quercetin isolated from mulberry leaves against enterovirus 71 via the NF-κB signaling pathway

Introduction: Mulberry leaf (ML) is known for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, historically documented in “Shen Nong’s Materia Medica”. This study aimed to investigate the effects of ML on enterovirus 71 (EV71) using network pharmacology, molecular docking, and in vitro experiments.Methods: We successfully pinpointed shared targets between mulberry leaves (ML) and the EV71 virus by leveraging online databases. Our investigation delved into the interaction among these identified targets, leading to the identification of pivotal components within ML that possess potent anti-EV71 properties. The ability of these components to bind to the targets was verified by molecular docking. Moreover, bioinformatics predictions were used to identify the signaling pathways involved. Finally, the mechanism behind its anti-EV71 action was confirmed through in vitro experiments.Results: Our investigation uncovered 25 active components in ML that targeted 231 specific genes. Of these genes, 29 correlated with the targets of EV71. Quercetin, a major ingredient in ML, was associated with 25 of these genes. According to the molecular docking results, Quercetin has a high binding affinity to the targets of ML and EV71. According to the KEGG pathway analysis, the antiviral effect of Quercetin against EV71 was found to be closely related to the NF-κB signaling pathway. The results of immunofluorescence and Western blotting showed that Quercetin significantly reduced the expression levels of VP1, TNF-α, and IL-1β in EV71-infected human rhabdomyosarcoma cells. The phosphorylation level of NF-κB p65 was reduced, and the activation of NF-κB signaling pathway was suppressed by Quercetin. Furthermore, our results showed that Quercetin downregulated the expression of JNK, ERK, and p38 and their phosphorylation levels due to EV71 infection.Conclusion: With these findings in mind, we can conclude that inhibiting the NF-κB signaling pathway is a critical mechanism through which Quercetin exerts its anti-EV71 effectiveness

RTA-408 Protects Kidney from Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury in Mice via Activating Nrf2 and Downstream GSH Biosynthesis Gene

Acute kidney injury (AKI) induced by ischemia-reperfusion is a critical conundrum in many clinical settings. Here, this study aimed to determine whether and how RTA-408, a novel oleanane triterpenoid, could confer protection against renal ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) in male mice. Mice treated with RTA-408 undergoing unilateral ischemia followed by contralateral nephrectomy had improved renal function and histological outcome, as well as decreased apoptosis, ROS production, and oxidative injury marker compared with vehicle-treated mice. Also, we had found that RTA-408 could strengthen the total antioxidant capacity by increasing Nrf2 nuclear translocation and subsequently increased Nrf2 downstream GSH-related antioxidant gene expression and activity. In vitro study demonstrated that GSH biosynthesis enzyme GCLc could be an important target of RTA-408. Furthermore, Nrf2-deficient mice treated with RTA-408 had no significant improvement in renal function, histology, ROS production, and GSH-related gene expression. Thus, by upregulating Nrf2 and its downstream antioxidant genes, RTA-408 presents a novel and potential approach to renal IRI prevention and therapy

Optic Disc Segmentation Using Attention-Based U-Net and the Improved Cross-Entropy Convolutional Neural Network

Medical image segmentation is an important part of medical image analysis. With the rapid development of convolutional neural networks in image processing, deep learning methods have achieved great success in the field of medical image processing. Deep learning is also used in the field of auxiliary diagnosis of glaucoma, and the effective segmentation of the optic disc area plays an important assistant role in the diagnosis of doctors in the clinical diagnosis of glaucoma. Previously, many U-Net-based optic disc segmentation methods have been proposed. However, the channel dependence of different levels of features is ignored. The performance of fundus image segmentation in small areas is not satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a new aggregation channel attention network to make full use of the influence of context information on semantic segmentation. Different from the existing attention mechanism, we exploit channel dependencies and integrate information of different scales into the attention mechanism. At the same time, we improved the basic classification framework based on cross entropy, combined the dice coefficient and cross entropy, and balanced the contribution of dice coefficients and cross entropy loss to the segmentation task, which enhanced the performance of the network in small area segmentation. The network retains more image features, restores the significant features more accurately, and further improves the segmentation performance of medical images. We apply it to the fundus optic disc segmentation task. We demonstrate the segmentation performance of the model on the Messidor dataset and the RIM-ONE dataset, and evaluate the proposed architecture. Experimental results show that our network architecture improves the prediction performance of the base architectures under different datasets while maintaining the computational efficiency. The results render that the proposed technologies improve the segmentation with 0.0469 overlapping error on Messidor

Research advances in the treatment of lung diseases based on mesenchymal stem cell exosomes

Exosomes secreted by mesenchymal stem cell(MSC-EXOs)carry lipids,proteins,nucleic acids and other signaling substances, which play an important role in intercellular communication, immune regulation and vascular regeneration. MSC-EXOs in pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis and other lung diseases can improve the function of the lung tissue and treat lung diseases by regulating different signaling pathways, reducing cell inflammatory reaction, regulating immune function, improving the function of mitochondria, promoting angiogenesis, reducing pulmonary vascular remodeling and etc.,which provides new ideas for the treatment of refractory lung diseases in the future