Antitumor effect and mechanism of action of polysaccharides extracted from Polygonum perfoliatum L whole plant in human lung carcinoma A549 cell line

Purpose: To optimize the extraction conditions of polysaccharides from Polygonum perfoliatum L. (PSDP) and to evaluate their anti-tumor activities on A549 cell line.Methods: Extraction of PSDP was optimized using Box-Behnken design (BBD). Three factors of response surface methodology (RSM) including extraction time, ratio of water to raw material and number of extractions were employed to optimize the yield of PSDP. The cytotoxic effect of PSDP on human lung carcinoma A549 cell line was evaluated in vivo, while its effects on expressions of caspase- 3, caspase-9, Bcl-2 and Bax were determined by western blot assay.Result: BBD was significant and applicable to PSDP extraction. Based on the contour plots, response surface plots and variance analysis, it predicted that the optimum conditions for PSDP extraction were: 1.58 h (extraction time); 30.18 mL/g (ratio of water to raw material); and 2.02 (number of extractions). PSDP had significant inhibitory effect on the growth of A549 cells in a concentration- and timedependent manner (p < 0.05). After treatment with PSDP, caspase-3, caspase-9 and Bax were significantly up-regulated (p < 0.05), whereas Bcl-2 was down-regulated, all concentration-dependently.Conclusion: RSM analysis is an appropriate method to optimize PSDP extraction. The results also indicate that PSDP has significant anti-tumor effect against A549 cells, most likely via inducing mitochondria-mediated apoptosis.Keywords: Polygonum perfoliatum, Polysaccharides, Anti-tumor effect, Human lung carcinoma, Mitochondria-mediated apoptosi

Effects of behavioral response and vaccination policy on epidemic spreading - an approach based on evolutionary-game dynamics

date of Acceptance: 23/06/2014 This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11331009, 11135001, 11105025). Y.-C.L. was supported by AFOSR under Grant No. FA9550-10-1-0083.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Entanglement criterion via general symmetric informationally complete measurements

We study the quantum separability problem by using general symmetric informationally complete measurements and present a separability criterion for arbitrary dimensional bipartite systems. We show by detailed examples that our criterion is more powerful than the existing ones in entanglement detection.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Online Statistical Inference for Stochastic Optimization via Kiefer-Wolfowitz Methods

This paper investigates the problem of online statistical inference of model parameters in stochastic optimization problems via the Kiefer-Wolfowitz algorithm with random search directions. We first present the asymptotic distribution for the Polyak-Ruppert-averaging type Kiefer-Wolfowitz (AKW) estimators, whose asymptotic covariance matrices depend on the function-value query complexity and the distribution of search directions. The distributional result reflects the trade-off between statistical efficiency and function query complexity. We further analyze the choices of random search directions to minimize the asymptotic covariance matrix, and conclude that the optimal search direction depends on the optimality criteria with respect to different summary statistics of the Fisher information matrix. Based on the asymptotic distribution result, we conduct online statistical inference by providing two construction procedures of valid confidence intervals. We provide numerical experiments verifying our theoretical results with the practical effectiveness of the procedures