525 research outputs found
Radical scavenging activity of crude polysaccharides from Camellia sinensis
A preparation of crude polysaccharides (TPS) was isolated from Camellia sinensis by precipitation and ultrafiltration. TPS1, TPS2, and TPS3 had molecular weights of 240, 21.4, and 2.46 kDa, respectively. The radical scavenging activities of TPS were evaluated by DPPH free radical, hydroxyl radical and superoxide radical scavenging. These results revealed that TPS exhibited strong radical scavenging activity in a concentration-dependent manner. TPS3 with lowest molecular weight showed a higher radical scavenging activity
Affinity Attention Graph Neural Network for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is receiving great attention due to
its low human annotation cost. In this paper, we aim to tackle bounding box
supervised semantic segmentation, i.e., training accurate semantic segmentation
models using bounding box annotations as supervision. To this end, we propose
Affinity Attention Graph Neural Network (GNN). Following previous
practices, we first generate pseudo semantic-aware seeds, which are then formed
into semantic graphs based on our newly proposed affinity Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN). Then the built graphs are input to our GNN, in which an
affinity attention layer is designed to acquire the short- and long- distance
information from soft graph edges to accurately propagate semantic labels from
the confident seeds to the unlabeled pixels. However, to guarantee the
precision of the seeds, we only adopt a limited number of confident pixel seed
labels for GNN, which may lead to insufficient supervision for training.
To alleviate this issue, we further introduce a new loss function and a
consistency-checking mechanism to leverage the bounding box constraint, so that
more reliable guidance can be included for the model optimization. Experiments
show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performances on Pascal VOC
2012 datasets (val: 76.5\%, test: 75.2\%). More importantly, our approach can
be readily applied to bounding box supervised instance segmentation task or
other weakly supervised semantic segmentation tasks, with state-of-the-art or
comparable performance among almot all weakly supervised tasks on PASCAL VOC or
COCO dataset. Our source code will be available at
https://github.com/zbf1991/A2GNN.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence (TAPMI 2021
Emerging Exotic Fruits: New Functional Foods in the European Market
The consumption of exotic fruits is rapidly increasing in European countries. Some of these products have attracted much
interest due to their alleged properties of preventing malnutrition, over-nutrition, and disease, maintaining a healthy body.
Scientific studies on these fruits are multiplying, including chemical characterizations and biological investigations on in vitro
and in vivo experimental models. This review concerns four edible fruits: Hylocereus undatus (dragon fruit), Annona cherimola
(cherimoya), Citrus australasica (finger lime), and Averrhoa carambola (carambola or star fruit). By screening biomedical
databases, viz. Scopus, WOS, and PubMed, a total of 131 papers have been selected. Data reveals a wide series of biological
effects that confirm traditional medicinal uses or suggest new therapeutic applications. Most studies concern problems related
to nutrition, such as body redox balance, metabolic syndrome, and hepatoprotective effects, but other properties have been
highlighted, including anticancer, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotective effects, as well as cardiovascular and
skin protection. Pharmacological investigations have also been focused on specific compounds, assuming a potential role in drug
discovery. In summary, food products, byproducts, and single compounds derived from these plants could be exploited in the
prevention of disease or for specific treatments of health problems
Fermionic steering is not nonlocal in the background of dilaton black hole
We study the redistribution of the fermionic steering and the relation among
fermionic Bell nonlocality, steering, and entanglement in the background of the
Garfinkle-Horowitz-Strominger dilaton black hole. We analyze the meaning of the
fermionic steering in terms of the Bell inequality in curved spacetime. We find
that the fermionic steering, which is previously found to survive in the
extreme dilaton black hole, cannot be considered to be nonlocal. We also find
that the dilaton gravity can redistribute the fermionic steering, but cannot
redistribute Bell nonlocality, which means that the physically inaccessible
steering is also not nonlocal. Unlike the inaccessible entanglement, the
inaccessible steering may increase non-monotonically with the dilaton.
Furthermore, we obtain some monogamy relations between the fermionic steering
and entanglement in dilaton spacetime. In addition, we show the difference
between the fermionic and bosonic steering in curved spacetime.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure
New highlights of resveratrol: a review of properties against ocular diseases
Eye diseases are currently a major public health concern due to the growing number of cases resulting from both an aging of populations and exogenous factors linked to our lifestyles. Thus, many treatments including surgical pharmacological approaches have emerged, and special attention has been paid to prevention, where diet plays a preponderant role. Recently, potential antioxidants such as resveratrol have received much attention as potential tools against various ocular diseases. In this review, we focus on the mechanisms of resveratrol against ocular diseases, in particular age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataract, diabetic retinopathy, and vitreoretinopathy. We analyze, in relation to the different steps of each disease, the resveratrol properties at multiple levels, such as cellular and molecular signaling as well as physiological effects. We show and discuss the relationship to reactive oxygen species, the regulation of inflammatory process, and how resveratrol can prevent ocular diseases through a potential epigenetic action by the activation of sirtuin-1. Lastly, various new forms of resveratrol delivery are emerging at the same time as some clinical trials are raising more questions about the future of resveratrol as a potential tool for prevention or in therapeutic strategies against ocular diseases. More preclinical studies are required to provide further insights into RSV’s potential adjuvant activity.Agence Nationale de la Recherche, France | Ref. ANR-11-LABX-002
miRNAs as Regulators of Antidiabetic Effects of Fucoidans
open access articleDiabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease with a high mortality rate worldwide. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), and other small noncoding RNAs, serve as endogenous gene regulators through binding to specific sequences in RNA and modifying gene expression toward up- or down-regulation. miRNAs have become compelling therapeutic targets and play crucial roles in regulating the process of insulin resistance. Fucoidan has shown potential function as an a-amylase inhibitor, which may be beneficial in the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus. In recent years, many studies on fucoidan focused on the decrease in blood glucose levels caused by ingesting low-glucose food or glucose-lowering components. However, the importance of miRNAs as regulators of antidiabetic effects was rarely recognized. Hence, this review emphasizes the antidiabetic mechanisms of fucoidan through regulation of miRNAs. Fucoidan exerts a vital antidiabetic effect by regulation of miRNA expression and thus provides a novel biological target for future research
Revalorization of food losses and food co-products
According to the report on the World State of Food and Agriculture 2019, progress in the fight against food loss and waste, and the reduction of food loss, help to improve the sustainability of the environment, while the reduction of waste benefits food security. According to the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, global food waste represents a third of total food produced for consumption, ∼1.6 billion tons per year, which represents a cost of e 730 million/year. The food groups that stand out for their highest percentages of losses are fruits and vegetables, and roots and tubers, both with a 45% loss. It is followed by fish and marine products with 35%, and cereals with 30%. Both food losses and its co-products are very rich sources of nutrients and other bioactive substances that, once extracted, represent very valuable ingredients for the elaboration of functional and nutraceutical foods (among other products). The extraction and isolation of these compounds allow for their use in other sectors (yogurts and dairy products, juices and beverages, energy bars, etc.), as ingredients that favor certain functions when ingesting them.Fil: Simal Gandara, Jesus. Universidad de Vigo; EspañaFil: Agarwal, Tripti. National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences; IndiaFil: Esteki, Mahnaz. University of Zanjan; IránFil: Gomez Zavaglia, Andrea. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Criotecnología de Alimentos; ArgentinaFil: Xiao, Jianbo. Universidad de Vigo; Españ
Characterization and Localization of Cyclin B3 Transcript in Both Oocyte and Spermatocyte of the Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus Mykiss)
B-type cyclins are regulatory subunits with distinct roles in the cell cycle. To date, at least three subtypes of B-type cyclins (B1, B2, and B3) have been identified in vertebrates. Previously, we reported the characterization and expression profiles of cyclin B1 and B2 during gametogenesis in the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). In this paper, we isolated another subtype of cyclin B, cyclin B3 (CB3), from a cDNA library of the rainbow trout oocyte. The full-length CB3 cDNA (2,093 bp) has an open reading frame (1,248 bp) that encodes a protein of 416 amino acid residues. The CB3 transcript was widely distributed in all the examined tissues, namely, eye, gill, spleen, brain, heart, kidney, stomach, skin, muscle, and, especially, gonad. Northern blot analysis indicated only one form of the CB3 transcript in the testis and ovary. In situ hybridization revealed that, in contrast to cyclin B1 and B2 transcripts, CB3 transcripts were localized in the oocytes, spermatocytes, and spermatogonia. These findings strongly suggest that CB3 plays a role not only as a mitotic cyclin in spermatogonial proliferation during early spermatogenesis but also during meiotic maturation of the spermatocyte and oocyte in the rainbow trout
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