Opportunities and Challenges Faced by the Trade Cooperation of China and Africa

This paper is based on the new normal background that the early days macroeconomic stimulation lead to the waste of manufacturability and hasted to find a new trade market, So we use the RCA Index proposed by Balassa in 1965 to compute the RCA Index and RMA Index of the mainly ten products of the export and import trade between China and Africa, Then specifies the competitive industries and the disadvantage industries in two countries, furthermore affirms the high growth potential trading products among the China and Africa. At the end of the paper, several opportunities and challenges are proposed according to the empirical results

Selecting Genes by Test Statistics

Gene selection is an important issue in analyzing multiclass microarray data. Among many proposed selection methods, the traditional ANOVA F test statistic has been employed to identify informative genes for both class prediction (classification) and discovery problems. However, the F test statistic assumes an equal variance. This assumption may not be realistic for gene expression data. This paper explores other alternative test statistics which can handle heterogeneity of the variances. We study five such test statistics, which include Brown-Forsythe test statistic and Welch test statistic. Their performance is evaluated and compared with that of F statistic over different classification methods applied to publicly available microarray datasets

Global Attractors of the Extensible Plate Equations with Nonlinear Damping and Memory

We prove in this paper the existence of a global attractor for the plate equations of Kirchhoff type with nonlinear damping and memory using the contraction function method

Hypoacetylation, Hypomethylation, and Dephosphorylation of H2B Histones and Excessive Histone Deacetylase Activity in DU-145 Prostate Cancer Cells

BACKGROUND: Hypoacetylation on histone H3 of human prostate cancer cells has been described. Little is known about the modifications of other histones from prostate cancer cells. METHODS: Histones were isolated from the prostate cancer cell line DU-145 and the non-malignant prostatic cell line RC170N/h. Post-translational modifications of histone H2B were determined by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)/MS. RESULTS: The histone H2B of the prostate cancer cell line DU-145 was found to have hypoacetylation, hypomethylation, and dephosphorylation as compared to the non-malignant prostatic cell line RC170N/h. H2B regained acetylation on multiple lysine residues, phosphorylation on Thr19, and methylation on Lys23 and Lys43 in the DU-145 cells after sodium butyrate treatment. CONCLUSIONS: The histone H2B of DU-145 prostate cancer cells are hypoacetylated, hypomethylated, and dephosphorylated. Histone deacetylase inhibitor reversed this phenotype. Epigenetic agent may therefore be useful for prostate cancer therapy and worth further investigation

Inhibition of lactose crystallisation in the presence of galacto-oligosaccharide

peer-reviewedThe stabilization of lactose in the form of amorphous (i.e. non-crystalline form) is the basic requirement to maintain the quality of relevant food and pharmaceutical products. The physiochemical properties of amorphous lactose mixed with galacto-oligosaccharide (GOS) were investigated. Water sorption, glass transition temperature, and crystallisation behaviour of lactose in the present of GOS (1:1 w/w) were measured at various water activity (0.11–0.75 aw, 25 °C) and lactose mutarotation was also evaluated. All of them were compared with the physiochemical properties of trehalose-lactose (1:1 w/w). The addition of GOS to lactose increased the hygroscopicity of the mixture, as well as slightly increased the glass transition temperature compared to lactose alone. The critical water activity (at 0.68 aw) of lactose crystallisation was increased by the addition of GOS as compared to that of trehalose-lactose (1:1 w/w) (at 0.58 aw) or lactose alone (at 0.44 aw). The dramatical inhibition of lactose crystallisation with a lower crystallisation kinetic constant and the alternation of lactose crystal forms in the presence of GOS was observed as compared to the crystallisation behaviour of trehalose-lactose (1:1 w/w) and pure lactose at 0.68 and 0.75 aw, 25 °C. Without affecting its Tg, the significantly delayed crystallisation of lactose in GOS-lactose mixture (1:1 w/w) was more likely due to the change of lactose mutarotation. As comparing to trehalose that is an effective inhibitor, GOS has a stronger ability to prevent lactose from crystallisation in hydrous matrices

A novel method of rapid detection for heavy metal copper ion via a specific copper chelator bathocuproinedisulfonic acid disodium salt

The extensive usage and production of copper may lead to toxic effects in organisms due to its accumulation in the environment. Traditional methods for copper detection are time consuming and infeasible for field usage. It is necessary to discover a real-time, rapid and economical method for detecting copper to ensure human health and environmental safety. Here we developed a colorimetric paper strip method and optimized spectrum method for rapid detection of copper ion based on the specific copper chelator bathocuproinedisulfonic acid disodium salt (BCS). Both biological assays and chemical methods verified the specificity of BCS for copper. The optimized reaction conditions were 50 mM Tris–HCl pH 7.4, 200 μM BCS, 1 mM ascorbate and less than 50 μM copper. The detection limit of the copper paper strip test was 0.5 mg/L by direct visual observation and the detection time was less than 1 min. The detection results of grape, peach, apple, spinach and cabbage by the optimized spectrum method were 0.91 μg/g, 0.87 μg/g, 0.19 μg/g, 1.37 μg/g and 0.39 μg/g, respectively. The paper strip assays showed that the copper contents of grape, peach, apple, spinach and cabbage were 0.8 mg/L, 0.9 mg/L, 0.2 mg/L, 1.3 mg/L and 0.5 mg/L, respectively. These results correlated well with those determined by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). The visual detection limit of the paper strip based on Cu-BCS-AgNPs was 0.06 mg/L. Our study demonstrates the potential for on-site, rapid and cost-effective copper monitoring of foods and the environment

The Attenuation of Moutan Cortex on Oxidative Stress for Renal Injury in AGEs-Induced Mesangial Cell Dysfunction and Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetic Nephropathy Rats

Oxidative stress (OS) has been regarded as one of the major pathogeneses of diabetic nephropathy (DN) through damaging kidney which is associated with renal cells dysfunction. The aim of this study was to investigate whether Moutan Cortex (MC) could protect kidney function against oxidative stress in vitro or in vivo. The compounds in MC extract were analyzed by HPLC-ESI-MS. High-glucose-fat diet and STZ (30 mg kg−1) were used to induce DN rats model, while 200 μg mL−1 AGEs were for HBZY-1 mesangial cell damage. The treatment with MC could significantly increase the activity of SOD, glutathione peroxidase (GSH-PX), and catalase (CAT). However, lipid peroxidation malondialdehyde (MDA) was reduced markedly in vitro or in vivo. Furthermore, MC decreased markedly the levels of blood glucose, serum creatinine, and urine protein in DN rats. Immunohistochemical assay showed that MC downregulated significantly transforming growth factor beta 2 (TGF-β2) protein expression in renal tissue. Our data provided evidence to support this fact that MC attenuated OS in AGEs-induced mesangial cell dysfunction and also in high-glucose-fat diet and STZ-induced DN rats

pLMFPPred: a novel approach for accurate prediction of functional peptides integrating embedding from pre-trained protein language model and imbalanced learning

Functional peptides have the potential to treat a variety of diseases. Their good therapeutic efficacy and low toxicity make them ideal therapeutic agents. Artificial intelligence-based computational strategies can help quickly identify new functional peptides from collections of protein sequences and discover their different functions.Using protein language model-based embeddings (ESM-2), we developed a tool called pLMFPPred (Protein Language Model-based Functional Peptide Predictor) for predicting functional peptides and identifying toxic peptides. We also introduced SMOTE-TOMEK data synthesis sampling and Shapley value-based feature selection techniques to relieve data imbalance issues and reduce computational costs. On a validated independent test set, pLMFPPred achieved accuracy, Area under the curve - Receiver Operating Characteristics, and F1-Score values of 0.974, 0.99, and 0.974, respectively. Comparative experiments show that pLMFPPred outperforms current methods for predicting functional peptides.The experimental results suggest that the proposed method (pLMFPPred) can provide better performance in terms of Accuracy, Area under the curve - Receiver Operating Characteristics, and F1-Score than existing methods. pLMFPPred has achieved good performance in predicting functional peptides and represents a new computational method for predicting functional peptides.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures,under revie

Clinical Effects of Shenqi Fuzheng Injection in the Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for Local Advanced Breast Cancer and the Effects on T-lymphocyte Subsets

ObjectiveTo evaluate clinical effects of Shenqi Fuzheng Injection in the neoadjuvant chemotherapy for local advanced breast cancer and the effects on T-lymphocyte subsets.MethodsDuring the period from 2000 to 2005, 126 patients with local advanced breast cancer were treated with the neoadjuvant chemotherapy. They were randomly divided into the following two groups: a control group of 61 cases treated by chemotherapy alone and a study group of 65 cases treated by chemotherapy plus Shenqi Fuzheng Injection. All the cases of both groups were given the CEF (CTX 500 mg/m2, d1, 8; EPI 40 mg/m2, d1, 8; and 5-Fu 500 mg/m2, d1,8) regimen. The clinical effects, the effects on T-lymphocyte subgroup and NK cells, and the toxic side effects were observed.ResultsAll the patients completed two cycles of the chemotherapy, and the efficacy and the toxic side effects were evaluated. For the primary tumor in the breast, the total effective rate was 69.2% (45/65) in the study group and 49.2% (30/61) in the control group with a statistically significant difference in the intergroup comparison (χ 2=5.251, P=0.022, < 0.05). There was no progression of the disease in both the groups, and there were no grade IV toxic side effects in the two groups. The major toxic responses were myelosuppression and gastrointestinal reaction, which were milder in the study group than the control group, and with a shorter recovery course in the former than the latter. Besides, an obvious rise of the T-lymphocyte subgroup and NK cells was found in the study group after the neoadjuvant chemotherapy, with a very significant difference from the controls (P < 0.01).ConclusionShenqi Fuzheng Injection can improve and regulate immune function of the patients with local advanced breast cancer given the neoadjuvant chemotherapy, and therefore it can enhance the curative effect and reduce the side effect as well