Metabolic fingerprinting of Angelica sinensis during growth using UPLC-TOFMS and chemometrics data analysis

BACKGROUND: The radix of Angelica sinensis is widely used as a medicinal herbal and metabolomics research of this plant during growth is necessary. RESULTS: Principal component analysis of the UPLC-QTOFMS data showed that these 27 samples could be separated into 4 different groups. The chemical markers accounting for these separations were identified from the PCA loadings plot. These markers were further verified by accurate mass tandem mass and retention times of available reference standards. The study has shown that accumulation of secondary metabolites of Angelica sinensis is closely related to the growth periods. CONCLUSIONS: The UPLC-QTOFMS based metabolomics approach has great potential for analysis of the alterations of secondary metabolites of Angelica sinensis during growth

Safe RLHF: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

With the development of large language models (LLMs), striking a balance between the performance and safety of AI systems has never been more critical. However, the inherent tension between the objectives of helpfulness and harmlessness presents a significant challenge during LLM training. To address this issue, we propose Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (Safe RLHF), a novel algorithm for human value alignment. Safe RLHF explicitly decouples human preferences regarding helpfulness and harmlessness, effectively avoiding the crowdworkers' confusion about the tension and allowing us to train separate reward and cost models. We formalize the safety concern of LLMs as an optimization task of maximizing the reward function while satisfying specified cost constraints. Leveraging the Lagrangian method to solve this constrained problem, Safe RLHF dynamically adjusts the balance between the two objectives during fine-tuning. Through a three-round fine-tuning using Safe RLHF, we demonstrate a superior ability to mitigate harmful responses while enhancing model performance compared to existing value-aligned algorithms. Experimentally, we fine-tuned the Alpaca-7B using Safe RLHF and aligned it with collected human preferences, significantly improving its helpfulness and harmlessness according to human evaluations

A bibliometric analysis of research progress on pharmacovigilance and cancer from 2002 to 2021

The complexity of cancer itself and treatment makes pharmacovigilance critical in oncology. Despite rapid progress on pharmacovigilance and cancer research in the past two decades, there has been no bibliometric analysis in this field. Therefore, based on the Web of Science database, we used CiteSpace, VOS-viewer and R-bibliometrix to analyze and visualize publications, and described the development trend and research hot spots in this field. 502 publications were included. The development of pharmacovigilance and cancer research has continued to grow. The USA has the largest number of publications and citations, followed by France and UK. Vanderbilt University and Sorbonne University are the institutions that contribute the most papers, and 5 of the top 10 high-yield institutions are from France. Salem JE and Lebrun-Vignes B of Sorbonne University have published the most papers, and they have a strong cooperative relationship. Salem JE has the highest H index. Drug Safety has the largest number of publications in the field of pharmacovigilance and cancer, with a high impact factor (IF). In recent years, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have been identified as a hot topic and will continue to be maintained. This paper can help researchers get familiar with the current situation and trend of pharmacovigilance and cancer research, and provide valuable reference for the selection of future research directions

Plasma-photocatalytic conversion of CO2 at low temperatures: Understanding the synergistic effect of plasma-catalysis

A coaxial dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor has been developed for plasma-catalytic conversion of pure CO2 into CO and O2 at low temperatures (<150°C) and atmospheric pressure. The effect of specific energy density (SED) on the performance of the plasma process has been investigated. In the absence of a catalyst in the plasma, the maximum conversion of CO2 reaches 21.7% at a SED of 80kJ/L. The combination of plasma with BaTiO3 and TiO2 photocatalysts in the CO2 DBD slightly increases the gas temperature of the plasma by 6-11°C compared to the CO2 discharge in the absence of a catalyst at a SED of 28kJ/L. The synergistic effect from the combination of plasma with photocatalysts (BaTiO3 and TiO2) at low temperatures contributes to a significant enhancement of both CO2 conversion and energy efficiency by up to 250%. The UV intensity generated by the CO2 discharge is significantly lower than that emitted from UV lamps that are used to activate photocatalysts in conventional photocatalytic reactions, which suggests that the UV emissions generated by the CO2 DBD only play a very minor role in the activation of the BaTiO3 and TiO2 catalysts in the plasma-photocatalytic conversion of CO2. The synergy of plasma-catalysis for CO2 conversion can be mainly attributed to the physical effect induced by the presence of catalyst pellets in the discharge and the dominant photocatalytic surface reaction driven by the plasma

Effects of Water and Alkaline Solution on Durability of Carbon-Glass Hybrid Fiber Reinforced Polymer Bars

The glass fiber reacts with the hydroxyl owing to the concrete pore solution. A thin coat of carbon fiber wraps around the internal GFRP bars to improve the durability of internal GFRP bars in harsh environments. This paper investigates the effect of a thin carbon fiber coat on the durability of the carbon–glass hybrid fiber reinforced polymer bars (HFRP bars) in water, and compares the performance of FRP bars in alkaline solution. To this end, the water absorption behavior, interlaminar shear strength of both the GFRP bars and the HFRP bars was characterized in water and alkaline solution. The results indicate that the diffusivity coefficient of the carbon fiber coat is higher than that of internal GFRP in water. Compared to the GFRP bars in water, the HFRP bars have a higher diffusivity coefficient and saturation water absorption. It caused that the interlaminar shear strength of the HFRP bars aged in water at a temperature of 60 °C for 140 days decreases more markedly than that of the GFRP bars aged under similar conditions. Finally, it was proved that the thin carbon fiber coat does not slow the deterioration of the GFRP bars in water, while the carbon fiber coat significantly improves the retention of the interlaminar shear strength of the HFRP bars in the alkaline solution owing to the prevention of internal glass fiber reactivated by alkali ions

Comparative Assessment of Phenolic Profiles, Cellular Antioxidant and Antiproliferative Activities in Ten Varieties of Sweet Potato (Ipomoea Batatas) Storage Roots

Sweet potato is the sixth most important crop widely cultivated around the world with abundant varieties. Different varieties gain different phenolic profiles which has drawn researchers&rsquo; attention for its unique health benefits. Our study evaluated the phenolic profiles, total and cellular antioxidant activities, antiproliferative activities, and cytotoxicity in 10 cultivated varieties of sweet potato in different colours. Among fourteen metabolites detected in our study, hyperoside, ferulic acid and caffeic acid were considered as prominent in SPSRs. According to the principle component analysis, phytochemical composition of HX22, YS15 and YS7 was quite similar. The results also evidenced that purple-fleshed varieties, such as YS43, YZ7 and YY153, have higher total phenolics content and corresponding stronger total antioxidant capacities as well as cellular antiproliferative activities against human liver cancer HepG2 cells than other varieties. The extremely significant correlation between phenolics and total antioxidant activity was also revealed by Pearson correlation analysis (p &lt; 0.05). However, no significant relevance was found between intracellular antioxidant activity and total phenolic content or flesh colour of sweet potatoes