Berberine regulates endocrine function in mice with polycystic ovary syndrome through PI3K/Akt/GSK-3β insulin signaling pathway

Purpose: To study the influence of berberine on endocrine status in mice with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and the underlying mechanism of action. Methods: A total of 80 mice were used in this research. Sixteen mice were randomly selected to serve as control. The remaining 64 mice were subcutaneously given dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) injection to establish a mouse model of PCOS. The PCOS mice were randomly divided into model group, and low-dose-, medium-dose and high-dose berberine groups. Oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) and expression levels of PI3K/Akt/GSK-3 signaling pathway related proteins (PI3K 85, Akt2, p-GSK-3 Tyr216, p-GSK-3β Ser9, and GSK-3) were evaluated. Results: At 60 and 120 min, OGTT blood glucose level of model group was significantly higher than that of blank control group, but it was significantly lower in the berberine dose groups than in model group (p < 0.05). There were significantly higher protein expression levels of pi3k85, AKT2 and p-GSK-3β tyr116 in berberine dose groups than in model mice, but the protein levels of p-GSK-3β ser9 in berberine dose groups were significantly lower than that in model mice. Conclusion: Berberine improved endocrine function in PCOS mice through a mechanism involving regulation of the key proteins of PI3K/Akt/GSK-3 β insulin signaling pathway. Thus, berberine may potentially play a similar role in humans with PCOS functions. However, clinical trials need to be carried out first

A comment on "Ab initio calculations of pressure-dependence of high-order elastic constants using finite deformations approach" by I. Mosyagin, A.V. Lugovskoy, O.M. Krasilnikov, Yu.Kh. Vekilov, S.I. Simak and I.A. Abrikosov

Recently, I. Mosyagin, A.V. Lugovskoy, O.M. Krasilnikov, Yu.Kh. Vekilov, S.I. Simak and I.A. Abrikosov in the paper: "Ab initio calculations of pressure-dependence of high-order elastic constants using finite deformations approach"[Computer Physics Communications 220 (2017) 2030] presented a description of a technique for ab initio calculations of the pressure dependence of second- and third-order elastic constants. Unfortunately, the work contains serious and fundamental flaws in the field of finite-deformation solid mechanics.Comment: 3 pages, 0 figure

Comparative Metabolomics of Early Development of the Parasitic Plants Phelipanche aegyptiaca and Triphysaria versicolor.

Parasitic weeds of the family Orobanchaceae attach to the roots of host plants via haustoria capable of drawing nutrients from host vascular tissue. The connection of the haustorium to the host marks a shift in parasite metabolism from autotrophy to at least partial heterotrophy, depending on the level of parasite dependence. Species within the family Orobanchaceae span the spectrum of host nutrient dependency, yet the diversity of parasitic plant metabolism remains poorly understood, particularly during the key metabolic shift surrounding haustorial attachment. Comparative profiling of major metabolites in the obligate holoparasite Phelipanche aegyptiaca and the facultative hemiparasite Triphysaria versicolor before and after attachment to the hosts revealed several metabolic shifts implicating remodeling of energy and amino acid metabolism. After attachment, both parasites showed metabolite profiles that were different from their respective hosts. In P. aegyptiaca, prominent changes in metabolite profiles were also associated with transitioning between different tissue types before and after attachment, with aspartate levels increasing significantly after the attachment. Based on the results from 15N labeling experiments, asparagine and/or aspartate-rich proteins were enriched in host-derived nitrogen in T. versicolor. These results point to the importance of aspartate and/or asparagine in the early stages of attachment in these plant parasites and provide a rationale for targeting aspartate-family amino acid biosynthesis for disrupting the growth of parasitic weeds

The Causative Agent of FMD Disease

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is an acute infection of cloven-hoofed animals caused by foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV). It is one of the most serious infectious diseases affecting animal husbandry and a major impediment to international trade in livestock and their products. Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), a member of the Picornaviridae family of Aphthovirus, is an icosahedral virus without envelope, 25–30 nm in diameter, containing about 8.4 kb of positive-sense single-stranded RNA. The virus exists in seven different serotypes: A, O, C, Asia1, SAT1, SAT2, and SAT3, but a large number of subtypes have evolved in each serotype. This chapter reviews the genome, structure, serotype, and epidemiology of FMDV, which will help people to further explore the mechanism of the interaction between foot-and-mouth disease virus and host and provide reference for scientific prevention and control of FMDV

UCAS-IIE-NLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Enhancing Generalization of Multilingual BERT for Low-resource Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment analysis for African languages. The challenge faced by this task is the scarcity of labeled data and linguistic resources in low-resource settings. To alleviate these, we propose a generalized multilingual system SACL-XLMR for sentiment analysis on low-resource languages. Specifically, we design a lexicon-based multilingual BERT to facilitate language adaptation and sentiment-aware representation learning. Besides, we apply a supervised adversarial contrastive learning technique to learn sentiment-spread structured representations and enhance model generalization. Our system achieved competitive results, largely outperforming baselines on both multilingual and zero-shot sentiment classification subtasks. Notably, the system obtained the 1st rank on the zero-shot classification subtask in the official ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.Comment: 9 pages, accepted by SemEval@ACL 202