Dai-Huang-Fu-Zi-Tang Alleviates Intestinal Injury Associated with Severe Acute Pancreatitis by Regulating Mitochondrial Permeability Transition Pore of Intestinal Mucosa Epithelial Cells

Objective. The aim of the present study was to examine whether Dai-Huang-Fu-Zi-Tang (DHFZT) could regulate mitochondrial permeability transition pore (MPTP) of intestinal mucosa epithelial cells for alleviating intestinal injury associated with severe acute pancreatitis (SAP). Methods. A total of 72 Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into 3 groups (sham group, SAP group, and DHFZT group, n=24 per group). The rats in each group were divided into 4 subgroups (n=6 per subgroup) accordingly at 1, 3, 6, and 12 h after the operation. The contents of serum amylase, D-lactic acid, diamine oxidase activity, and degree of MPTP were measured by dry chemical method and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The change of mitochondria of intestinal epithelial cells was observed by transmission electron microscopy. Results. The present study showed that DHFZT inhibited the openness of MPTP at 3, 6, and 12 h after the operation. Meanwhile, it reduced the contents of serum D-lactic acid and activity of diamine oxidase activity and also drastically relieved histopathological manifestations and epithelial cells injury of intestine. Conclusion. DHFZT alleviates intestinal injury associated SAP via reducing the openness of MPTP. In addition, DHFZT could also decrease the content of serum diamine oxidase activity and D-lactic acid after SAP

Rethinking Mobile Block for Efficient Attention-based Models

This paper focuses on developing modern, efficient, lightweight models for dense predictions while trading off parameters, FLOPs, and performance. Inverted Residual Block (IRB) serves as the infrastructure for lightweight CNNs, but no counterpart has been recognized by attention-based studies. This work rethinks lightweight infrastructure from efficient IRB and effective components of Transformer from a unified perspective, extending CNN-based IRB to attention-based models and abstracting a one-residual Meta Mobile Block (MMB) for lightweight model design. Following simple but effective design criterion, we deduce a modern Inverted Residual Mobile Block (iRMB) and build a ResNet-like Efficient MOdel (EMO) with only iRMB for down-stream tasks. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, COCO2017, and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our EMO over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., EMO-1M/2M/5M achieve 71.5, 75.1, and 78.4 Top-1 that surpass equal-order CNN-/Attention-based models, while trading-off the parameter, efficiency, and accuracy well: running 2.8-4.0x faster than EdgeNeXt on iPhone14

Modeling and dynamic characteristic simulation of air-cooled proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack for unmanned aerial vehicle

Air-cooled low-temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack applied with metallic bipolar plate is considered as a promising power source for an unmanned aerial vehicle. This paper presents a coupled electrochemical thermal model for simulating its dynamic characteristic. The impact of the applied metallic bipolar plate on the stack thermal balance is considered; an environmental model estimating atmospheric temperature and pressure variations with altitude is included. Our theoretical analysis shows that with altitude increased from 0m to 4000m, the output electric power declined rate is 4.7–6.5% at the current density of 400–800 mA·cm−2. To avoid severe stack degradation due to high stack operating temperature, minimum air stoichiometric ratio is required for maintaining stack thermal balance. When the altitude increases from 0 to 4000m, the minimum required air stoichiometric ratio decreases from 110 to 22 at the current density of 800 mA·cm−2

Effect of Traditional Chinese Medicine Injection on Cancer-Related Fatigue: A Meta-Analysis Based on Existing Evidence

Background and Objective. Cancer-related fatigue (CRF) is a common and painful side effect for cancer patients. The treatment of CRF by traditional Chinese medicine injection (TCMJ) is controversial. We conducted a meta-analysis and systematic review to evaluate the effect of TCMJ on CRF, with a view to providing some guidance for clinical application. Methods. We systematically searched randomized controlled studies reported through March 2020 in PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science, China Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang, and VIP databases. Two investigators independently screened the studies according to the predetermined criteria, extracted data, and evaluated the bias risk of the included studies, using RevMan5.3 software. Results. Twelve studies enrolling 1005 participants were included in this systematic review. We found that TCMJ could improve the clinical efficacy of CRF patients (RR = 1.24, 95% CI: 1.05–1.46, P=0.01), ameliorate fatigue status (RR = 1.44, 95% CI: 1.27–1.65, P<0.00001), and improve quality of life (MD = 8.34, 95% CI: 3.31–13.37, P=0.001), but there was no statistical significance in the fatigue score (MD = −1.10, 95% CI: −2.23–0.04, P=0.06). Referring to the number of adverse events, the safety of TCMJ was good. Subgroup analysis showed that TCMJ could improve clinical efficacy, fatigue, and quality of life in a short time (≤4 weeks). Among them, tonic TCMJ could improve the clinical efficacy. TCMJ had advantages in improving fatigue of lung cancer and gastric cancer. In addition, life quality of lung cancer patients improved significantly. Conclusion. Current research evidence showed that TCMJ could improve the clinical efficacy, fatigue status, and life quality of patients with CRF. In addition, we found that TCMJ could improve the clinical efficacy of CRF patients in a short period of time. Tonic TCMJ could improve the clinical efficacy, but heat-clearing TCMJ could not. Life quality and fatigue status of lung cancer patients improved significantly. However, due to the sample size and quality of the included studies, the results of this analysis should be treated with caution. The above conclusions still need to be verified by more large-sample and high-quality randomized controlled trials

<em>Zea mays</em> Taxilin Protein Negatively Regulates Opaque-2 Transcriptional Activity by Causing a Change in Its Sub-Cellular Distribution

<div><p><em>Zea mays</em> (maize) Opaque-2 (ZmO2) protein is an important bZIP transcription factor that regulates the expression of major storage proteins (22-kD zeins) and other important genes during maize seed development. ZmO2 is subject to functional regulation through protein-protein interactions. To unveil the potential regulatory network associated with ZmO2, a protein-protein interaction study was carried out using the truncated version of ZmO2 (O2-2) as bait in a yeast two-hybrid screen with a maize seed cDNA library. A protein with homology to Taxilin was found to have stable interaction with ZmO2 in yeast and was designated as ZmTaxilin. Sequence analysis indicated that ZmTaxilin has a long coiled-coil domain containing three conserved zipper motifs. Each of the three zipper motifs is individually able to interact with ZmO2 in yeast. A GST pull-down assay demonstrated the interaction between GST-fused ZmTaxilin and ZmO2 extracted from developing maize seeds. Using onion epidermal cells as <em>in vivo</em> assay system, we found that ZmTaxilin could change the sub-cellular distribution of ZmO2. We also demonstrated that this change significantly repressed the transcriptional activity of ZmO2 on the 22-kD zein promoter. Our study suggests that a Taxilin-mediated change in sub-cellular distribution of ZmO2 may have important functional consequences for ZmO2 activity.</p> </div

Short-term dynamic changes in neutralizing antibodies against enterovirus 71 after vaccination

Background Short-term dynamic changes in neutralizing antibodies against EV71 and EV71-IgM after inactivated EV71 vaccine injection are unknown. Methods This study was designed as a randomized, open-label study and was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03278132). In total, 120 healthy infants aged 6–35 months were randomized 1:1:1 to provide a second blood sample on day 10, day 20, or day 30 after the first vaccine dose, respectively. Results According to the per-protocol set, a rapid immune response against EV71 was observed 10 days after the first EV71 vaccine dose, with antibody titers ≥1:8 in 89.19% of participants (95% CI: 74.58–96.97%) on day 10, in 80.65% (95% CI: 62.53–92.55%) on day 20, in 66.67% (95% CI: 49.03–81.44%) on day 30, and in 100% (95% CI: 96.52%-.) on day 60. Based on an ELISA, the percentages of participants positive for EV71-IgM on day 0 and day 60 were 1.71% (2 out of 117) and 82.86% (87 out of 105), respectively. Conclusions The EV71 vaccine could be used for contingency vaccination to further control EV71-associated disease outbreaks. Caution should be taken in using the EV71-IgM test for rapid EV71 infection diagnosis after EV71 vaccine administration. Clinical Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT0327813

ZmTaxilin and ZmO2 interact in a GST pull-down assay.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Western blot detection of the GST pull-down sample with a GST antibody. The kernel sample was a pool of equal amounts of RNA from different developmental stages between 3 and 36 days after pollination (DAP). (<b>B</b>) Western blot detection of the GST pull-down sample with the ZmO2 antibody. Lane 1 in (<b>A</b>) and (<b>B</b>): <i>E. coli</i> lysate containing the GST-Taxilin protein and the maize seed protein containing ZmO2. Lane 2 in (<b>A</b>) and (<b>B</b>): <i>E. coli</i> lysate containing GST and maize seed protein containing ZmO2. The expected molecular weight of the GST-Taxilin fusion protein, the GST tag and ZmO2 are 75.397, 27.895 and 47.075 kDa, respectively. The apparent molecular weight of the ZmO2 protein was approximately 68–72 kDa.</p

<i>ZmTaxilin</i> clones identified by yeast two-hybrid.

<p><i>ZmTaxilin</i> clones identified by yeast two-hybrid.</p

ZmTaxilin can repress the transcriptional activity of ZmO2.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Structure of effecter and reporters. (<b>B</b>) GUS/luciferase values of different reporter and effecter combinations. The values are the averages with SD of three independent experiments, after normalisation to the internal control. Statistical significance between YFP-O2 and YFP-O2+CFP-Taxilin was calculated using a two-tailed T-test. *p≤0.05.</p