Diuretic properties and chemical constituent studies on

The pharmacological evaluation demonstrated that the extracts from the stem of S. brachyanthera could significantly increase the outputs of urine of rats compared to those of furosemide treated group, and the effect could last for a longer period of time. The best effect appeared in the first two hours, which scientifically confirmed the diuretic effect of the plant. The comparative pharmacognosy study showed that the characters of the crude drugs of the stem of S. brachyanthera were similar to those of Akebia caulis. Further systemic work on its chemical constituents by chromatographic methods and NMR elucidations led to the isolation of 10 triterpenoids, 6 flavonoids, 4 lignanoids, and 3 phenylethanoid glycosides, whose structural types were much similar to those of A. quinata. Among them, 7 compounds were firstly reported in the genus of Stauntonia and calceolarioside B was the common characteristic constituent in both plants. From the similar pharmacognosy characters, pharmacological effects, and chemical constituents, it could be concluded that S. brachyanthera have a great possibility to be a succedaneum of Akebia caulis, whose supply is extremely short in recent years

«El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote» (1605), satire ménippéenne : (Prosas nuevas -V-: cartas, relaciones, «Lazarillos», «Guzmanes» y «Quijotes»)

Convocar marbetes como «novela» o «parodia de libros de caballerías» es tan natural que pocas veces nos fijamos en la tradición narrativa en la cual se situaba El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Este artículo propone recuperar la vena jocoseria y los textos fundamentales de Luciano que hicieron posible la ficción de Cervantes. Sin atar el libro de 1605 al género de la sátira menipea, sí lo define como libro menipeano. La adaptación alemaniana (Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache) de la fórmula lucianesca vieja (Historia verdadera, El sueño) y nueva (Segunda parte del Lazarillo, Crotalón) no podía satisfacer a Cervantes : desde esta perspectiva de historia literaria, el Quijote constituye una propuesta narrativa alternativa de prosa menipeana.Utiliser des termes comme « roman » ou « parodie de livres de chevalerie » est tellement naturel que l'on a presque oublié de se demander à quelle tradition narrative se rattache El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Cet article s'emploie à récupérer la veine sério-comique et les textes fondamentaux de Lucien de Samosate qui rendirent possible la fiction de Cervantès. Si ce livre n'est pas une satire ménippée, il n'en demeure pas moins un livre ménippéen. L'adaptation alémanienne (Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache) de la formule lucianesque ancienne (Histoire véritable, Le songe) et nouvelle (Segunda parte del Lazarillo, Crotalón) ne pouvait complètement satisfaire Cervantès : dans ce cadre, qui relève de l'histoire littéraire, on verra ainsi que le Quichotte constitue une proposition narrative alternative de prose ménippéenne.Using categories such as "novel" or "parody of tale of chivalry" is such a common thing that we rarely consider the narrative tradition within which El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha fell. This article comes back to the jocoseria inspiration and those among Lucien's fundamental texts which made it possible for Cervantes's fiction to emerge. Without locking his 1605 text in the Menippean satire genre, Cervantes defines it as a Menippean book. Cervantes could not be satisfied with the adaptation by Mateo Alemán (Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache) of the old Lucianesque formula (Historia verdadera, El sueño) nor of the short story (Segunda parte del Lazarillo, Crotalón). Envisaged from such a perspective of literary history, the Quijote becomes an alternative to the narrative proposition of Menippean prose

A Data Driven Method for Multi-step Prediction of Ship Roll Motion in High Sea States

Ship roll motion in high sea states has large amplitudes and nonlinear dynamics, and its prediction is significant for operability, safety, and survivability. This paper presents a novel data-driven methodology to provide a multi-step prediction of ship roll motions in high sea states. A hybrid neural network is proposed that combines long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) in parallel. The motivation is to extract the nonlinear dynamic characteristics and the hydrodynamic memory information through the advantage of CNN and LSTM, respectively. For the feature selection, the time histories of motion states and wave heights are selected to involve sufficient information. Taken a scaled KCS as the study object, the ship motions in sea state 7 irregular long-crested waves are simulated and used for the validation. The results show that at least one period of roll motion can be accurately predicted. Compared with the single LSTM and CNN methods, the proposed method has better performance in predicting the amplitude of roll angles. Besides, the comparison results also demonstrate that selecting motion states and wave heights as feature space improves the prediction accuracy, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method

Water-Soluble Flexible Organic Frameworks That Include and Deliver Proteins.

Four water-soluble hydrazone-based three-dimensional (3D) flexible organic frameworks FOF-1-4 have been synthesized from a semirigid tetracationic tetraaldehyde and four flexible dihydrazides. 1H NMR spectroscopy indicated the quantitative formation of FOF-1-4 in D2O, while dynamic light scattering experiments revealed that, depending on the concentration, these porous frameworks display hydrodynamic diameters ranging from 50 to 120 nm. The porosity of the frameworks is confirmed by ethanol vapor adsorption experiments of the solid samples as well as the high loading capacity for a 2.3 nm porphyrin guest in water. The new water-soluble frameworks exhibit low cytotoxicity and form inherent pores with diameters of 5.3 or 6.7 nm, allowing rapid inclusion of proteins such as bovine serum albumin and green and orange fluorescent proteins, and efficient delivery of the proteins into normal and cancer cells. Flow cytometric analysis reveals percentages of the delivered cells up to 99.8%

Generalized joint density of states and its application to exploring the pairing symmetry of superconductors

We introduce a generalized joint density of states (GJDOS), which incorporates the coherent factor into the JDOS, to study quasiparticle interference (QPI) in superconductors. The intimate relation between the Fourier-transformed local density of states and GJDOS is revealed: they corre- spond respectively to the real and imaginary parts of a generalized impurity-response function, and particularly share the same angular factors and singular boundaries, as seen from our approximate analytic results for d-wave superconductors. Remarkably, our numerical GJDOS analysis agrees well with the QPI patten of d-wave cuprates and s\pm-wave iron-based superconductors. Moreover, we illustrate that the present GJDOS scenario can uncover the sign features of the superconducting gap and thus can be used to explore the possible pairing symmetry of the KxFe2-ySe2 superconductors.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

An ultra-sensitive and easy-to-use assay for sensing human UGT1A1 activities in biological systems

The human UDP-glucuronosyltransferase 1A1 (UGT1A1), one of the most essential conjugative enzymes, is responsible for the metabolism and detoxification of bilirubin and other endogenous substances, as well as many different xenobiotic compounds. Deciphering UGT1A1 relevance to human diseases and characterizing the effects of small molecules on the activities of UGT1A1 requires reliable tools for probing the function of this key enzyme in complex biological matrices. Herein, an easy-to-use assay for highly-selective and sensitive monitoring of UGT1A1 activities in various biological matrices, using liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (LC-FD), has been developed and validated. The newly developed LC-FD based assay has been confirmed in terms of sensitivity, specificity, precision, quantitative linear range and stability. One of its main advantages is lowering the limits of detection and quantification by about 100-fold in comparison to the previous assay that used the same probe substrate, enabling reliable quantification of lower amounts of active enzyme than any other method. The precision test demonstrated that both intra- and inter-day variations for this assay were less than 5.5%. Furthermore, the newly developed assay has also been successfully used to screen and characterize the regulatory effects of small molecules on the expression level of UGT1A1 in living cells. Overall, an easy-to-use LC-FD based assay has been developed for ultra-sensitive UGT1A1 activities measurements in various biological systems, providing an inexpensive and practical approach for exploring the role of UGT1A1 in human diseases, interactions with xenobiotics, and characterization modulatory effects of small molecules on this conjugative enzyme. (c) 2020 Xi'an Jiaotong University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer reviewe

Applying hybrid clustering in pulsar candidate sifting with multi-modality for FAST survey

Pulsar search is always the basis of pulsar navigation, gravitational wave detection and other research topics. Currently, the volume of pulsar candidates collected by Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) shows an explosive growth rate that has brought challenges for its pulsar candidate filtering System. Particularly, the multi-view heterogeneous data and class imbalance between true pulsars and non-pulsar candidates have negative effects on traditional single-modal supervised classification methods. In this study, a multi-modal and semi-supervised learning based pulsar candidate sifting algorithm is presented, which adopts a hybrid ensemble clustering scheme of density-based and partition-based methods combined with a feature-level fusion strategy for input data and a data partition strategy for parallelization. Experiments on both HTRU (The High Time Resolution Universe Survey) 2 and FAST actual observation data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm could excellently identify the pulsars: On HTRU2, the precision and recall rates of its parallel mode reach 0.981 and 0.988. On FAST data, those of its parallel mode reach 0.891 and 0.961, meanwhile, the running time also significantly decrease with the increment of parallel nodes within limits. So, we can get the conclusion that our algorithm could be a feasible idea for large scale pulsar candidate sifting of FAST drift scan observation

Spectrally resolved Franson interference

Franson interference can be used to test the nonlocal features of energy-time entanglement and has become a standard in quantum physics. However, most of the previous Franson interference experiments were demonstrated in the time domain, and the spectral properties of Franson interference have not been fully explored. Here, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate spectrally resolved Franson interference using biphotons with different correlations, including positive correlation, negative correlation, and non-correlation. It is found that the joint spectral intensities of the biphotons can be modulated along both the signal and idler directions, which has potential applications in generating high-dimensional frequency entanglement and time-frequency grid states. This work may provide a new perspective for understanding the spectral-temporal properties of the Franson interferometer.Comment: 6+7pages, 3+1 figure

Molecular identification of Trichinella spiralis nudix hydrolase and its induced protective immunity against trichinellosis in BALB/c mice

Background: Nudix hydrolases (Nd) is a widespread superfamily, which is found in all classes of organism, hydrolyse a wide range of organic pyrophosphates and has a ‘housecleaning’ function. The previous study showed that Trichinella spiralis Nd (TsNd) bound to intestinal epithelial cells (IECs), and the vaccination of mice with T7 phage-displayed TsNd polypeptides produced protective immunity. The aim of this study was to clone, express and identify the full-length TsNd and to investigate its immune protection against T. spiralis infection. Methods: The full-length cDNA sequence of TsNd gene encoding a 46 kDa protein from T. spiralis intestinal infective larvae (IIL) was cloned and identified. The antigenicity of rTsNd was analyzed by Western blot. Transcription and expression of TsNd at T. spiralis different stages were observed by RT-PCR and IFT. The levels of the specific total IgG, IgG1 and IgG2a antibodies to rTsNd were determined by ELISA. The immune protection of rTsNd against T. spiralis infection was investigated. Results: Sequence and phylogenetic analysis revealed that TsNd had a nudix motif located at 226-244aa, which had high homology and the closest evolutionary status with T. pseudospiralis. The rTsNd was obtained after expression and purification. Western blot analysis showed that anti-rTsNd serum recognized the native TsNd protein in crude antigens of muscle larvae (ML), IIL, adult worms (AW) and newborn larvae (NBL), and ES antigens of ML. Transcription and expression of TsNd gene was observed in all developmental stages of T. spiralis (ML, IIL, AW and NBL), with high level expression in IIL. An immunolocalization analysis identified TsNd in the cuticle, stichocytes and reproductive organs of the parasite. Following immunization, anti-rTsNd IgG levels were increased, and the levels of IgG1 were more significantly higher than that of IgG2a. After a challenge infection with T. spiralis, mice immunized with the rTsNd displayed a 57.7% reduction in adult worms and a 56.9% reduction in muscle larval burden. Conclusions: TsNd induced a partial protective immunity in mice and could be considered as a novel candidate vaccine antigen against trichinellosis