PROMOTION OF COLON HEALTH BY STRAWBERRY AND CRANBERRY

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has posed serious threats to the human health, which lead to chronic malabsorption of nutrients, abnormal pain and rectal bleeding. Both genetic predisposition and environmental factors contribute to the onset of IBD. Multiple studies suggested that dysbiosis in colon plays an important role in the development of colitis, and gut microbiota composition are different between patients with IBD and healthy individuals. Intake of whole foods, such as fruits and vegetables, may confer health benefits to the host. The beneficial effects of fruits and vegetables mainly attribute to their richness of polyphenols and microbiota-accessible carbohydrates (MACs). Components in fruits and vegetables modulate composition and associated functions of the gut microbiota, while gut microbiota can transform components in fruits and vegetables to produce metabolites that are bioactive and important for health. Accumulating evidence suggests that colonic inflammation may be prevented by increased consumption of certain fruits and vegetables such as berries. Cranberry and strawberry are abundant of polyphenols with various health benefits. Most studies focused on extractable polyphenols (EP), non-extractable polyphenols (NEP) were often neglected, although NEP may possess important biological functions. NEP is not significantly released from the food matrix during digestion in the stomach or small intestine, therefor they reach colon nearly intact. In the colon, the potential interaction between gut microbiota and NEP could also play an important role in colon health. NEP could be biotransformed by gut microbiota to produce bioactive metabolites that may contribute to the promotion of colon health as well. Therefore, it is important to investigate the interaction of gut microbiota and NEP in the colon in terms of production of bioactive metabolites. Meanwhile, composition and functions of gut microbiota can be altered by the presence of polyphenols in the colon, which in turn could affect colon health. The objective of this work was to characterize EP and NEP fractions from whole cranberry and strawberry and determine their potential in anti-inflammation and anti-colon cancer. EP and NEP from cranberry and strawberry showed anti-inflammatory effects in inhibiting LPS-induced production of nitric oxide in macrophages, which was accompanied by decreased expression of iNOS and increased expression of HO-1. EP and NEP from cranberry and strawberry showed anti-cancer capacities in HCT116 cells. Flow cytometry analysis demonstrated that NEP caused a cell cycle arrest and induced a significant cellular apoptosis in colon cancer cells. Furthermore, this study determined the protective effects of whole strawberry (WS) against dextran sulfate sodium (DSS)-induced colitis in mice. In colitic mice, dietary WS reduced the disease activity index (DAI), prevented the colon shortening and spleen enlargement, and alleviated the colonic tissue damages. The abundance of pro-inflammatory immune cells was reduced by dietary WS in the colonic mucosa, which was accompanied by the suppression of overproduction of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Western blotting and immunohistochemical analysis revealed that dietary WS decreased the expression of pro-inflammatory proteins in the colonic mucosa. Moreover, dietary WS partially reversed the alteration of gut microbiota in the colitic mice by increasing the abundance of potential beneficial bacteria, e.g. Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus, and decreasing the abundance of potential harmful bacteria, e.g. Dorea and Bilophila. Dietary WS also restored the decreased production of short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) in the cecum of the colitic mice. The results revealed the anti-inflammatory effects and mechanisms of dietary WS in the colon, which is critical for the rational utilization of strawberry for the prevention of inflammation-driven diseases

Seismic Analysis of the Reservoir-Earth Dam-Pore Fluid System Using an Integrated Numerical Approach

In this paper, an integrated numerical approach is proposed for analyzing the seismic response of the reservoir-earth dam-pore fluid system subjected to earthquake loading. The fluid-mechanical coupling approach is deployed to capture the fluid-solid matrix coupling effects automatically. A hysteretic damping constitutive law is adopted to follow the modulus reduction and damping ratio curves. The Finn-Byrne equation is used to represent the shear-induced volumetric strain behavior of liquefiable materials. The interaction between the reservoir water and the dam boundary is treated as a dynamically updated pressure boundary condition. The deconvolution is accomplished by the equivalent linear program SHAKE. An automatic remeshing algorithm is employed to replace the badly distorted mesh with a new regular mesh whenever needed during the system evolution process. The system integrating these elements is constructed in the explicit finite-difference program FLAC, and applied to analyze the responses of a reservoir dam under seismic loading in both horizontal and vertical directions; the potential liquefied regions, earthquake-induced settlement and lateral spreading predicted by the simulation are presented

A review of development of micro-channel heat exchanger applied in air-conditioning system

AbstractMicro-channel heat exchanger(MCHX) has been increasingly applied in HVAC&R(Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning & Refrigeration) field due to its higher efficiently heat transfer rate, more compact structure, lower cost. The characteristics of micro-channel heat transfer and fluid dynamics are summarized in this paper. The methods about optimizations (ie, geometry and thermodynamic performance) and the advantages and disadvantages of the MCHX are analyzed

A Class of Lie 2-Algebras in Higher-Order Courant Algebroids

Abstract In this paper, we study the relation of the algebraic properties of the higher-order Courant bracket and Dorfman bracket on the direct sum bundle for an m-dimensional smooth manifold M, and a Lie 2-algebra which is a "categorified" version of a Lie algebra. We prove that the higher-order Courant algebroids give rise to a semistrict Lie 2-algebra, and we prove that the higher-order Dorfman algebroids give rise to a hemistrict Lie 2-algebra. Consequently, there is an isomorphism from the higher-order Courant algebroids to the higher-order Dorfman algebroids as Lie 2-algebras homomorphism

Inhibitory Effects of Peptide Lunasin in Colorectal Cancer HCT-116 Cells and Their Tumorsphere-Derived Subpopulation

The involvement of cancer stem-like cells (CSC) in the tumor pathogenesis has profound implications for cancer therapy and chemoprevention. Lunasin is a bioactive peptide from soybean and other vegetal sources with proven protective activities against cancer and other chronic diseases. The present study focused on the cytotoxic effect of peptide lunasin in colorectal cancer HCT-116 cells, both the bulk tumor and the CSC subpopulations. Lunasin inhibited the proliferation and the tumorsphere-forming capacity of HCT-116 cells. Flow cytometry results demonstrated that the inhibitory effects were related to apoptosis induction and cell cycle-arrest at G1 phase. Moreover, lunasin caused an increase in the sub-GO/G1 phase of bulk tumor cells, linked to the apoptotic events found. Immunoblotting analysis further showed that lunasin induced apoptosis through activation of caspase-3 and cleavage of PARP, and could modulate cell cycle progress through the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p21. Together, these results provide new evidence on the chemopreventive activity of peptide lunasin on colorectal cancer by modulating both the parental and the tumorsphere-derived subsets of HCT-116 cells

Conceptual Study of a Real-Time Hybrid Simulation Framework for Monopile Offshore Wind Turbines Under Wind and Wave Loads

As an attractive renewable energy source, offshore wind plants are becoming increasingly popular for energy production. However, the performance assessment of offshore wind turbine (OWT) structure is a challenging task due to the combined wind-wave loading and difficulties in reproducing such loading conditions in laboratory. Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS), combining physical testing and numerical simulation in real-time, offers a new venue to study the structural behavior of OWTs. It overcomes the scaling incompatibilities in OWT scaled model testing by replacing the rotor components with an actuation system, driven by an aerodynamic simulation tool running in real-time. In this study, a RTHS framework for monopile OWTs is proposed. A set of sensitivity analyses is carried out to evaluate the feasibility of this RTHS framework and determine possible tolerances on its design. By simulating different scaling laws and possible error contributors (delays and noises) in the proposed framework, the sensitivity of the OWT responses to these parameters are quantified. An example using a National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) 5-MW reference OWT system at 1:25 scale is simulated in this study to demonstrate the proposed RTHS framework and sensitivity analyses. Three different scaling laws are considered. The sensitivity results show that the delays in the RTHS framework significantly impact the performance on the response evaluation, higher than the impact of noises. The proposed framework and sensitivity analyses presented in this study provides important information for future implementation and further development of the RTHS technology for similar marine structures

MLA-BIN: Model-level Attention and Batch-instance Style Normalization for Domain Generalization of Federated Learning on Medical Image Segmentation

The privacy protection mechanism of federated learning (FL) offers an effective solution for cross-center medical collaboration and data sharing. In multi-site medical image segmentation, each medical site serves as a client of FL, and its data naturally forms a domain. FL supplies the possibility to improve the performance of seen domains model. However, there is a problem of domain generalization (DG) in the actual de-ployment, that is, the performance of the model trained by FL in unseen domains will decrease. Hence, MLA-BIN is proposed to solve the DG of FL in this study. Specifically, the model-level attention module (MLA) and batch-instance style normalization (BIN) block were designed. The MLA represents the unseen domain as a linear combination of seen domain models. The atten-tion mechanism is introduced for the weighting coefficient to obtain the optimal coefficient ac-cording to the similarity of inter-domain data features. MLA enables the global model to gen-eralize to unseen domain. In the BIN block, batch normalization (BN) and instance normalization (IN) are combined to perform the shallow layers of the segmentation network for style normali-zation, solving the influence of inter-domain image style differences on DG. The extensive experimental results of two medical image seg-mentation tasks demonstrate that the proposed MLA-BIN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Aberrant Brain Regional Homogeneity and Functional Connectivity of Entorhinal Cortex in Vascular Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Resting-State Functional MRI Study

The aim of this study was to investigate changes in regional homogeneity (ReHo) and the functional connectivity of the entorhinal cortex (EC) in vascular mild cognitive impairment (VaMCI) and to evaluate the relationships between such changes and neuropsychological measures in VaMCI individuals. In all, 31 patients with VaMCI and 32 normal controls (NCs) underwent rs-fMRI. Differences in whole-brain ReHo and seed-based bilateral EC functional connectivity (EC-FC) were determined. Pearson's correlation was used to evaluate the relationships between regions with significant group differences and different neuropsychological measures. Vascular mild cognitive impairment (VaMCI) patients had lower scores in Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and higher ones in Activity of Daily Living (ADL) (p < 0.05). Vascular mild cognitive impairment (VaMCI) individuals had significantly lower ReHo in the left cerebellum and right lentiform nucleus than NCs (P < 0.05, TFCE FWE correction). Vascular mild cognitive impairment (VaMCI) subjects showed significant decreases in the FC of the right EC in the right inferior frontal gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus, bilateral pre-central gyrus, and right post-central/superior parietal lobules (P < 0.05, TFCE FWE correction). Significant positive correlations were found between ReHo and MoCA scores for the right lentiform nucleus (r = 0.37, P < 0.05). The right post-central/superior parietal lobules showed a significant positive correlation between right EC-FC and MoCA scores (r = 0.37, P < 0.05). Patterns in ReHo and EC-FC changes in VaMCI patients and their correlations with neuropsychological measures may be a pathophysiological foundation of cognitive impairment, which may aid the early diagnosis of VaMCI

Ultra low RIN, low threshold AlGaInAs/InP BH-DFB laser

This study presents a comparative analysis of AlGalnAs buried heterostructure laser diodes by using dual-channel ridge-waveguides. Different shaped channels, including bowl shaped groove and vertical groove, are explored. Using a vertical groove structure, we achieved an output power of 90 mW at 25 °C with a threshold current of only 4 mA. This represents a 3.6-fold increase in output power compared to the BH-DFB structure. At a high temperature of 85 °C, the laser maintains a side-mode suppression ratio of over 45 dB at the maximum power point. The laser’s relative intensity noise in the 0–40 GHz frequency range is less than −162.8 dB/Hz when operated at 300 mA with the chip butterfly packaged. These findings underscore the robustness, reliability, and high-performance capabilities of the developed DFB laser, highlighting its potential for various practical applications

The flavor-changing single-top quark production in the littlest Higgs model with T parity at the LHC

The littlest Higgs model with discrete symmetry named "T-parity"(LHT) is an interesting new physics model which does not suffer strong constraints from electroweak precision data. One of the important features of the LHT model is the existence of new source of FC interactions between the SM fermions and the mirror fermions. These FC interactions can make significant loop-level contributions to the couplings $tcV$, and furthermore enhance the cross sections of the FC single-top quark production processes. In this paper, we study some FC single-top quark production processes, $pp\to t\bar{c}$ and $pp\to tV$, at the LHC in the LHT model. We find that the cross sections of these processes are strongly depended on the mirror quark masses. The processes $pp\to t\bar{c}$ and $pp\to tg$ have large cross sections with heavy mirror quarks. The observation of these FC processes at the LHC is certainly the clue of new physics, and further precise measurements of the cross scetions can provide useful information about the free parameters in the LHT model, specially about the mirror quark masses.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure