Fruit and vegetable fermented beverages, a functional non-dairy fermented product, are popular worldwide due to their health-promoting attributes. It is reported that a variety of nutrients and ...chemical composition are found in fruit and vegetable fermented beverages, and health-promoting effects also have been reported. In addition, the quality and consumer acceptance of products is largely affected by probiotics starter, fermentation process, juice sterilization process and beverage enhancements. Considering the extensive reports on fruit and vegetable fermented beverages, the summary of these aspects is rare and not comprehensive enough. In view of this, we realized that it is necessary to update influencing factors of the quality and consumer acceptance of fruit and vegetable fermented beverages and some of the technologies involved, as well as nutrients, chemical properties and health benefits. Based on recent developments, it can be anticipated that fruit and vegetable fermented beverages will continue to be an important part of the functional food market.
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BFBNIB, GIS, IJS, KISLJ, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
While post-transcriptional modifications play a pivotal role in the autophagy regulation, studies on dental pulp disease are limited. This study investigated the effect of BRF1 on autophagy in ...inflamed pulp tissue and human dental pulp stem cells (hDPSCs).
Immunohistochemical analysis was used to examine BRF1 expression, autophagy levels, and dentinogenic markers in normal and inflamed pulp. The presence of autophagosomes was observed by transmission electron microscopy. Primary hDPSCs were treated with 1 μg/mL lipopolysaccharide (LPS) for different lengths of time. The expression of BRF1 and autophagy makers was determined by Western blotting. BRF1 knockdown and 3MA treatment were employed to assess changes in autophagy and dentinogenic differentiation. Double immunofluorescence staining was performed to co-localize BRF1 with LC3B in pulp tissue.
The expressions of BRF1, LC3, DMP1, and DSP were significantly elevated in the inflamed pulp. LPS enhanced the protein production of IL-6, BRF1, LC3, and Beclin-1 from 6 h to 24 h after the treatment. BRF1 knockdown reduced the ratio of LC3-II/LC3-I and the differentiation ability of hDPSCs, while 3MA inhibited LPS-mediated dentinogenic differentiation. Double-labeling revealed that BRF1 co-localized with LC3B in inflamed pulp.
This study demonstrated that BRF1 promoted autophagy activation and odontogenic differentiation in pulpitis.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
It is important to understand the mechanism that regulates post-ischemic angiogenesis and to explore a new therapeutic target for an effective improvement of revascularization in peripheral artery ...disease (PAD) patients. Post-ischemic angiogenesis is a highly orchestrated process, which involves vascular endothelial cells (ECs) proliferation, migration and assembly into capillaries. We found a significant reduction of S1pr2 (sphingosine 1-phosphate receptor 2) in endothelial cells after hindlimb ischemia (HLI). We thus hypothesized that EC-S1pr2 might be involved in the regulation of post-ischemic angiogenesis and blood flow recovery during peripheral arterial disease (PAD).
We generated both EC-specific S1pr2 loss-of-function and S1pr2 gain-of-function mice. Our study showed that EC-specific S1pr2 loss-of-function significantly enhanced post-ischemic angiogenesis and improved blood flow recovery upon femoral artery ligation, whereas the EC-specific S1pr2 gain-of-function severely hindered post-ischemic angiogenesis and reduced blood flow recovery in ischemic limbs. We next identified that S1pr2 inhibited AKT/eNOS signaling pathway, and thus inhibited EC proliferation/migration and angiogenic activity. As expected, pharmacological inhibition of S1pr2 by JTE013 improved post-ischemic angiogenesis and improved blood flow perfusion after femoral artery ligation. Moreover, we developed RGD-peptide magnetic nanoparticles packaging S1pr2-siRNA which specifically targeted ECs and achieved an efficient silencing of S1pr2 expression in ECs
. This EC-targeted strategy to dampen S1pr2 significantly enhanced post-ischemic angiogenesis and boosted blood perfusion after HLI, supplying a novel therapy target for patients with peripheral arterial disease.
This present study demonstrates that EC-expressing S1pr2 tightly controls post-ischemic angiogenesis and blood flow perfusion recovery. This research provides a novel strategy for EC-target knockdown of S1pr2 as a new therapeutic intervention for patients with peripheral artery disease.
Objectives
Our study aimed to observe the distribution of putative stem cells in irreversible pulpitis and to investigate the expression of specific molecules.
Subjects and Methods
Extracted third ...molar teeth were collected and divided into two groups: the normal pulp group and inflamed pulp group. Real‐time PCR was applied to detect the expression of several embryonic and dentinogenic genes. The expression of mesenchymal cell markers (STRO‐1, CD90, and CD146) and stromal cell‐derived factor 1α (SDF‐1α)/CXC chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4) proteins was examined by immunohistochemical analysis.
Results
The expression levels of most embryonic and dentinogenic genes were not statistically different between the two groups. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed that in inflamed pulp, cells with positive expression for STRO‐1, CD90, and CD146 mainly resided in two specific niches, both adjacent to inflammatory sites: one in the pulp core and another in the odontoblast layer. SDF‐1α‐ and CXCR4‐positive cells were significantly correlated with STRO‐1‐positive cells. Double immunofluorescence analysis indicated that STRO‐1‐positive cells overlapped with SDF‐1α‐ and CXCR4‐positive cells near the inflammatory site.
Conclusions
This study gave a direct observation of putative stem cells distributed in irreversible pulpitis and implied a role of SDF‐1α/CXCR4 signaling in stem cell‐based therapies for reparative dentinogenesis.
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CMK, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Deep learning-based edge detectors heavily rely on pixel-wise labels which are often provided by multiple annotators. Existing methods fuse multiple annotations using a simple voting process, ...ignoring the inherent ambiguity of edges and labeling bias of annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware edge detector (UAED), which employs uncertainty to investigate the subjectivity and ambiguity of diverse annotations. Specifically, we first convert the deterministic label space into a learnable Gaussian distribution, whose variance measures the degree of ambiguity among different annotations. Then we regard the learned variance as the estimated uncertainty of the predicted edge maps, and pixels with higher uncertainty are likely to be hard samples for edge detection. Therefore we design an adaptive weighting loss to emphasize the learning from those pixels with high uncertainty, which helps the network to gradually concentrate on the important pixels. UAED can be combined with various encoder-decoder backbones, and the extensive experiments demonstrate that UAED achieves superior performance consistently across multiple edge detection benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZhouCX117/UAED.
Metallic super‐hydrophobic surfaces with ultralow water adhesion are essential for a wide variety of applications, such as enhanced condensation heat transfer and anti‐icing applications. ...Broccoli‐like multiscale micro‐ and nanostructures composed of four different microscale and nanoscale features are fabricated on different metal surfaces by an inexpensive nanosecond laser system in this study. The surface shows high stability during evaporation, and the surface water adhesion of this structure is only 1.4 ± 0.4 µN, much lower than that of typical reported surfaces. Slight changes to the surface morphology results in an increase in the surface water adhesion, and this unique broccoli‐like surface structure shows an much better anti‐frost ability compared with similar structures with slightly higher water adhesion. The results provide a cost‐effective method to achieve large‐area metallic super‐hydrophobic surfaces with extremely low water adhesion and superior anti‐frost ability.
Broccoli‐like multiscale micro‐ and nanostructures are fabricated on different metal surfaces by an inexpensive nanosecond laser system. The surface water adhesion of this structure is only 1.4 ± 0.4 µN. This unique broccoli‐like surface structure shows an enhanced anti‐frost ability compared with similar structures with slightly higher water adhesion.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Animal studies showed glucocorticoids could specifically dilate renal vasculature, regulate synthesis and release of atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP), upregulate ANP receptors on vascular endothelial ...cells, and thus have potent potentiating diuresis and natriuresis effects in animal studies; however, their diuretic efficacy in humans is yet to be known. Therefore, we designed this randomized, double- blind, placebo-controlled, clinical study to determine the diuretic efficacy of prednisone, a glucocorticoid, in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF).
METHODS:Twenty clinically stable patients with CHF without overt fluid retention were randomized to a prednisone group or placebo group. Prednisone (1 mg/kg/day with a maximum dose of 60 mg/day) was added to standard care for 7 days, leaving other medications unchanged. Variables included urine volume and electrolytes, serum electrolytes, and change from baseline in serum creatinine.
RESULTS:Adding prednisone resulted in striking diuresis and natriuresis with time. As compared with the placebo group, the maximum of mean daily urine volume was 810.5 mL larger than those in the placebo group (95% confidence intervals CI 276.25 to 1344.86, P < 0.05). The maximum mean daily sodium excretion was 123.8 mmol higher than those patients given placebo (95% CI 11.4 to 236.2, P < 0.05). The placebo-corrected effect on change from baseline in serum creatinine was −19.5 μmol/L (95% CI −7.4 to −31.6, P < 0.01), favoring prednisone.
CONCLUSIONS:This pilot study showed that prednisone had potent potentiating diuretic effects in patients with heart failure and might improve renal function in the same time. Further prospective randomized clinical studies are warranted to determine the preferable dose and its efficacy in decompensated congestive heart failure.
•A visual multimodal facial database for hedonic recognition is constructed.•Hedonic rating categories are identified by automatic facial expression recognition technique.•A hybrid deep learning ...framework is employed to exploit facial information.
The emotional reactions that certain products evoke (like or dislike) play a key role in the user acceptance or preference toward these products and influence the choice behaviors. Facial expressions constitute a primary channel to express and communicate emotions. In particular, the facial reactions evoked by certain stimuli are generated subconsciously, and they can be easily captured by video recording. However, it is challenging to quantify and objectively describe facial expressions. Until now, most implicit measurements based on facial expression analyses have been implemented considering “basic emotions”, which cannot directly represent like/dislike. How can we identify the affective state of consumers directly by using facial expression analysis technology? In this study, hedonic rating categories are defined based on the hedonic scale, and automatic facial expression analysis technology is applied to evaluate the suitability of the defined categories. Moreover, a visual multimodal facial database (RGB, depth, and infrared images) for the hedonic recognition of Asian individuals is constructed. A hybrid deep learning framework is employed to exploit the spatiotemporal information of the collected data to realize hedonic recognition. Early and late fusion strategies are used to investigate the suitability of the individual modalities and their complementarity. The experimental results indicate that the late fusion of the three modalities yielded the highest recognition accuracy compared to those obtained using individual modalities and the early fusion scheme. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of fusing different visual facial data and indicate that the use of multimodality-based facial expression analyses could enhance the accuracy of hedonic recognition.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
A poor oxygen evolution reaction (OER) activity restricts the efficiency of large scale H 2 production from water splitting. Developing highly active, low cost and lasting electrocatalysts has become ...a top priority. Herein, we have successfully synthesized iron and nickel co-doped cobalt hydroxide (Co–Ni–Fe 511 ) nanosheets for the OER. This catalyst exhibits outstanding performance with an overpotential of 288 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm −2 , a high polarization current of about 67 mA cm −2 at 330 mV overpotential, a low Tafel slope of 43 mV dec −1 , and small degradation after 8 hours of long-term OER operation. In addition, we simulate alkaline water electrolysis at a current density of 200 mA cm −2 at 70 °C in 6 M KOH electrolyte, and the energy consumption of Co–Ni–Fe 511 is 45.7 kW h kg H2 −1 . For comparison, commercial RuO 2 consumed 46.8 kW h kg H2 −1 . This suggests that Co–Ni–Fe 511 is more appropriate than commercial RuO 2 for water electrolysis in commercial water electrolysis. The high activity, low Tafel slope, good stability and low energy consumption will pave the way for the use of Co–Ni–Fe 511 in practical applications.
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IJS, KILJ, NUK, UL, UM, UPUK
A multilayered NiO film is fabricated on 3D Ni foam (NF) substrate via electrochemical cyclic voltammetry (CV) as a high-efficient methanol oxidation catalyst. We carefully studied the formation ...mechanism of an as-fabricated electrode and found that lower cathode potential in CV plays a key role in constructing the microstructure of this material. The as-synthesized electrode shows remarkable electrocatalytic methanol oxidation activity (161.5 mA cm
−2
in 1 M KOH with 0.3 M methanol) and good stability (current retention >92% after 500 cycles) in three-electrode measurement. Moreover, the NiO film/Ni foam is further used as anode catalyst in two-electrode configured methanol-water solution electrolysis. A sharp decline of cell voltage is observed (∼170 mV) when 0.1 M methanol was added in alkaline solution. In addition, the methanol-water solution electrolysis also exhibits lower electric energy consumption (∼41.87 KWh kg
−1
Hydrogen
@200 mA cm
−2
) for hydrogen production.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
