Rhizoma Paridis, as a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), has been used in clinic for thousands of years. Recently, the hepatic toxicity was reported in some published articles while its ...hepatotoxicity mechanisms have not been well established. Therefore, the present study was performed to determine the effect of Rhizoma Paridis treatment on the lipid deposition and metabolism, oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction, and explore the underlying molecular mechanism through L02 cell, rat and zebrafish larvae. Rhizoma Paridis could diminish cell activity and cell proliferation, brought on cell apoptosis and elevated the levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) compared with the control group, as evaluated in cell cultures. Rhizoma Paridis could result in the change of the liver structure and the liver function in the rat model and zebrafish larvae. Our results showed that Rhizoma Paridis could increase hepatic lipid accumulation, which was similar to the previous study and probably exerted toxic effect through intensive fatty acid lipogenesis, inhibition of fat degradation. Meanwhile, this experiment highlighted the importance of the oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, ER function, and the inflammation response in Rhizoma Paridis-induced disorder of hepatic lipid metabolism, which proposed a novel mechanism for interpretation of Rhizoma Paridis exposure inducing the disorder of lipid metabolism in vertebrates. Furthermore, the result of this experiment suggested that the toxicity response of zebrafish larvae was similar to the conventional model with a significant advantage.
Display omitted
•DA is a dual-PPAR-α/γ and PPAR-γ partial agonist.•DA alleviates HFD-induced insulin resistance via PPAR-γ.•DA alleviates HFD-induced hepatic steatosis via PPAR-α.
Dual-PPAR-α/γ agonist has the dual ...potentials to improve insulin resistance (IR) and hepatic steatosis associated with obesity. This study aimed to investigate whether dehydroabietic acid (DA), a naturally occurred compound, can bind to and activate both PPAR-γ and PPAR-α to ameliorate IR and hepatic steatosis in high-fat diet (HFD)-fed mice.. We found that DA formed stable hydrogen bonds with the ligand-binding domains of PPAR-γ and PPAR-α. DA treatment also promoted 3T3-L1 differentiation via PPAR-γ activation, and mitochondrial oxygen consumption in HL7702 cells via PPAR-α activation. In HFD-fed mice, DA treatment alleviated glucose intolerance and IR, and reduced hepatic steatosis, liver injury markers (ALT, AST), and lipid accumulation, and promoted mRNA expression of PPAR-γ and PPAR-α signaling elements involved in IR and lipid metabolism in vivo and in vitro, and inhibited mRNA expression of pro-inflammatory factors. Therefore, DA is a dual-PPAR-α/γ and PPAR-γ partial agonist, which can attenuate IR and hepatic steatosis induced by HFD-consumption in mice.
Clinical reports on hepatotoxicity that arise from Rhizoma Paridis have recently received widespread attention. Because the hepatotoxicity mechanism is little understood, this research strived to ...investigate the hepatotoxicity mechanism of Rhizoma Paridis extracts based on iTRAQ quantitative proteomics and metabonomics. The extraction solutions were administrated to rats for 7 days by gavage, and the hepatotoxicity was assessed through quantification of biochemical indexes and Oil red O staining. Additionally, the mechanism of hepatotoxicity was investigated by metabonomics based upon GC-MS and iTRAQ quantitative proteomics. The biochemical and histopathological analysis stood out that Rhizoma Paridis extract could induce liver injury, which was proved by the formation of fat droplets, the changes of mitochondrial structure, and biochemical parameters. The iTRAQ proteomics and metabonomics revealed that Rhizoma Paridis-induced hepatotoxicity was chiefly connected with the abnormal activity of mitochondrion function, which brought about oxidative stress injuries and inflammation, finally causing cell apoptosis. Collectively, we have provided previously uncharacterized hepatotoxic mechanism induced by Rhizoma Paridis and a reference to ensure its safe use in the future.
In this paper, we report a fiber-optic carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) near-infrared (IR) absorption sensor with only 8-cm sensing length that is coated with nanoporous metalorganic framework material Cu-BTC ...(BTC = benzene-1,3, 5-tricarboxylate). The multimode optical fiber was etched by hydrofluoric acid to remove the cladding and part of the core, resulting in larger evanescent field to sense the near-IR absorption induced by the adsorbed CO 2 . The Cu-BTC thin film with 100 nm thickness was then grown onto the ethced core through a stepwise layer-by-layer method. Our real-time measurement results show that the CO 2 detection limit is better than 500 ppm and the overall response time is 40 s for absorption and 75 s for desorption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the shortest near-IR fiber-optic sensor for CO2 detection at 1.57-μm wavelength.
Diatomaceous earth-otherwise called diatomite-is essentially composed of hydrated biosilica with periodic nanopores. Diatomite is derived from fossilized remains of diatom frustules and possesses ...photonic-crystal features. In this paper, diatomite simultaneously functions as the matrix of the chromatography plate and the substrate for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), by which the photonic crystal-features could enhance the optical field intensity. The on-chip separation performance of the device was confirmed by separating and detecting industrial dye (Sudan I) in an artificial aqueous mixture containing 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (MBA), where concentrated plasmonic Au colloid was casted onto the analyte spot for SERS measurement. The plasmonic-photonic hybrid mode between the Au nanoparticles (NP) and the diatomite layer could supply nearly 10 times the increment of SERS signal (MBA) intensity compared to the common silica gel chromatography plate. Furthermore, this lab-on-a-chip photonic crystal device was employed for food safety sensing in real samples and successfully monitored histamine in salmon and tuna. This on-chip food sensor can be used as a cheap, robust, and portable sensing platform for monitoring for histamine or other harmful ingredients at trace levels in food products.
Surface-enhanced infrared absorption (SEIRA) is capable of identifying molecular fingerprints by resonant detection of infrared vibrational modes through the coupling with plasmonic modes of metallic ...nanostructures. However, SEIRA for on-chip gas sensing is still not very successful due to the intrinsically weak light-matter interaction between photons and gas molecules and the technical challenges in accumulating sufficient gas species in the vicinity of the spatially localized enhanced electric field, namely, the “hot-spots”, generated through plasmonics. In this paper, we present a suspended silicon nitride (Si3N4) nanomembrane device by integrating plasmonic nanopatch gold antennas with metal–organic framework (MOF), which can largely adsorb carbon dioxide (CO2) through its nanoporous structure. Unlike conventional SEIRA sensing relying on highly localized hot-spots of plasmonic nanoantennas or nanoparticles, the device reported in this paper engineered the coupled surface plasmon polaritons in the metal–Si3N4 and metal–MOF interfaces to achieve strong optical field enhancement across the entire MOF film. We successfully demonstrated on-chip gas sensing of CO2 with more than 1800× enhancement factors by combining the concentration effect from the 2.7 μm MOF thin film and the optical field enhancement of the plasmonic nanopatch antennas.
Recently discovered extraordinary optical nonlinearities in epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) materials open a new realm of ultra-energy-efficient, all-optical switching devices for future optical ...communication and computation. In this paper, we propose a sub-micron, sub-pico-second, femto-joule level all-optical switch (AOS) using hybrid plasmonic-silicon waveguides driven by high mobility transparent conductive oxides (HMTCOs) such as cadmium oxide. Our analysis indicates that the ENZ-induced nonlinear optical effect is greatly enhanced by the high free carrier mobility in the telecom wavelength region. We propose an electrically tunable AOS device which is precisely biased at the ENZ condition, or the high-loss "OFF" state. Then the AOS device can be switched to the "ON" state with an unprecedented modulation strength of 15.9 dB/μm and a rapid switching time of 230 fs at the cost of an ultralow switching energy of 13.5 fJ. By defining a comprehensive metric using the product of device size, switching energy and switching time, the proposed ENZ-enabled device shows superior performance than any existing on-chip AOS device. We envision that such HMTCO-driven AOS device can be integrated with silicon photonic integrated circuits to realize on-chip optical signal processing and computation with ultra-low energy and ultra-high bandwidth.
PDF
