Ethnopharmacological relevance: The genus Polygonatum Tourn, ex Mill. contains numerous chemical components, such as steroidal saponins, polysaccharides, flavonoids, alkaloids, and others, it ...possesses diverse pharmacological activities, such as anti-aging, anti-tumor, immunological regulation, as well as blood glucose management and fat reducing properties. Aim of the review: This study reviews the current state of research on the systematic categorization, chemical composition, pharmacological effects, and processing changes of the plants belonging to the genus Polygonatum, to provide a theoretical foundation for their scientific development and rational application. Materials and methods: The information was obtained by searching the scientific literature published between 1977 and 2022 on online databases (including PubMed, CNKI, SciFinder, and Web of Science) and other sources (such as the Chinese Pharmacopoeia 2020 edition, and Chinese herbal books). Results: The genus Polygonatum contains 79 species, and 233 bioactive chemical compounds were identified in them. The abundance of pharmacological activities, such as antioxidant activities, anti-fatigue activities, anti-inflammatory activities, etc., were revealed for the representatives of this genus. In addition, there are numerous processing methods, and many chemical constituents and pharmacological activities change after the unappropriated processing. Conclusions: This review summarizes the taxonomy classification, chemical composition, pharmacological effects, and processing of the plants belonging to the genus Polygonatum, providing references and research tendencies for plant-based drug development and further clinical applications.
Increasing the content of oleic acid in peanut seeds is one of the major goals in peanut breeding due to consumer and industry benefits, such as anti-oxidation and long shelf-life. Homeologous ...ahFAD2A and ahFAD2B genes encode fatty acid desaturases, which are the key enzymes for converting oleic acid to linoleic acid that oxidizes readily. To date, all high oleic acid peanut varieties result from natural mutations occurred in both genes. A method to induce mutations in the genes of other elite cultivars could speed introgression of this valuable trait. The gene-editing approach utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 technology was employed to induce de novo mutations in the ahFAD2 genes using peanut protoplasts and hairy root cultures as models.
The hot spot of natural mutation in these genes was selected as the target region. Appropriate sgRNAs were designed and cloned into a CRISPR/Cas9 expression plasmid. As a result of CRISPR/Cas9 activity, three mutations were identified - G448A in ahFAD2A, and 441_442insA and G451T in ahFAD2B. The G448A and 441_442insA mutations are the same as those seen in existing high oleate varieties and the G451T is new mutation. Because natural mutations appear more often in the ahFAD2A gene than in the ahFAD2B gene in subspecies A. hypogaea var. hypogaea, the mutations induced in ahFAD2B by gene editing may be useful in developing high oleate lines with many genetic backgrounds after validation of oleic acid content in the transformed lines. The appearance of the G448A mutation in ahFAD2A is a further benefit for high oleic acid oil content.
Overall, these results showed that mutations were, for the first time, induced by CRISPR-based gene editing approach in peanut. This research demonstrated the potential application of gene editing for mutagenesis in peanut and suggested that CRISPR/Cas9 technology may be useful in the peanut breeding programs.
According to Chinese ancient books, both fruits and rhizomes of Polygonatum cyrtonema Hua have medicinal and edible values. Up to now, there is no report about the metabolite profiles and regulatory ...network in fruits and different year-old rhizomes of P. cyrtonema. In this study, we performed integrative analyses of metabolome and transcriptome to reveal the dynamic accumulation and regulatory network of fruits and different year-old rhizomes in P. cyrtonema. The relative content of phenolic acids, lignans and coumarins, flavonoids and alkaloids increased with growth years, while steroids and lipids decreased with it. In addition, the relative content of nucleotides and derivatives, flavonoids, organic acids, steroids and lipids in fruits were higher than rhizomes. Genes that might relate to the biosynthesis of polysaccharides, flavonoids, triterpene saponins and alkaloids biosynthesis were further analyzed by transcriptome analysis, including sacA, GMPP, PMM, CCoAOMT, CHI, ANR, CHS, DXS, GGPS, ZEP, CYP72A219 and so on, for their expressions were positively correlated with the relative content of the metabolites. Additionally, the correlation network in sugar and aromatic amino acids metabolites were constructed to further illustrate the biosynthesis of polysaccharides, flavonoids and alkaloids in P. cyrtonema, and some transcription factors (TFs) were screened, such as C2C2, MYB, bZIP, GRAS and NAC. This study can deepen our understanding of the accumulation patterns and molecular mechanism of the main compounds in P. cyrtonema, and provide reference for the standardize production of P. cyrtonema.
A neutral
polysaccharide (NPCP) was isolated and purified from
by various chromatographic techniques, including DEAE-52 and Sephadex-G100 chromatography. The structure of NPCP was characterized by ...HPLC, HPGPC, GC-MS, FT-IR, NMR, and SEM. Results showed that NPCP is composed of glucose (55.4%) and galactose (44.6%) with a molecular weight of 3.2 kDa, and the sugar chain of NPCP was →1)-α-D-Glc-(4→1)-β-D-Gal-(3→. In vitro bioactivity experiments demonstrated that NPCP significantly enhanced macrophages proliferation and phagocytosis while inhibiting the M1 polarization induced by LPS as well as the M2 polarization induced by IL-4 and IL-13 in macrophages. Additionally, NPCP suppressed the secretion of IL-6 and TNF-α in both M1 and M2 cells but promoted the secretion of IL-10. These results suggest that NPCP could serve as an immunomodulatory agent with potential applications in anti-inflammatory therapy.
A predisposition for thoracic aortic aneurysms leading to acute aortic dissections can be inherited in families in an autosomal dominant manner. Genome-wide linkage analysis of two large unrelated ...families with thoracic aortic disease followed by whole-exome sequencing of affected relatives identified causative mutations in TGFB2. These mutations-a frameshift mutation in exon 6 and a nonsense mutation in exon 4-segregated with disease with a combined logarithm of odds (LOD) score of 7.7. Sanger sequencing of 276 probands from families with inherited thoracic aortic disease identified 2 additional TGFB2 mutations. TGFB2 encodes transforming growth factor (TGF)-β2, and the mutations are predicted to cause haploinsufficiency for TGFB2; however, aortic tissue from cases paradoxically shows increased TGF-β2 expression and immunostaining. Thus, haploinsufficiency for TGFB2 predisposes to thoracic aortic disease, suggesting that the initial pathway driving disease is decreased cellular TGF-β2 levels leading to a secondary increase in TGF-β2 production in the diseased aorta.
This study aimed to examine the effects of activated charcoal-herb extractum complex (CHC) on the growth performance of broilers, inflammatory status, microbiota, and their relationships. A total of ...864 1-day-old Arbor Acres male broilers (41.83 ± 0.64 g) were distributed to eight dietary treatments with six replicates (18 birds per replicate), which were a corn-soybean meal-based diet (NCON); basal diets supplemented with 250, 500, 750, or 1,000 mg/kg CHC, and three positive controls; basal diets supplemented with 200 mg/kg antibacterial peptide (AMP), 200 mg/kg calsporin (Probio) or 500 mg/kg montmorillonite. The study period was 42 days including the starter (day 0-21) and grower (day 22-42) phases. Compared with the NCON group, CHC supplementation (optimal dose of 500 mg/kg) increased (
< 0.05) growth performance and tended to increase feed conversion rate in broilers. CHC (optimal dose of 500 mg/kg) decreased the level of the interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and interferon-γ (IFN-γ) in serum and improved the levels of immunoglobulins A (IgA) and immunoglobulins A (IgM) in serum, and secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA) in the mucosa of duodenum and jejunum (
< 0.05). In the ileum, CHC supplementation decreased community abundance represented by lower Sobs, Chao 1, Ace, and Shannon compared with NCON (
< 0.05). At the phylum level, CHC supplementation increased the abundance of Firmicutes, while decreasing the abundance of Bacteroidetes in ileum and cecum (
< 0.05). At the genus level, compared with the NCON group, CHC markedly reduced (
< 0.05) the abundances of pathogenic bacteria
in the ileum, which were negatively associated with the levels of SIgA and IL-1β in ileum mucosa. In conclusion, CHC had beneficial effects on growth performance, immune status, and intestinal microbiota composition. CHC had dual functions of absorption like clays and antibacterial like antibacterial peptides.
Multiview clustering is a hot research topic in machine learning and computer vision, and many non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)-based multiview clustering approaches have been proposed. ...However, most existing NMF-based multiview clustering methods aim to only push the learned latent feature matrices of all views towards a common consensus representation or only consider the consistency among all multiview data, whereas the complementary information between different views is often ignored. In this work, we propose a novel multi-view clustering via consistent and specific nonnegative matrix factorization with graph regularization method (
MCCS
), where the consistency among all multiview data and view-specific information in each view data are simultaneously considered. Specifically, the NMF problem is first formulated using a shared consistent basis matrix, consistent coefficient matrix, a set of view-specific basis matrices, and view-specific coefficient matrices. Then, manifold regularization is embedded into the objective function to preserve the intrinsic geometrical structure of the original data space. Furthermore, a disagreement term is designed to push these view-specific coefficient matrices further towards a common consensus and to ensure that the multiple views have the same underlying cluster structure. Moreover, the multiplicative update algorithm is employed to optimize the objective function. Extensive experimental results on five multiview benchmark datasets, namely, BBC, BBCSport, 20NGs, Wikipedia, and Handwritten, demonstrate that the proposed
MCCS
outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of 2.29%, 6.63%, 16.15%, 6.51%, and 2.85%, respectively, over the MVCC method in terms of NMI.
Gene mutations that lead to decreased contraction of vascular smooth-muscle cells (SMCs) can cause inherited thoracic aortic aneurysms and dissections. Exome sequencing of distant relatives affected ...by thoracic aortic disease and subsequent Sanger sequencing of additional probands with familial thoracic aortic disease identified the same rare variant, PRKG1 c.530G>A (p.Arg177Gln), in four families. This mutation segregated with aortic disease in these families with a combined two-point LOD score of 7.88. The majority of affected individuals presented with acute aortic dissections (63%) at relatively young ages (mean 31 years, range 17–51 years). PRKG1 encodes type I cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG-1), which is activated upon binding of cGMP and controls SMC relaxation. Although the p.Arg177Gln alteration disrupts binding to the high-affinity cGMP binding site within the regulatory domain, the altered PKG-1 is constitutively active even in the absence of cGMP. The increased PKG-1 activity leads to decreased phosphorylation of the myosin regulatory light chain in fibroblasts and is predicted to cause decreased contraction of vascular SMCs. Thus, identification of a gain-of-function mutation in PRKG1 as a cause of thoracic aortic disease provides further evidence that proper SMC contractile function is critical for maintaining the integrity of the thoracic aorta throughout a lifetime.
Mutations in smooth muscle cell (SMC)-specific isoforms of α-actin and β-myosin heavy chain, two major components of the SMC contractile unit, cause familial thoracic aortic aneurysms leading to ...acute aortic dissections (FTAAD). To investigate whether mutations in the kinase that controls SMC contractile function (myosin light chain kinase
MYLK) cause FTAAD, we sequenced
MYLK by using DNA from 193 affected probands from unrelated FTAAD families. One nonsense and four missense variants were identified in
MYLK and were not present in matched controls. Two variants, p.R1480X (c.4438C>T) and p.S1759P (c.5275T>C), segregated with aortic dissections in two families with a maximum LOD score of 2.1, providing evidence of linkage of these rare variants to the disease (p = 0.0009). Both families demonstrated a similar phenotype characterized by presentation with an acute aortic dissection with little to no enlargement of the aorta. The p.R1480X mutation leads to a truncated protein lacking the kinase and calmodulin binding domains, and p.S1759P alters amino acids in the α-helix of the calmodulin binding sequence, which disrupts kinase binding to calmodulin and reduces kinase activity in vitro. Furthermore, mice with SMC-specific knockdown of
Mylk demonstrate altered gene expression and pathology consistent with medial degeneration of the aorta. Thus, genetic and functional studies support the conclusion that heterozygous loss-of-function mutations in
MYLK are associated with aortic dissections.
Supply chain logistics information collaboration (SCLIC) is the basis and premise of supply chain logistics collaboration. An effective logistics information collaboration strategy can improve ...enterprises' chances of success in a new partnership in the supply chain. However, SCLIC is usually difficult to be achieved because of the complexity of the impact factor, strategy evolution process, and stability strategies. We propose an evolutionary game theory-based SCLIC strategy to solve this problem. Firstly, we build an evolutionary game model of SCLIC based on a two-echelon supply chain composed of suppliers and manufacturers. The strategy evolution game of suppliers, manufacturers, and the combination of manufacturers and suppliers are analyzed based on benefit maximization. The evolutionary stability strategy (ESS) is determined. Secondly, we analyze the impact of the relevant parameters on the strategy evolution process. And we use a comprehensive simulation to examine the efficiency of the proposed model. Finally, some managerial insights are presented for the supply chain enterprises to promote the realization of SCLIC.
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