is now widely consumed as a functional food and medicinal product, which is known as an enhancer of reproductive health. However, the specific chemical composition and mechanism of action for ...improving sexual function are unclear. The present study aims at screening and determining the potential compounds, which promote mouse leydig cells (TM3) proliferation. The partial least squares analysis (PLS) was employed to reveal the correlation between common peaks of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) fingerprint of
and the proliferation activity of TM3. The results suggested that three compounds had good activities on the proliferation of TM3 and promoting testosterone secretion, there were
-benzyl-hexadecanamide,
-benzyl-(9z,12z)-octadecadienamide and
-benzyl-(9z,12z,15z)-octadecatrienamide which might be the potential bioactive markers related to the enhancing sexual ability functions of
. The first step in testosterone synthesis is the transport of cholesterol into the mitochondria, and the homeostasis of mitochondrial function is related to cyclophilin D (CypD). In order to expound how bioactive ingredients lead to promoting testosterone secretion, a molecular docking simulation was used for further illustration in the active sites and binding degree of the ligands on CypD. The results indicated there was a positive correlation between the binding energy absolute value and testosterone secretion activity. In addition, in this study it also provided the reference for a simple, quick method to screen the promoting leydig cell proliferation active components in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).
Focusing of biological particles has important applications in the fields of biology, medicine, chemistry and environment. The emergence of microfluidic technology has brought new opportunities for ...the manipulation of biological particles. However, existing methods generally produce a relatively large shear stress or thermal effect on biological particles, which may cause negative biological effects during manipulation, especially for sensitive bioparticles. Herein, we propose a novel strategy for microfluidic focusing of microparticles based on negative magnetophoresis and oscillatory flow. A simple and efficient simulation model is first developed to calculate the motion of particles under magnetic field and fluid field. The non-monotonic size dependence of particle focusing is then revealed and elaborately analyzed. Furthermore, the effects of oscillatory flow field and magnetic field on particle focusing are quantitatively investigated and the particle size range for effective focusing in our proposed chip is provided. The proposed strategy of microfluidic focusing can guide the real applications such as enrichment and separation of sensitive biological particles.
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•Developing a high efficient enantioselective decarboxylative 4+2 cycloaddition.•Providing a series of enantio-enriched 3,4-dihydroquinolin-2-one derivatives in high yields.•Dipolar ...copper–allenylidenes as the key intermediates to react enolate azlactones.
In this paper, a pybox-copper catalyzed enantioselective decarboxylative 4+2 cycloaddition reaction of ethynyl benzoxazinanones with azlactones has been developed, which provides optically active 3,4-dihydroquinolin-2-ones in high yields with good enantioselectivities and diastereoselectivities. In this transformation, the chiral dipolar copper–allenylidene intermediates are kinetically generated via decarboxylative ethynyl benzoxazinanones, followed by the attack of the enolate azlactones to form enantiomerically enriched 3,4-dihydroquinolin-2-one structures.
In this letter, the compact multilayer differential corrugated substrate integrated waveguide (CSIW) and half-mode CSIW (HMCSIW) are designed by two vertically stacked identical CSIW and HMCSIW, ...respectively, and an aperture is etched on the common ground between them. Both the CSIW and HMCSIW have only one nonzero vertical electric field component in host waveguide. Under the common-mode (CM) operation, the aperture is a perfect magnetic conductor (PMC). When the height of the single substrate is less than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\lambda _{g} </tex-math></inline-formula>/4, the space between the perfect electric conductor (PEC) and PMC cannot transmit electromagnetic waves, and the edge of the aperture is an open circuit. Therefore, the etched aperture in differential CSIW can effectively cutoff CM noise. For the HMCSIW, the spoof surface plasmon polariton (SPP) is loaded in the aperture near the open circuit plane to suppress the slot line mode. Under the differential-mode (DM) operation, the aperture has less effect on the DM frequency responses. For verification, the differential HMCSIW is fabricated, and good agreement between the measured and simulated results demonstrates the validity of proposed configurations.
Key message
Plant CaCA superfamily genes with higher tendency to retain after WGD are more gene expression and function differentiated in ion-response.
Plants and animals face different environmental ...stresses but share conserved Ca
2+
signaling pathways, such as Ca
2+
/Cation transport. The Ca
2+
/cation antiporters superfamily (CaCAs) is an ancient and widespread family of ion-coupled cation transporters found in all kingdoms of life. We analyzed the molecular evolution progress of the family through comparative genomics and phylogenetics of CaCAs genes from plants and animals, grouping these genes into several families and clades, and identified multiple gene duplication retention events, particularly in the CAX (H
+
/cation exchanger), CCX (cation/Ca
2+
exchanger), and NCL (Na
+
/Ca
2+
exchanger-like) families. The tendency of duplication retention differs between families and gene clades. The gene duplication events were probably the result of whole-genome duplication (WGD) in plants and might have led to functional divergence. Tissue and ion-response expression analyses revealed that CaCAs genes with more highly differentiated expression patterns are more likely to be retained as duplicates than those with more conserved expression profiles. Phenotype of
Arabidopsis thaliana
mutants showed that loss of genes with a greater tendency to be retained after duplication resulted in more severe growth deficiency. CaCAs genes in salt-tolerant species tended to inherit the expression characteristics of their most recent common ancestral genes, with conservative ion-response expression. This study indicates a possible evolutionary scheme for cation transport and illustrates distinct fates and a mechanism for the evolution of gene duplicates. The increased copy numbers of genes and divergences in expression might have contributed to the divergent functions of CaCAs protein, allowing plants to cope with environmental stresses and adapt to a larger number of ecological niches.
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•Environmentally relevant levels of PTC and dPTC reduced the fecundity of F0 parental zebrafish, especially in female zebrafish.•Transgenerational abnormal development occurred in ...unexposed offspring.•The possible mechanism was related to epigenetic modification involving DNA methylation.
Prothioconazole (PTC) is a widely used agricultural fungicide, and its parent and metabolite prothioconazole-desthio (dPTC) have been detected in diverse environmental media. This study was aimed at investigating the gender-dependent effects on adult zebrafish reproduction and intergenerational effects on offspring development following parental exposure to PTC and dPTC. The results showed that after the adult zebrafish (F0) was exposed to 0.5 and 10 μg/L PTC and dPTC for 21 days, the fertility and gametogenesis of female zebrafish were decreased more significantly than that of male zebrafish. After that, three fecundity tests were conducted in the exposure period to explore the development endpoints of F1 embryos/larvae without further treatment with PTC and dPTC exposure. However, PTC and dPTC exposure did lead to abnormal development of F1 embryos, including delayed hatching, shortened body length, abnormal development and significant changes in locomotor behavior. These changes were related to the abnormal expression of sex hormones and the regulation of DNA methylation in F0 fish. In a word, the results of this study showed that parental PTC and dPTC interference have sex-dependent reproductive toxicity on F0 zebrafish, which may be passed on to the next generation through epigenetic modification involving DNA methylation, resulting in alternations in growth phenotype of offspring.
Previous study revealed that the protective effect of TIGAR in cell survival is mediated through the increase in PPP (pentose phosphate pathway) flux. However, it remains unexplored if TIGAR plays an ...important role in DNA damage and repair. This study investigated the role of TIGAR in DNA damage response (DDR) induced by genotoxic drugs and hypoxia in tumor cells. Results showed that TIGAR was increased and relocated to the nucleus after epirubicin or hypoxia treatment in cancer cells. Knockdown of TIGAR exacerbated DNA damage and the effects were partly reversed by the supplementation of PPP products NADPH, ribose, or the ROS scavenger NAC. Further studies with pharmacological and genetic approaches revealed that TIGAR regulated the phosphorylation of ATM, a key protein in DDR, through Cdk5. The Cdk5-AMT signal pathway involved in regulation of DDR by TIGAR defines a new role of TIGAR in cancer cell survival and it suggests that TIGAR may be a therapeutic target for cancers.
Asian cultivated rice consists of two subspecies: Oryza sativa subsp. indica and O. sativa subsp. japonica. Despite the fact that indica rice accounts for over 70% of total rice production worldwide ...and is genetically much more diverse, a high-quality reference genome for indica rice has yet to be published. We conducted map-based sequencing of two indica rice lines, Zhenshan 97 (ZS97) andMinghui 63 (MH63), which represent the two major varietal groups of the indica subspecies and are the parents of an elite Chinese hybrid. The genome sequences were assembled into 237 (ZS97) and 181 (MH63) contigs, with an accuracy >99.99%, and covered 90.6% and 93.2% of their estimated genome sizes. Comparative analyses of these two indica genomes uncovered surprising structural differences, especially with respect to inversions, translocations, presence/absence variations, and segmental duplications. Approximately 42% of non-transposable element related genes were identical between the two genomes. Transcriptome analysis of three tissues showed that 1,059–2,217 more genes were expressed in the hybrid than in the parents and that the expressed genes in the hybrid were much more diverse due to their divergence between the parental genomes. The public availability of two high-quality reference genomes for the indica subspecies of rice will have large-ranging implications for plant biology and crop genetic improvement.
The purpose of this paper was to develop a machine learning algorithm with good performance in predicting bone metastasis (BM) in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and establish a simple web ...predictor based on the algorithm.
Patients who diagnosed with NSCLC between 2010 and 2018 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database were involved. To increase the extensibility of the research, data of patients who first diagnosed with NSCLC at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University between January 2007 and December 2016 were also included in this study. Independent risk factors for BM in NSCLC were screened by univariate and multivariate logistic regression. At this basis, we chose six commonly machine learning algorithms to build predictive models, including Logistic Regression (LR), Decision tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Naive Bayes classifiers (NBC) and eXtreme gradient boosting (XGB). Then, the best model was identified to build the web-predictor for predicting BM of NSCLC patients. Finally, area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were used to evaluate the performance of these models.
A total of 50581 NSCLC patients were included in this study, and 5087(10.06%) of them developed BM. The sex, grade, laterality, histology, T stage, N stage, and chemotherapy were independent risk factors for NSCLC. Of these six models, the machine learning model built by the XGB algorithm performed best in both internal and external data setting validation, with AUC scores of 0.808 and 0.841, respectively. Then, the XGB algorithm was used to build a web predictor of BM from NSCLC.
This study developed a web predictor based XGB algorithm for predicting the risk of BM in NSCLC patients, which may assist doctors for clinical decision making.
The improvement of microstructure and mechanical properties of Ti alloys is of great significance for their industrial application. In this study, a developed multi-step hot deformation process was ...employed to regulate the grain boundaries (GBs), hetero-phase boundaries (PBs) and dislocation structure for dual-phase titanium alloy. The effects of accumulative thermal deformation ratios from 33% to 75% (2–8 cycles) on the microstructure and mechanical properties have been investigated. It is found that the sintered sample shows a typical Widmanstätten structure without obvious pores and micro-cracks. However, with the increase of the deformation ratio, for the hexagonal close packed (HCP) Ti, the crystal orientations of {011‾0} and {1‾21‾0} were gradually transformed into {0001}, with the change of high-angle grain boundaries (HAGBs) to low-angle grain boundaries (LAGBs). The density of stored geometrically necessary dislocations (GNDs) density raised dramatically from 1.95 × 1014 m−2 to 6.5 × 1014 m−2, and various types of dislocations have been characterized. For the β phase, in the thermal deformation process, high density α-precipitates with an average thickness below 20 nm had formed with Burgers relationship of {110}BCC//{0001}HCP and <1‾11 >BCC//<21‾1‾0 >HCP. Finally, the yield strength of the dual-phase titanium alloy increased dramatically from 881 MPa to 1178 MPa, and the ductility can still maintain at above 8.5%. The enhanced strength was mainly contributed by the increase of geometrically necessary boundaries (GNBs) and nano-lamellae boundaries (NLBs). Therefore, this strategy of combining hetero-phase boundaries (PBs) and dislocation engineering could open up new avenues to designing strong and ductile titanium matrix materials.
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![Asymmetric [4+2] cycloaddit...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0040-4039/small "Asymmetric [4+2] cycloaddition of azlactones with dipolar copper–allenylidene intermediates for chiral 3,4-dhydroquinolin-2-one derivatives")
