Chestnut is popular worldwide for its unique flavor, high eating quality and nutrition. Here, we evaluated the influence of phosphorylation and acetylation on the structural, physicochemical and ...functional properties of chestnut starch. Scanning electron micrographs showed the agglomeration of starch granules and the appearance of numerous dents on the starch granule surface under phosphorylation and acetylation. X-ray diffractograms confirmed that the modification treatments did not affect the C-type crystal pattern, but reduced the relative crystallinity of the chestnut starch, particularly phosphorylation. Moreover, modification improved the paste transparency of the starch. Differential scanning calorimeter analysis revealed that the gelatinization temperature and enthalpy of the starch decreased with the increasing substitution degree, particularly in phosphorylated starch. The Rapid Visco Analyser analysis demonstrated that phosphorylation could greatly improve the pasting properties of chestnut starch. In addition, phosphorylated and acetylated starch had a smaller amount of slowly digested starch and a larger amount of resistant starch relative to native chestnut starch. In conclusion, the functional and physicochemical properties of chestnut starch can be significantly improved through phosphorylation and acetylation, demonstrating its great application potential as a food additive.
Spaceflight and ground-based microgravity analog experiments have suggested that microgravity can affect microbial growth and metabolism. Although the effects of microgravity and its analogs on ...microorganisms have been studied for more than 50 years, plausible conflicting and diverse results have frequently been reported in different experiments, especially regarding microbial growth and secondary metabolism. Until now, only the responses of a few typical microbes to microgravity have been investigated; systematic studies of the genetic and phenotypic responses of these microorganisms to microgravity in space are still insufficient due to technological and logistical hurdles. The use of different test strains and secondary metabolites in these studies appears to have caused diverse and conflicting results. Moreover, subtle changes in the extracellular microenvironments around microbial cells play a key role in the diverse responses of microbial growth and secondary metabolisms. Therefore, "indirect" effects represent a reasonable pathway to explain the occurrence of these phenomena in microorganisms. This review summarizes current knowledge on the changes in microbial growth and secondary metabolism in response to spaceflight and its analogs and discusses the diverse and conflicting results. In addition, recommendations are given for future studies on the effects of microgravity in space on microbial growth and secondary metabolism.
Support recovery of sparse signals via orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) has been extensively studied in recent years. In this paper, by exploiting the knowledge about orthogonal projection matrix ...and Schur complement, we study the sufficient conditions for exact support recovery of sparse signals with OMP in the framework of restricted isometry property (RIP). In the noisy case, we prove that under some constraints on the minimum magnitude of the nonzero elements of the K-sparse signal, OMP can exactly recover the support of the signal if the restricted isometry constant δ κ+1 satisfies δ κ+1 <; 1/√K + 1. Our constraints on the minimum magnitude of nonzero elements of the signal are weaker than existing ones. In the noiseless case, although it has been proved that δ κ+1 <; 1/√K + 1 is a sharp condition for exactly recovering any K-sparse signal with OMP, our result shows that under some constraints on the signal, OMP can also exactly recover the signal if δ κ+1 satisfies δ κ+1 <; √2/2.
Ruminants are the only extant mammalian group possessing bony (osseous) headgear. We obtained 221 transcriptomes from bovids and cervids and sequenced three genomes representing the only two pecoran ...lineages that convergently lack headgear. Comparative analyses reveal that bovid horns and cervid antlers share similar gene expression profiles and a common cellular basis developed from neural crest stem cells. The rapid regenerative properties of antler tissue involve exploitation of oncogenetic pathways, and at the same time some tumor suppressor genes are under strong selection in deer. These results provide insights into the evolutionary origin of ruminant headgear as well as mammalian organ regeneration and oncogenesis.
Paired box gene 8 (PAX8) is expressed in and indispensable to thyroid development. MiR-144-3p is found dys-regulated in cancers, and it can block the expression of target gens. This study sought to ...understand the effect of MiR-144-3p in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) as well as the associated mechanisms.
Real-time PCR, immunohistochemical and Western blot assays were performed to examine the expression of target miRNA and/or genes. CCK-8 and flow cytometry analysis was used to respectively test cell growth, cell cycle progression and apoptosis. Luciferase reporter assay was performed to find out whether miR-144-3p could bind to the 3' untranslated region of PAX8 or not.
We found that PAX8 decreased in PTC, while miR-144-3p increased in PTC. Over-expression of miR-144-3p promoted the cell viability and cell cycle progression. The expressions of cell-cycle-related genes, cyclin D1, cyclin-dependent kinase 2 and CDC25A were modulated by miR-144-3p. Meanwhile, the presence or absence of miR-144-3p both affected epithelial-mesenchymal transition of PTC by regulating the expression of E-cadherin, N-cadherin and vimentin. Moreover, PAX8 may be a potential direct target of miR-144-3p. Mechanically, the activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2, Akt and c-Jun N-terminal kinases may be associated with the tumor-promoting effect of miR-144-3p. In addition, the blockage of miR-144-3p forced the anti-tumor effect delivered by X-ray exposure or paclitaxel.
MiR-144-3p promoted the growth of tumor and the metastasis of PTC by targeting PAX 8. The study provided promising prognosis markers and valuable treatment strategy for PTC.
Biomass-derived raw bamboo charcoal (BC), NaOH-impregnated bamboo charcoal (BC-I), and magnetic bamboo charcoal (BC-IM) were fabricated and used as bio-adsorbents and Fenton-like catalysts for ...methylene blue removal. Compared to the raw biochar, a simple NaOH impregnation process significantly optimized the crystal structure, pore size distribution, and surface functional groups and increase the specific surface area from 1.4 to 63.0 m
/g. Further magnetization of the BC-I sample not only enhanced the surface area to 84.7 m
/g, but also improved the recycling convenience due to the superparamagnetism. The maximum adsorption capacity of BC, BC-I, and BC-IM for methylene blue at 328 K was 135.13, 220.26 and 497.51 mg/g, respectively. The pseudo-first-order rate constants
at 308 K for BC, BC-I, and BC-IM catalytic degradation in the presence of H
O
were 0.198, 0.351, and 1.542 h
, respectively. A synergistic mechanism between adsorption and radical processes was proposed.
MicroRNAs are endogenous small non‐coding RNAs that regulate gene expression and cancer development. A rare population of hepatocellular cancer stem cells (HSCs) holds the extensive proliferative and ...self‐renewal potential necessary to form a liver tumour. We postulated that specific transcriptional factors might regulate the expression of microRNAs and subsequently modulate the expression of gene products involved in phenotypic characteristics of HSCs. We evaluated the expression of microRNA in human HSCs by microarray profiling, and defined the target genes and functional effects of two groups of microRNA regulated by IL‐6 and transcriptional factor Twist. A subset of highly chemoresistant and invasive HSCs was screened with aberrant expressions of cytokine IL‐6 and Twist. We demonstrated that conserved let‐7 and miR‐181 family members were up‐regulated in HSCs by global microarray‐based microRNA profiling followed by validation with real‐time polymerase chain reaction. Importantly, inhibition of let‐7 increases the chemosensitivity of HSCs to sorafenib and doxorubicin whereas silencing of miR‐181 led to a reduction in HSCs motility and invasion. Knocking down IL‐6 and Twist in HSCs significantly reduced let‐7 and miR‐181 expression and subsequently inhibited chemoresistance and cell invasion. We showed that let‐7 directly targets SOCS‐1 and caspase‐3, whereas miR‐181 directly targets RASSF1A, TIMP3 as well as nemo‐like kinase (NLK). In conclusion, alterations of IL‐6‐ and Twist‐regulated microRNA expression in HSCs play a part in tumour spreading and responsiveness to chemotherapy. Our results define a novel regulatory mechanism of let‐7/miR‐181s suggesting that let‐7 and miR‐181 may be molecular targets for eradication of hepatocellular malignancies.
The human brain is a directional network system of brain regions involving directional connectivity. Seizures are a directional network phenomenon as abnormal neuronal activities start from a seizure ...onset zone (SOZ) and propagate to otherwise healthy regions. To localize the SOZ of an epileptic patient, clinicians use intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to record the patient's intracranial brain activity in many small regions. iEEG data are high-dimensional multivariate time series. We build a state-space multivariate autoregression (SSMAR) for iEEG data to model the underlying directional brain network. To produce scientifically interpretable network results, we incorporate into the SSMAR the scientific knowledge that the underlying brain network tends to have a cluster structure. Specifically, we assign to the SSMAR parameters a stochastic-blockmodel-motivated prior, which reflects the cluster structure. We develop a Bayesian framework to estimate the SSMAR, infer directional connections, and identify clusters for the unobserved network edges. The new method is robust to violations of model assumptions and outperforms existing network methods. By applying the new method to an epileptic patient's iEEG data, we reveal seizure initiation and propagation in the patient's directional brain network and discover a unique directional connectivity property of the SOZ. Overall, the network results obtained in this study bring new insights into epileptic patients' normal and abnormal epileptic brain mechanisms and have the potential to assist neurologists and clinicians in localizing the SOZ-a long-standing research focus in epilepsy diagnosis and treatment.
Supplementary materials
for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement.
Mitochondria are promising targeting organelles for anticancer strategies; however, mitochondria are difficult for antineoplastic drugs to recognize and bind. Mitochondria-penetrating peptides (MPPs) ...are unique tools to gain access to the cell interior and deliver a bioactive cargo into mitochondria. MPPs have combined or delivered a variety of antitumor cargoes and obviously inhibited the tumor growth in vivo and in vitro. MPPs create new opportunities to develop new treatments for cancer. Areas covered: We review the target sites of mitochondria and the target-penetration mechanism of MPPs, different strategies, and various additional strategies decorated MPPs for tumor cell mitochondria targeting, the decorating mattes including metabolism molecules, RNA, DNA, and protein, which exploited considered as therapeutic combined with MPPs and target in human cancer treatment. Expert opinion/commentary: Therapeutic selectivity that preferentially targets the mitochondrial abnormalities in cancer cells without toxic impact on normal cells still need to be deepen. Moreover, it needs appropriate study designs for a correct evaluation of the target delivery outcome and the degradation rate of the drug in the cell. Generally, it is optimistic that the advances in mitochondrial targeting drug delivery by MPPs plasticity outlined here will ultimately help to the discovery of new approaches for the prevention and treatment of cancers.
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