Skin, our first interface to the external environment, is subjected to oxidative stress caused by a variety of factors such as solar ultraviolet, infrared and visible light, environmental pollution, ...including ozone and particulate matters, and psychological stress. Excessive reactive species, including reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen species, exacerbate skin pigmentation and aging, which further lead to skin tone unevenness, pigmentary disorder, skin roughness and wrinkles. Besides these, skin microbiota are also a very important factor ensuring the proper functions of skin. While environmental factors such as UV and pollutants impact skin microbiota compositions, skin dysbiosis results in various skin conditions. In this review, we summarize the generation of oxidative stress from exogenous and endogenous sources. We further introduce current knowledge on the possible roles of oxidative stress in skin pigmentation and aging, specifically with emphasis on oxidative stress and skin pigmentation. Meanwhile, we summarize the science and rationale of using three well‐known antioxidants, namely vitamin C, resveratrol and ferulic acid, in the treatment of hyperpigmentation. Finally, we discuss the strategy for preventing oxidative stress‐induced skin pigmentation and aging.
Résumé
La peau, notre première interface avec l’environnement externe, est soumise à un stress oxydatif causé par divers facteurs tels que les ultraviolets solaires, l’infrarouge et la lumière visible, la pollution environnementale, y compris l’ozone et les particules, et le stress psychologique. Les espèces réactives excessives, y compris les espèces réactives de l’oxygène et les espèces réactives de l’azote, exacerbent la pigmentation et le vieillissement de la peau, ce qui entraîne une irrégularité du teint, un trouble pigmentaire, de la rugosité de la peau et des rides. De plus, le microbiote cutané est également un facteur très important pour assurer le bon fonctionnement de la peau. Alors que les facteurs environnementaux tels que les UV et les polluants ont un impact sur les compositions du microbiote cutané, la dysbiose cutanée entraîne diverses affections cutanées. Dans cette revue, nous résumons la production du stress oxydatif à partir de sources exogènes et endogènes. Nous introduisons également les connaissances actuelles sur les rôles possibles du stress oxydatif dans la pigmentation et le vieillissement de la peau, en particulier sur le stress oxydatif et la pigmentation de la peau. Pendant ce temps, nous résumons la science et la justification de l’utilisation de trois antioxydants bien connus, à savoir la vitamine C, le resvératrol, et l’acide férulique, dans le traitement de l’hyperpigmentation. Enfin, nous discutons de la stratégie de prévention de la pigmentation et du vieillissement de la peau induits par le stress oxydatif.
Recently, bipolar fuzzy sets have been studied and applied a bit enthusiastically and a bit increasingly. In this paper we prove that bipolar fuzzy sets and 0,1 2 -sets (which have been deeply ...studied) are actually cryptomorphic mathematical notions. Since researches or modelings on real world problems often involve multi-agent, multi-attribute, multi-object, multi-index, multi-polar information, uncertainty, or/and limit process, we put forward (or highlight) the notion of m -polar fuzzy set (actually, 0,1 m -set which can be seen as a generalization of bipolar fuzzy set, where m is an arbitrary ordinal number) and illustrate how many concepts have been defined based on bipolar fuzzy sets and many results which are related to these concepts can be generalized to the case of m -polar fuzzy sets. We also give examples to show how to apply m -polar fuzzy sets in real world problems.
Osteoarthritis (OA) is a multifactorial joint degenerative disease with low-grade inflammation. The gut microbiome has recently emerged as an pathogenic factor of OA, and prebiotics supplementation ...could alleviate OA symptoms in animal models. However, the relationship between the gut microbiome and OA in the older female adults is hitherto not clear. Here we studied the gut microbiome of 57 OA patients and their healthy controls by metagenome-wide association study based on previously published data. A significant reduction in the richness and diversity of gut microbiome were observed in OA patients. Bifidobacterium longum and Faecalibacterium prausnitzii were decreased while Clostridium spp. was increased in the OA group. The functional modules, particularly the energetic metabolism and acetate production were also decreased in the OA patients. To evaluate the diagnostic value of identified species for elderly patients with OA, we constructed a set of random forest disease classifiers based on species differences between the two groups. Among them, 9 species reached the lowest classification error in the random forest cross validation, and the area under ROC of the model was 0.81. Significant alterations in the gut microbial composition and function were observed between the older patients with OA and their controls, and a random forest classifier model for OA were constructed based on the differences in our study. Our study have identified several potential gut microbial targets in the elderly females with OA, which will facilitate the treatment of OA based on gut microbiota, is of great value in alleviating pain and improving the quality of life for them.
With the improvement of living standard, people begin to pay more attention to food safety and product quality. Therefore, for consumers, it is necessary to establish a reliable system that can trace ...the source of products. However, most existing traceability systems tend to lack transparency, data is primarily stored within the enterprise, and the cost of tampering with data is very low. Besides, the supply chain nodes are easy to evade responsibility when product safety or quality issues arise under the traditional centralized management model, and it is difficult to trace the root of issues. The development of blockchain technology provides us with new ideas for realizing the traceability of products in supply chain scenarios. Due to its characteristics of decentralization, transparency, and immutability, blockchain can be effectively used to alleviate the above problems. In this paper, we propose a product traceability system based on blockchain technology, in which all product transferring histories are perpetually recorded in a distributed ledger by using smart contracts and a chain is formed that can trace back to the source of the products. In particular, we design an event response mechanism to verify the identities of both parties of the transaction, so that the validity of the transaction can be guaranteed. And all events are permanently stored in the form of logs as a basis for handling disputes and tracking responsible entities. Furthermore, a system prototype is constructed based on the testing framework of Truffle. The contract code is deployed on a test network TestRpc that runs in local memory, and a decentralized web page interface is implemented based on the prototype. Finally, the system security analysis and experimental results show that our solution is feasible.
Endogenous estrogen deficiency accelerates many diseases in postmenopausal women, and gut microbes contribute to estrogen level modulation. However, the compositional alterations and influences of ...the gut microbiota in postmenopausal women remain uncertain. A metagenome‐wide association study was performed to compare the gut microbiota of 24 premenopausal and 24 postmenopausal women. Firmicutes and Roseburia spp. are depleted, while Bacteroidetes and the toluene‐producing genus Tolumonas are overrepresented in fecal samples from postmenopausal women. The pentose phosphate pathway is enriched in premenopausal women. Homocysteine synthesis‐related processes are enriched in postmenopausal women. The gut microbiomes of premenopausal and postmenopausal women differ and produce different metabolites. The gut microbiome may be a therapeutic target to reduce risks and improve the quality of life in postmenopausal women.
Migraine is a very common, multifactorial, and recurrent central nervous system disorder that causes throbbing headache, photophobia, phonophobia, nausea, and disability. Migraine occurs more often ...in females, and its complex physiopathology is not yet fully understood. An increasing number of gastrointestinal disorders have been linked to the occurrence of migraine suggesting that gut microbiota might play a pivotal role in migraine through the gut-brain axis. In the present work, we performed a metagenome-wide association study (MWAS) to determine the relationship between gut microbiota and migraine by analyzing 108 shotgun-sequenced fecal samples obtained from elderly women who suffer from migraine and matched healthy controls. Notably, the alpha diversity was significantly decreased in the migraine group at species, genus, and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) orthologous levels. Firmicutes, especially the "unfriendly"
spp., were significantly enriched in the migraine group. Conversely, the healthy controls held more beneficial microorganisms, such as
, and
. For functional modules, the migraine group was enriched in gut-brain modules (GBMs) including kynurenine degradation and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) synthesis. However, the healthy controls held higher gut metabolic modules (GMMs) including glycolysis, homoacetogenesis, and GBMs including quinolinic acid degradation and
-adenosyl methionine (SAM) synthesis. The differences in gut microbiota composition and function between the migraine and healthy groups provided new information as well as novel therapeutic targets and strategies for migraine treatment, which could help to improve the early diagnosis of the disease, as well as the long-term prognosis and the life quality of patients suffering from migraine.
COVID-19 has caused negative emotional responses in patients, with significant mental health consequences for the infected population. The need for an in-depth analysis of the emotional state of ...COVID-19 patients is imperative. This study employed semi-structured interviews and the text mining method to investigate features in lived experience narratives of COVID-19 patients and healthy controls with respect to five basic emotions. The aim was to identify differences in emotional status between the two matched groups of participants. The results indicate generally higher complexity and more expressive emotional language in healthy controls than in COVID-19 patients. Specifically, narratives of fear, happiness, and sadness by COVID-19 patients were significantly shorter as compared to healthy controls. Regarding lexical features, COVID-19 patients used more emotional words, in particular words of fear, disgust, and happiness, as opposed to those used by healthy controls. Emotional disorder symptoms of COVID-19 patients at the lexical level tended to focus on the emotions of fear and disgust. They narrated more in relation to self or family while healthy controls mainly talked about others. Our automatic emotional discourse analysis potentially distinguishes clinical status of COVID-19 patients versus healthy controls, and can thus be used to predict mental health disorder symptoms in COVID-19 patients.
Deep learning (DL)-based object detection algorithms have gained impressive achievements in natural images and have gradually matured in recent years. However, compared with natural images, remote ...sensing images are faced with severe challenges due to the complex backgrounds and difficult detection of small objects in dense scenes. To address these problems, a novel one-stage object detection model named MDCT is proposed based on a multi-kernel dilated convolution (MDC) block and transformer block. Firstly, a new feature enhancement module, MDC block, is developed in the one-stage object detection model to enhance small objects’ ontology and adjacent spatial features. Secondly, we integrate a transformer block into the neck network of the one-stage object detection model in order to prevent the loss of object information in complex backgrounds and dense scenes. Finally, a depthwise separable convolution is introduced to each MDC block to reduce the computational cost. We conduct experiments on three datasets: DIOR, DOTA, and NWPU VHR-10. Compared with the YOLOv5, our model improves the object detection accuracy by 2.3%, 0.9%, and 2.9% on the DIOR, DOTA, and NWPU VHR-10 datasets, respectively.
Monomeric (m)Eos2 is an engineered photoactivatable fluorescent protein widely used for super-resolution microscopy. We show that mEos2 forms oligomers at high concentrations and forms aggregates ...when labeling membrane proteins, limiting its application as a fusion partner. We solved the crystal structure of tetrameric mEos2 and rationally designed improved versions, mEos3.1 and mEos3.2, that are truly monomeric, are brighter, mature faster and exhibit higher photon budget and label density.
Concept mapping has been employed as a promising tool to facilitate group learning and interaction mainly in the classroom. Computer- and web-based applications provide plenty of opportunities to ...extend concept mapping mediated group learning to online environments. Nevertheless, the effects of concept mapping on group learning and interaction may vary with the nature of group tasks and other factors. This study investigated the effects of web-based collaborative concept mapping on group interaction in two task situations: concept-oriented task and design-oriented task. Web-based collaborative concept mapping was used to mediate small group learning among college students in an online environment. The findings revealed that there were differences in the effects of collaborative concept mapping on group interaction between the two task situations; collaborative concept mapping functioned more effectively in facilitating group interaction in the concept-oriented task situation than in the design-oriented task situation in several ways.
•Web-based collaborative concept mapping supports interaction in group learning.•Concept mapping is effective in mediating group interaction in a conceptual task.•Concept mapping is ineffective in facilitating group interaction in a design task.
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