House dust mite major allergens Der p 1 promote the production of IL-8 and MUC5AC in human airway-derived epithelial cells by NF-kB mechanism

Backgroud： House dust mite allergens （HDM） is the most commonly encountered patho- gen of humans, predominantly causing bronchoconstriction in asthma patients and inducing an inflammatory response in the lungs dune to the release of cytokines, chemokines and other medi- ators. During the clinical course of treatment, dexamethasone has a limited effect on asthma pa- tients, especially for refractory asthma, because it is infective to block a large number of theneutrophils to invade the lung tissue.

TST: Threshold Based Similarity Transitivity Method in Collaborative Filtering with Cloud Computing

Collaborative filtering solves information overload problem by presenting personalized content to individual users based on their interests, which has been extensively applied in real-world recommender systems. As a class of simple but efficient collaborative filtering method, similarity based approaches make predictions by finding users with similar taste or items that have been similarly chosen. However, as the number of users or items grows rapidly, the traditional approach is suffering from the data sparsity problem. Inaccurate similarities derived from the sparse user-item associations would generate the inaccurate neighborhood for each user or item. Consequently, its poor recommendation drives us to propose a Threshold based Similarity Transitivity （TST） method in this paper. TST firstly filters out those inaccurate similarities by setting an intersection threshold and then replaces them with the transitivity similarity. Besides, the TST method is designed to be scalable with MapReduce framework based on cloud computing platform. We evaluate our algorithm on the public data set MovieLens and a real-world data set from AppChina （an Android application market） with several well-known metrics including precision, recall, coverage, and popularity. The experimental results demonstrate that TST copes well with the tradeoff between quality and quantity of similarity by setting an appropriate threshold. Moreover, we can experimentally find the optimal threshold which will be smaller as the data set becomes sparser. The experimental results also show that TST significantly outperforms the traditional approach even when the data becomes sparser.

Ginsenoside Rg1 protects against transient focal cerebral ischemic injury and suppresses its systemic metabolic changes in cerabral injury rats

Ginsenoside Rg1(GR),a major bioactive compound of traditional Chinese medicine,such as Panax ginseng or Radix Notoginseng,has been shown to exert neuroprotective effects against ischemic stroke.However,pharmacokinetic studies have suggested that GR could not be efficiently transported through the blood–brain barrier.The mechanism by which GR attenuates cerebral ischemic injury in vivo remains largely unknown.Therefore,this study explored potential neuro-protective effects of GR through its systemic metabolic regulating mechanism by using mass spectrometry–based metabolomic profiling.Rats with middle cerebral artery occlusion(MCAO) were treated with GR intravenously.Their metabolic profiles in serum were measured by gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry on 1 and 3 days after MCAO.GR exhibited a potent neuro-protective effect by significantly decreasing the neurological scores and infarct volume in the MCAO rats.Moreover,18 differential metabolites were tentatively identified,all of which appeared to correlate well with these disease indices.Our findings suggested that GR carries a therapeutic potential in stroke possibly through a feed-back mechanism by regulating systematic metabolic mediation.

New seco-dibenzocyclooctadiene lignans with nitric oxide production inhibitory activity from the roots of Kadsura longipedunculata

Four new seco-dibenzocyclooctadiene lignans,kadlongilignans A-D(1-4),consisting of a rare 6,7-seco-(1),two 15,16-seco-(2 and 3) and a 9,10-seco-dibenzocyclooctadiene(4) lignans,were isolated from the roots of Kadsura longipedunculata.Their structures were elucidated by spectroscopic analysis,including extensive NM R,MS and ECD(electronic circular dichroism) spectra.Compounds 3 and 4 exhibited potent inhibitory activities against NO(nitric oxide) production of LPS(lipopolysaccharide)-induced murine macrophages with the inhibition rates of 36.3% and 26.9%,respectively.

Hyperterpenoids A and B:Two pairs of unprecedented 6/6/4/6/6 polycyclic cyclobutane meroterpenoids with potent neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory activities from Hypericum beanii

Hyperterpenoid A(1)and B(2),two pairs of enantiomers,with an unprecedented 6/6/4/6/6 polycyclic skeleton,along with one known compoud hypermonone A(3)were isolated from Hypericum beanii.The racemate(±)-1 and(±)-2 were successfully separated into the two optically pure enantiomers(ee>99%)using a preparative HPLC system.Their absolute configurations were elucidated by extensive spectroscopic analyses and single-crystal X-ray diffraction method.The related plausible biogenetic pathways were pre sented.Compound 1-3 showed significant neuroprotective activity and potential antiinflammatory activity.The result that(+)-2 and(-)-2 presented different anti-inflammatory properties,may lead us to new discovery of structure activity relationship between racemates,enantiomers,and diastereomers,as well as further research regarding the binding of drugs to target proteins.