Effect and Mechanism of Dicliptera chinensis Polysaccharide on miR-141/AMPK/SIRT1 Signaling Pathway in Rats with NAFLD

[Objectives]Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFLD)rat model was established by feeding high-fat and high-sugar fodder to rats,and the protective effect of Dicliptera chinensis polysaccharide(DCP)on NAFLD rats was studied to explore its potential mechanism.[Methods]45 SD rats were randomly divided into 4 groups:normal control group,model control group and DCP treatment groups(100 and 300 mg/kg).The rats in the normal control group were fed with ordinary fodder,and the rats in other groups were fed with high-fat and high-sugar diet for 14 weeks to establish NAFLD model.From the 9^(th)week,the rats in the DCP treatment groups were given different doses of DCP by intragastric administration(5 mL/kg)for 6 weeks.After the last intragastric administration,the rats fasted for 16 h,and the serum and liver of rats were collected for detection.Hematoxylin-eosin(HE)staining was conducted to observe the histopathological changes of rat liver,and alanine aminotransferase(ALT),aspartate aminotransferase(AST),superoxide dismutase(SOD),glutathione peroxidase(GSH-Px),malondialdehyde(MDA),triglyceride(TG),total cholesterol(TC),low density lipoprotein cholesterol(LDL-C),and high density lipoprotein cholesterol(HDL-C)were detected by biochemical method.Interleukin-6(IL-6),interleukin-1β(IL-1β),tumor necrosis factor(TNF-α)and micrornA-141(micro RNA-141)were detected by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR).The expression of SIRT1 and adenosine 5'-monophosphate(AMP)-activated protein kinase(AMPK)in rat liver was detected by western blot.[Results]Compared with the model control group,the inflammatory damage and steatodegeneration of rats in the DCP groups were relieved to varying degrees,and the number of lipid vacuoles significantly reduced.The ALT,AST,TC,TG and LDL-C content in the serum and MDA content in the liver tissue decreased to varying degrees,while the HDL-C,SOD and GSH-Px content increased.The expression of SIRT1 and AMPK increased,while the expression of miR-141,TNF-α,IL-6 and IL-1βdeclined,and the DCP 300 mg/kg treatment group had better improvement effect.[Conclusions]DCP had a certain protective effect on NAFLD rats,which may be related to the regulation of miR-141/AMPK/SIRT1 signaling pathway.

Automatic Calcified Plaques Detection in the OCT Pullbacks Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Background Coronary artery calcification is a well-known marker of atherosclerotic plaque burden.High-resolution intravascular optical coherence tomography(OCT)imaging has shown the potential to characterize the details of coronary calcification in vivo.In routine clinical practice,it is a time-consuming and laborious task for clinicians to review the over 250 images in a single pullback.Besides,the imbalance label distribution within the entire pullbacks is another problem,which could lead to the failure of the classifier model.Given the success of deep learning methods with other imaging modalities,a thorough understanding of calcified plaque detection using Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs)within pullbacks for future clinical decision was required.Methods All 33 IVOCT clinical pullbacks of 33 patients were taken from Affiliated Drum Tower Hospital,Nanjing University between December 2017 and December 2018.For ground-truth annotation,three trained experts determined the type of plaque that was present in a B-Scan.The experts assigned the labels'no calcified plaque','calcified plaque'for each OCT image.All experts were provided the all images for labeling.The final label was determined based on consensus between the experts,different opinions on the plaque type were resolved by asking the experts for a repetition of their evaluation.Before the implement of algorithm,all OCT images was resized to a resolution of 300×300,which matched the range used with standard architectures in the natural image domain.In the study,we randomly selected 26 pullbacks for training,the remaining data were testing.While,imbalance label distribution within entire pullbacks was great challenge for various CNNs architecture.In order to resolve the problem,we designed the following experiment.First,we fine-tuned twenty different CNNs architecture,including customize CNN architectures and pretrained CNN architectures.Considering the nature of OCT images,customize CNN architectures were designed that the layers were fewer than 25 layers.Then,three with good performance were selected and further deep fine-tuned to train three different models.The difference of CNNs was mainly in the model architecture,such as depth-based residual networks,width-based inception networks.Finally,the three CNN models were used to majority voting,the predicted labels were from the most voting.Areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve(ROC AUC)were used as the evaluation metric for the imbalance label distribution.Results The imbalance label distribution within pullbacks affected both convergence during the training phase and generalization of a CNN model.Different labels of OCT images could be classified with excellent performance by fine tuning parameters of CNN architectures.Overall,we find that our final result performed best with an accuracy of 90%of'calcified plaque'class,which the numbers were less than'no calcified plaque'class in one pullback.Conclusions The obtained results showed that the method is fast and effective to classify calcific plaques with imbalance label distribution in each pullback.The results suggest that the proposed method could be facilitating our understanding of coronary artery calcification in the process of atherosclerosis andhelping guide complex interventional strategies in coronary arteries with superficial calcification.

Multi-Effect Evaporation Coupled with MVR Heat Pump Thermal Integration Distillation for Separating Salt Containing Methanol Wastewater

Due to the high energy consumption for separation of salt containing methanol wastewater, in this work, the multi-effect evaporation coupled with mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) heat pump and thermal integration technologies were raised for the first time. The ELECNRTL thermodynamic model is used to simulate and optimize the evaporation rectification process. Energy consumption and total annual cost (TAC) are taken as objective functions. The results show that multi-effect evaporation coupled with conventional distillation process can save energy consumption and TAC by 44.12% and 39.14%. The multi-effect evaporation coupled with distillation process based on MVR heat pump technology can save energy consumption and TAC by 55.27% and 47.49%, which is super to three-effect evaporation coupled with conventional distillation process. The three-effect evaporation coupled with MVR heat integration process can save energy consumption and TAC by 81.32% and 58.55%, which is more economical than other processes. It can be clearly seen that three-effect evaporation coupled with MVR heat integration process is more competitive to deal with the salt containing methanol wastewater.

Spatiotemporal evolution and assembly processes of ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotic communities in 1 000-year-old coastal reclaimed soils

Coastal marshes are transitional areas between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.They are sensitive to climate change and anthropogenic activities.In recent decades,the reclamation of coastal marshes has greatly increased,and its effects on microbial communities in coastal marshes have been studied with great interest.Most of these studies have explained the short-term spatiotemporal variation in soil microbial community dynamics.However,the impact of reclamation on the community composition and assembly processes of functional microbes(e.g.,ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotes)is often ignored.In this study,using quantitative polymerase chain reaction and the Ion S5™XL sequencing platform,we investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics,assembly processes,and diversity patterns of ammonia-oxidizing prokaryotes in 1000-year-old reclaimed coastal salt marshes.The taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity and composition of ammonia oxidizers showed apparent spatiotemporal variations with soil reclamation.Phylogenetic null modelling-based analysis showed that across all sites,the archaeal ammonia-oxidizing community was assembled by a deterministic process(84.71%),and deterministic processes were also dominant(55.2%)for ammonia-oxidizing bacterial communities except for communities at 60 years of reclamation.The assembly process and nitrification activity in reclaimed soils were positively correlated.The abundance of the amoA gene and changes in ammonia-oxidizing archaeal and bacterial diversities significantly affected the nitrification activity in reclaimed soils.These findings suggest that long-term coastal salt marsh reclamation affects nitrification by modulating the activities of ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms and regulating their community structures and assembly processes.These results provide a better understanding of the effects of long-term land reclamation on soil nitrogen-cycling microbial communities.