An overview of potential cardioprotective benefits of xanthophylls in atherosclerosis:an evidence-based review

Atherosclerosis,as the most prevalent form of cardiovascular disease,is characterized by oxidized lowdensity lipoprotein(ox-LDL)accumulation in the vascular wall,increased inflammation of the large arteries,dysfunction of the endothelial cells(ECs)and vascular smooth muscle cells(VSMCs),which may eventually lead to the formation of plaques.Xanthophylls,one of the main groups of carotenoids,have been proposed as preventive agents or adjunct therapies to prevent and slow the progression of atherosclerosis due to their cardioprotective properties.However,the underlying preventive mechanism of action of xanthophylls on the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis remains unclear,and clinical evidence of the effect of xanthophylls on atherosclerosis have not yet been summarized and critically reviewed.In this regard,we conducted a comprehensive literature search in four scientific databases(Pub Med,Google Scholar,Science Direct and Web of Science)and carefully analyzed the existing evidence to provide meaningful insights on the association between xanthophylls and atherosclerosis from various aspects.Based on the evidence from in vitro and in vivo studies,we explored several potential mechanisms,including antioxidant effect,anti-inflammatory effect,regulation of lipid metabolism,and modulation of ECs and VSMCs dysfunction,and we found that a clear picture of regulatory pathways of xanthophylls on atherosclerosis prevention and treatment is still lacking.In addition,epidemiological studies suggested the possible relationship among high dietary intake of xanthophylls,high plasma/serum xanthophylls and a reduced risk of atherosclerosis.Direct evidence from interventional studies investigating the effect of xanthophylls on atherosclerosis is very sparse,whilst indirect clinical evidence was only limited to astaxanthin and lutein.Therefore,well-designed long-term randomized controlled trials(RCTs)are highly recommended for future studies to investigate the effective dose of different xanthophylls on atherosclerosis prevention and their possible ancillary effect in conjunction with drug therapies on different stages of atherosclerosis.

MSCs-derived apoptotic extracellular vesicles promote muscle regeneration by inducing Pannexin 1 channel-dependent creatine release by myoblasts

Severe muscle injury is hard to heal and always results in a poor prognosis.Recent studies found that extracellular vesicle-based therapy has promising prospects for regeneration medicine,however,whether extracellular vesicles have therapeutic effects on severe muscle injury is still unknown.Herein,we extracted apoptotic extracellular vesicles derived from mesenchymal stem cells(MSCs-Apo EVs)to treat cardiotoxin induced tibialis anterior(TA)injury and found that MSCs-Apo EVs promoted muscles regeneration and increased the proportion of multinucleated cells.Besides that,we also found that apoptosis was synchronized during myoblasts fusion and MSCs-Apo EVs promoted the apoptosis ratio as well as the fusion index of myoblasts.Furthermore,we revealed that MSCs-Apo EVs increased the relative level of creatine during myoblasts fusion,which was released via activated Pannexin 1 channel.Moreover,we also found that activated Pannexin 1 channel was highly expressed on the membrane of myoblasts-derived Apo EVs(Myo-Apo EVs)instead of apoptotic myoblasts,and creatine was the pivotal metabolite involved in myoblasts fusion.Collectively,our findings firstly revealed that MSCs-Apo EVs can promote muscle regeneration and elucidated that the new function of Apo EVs as passing inter-cell messages through releasing metabolites from activated Pannexin 1 channel,which will provide new evidence for extracellular vesicles-based therapy as well as improving the understanding of new functions of extracellular vesicles.

阿司匹林合成过程在线分析实验教学实践

针对阿司匹林合成过程在线分析实验内容,采用基于子空间角度转换的化学计量学方法,通过求取反应体系拉曼光谱响应与阿司匹林对照品光谱的角度值,实现阿司匹林合成产物的无损定量分析和反应过程趋势跟踪。通过在教学中引入过程分析技术(PAT)的观念和教师科研成果,实施实验教学改革,让学生对新技术产生直接认识,拓宽了学生的视野,提高了学生的学习兴趣、综合素质和创新能力。

Immobilization of heparin on decellularized kidney scaffold to construct microenvironment for antithrombosis and inducing reendothelialization

In recent years, rapid development of tissue engineering technology provides possibilities for the construction of artificial tissues or organs. In construction of engineered kidneys, researchers used native decellularized extracellular matrix(ECM) as the scaffolds to recellularization. However, thrombosis has been a great issue that hinders the progress of transplantation in vivo. In this study, heparin was immobilized to the collagen part of decellularized scaffold with collagen-binding peptide(CBP). Through the anticoagulant and endothelial cell reperfusion experiments, it can be demonstrated that the heparinized scaffolds absorbed less platelets and red blood cells which can effectively reduce the formation of thrombosis. Moreover, it is conducive to longterm adhesion of endothelial cells which is important for the formation of subsequent vascularization. Taken together, our results reveal that the whole kidney can be modified by CBP-heparin composite to reduce the thrombosis and provide the better conditions for neovascularization.

Multi-modal Correlated Network for emotion recognition in speech

With the growing demand of automatic emotion recognition system,emotion recognition is becoming more and more crucial for human-computer interaction(HCI)research.Recently,there is a continuous improvement in the performance of automatic emotion recognition due to the development of both hardware and deep learning methods.However,because of the abstract concept and multiple expressions of emotion,automatic emotion recognition is still a challenging task.In this paper,we propose a novel Multi-modal Correlated Network for emotion recognition aiming at exploiting the information from both audio and visual channels to achieve more robust and accurate detection.In the proposed method,the audio signals and visual signals are first preprocessed for the feature extraction.After preprocessing,we obtain the Mel-spectrograms,which can be treated as images,and the representative frames from visual segments.Then the Mel-spectrograms are fed to the convolutional neural network(CNN)to get the audio features and the representative frames are fed to the CNN and LSTM to get features.Specially,we employ the triplet loss to increase the differentiation of inter-class.Meanwhile,we propose a novel correlated loss to reduce the differentiation of intra-class.Finally,we apply the feature fusion method to fuse the audio and visual feature for emotion recognition classification.The experimental result on AEFW dataset demonstrates the correlation information of multiple modals is crucial for automatic emotion recognition and the proposed method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the classification task.

青少年近视眼预防与控制技术研究的新进展

传统预防与控制近视眼的方法主要包括光学矫正、角膜塑形镜、离焦眼镜及其他手段。但此类方法尚不理想。目前,有研究结果表明,户外活动和低浓度阿托品对预防近视眼的发生和控制具有积极作用;轴性近视眼的发展与巩膜向近视眼方向重塑性有关,但机制尚不明确;眼轴增长而致的真性近视眼具有不可恢复或逆转的特点。长期航天飞行后会表现为后极部眼球扁平化、眼轴变短及屈光状态呈现远视性位移,表明受力环境变化可以影响巩膜重塑。因此,笔者认为结合适当的锻炼方式可促使血液头向转移和增加头眼部组织静水压力梯度,影响局部巩膜重塑,从而使眼轴向变短的方向发展或延缓眼轴增长的趋势,可作为近视眼预防与控制的新思路。