Molecular Mechanism of Ginseng in Treating Nephrotic Syndrome Based on Network Pharmacology and Experimental Verification

[Objectives]To study the potential molecular mechanism of ginseng in treating nephrotic syndrome(NS)by using network pharmacology,molecular docking and experimental verification methods.[Methods]The active components and targets of ginseng were obtained through the network pharmacology database,and the potential targets for the treatment of NS were predicted.The STRING data platform and Cytoscape software were used to construct protein interaction network,and carry out GO and KEGG enrichment analysis.Molecular docking of active components of ginseng and core targets was performed.The in vitro experiment verified the improvement effect of kaempferol,a key active ingredient of ginseng,on podocyte injury.[Results]After screening,17 active components of ginseng and 38 key targets for treating NS were obtained.GO and KEGG enrichment analysis showed that NF-κB,MAPK and other inflammatory pathways were involved.Molecular docking results show that the core components had good binding activity to key targets.The results of in vitro experiments show that kaempferol can reduce the phosphorylation level of AKT1,down-regulate the expression levels of NF-κB p65 and p-NF-κB p65,play an anti-inflammatory effect by inhibiting the activation of NF-κB pathway,and improve podocyte injury.[Conclusions]Ginseng may play a role in the treatment of NS by regulating multiple targets and pathways such as inflammatory response,substance metabolism,and signal transduction.

Social credit:a comprehensive literature review

To avoid credit fraud,social credit within an economic system has become an increasingly important criterion for the evaluation of economic agent activity and guaranteeing the development of a market economy with minimal supervision costs.This paper provides a comprehensive review of the social credit literature from the perspectives of theoretical foundation,scoring methods,and regulatory mechanisms.The study considers the credit of various economic agents within the social credit system such as countries(or governments),corporations,and individuals and their credit variations in online markets(i.e.,network credit).A historical review of the theoretical(or model)development of economic agents is presented together with significant works and future research directions.Some interesting conclusions are summarized from the literature review.(1)Credit theory studies can be categorized into traditional and emerging schools both focusing on the economic explanation of social credit in conjunction with creation and evolution mechanisms.(2)The most popular credit scoring methods include expert systems,econometric models,artificial intelligence(AI)techniques,and their hybrid forms.Evaluation indexes should vary across different target agents.(3)The most pressing task for regulatory mechanisms that supervise social credit to avoid credit fraud is the establishment of shared credit databases with consistent data standards.

Tunable reducibility of Brillouin zone and bandgap width in elliptical nanowire arrays

Rotating elliptical nanowire arrays as two-dimensional photonic crystals has been proposed and studied in this Letter.The analysis of the four lowest energy bands and the first bandgap width of some examples illustrates that the rotation and configuration of the primitive cell can have effects on the reducibility of the Brillouin zone.As the central element’s orientation changes,the irreducible Brillouin zone could be expanded to the whole first Brillouin zone.Special attention has been paid to the nanowire arrays with adjacent elements perpendicular to each other,and the irreducible Brillouin zone unexpectedly retracted back to the 1/8 of the first Brillouin zone though the symmetry of elements is lower than that of the square lattice.Meanwhile,the first bandgap width of the perpendicular array can be adjusted by the rotation of each primitive element.