Systematic chemical characterization of Xiexin decoctions using high performance liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray ionization mass spectrometry

Xiexin decoctions(XXDs)display beneficial anti-inflammatory and anti-diabetic effects,which raises interests on this group of formulae for broad clinical applications.However,there was no report about systematic analysis of XXDs to elucidate the constitution of chemical components,which hampers further investigations on the therapeutic values of XXDs.In this work,crude herbs were extracted and prepared to obtain the XXDs for systemic analysis on their chemical compositions,according to the information described in the ancient Zhang Zhongjing’s herbal formulae.LC-MS analysis of five XXDs was carried out to facilitate recognition of the source herbs for compounds in the mixture.A total number of 93 compounds were identified through our methods and their chemical classes encompassed five major groups,including protoberberine alkaloids,flavonoids,stilbenes,anthraquinones and saponins.Our current work provided important information about material basis for pharmacological studies on XXDs and would help shed light on relationships between chemical compositions and therapeutic effects.

An online automatic sorting system for defective Ginseng Radix et Rhizoma Rubra using deep learning

Objective:To establish a deep-learning architecture based on faster region-based convolutional neural networks(Faster R-CNN)algorithm for detection and sorting of red ginseng(Ginseng Radix et Rhizoma Rubra)with internal defects automatically on an online X-ray machine vision system.Methods:A Faster R-CNN based classifier was trained with around 20000 samples with mean average precision value(mAP)of 0.95.A traditional image processing method based on feedforward neural network(FNN)obtained a bad performance with the accuracy,recall and specificity of 69.0%,68.0%,and70.0%,respectively.Therefore,the Faster R-CNN model was saved to evaluate the model performance on the defective red ginseng online sorting system.Results:An independent set of 2000 red ginsengs were used to validate the performance of the Faster RCNN based online sorting system in three parallel tests,achieving accuracy of 95.8%,95.2%and 96.2%,respectively.Conclusion:The overall results indicated that the proposed Faster R-CNN based classification model has great potential for non-destructive detection of red ginseng with internal defects.

Emerging biotechnology applications in natural product and synthetic pharmaceutical analyses

Pharmaceutical analysis is a discipline based on chemical, physical, biological, and information technologies. At present, biotechnological analysis is a short branch in pharmaceutical analysis;however, bioanalysis is the basis and an important part of medicine. Biotechnological approaches can provide information on biological activity and even clinical efficacy and safety, which are important characteristics of drug quality. Because of their advantages in reflecting the overall biological effects or functions of drugs and providing visual and intuitive results, some biotechnological analysis methods have been gradually applied to pharmaceutical analysis from raw material to manufacturing and final product analysis,including DNA super-barcoding, DNA-based rapid detection, multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification, hyperspectral imaging combined with artificial intelligence, 3D biologically printed organoids,omics-based artificial intelligence, microfluidic chips, organ-on-a-chip, signal transduction pathwayrelated reporter gene assays, and the zebrafish thrombosis model. The applications of these emerging biotechniques in pharmaceutical analysis have been discussed in this review.