Search

Chinese herbal medicines (CHMs), with a wide range of bioactive components, are considered to be an important source for new drug discovery. However, the process to isolate and obtain those bioactive components to develop new drugs always consumes a large amount of organic solvents with high toxicity and non-biodegradability. Natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES), a new type of green and designable solvents composed of primary plant-based metabolites, have been used as eco-friendly substitutes for traditional organic solvents in various fields. Due to the advantages of easy preparation, low production cost, low toxicity, and eco-friendliness, NADES have been also applied as extraction solvents, media, and drug delivery agents in CHMs in recent years. Besides, the special properties of NADES have been contributed to elucidating the traditional processing (also named Paozhi in Chinese) theory of CHMs, especially processing with honey. In this paper, the development process, preparation, classification, and applications for NADES in CHMs have been reviewed. Prospects in the future applications and challenges have been discussed to better understand the possibilities of the new solvents in the drug development and other uses of CHMs.

In terms of small objects in traffic scenes, general object detection algorithms have low detection accuracy, high model complexity, and slow detection speed. To solve the above problems, an improved algorithm (named YOLO-MXANet) is proposed in this paper. Complete-Intersection over Union (CIoU) is utilized to improve loss function for promoting the positioning accuracy of the small object. In order to reduce the complexity of the model, we present a lightweight yet powerful backbone network (named SA-MobileNeXt) that incorporates channel and spatial attention. Our approach can extract expressive features more effectively by applying the Shuffle Channel and Spatial Attention (SCSA) module into the SandGlass Block (SGBlock) module while increasing the parameters by a small number. In addition, the data enhancement method combining Mosaic and Mixup is employed to improve the robustness of the training model. The Multi-scale Feature Enhancement Fusion (MFEF) network is proposed to fuse the extracted features better. In addition, the SiLU activation function is utilized to optimize the Convolution-Batchnorm-Leaky ReLU (CBL) module and the SGBlock module to accelerate the convergence of the model. The ablation experiments on the KITTI dataset show that each improved method is effective. The improved algorithm reduces the complexity and detection speed of the model while improving the object detection accuracy. The comparative experiments on the KITTY dataset and CCTSDB dataset with other algorithms show that our algorithm also has certain advantages.

In the practical application scenarios of safety helmet detection, the lightweight algorithm You Only Look Once (YOLO) v3-tiny is easy to be deployed in embedded devices because its number of parameters is small. However, its detection accuracy is relatively low, which is why it is not suitable for detecting multi-scale safety helmets. The safety helmet detection algorithm (named SAS-YOLOv3-tiny) is proposed in this paper to balance detection accuracy and model complexity. A light Sandglass-Residual (SR) module based on depthwise separable convolution and channel attention mechanism is constructed to replace the original convolution layer, and the convolution layer of stride two is used to replace the max-pooling layer for obtaining more informative features and promoting detection performance while reducing the number of parameters and computation. Instead of two-scale feature prediction, three-scale feature prediction is used here to improve the detection effect about small objects further. In addition, an improved spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) module is added to the feature extraction network to extract local and global features with rich semantic information. Complete-Intersection over Union (CIoU) loss is also introduced in this paper to improve the loss function for promoting positioning accuracy. The results on the self-built helmet dataset show that the improved algorithm is superior to the original algorithm. Compared with the original YOLOv3-tiny, the SAS-YOLOv3-tiny has significantly improved all metrics (including Precision (P), Recall (R), Mean Average Precision (mAP), F1) at the expense of only a minor speed while keeping fewer parameters and amounts of calculation. Meanwhile, the SAS-YOLOv3-tiny algorithm shows advantages in accuracy compared with lightweight object detection algorithms, and its speed is faster than the heavyweight model.

Objective: To study the effect of ginsenoside Rg1 on the pro-apoptosis/anti-apoptosis balance in lesions of model rats with spinal cord compression injury. Methods: Wistar rats were selected as the experimental animals and randomly divided into sham operation group, compression injury group and ginsenoside group, and spinal cord compression injury models were made and then given intraperitoneal injection of 10 mg/kg ginsenoside Rg1 for intervention. 14 d after intervention, the spinal cord tissue was collected from the injured area to determine the mRNA expression of pro-apoptosis genes, anti-apoptosis genes and apoptosisrelated signaling pathway genes. Results: Bcl-2, Bcl-xl, NAIP, Survivin, ERK1/2, p38MAPK, JNK, STAT3 and STAT5 mRNA expression in spinal cord tissue of compression injury group were significantly lower than those of sham operation group while Bax, caspase-3, caspase-9 and caspase-12 mRNA expression were significantly higher than those of sham operation group; Bcl-2, Bcl-xl, NAIP, Survivin, ERK1/2, p38MAPK, JNK, STAT3 and STAT5 mRNA expression in spinal cord tissue of ginsenoside group were significantly higher than those of compression injury group while Bax, caspase-3, caspase-9 and caspase-12 mRNA expression were significantly lower than those of compression injury group. Conclusion: Ginsenoside Rg1 can regulate the pro-apoptosis/anti-apoptosis balance in lesions of model rats with spinal cord compression injury.

China is a power country in the textile production and trading. But comprehensive perspective on the development of China's textile industry, we find that it is not free from extensive growth mode, and is still an industry with more serious environmental pollution in our country. As to some problems which existed in the rapid development of China's textile industry, this paper put forward the basic concept of the Rapid-Response Eco-Supply Chain of the textile industry according to the basic theory and operation principle of the circular economy, and analyzed that's very important to construct the Rapid-Response Circular Supply Chain for sustainable development of China's textile industry and overcoming the “green” trade barriers. Finally, the main content of the construction research is elaborated.

Electret attracts increasing attention nowadays because of its lasting and stable electrostatic field. To achieve the widespread use of electret material, higher density and better stability of the electret charge storage as well as well-distributed electrostatic field must be ensured at the same time. Based on the mechanism of interface polarization on double-layer media, a novel charging technology for electret is reported in this paper; and PP film is successfully charged through an auxiliary layer to form electret by this proposed method. Effect of charging temperature and charging voltage on the charge storage performance of the as-prepared PP film electret is investigated by means of surface potential measurement. Also its charge storage performance at high temperatures is explored by thermally stimulated discharge technique. Furthermore, its electrostatic field distribution in the directions of X and Y is measured. Results show that the interface polarization charging is more excellent than the corona charging. At a certain temperature, the surface potential of PP film electret increases with increasing charging voltage and both are in a good linear relationship. This is in good agreement with the theoretical analysis in terms of the equation of electret charge accumulation during the charging process. It is shown that in the case of constant charging voltage within the range of 0.53.0 kV, the effect of charging temperature is not obvious when the temperature is below 75 ℃; however, when the temperature is higher than 75 ℃, the surface potential of PP film electret increases with increasing temperature. In addition, its surface potential may change a little with time so it has an excellent charge storage stability. The distribution of its surface potential shows that it exhibits an homogeneous electrostatic field due to interface polarization charging.

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) appears to be a promising candidate for cancer therapeutics because of its ability to preferentially induce apoptosis in malignant cells. However, heterogeneous sensitivity of cancer cells to TRAIL-induced apoptosis may lead to persistent growth of TRAIL-resistant cells, and preclude successful treatment of cancer by TRAIL. Here we show that that the orally available tyrosine kinase inhibitor BAY61-3606 potently enhances sensitivity of human colon cancer cells to TRAIL-induced apoptosis, and that this is associated with upregulation of TRAIL-R1 and downregulation of the receptor-interacting serine/threonine-protein kinase 1 (RIPK1). Although treatment with BAY61-3606 only caused moderate colon cancer cell death, it significantly enhanced TRAIL-induced killing. This could be efficiently blocked by the general caspase inhibitor z-VAD-fmk, indicating TRAIL primarily induced apoptosis in the presence of BAY61-3606. Interestingly, exposure of colon cancer cells resulted in upregulation of TRAIL-R1 and downregulation of RIPK1, suggesting that they may play an important role in BAY61-3606-mediated sensitization of colon cancer cells to TRAIL-induced apoptosis. Taken together, our results suggest that combination with BAY61-3606 may be a useful strategy to improve the therapeutic efficacy of TRAIL in the treatment of colon cancer. Citation Information: Mol Cancer Ther 2013;12(11 Suppl):B22. Citation Format: Jipei Du, Yan Li, Xinyuan Wang, Rao Cheng, Degao Chen, Ji Zhang, Yufang Wang. BAY61-3606 sensitizes colon cancer cells to TRAIL-induced apoptosis by targeting TRAIL-R1 and RIPK1. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference: Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics; 2013 Oct 19-23; Boston, MA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Mol Cancer Ther 2013;12(11 Suppl):Abstract nr B22.

A silicon carbide (SiC) based metal semiconductor field effect transistor (MESFET) is fabricated by using a standard SiC MESFET structure with the application of a dual p-buffer layer and a multi-recessed gate to the process for an S-band power amplifier. The lower doped upper-buffer layer serves to maintain the channel current, while the higher doped lower-buffer layer is used to provide excellent electron confinement in the channel layer. A 20-mm gate periphery SiC MESFET biased at a drain voltage of 85 V demonstrates a pulsed wave saturated output power of 94 W, a linear gain of 11.7 dB, and a maximum power added efficiency of 24.3% at 3.4 GHz. These results are improved compared with those of the conventional single p-buffer MESFET fabricated in this work using the same process. A radio-frequency power output greater than 4.7 W/mm is achieved, showing the potential as a high-voltage operation device for high-power solid-state amplifier applications.