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Phillyrin, a well-known natural compound from the dried fruits of Forsythia suspensa (Thunb.) Vahl., has shown anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and anti-virus activities as well as renal protective effects on diabetic nephropathy. In this study, we investigated whether phillyrin attenuated cardiac hypertrophy induced by catecholamine in vivo and in vitro, and explored the underlying mechanisms. Cardiac hypertrophy was induced in C57BL/6 mice by subcutaneous injection of norepinephrine (NE, a key catecholamine), and in rat cardiomyoblasts (H9c2) by stimulation with NE in vitro. Our results showed that administration of phillyrin (100 mg/kg, i.p. for 15 days) significantly improved cardiac function, histopathological changes, cardiac hypertrophy and decreased the upregulated hypertrophic markers (ANP, BNP, and β-MHC). Moreover, treatment with phillyrin obviously reduced the infiltration of the CD68 positive macrophages and the mRNA expression of proinflammatory genes (IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α) in left ventricular tissue. In addition, treatment with phillyrin markedly inhibited the phosphorylation of p38 MAPK, ERK1/2, AKT, and NF-κB p65 in heart tissues. Furthermore, in NE-treated H9c2 cells, pretreatment with phillyrin clearly attenuated cardiomyocyte hypertrophy, reduced ROS production and inhibited the phosphorylation of p38 MAPK, ERK1/2, AKT, and NF-κB p65 in vitro. Collectively, our results demonstrate that phillyrin effectively alleviates NE-induced cardiac hypertrophy and inflammatory response by suppressing p38 MAPK/ERK1/2 and AKT/NF-κB signaling pathways.

[Aim] To investigate the action of cytokines in patients with chronic liver failure and to explore the roles of cytokines in chronic liver failure. [Methods] Thirty-one patients with chronic liver failure admitted from May 2006 to November 2009 were included. Thirty cases with mild to moderate chronic type B hepatitis admitted concomitantly were regarded as control. IL-1, TNF-alpha, IL-12, IL-10 Levels in serum was the factors to determine at clinical diagnosis and 2-week treatment. We analyzed levels of cytokines action in 31 chronic liver failure patients both at clinical diagnosis and 2-week treatment in comparison with control group. [Results] We analyzed IL-1 level in death group at clinical diagnosis and 2-week treatment were sig- nificant higher than in survival and control groups, furthermore it was also higher in survival group than in control group. At clinical diagnosis, TNF-alpha level in death group was higher than that in control. How- ever, there was no obviously difference between the death group and the survival group in TNF-alpha level. With the progression of the disease, TNF-alpha level was remarkably risen in death group, but decreased in survival group. IL-10 level was dramatically increased in death group, but no changed in survival group. IL-12 level in death group was higher than in survival group, but lower than in control group. [Conclusions] The levels of TNF-alpha, IL-1, IL-10 and IL-12 in patients with chronic liver failure was increased and the increase of IL-10 is secondary to elevation of IL-12.

The availability of high-frequent price data in foreign exchange market, the biggest financial market in the world, attracts researchers to study its logarithm return time series quantitatively. Non-Markov processes prevail to model the time series, but non-Markov processes are difficult to model and characterize. In this paper, we use our proposed method to reconstruct the time series with Markov model. Our reconstruction repeats the fat-tailed transition probability density of the time series. From the reconstruction, we find that the underlying Markov process is mean-reverting, and more volatile and more tendentious to the mean when further from the mean. EUR/USD is more disciplinary than AUD/USD.

Prediction of RNA secondary structures including pseudoknots is a difficult topic in RNA field. Current predicting methods usually have relatively low accuracy and high complexity. Considering that the stacking of adjacent base pairs is a common feature of RNA secondary structure, here we present a method for predicting pseudoknots based on covariance with stacking and minimum free energy. A new score scheme, which combined stacked covariance with free energy, was used to assess the evaluation of base pair in our method. Based on this score scheme, we utilized an iterative procedure to compute the optimized RNA secondary structure with minimum score approximately. In each interaction, helix of high covariance and low free energy was selected until the sequences didn't form helix, so two crossing helixes which were selected from different iterations could form a pseudoknot. We test our method on data sets of ClustalW alignments and structural alignments downloaded from RNA databases. Experimental results show that our method can correctly predict the major portion of pseudoknots. Our method has both higher average sensitivity and specificity than the reference algorithms, and performs much better for structural alignments than for ClustalW alignments. Finally, we discuss the influence on the performance by the factor of covariance weight, and conclude that the best performance is achieved when lambda1 : lambda2 = 5 : 1.