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Aconitine, a major aconitum alkaloid, is well known for its high toxicity that induces severe arrhythmias and neurological symptoms. One mechanism of aconitine-induced toxic responses is the induction of apoptosis. Apoptosis and autophagy are interconnected processes and the two pathways share critical components. In this study, we investigated the role of autophagy in aconitine-induced toxicity using mouse model. 120 mice were randomly divided into 4 experimental groups (normal saline), low dose group (0.14 μmol/L), medium dose group (0.28 μmol/L) and high dose group (0.56 μmol/ L). 30 mice in each group were administered with aconitine (lavage) for 30 days. The livers were collected for analysis of autophagy-related proteins by Western blotting. The expression of LC3II/LC3I ratio and Beclin 1 were found to increase and then decrease with the highest expression at 10 days and the p62 showed a time-dependent decreases. Autophagy is regulated by the mTOR pathway, we further analyzed the effects of aconitine on this pathway and found aconitine inhibited, phosphorylation of p-PI3K, p-Akt and p-mTOR. The p-p70s6k and p-4EBP1 which are downstream of mTOR were concomitantly decreased. These results suggest that aconitine induce autophagy in mouse liver. The PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling pathway is involved in the regulation of aconitine-induced autophagy in the liver of mice.

Monolayer VS2 has two common stable phases, 2H-phase and 1T-phase. Based on first-principles calculations, we studied the optical properties of 2D-VS2, including their dielectric functions, absorption coefficients, refraction indexes and energy loss functions. Also, we fully analyzed the relationship between the electronic structure and the optical characteristics of 2D-VS2. We found that the differences of density of states are the fundamental reasons for the differences of the two phase optical absorption behavior.