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The pathological features of inflammatory bowel disease necessitate therapeutic strategies aimed at restoring intestinal mucosal barrier function in addition to controlling inflammation. Paeoniflorin, a bioactive herbal constituent isolated from the root of Paeonia albiflora Pall, has been reported to protect against acute colitis in mice. However, the direct molecular target of paeoniflorin in preventing colitis remains elusive. Here, we evaluated the therapeutical effects of Paeoniflorin using IL-10

Dry-cured Spanish mackerel (DSM; Scomberomorus niphonius) is a popularity worldwide dry-cured marine fish product due to its salty and umami flavor. Umami peptides from eight commercial DSMs were identified and compared, and their molecular mechanisms were evaluated via molecular simulation. The results showed that the sequence of peptides varied in different DSMs, wherein only ten sequences were repeated across multiple samples and the remaining 19 were detected in only one sample. The sensory characteristics of eight repeated peptides were evaluated, and four were found to exhibit umami taste and umami-enhancing effects, including Arg-Asp, Asp-Gly-Val, Asp-Arg, and Asp-Lys. They all had a strong affinity for umami receptors, and several amino acid residues of the receptors were mobilized as binding sites to form hydrogen bonds and hydrophobic bonds in ligand-receptor interactions. These results indicated that DSM was rich in umami and umami-enhancing peptides, but their sequence were different in different DSMs.

Summary As a key issue in recent international climate summits, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is confronted with the problem of insufficient financing. This paper intends to explore several schemes for raising the public finance of the GCF among developed countries. Lessons from three main ongoing international financing mechanisms have been drawn, including the United Nations (UN) membership dues, Official Development Assistance (ODA), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The indexes that reflect historical emission responsibility (HR) and ability to pay (AP) are also used to share the burden. Results reveal that the ongoing international financing mechanisms vary in their burden sharing results and the shares of existing donors are driven by highly complex reasons. Weighting the HR, UN, and GEF approaches with the Preference Score Compromises (PSC) method could yield a compromise scheme in which the regional contributions are highly similar to those under the GCF initial resource mobilization from 2015 to 2018. GCF financing heavily depends on contributions from the developed countries even if the donor parties are extended to emerging economics. This paper also finds that the decision of the United States to withdraw from climate finance will significantly increase the burden for other donors, particularly for the European Union the contribution share of which is predicted to increase to nearly 14 percentage points. The schemes proposed in this study can provide a useful reference for GCF financing.

Amounts of cost-effective biological observing and detecting instruments are needed in biology and medical applications. In these demands, a low-cost, portable microscope with light-weight and tele-communication, is very attractive in the resource-limit area. In this manuscript, a portable singlet phase contrast microscope based on smart-phones are proposed. In the optics hardware, an external singlet lens is designed and closely attached before the rear cameras of a smart-phone, which constructs the imaging part of a simplified microscope. And a circular oblique illumination is adopted. In the computational imaging part, the in-focus images recorded by the smart-phone are virtually enhanced and style-transferred to phase contrast images by deep learning methods. Through pairs of experimental image data, we train the deep learning network and demonstrate the effectiveness of this virtual phase contrast imaging approach using multiple samples, e.g., unstained/transparent tumor tissue pathological slide, and H&E (Hematoxylin and Eosin) stained tumor tissue pathological slide. Our results provide a powerful example of low-cost portable phase contrast microscope with high-speed tele-communication abilities in the 5G + mobile internet era.