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Increasing planting density has been adopted as an effective means to increase maize (Zea mays) yield. Competition for light from neighbors can trigger plant shade avoidance syndrome, which includes accelerated flowering. However, the regulatory networks of maize inflorescence development in response to high-density planting remain poorly understood. In this study, we showed that shade-mimicking treatments cause precocious development of the tassels and ears. Comparative transcriptome profiling analyses revealed the enrichment of phytohormone-related genes and transcriptional regulators among the genes co-regulated by developmental progression and simulated shade. Network analysis showed that three homologous Squamosa promoter binding protein (SBP)-like (SPL) transcription factors, Unbranched2 (UB2), Unbranched3 (UB3), and Tasselsheath4 (TSH4), individually exhibited connectivity to over 2,400 genes across the V3-to-V9 stages of tassel development. In addition, we showed that the ub2 ub3 double mutant and tsh4 single mutant were almost insensitive to simulated shade treatments. Moreover, we demonstrated that UB2/UB3/TSH4 could directly regulate the expression of Barren inflorescence2 (BIF2) and Zea mays teosinte branched1/cycloidea/proliferating cell factor30 (ZmTCP30). Furthermore, we functionally verified a role of ZmTCP30 in regulating tassel branching and ear development. Our results reveal a UB2/UB3/TSH4-anchored transcriptional regulatory network of maize inflorescence development and provide valuable targets for breeding shade-tolerant maize cultivars.

Maize (Zea mays) originated in southern Mexico and has spread over a wide latitudinal range. Maize expansion from tropical to temperate regions has necessitated a reduction of its photoperiod sensitivity. In this study, we cloned a quantitative trait locus (QTL) regulating flowering time in maize and show that the maize ortholog of Arabidopsis thaliana EARLY FLOWERING3, ZmELF3.1, is the causal locus. We demonstrate that ZmELF3.1 and ZmELF3.2 proteins can physically interact with ZmELF4.1/4.2 and ZmLUX1/2, to form evening complex(es; ECs) in the maize circadian clock. Loss-of-function mutants for ZmELF3.1/3.2 and ZmLUX1/2 exhibited delayed flowering under long-day and short-day conditions. We show that EC directly represses the expression of several flowering suppressor genes, such as the CONSTANS, CONSTANS-LIKE, TOC1 (CCT) genes ZmCCT9 and ZmCCT10, ZmCONSTANS-LIKE 3, and the PSEUDORESPONSE REGULATOR (PRR) genes ZmPRR37a and ZmPRR73, thus alleviating their inhibition, allowing florigen gene expression and promoting flowering. Further, we identify two closely linked retrotransposons located in the ZmELF3.1 promoter that regulate the expression levels of ZmELF3.1 and may have been positively selected during postdomestication spread of maize from tropical to temperate regions during the pre-Columbian era. These findings provide insights into circadian clock-mediated regulation of photoperiodic flowering in maize and new targets of genetic improvement for breeding.

This study aimed to investigate the mechanism and partial material basis of Jieduquyuziyin prescription (JQZP) reduces systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) inflammation via regulating Nek7-NLRP3 signaling pathway. The therapeutic effect of JQZP was evaluated by MRL/lpr SLE mice model in vivo and Lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced RAW264.7 macrophage inflammation model in vitro. The partial material basis of JQZP was analyzed by network pharmacology, molecular docking and HPLC. The effect of JQZP on inhibiting the Nek7-NLRP3 signaling pathway and the underlying molecular mechanism were investigated by ELISA, RT-qPCR and Western blot. in vivo experiments showed that JQZP could ameliorate renal histopathological changes, decrease spleen index, 24 h urine and urine creatinine (UCR) concentration, and increase urinary microalbumin (ALB) concentration and microalbumin/creatinine ratio (ACR) in MRL/lpr mice. In addition, JQZP down-regulated the levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-18 and IL-1β both in vivo and in vitro. Network pharmacology and HPLC analysis showed that salidroside, luteolin and apigenin in JQZP-medicated serum were partial main active ingredients, and molecular docking showed that all three main active ingredients could bind to Nek7, NLRP3 and ASC well. Western blot further confirmed that JQZP, JQZP-medicated serum and active monomer ingredients could regulate the expression of Nek7, NLRP3, and ASC in Nek7-NLRP3 signaling pathway. JQZP has a certain effect on improving excessive inflammation of SLE, and the mechanism of action may be related to the inhibition of Nek7-NLRP3 signaling pathway. Salidroside, luteolin and apigenin may be partial material basis for exerting this effect.

Because the existing maintenance models are not statistically analyzed, the maintenance effect is not ideal. Therefore, a distribution network area opportunistic maintenance model considering the total supply capability promotion of distributed generation is designed to achieve the total supply capability promotion and reduce the network loss rate after maintenance. Considering multiple time scales, the distribution network total supply capability model is constructed, and the improved repetitive power flow algorithm is used to count the model; taking the total supply capability model as the reliability basis of the distribution network system, and the maximum power supply capacity as the goal, the regional opportunistic maintenance model of total supply capability promotion is constructed, and the model is used to determine the area to be repaired, fully considering the reliability requirements of the distribution system, and combining with the node depth coding technology and the simulation Genetic algorithm optimizes the network structure, realizes the network reconfiguration, and completes the model solution. Through the analysis of the actual data, using this model to repair the regional equipment of distribution network can obtain good maintenance results. After the completion of maintenance, the network loss rate is low, but the total supply capability is high, which has good maintenance effect.

The measurement of atmospheric O2 concentrations and related oxygen budget have been used to estimate terrestrial and oceanic carbon uptake. However, a discrepancy remains in assessments of O2 exchange between ocean and atmosphere (i.e. air-sea O2 flux), which is one of the major contributors to uncertainties in the O2-based estimations of the carbon uptake. Here, we explore the variability of air-sea O2 flux with the use of outputs from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6). The simulated air-sea O2 flux exhibits an obvious warming-induced upward trend (∼1.49 Tmol yr−2) since the mid-1980s, accompanied by a strong decadal variability dominated by oceanic climate modes. We subsequently revise the O2-based carbon uptakes in response to this changing air-sea O2 flux. Our results show that, for the 1990–2000 period, the averaged net ocean and land sinks are 2.10±0.43 and 1.14±0.52 GtC yr−1 respectively, overall consistent with estimates derived by the Global Carbon Project (GCP). An enhanced carbon uptake is found in both land and ocean after year 2000, reflecting the modification of carbon cycle under human activities. Results derived from CMIP5 simulations also investigated in the study allow for comparisons from which we can see the vital importance of oxygen dataset on carbon uptake estimations.

Cold-start has become critical for recommendations, especially for sparse user-item interactions. Recent approaches based on meta-learning succeed in alleviating the issue, owing to the fact that these methods have strong generalization, so they can fast adapt to new tasks under cold-start settings. However, these meta-learning-based recommendation models learned with single and spase ratings are easily falling into the meta-overfitting, since the one and only rating $r_{ui}$ to a specific item $i$ cannot reflect a user's diverse interests under various circumstances(e.g., time, mood, age, etc), i.e. if $r_{ui}$ equals to 1 in the historical dataset, but $r_{ui}$ could be 0 in some circumstance. In meta-learning, tasks with these single ratings are called Non-Mutually-Exclusive(Non-ME) tasks, and tasks with diverse ratings are called Mutually-Exclusive(ME) tasks. Fortunately, a meta-augmentation technique is proposed to relief the meta-overfitting for meta-learning methods by transferring Non-ME tasks into ME tasks by adding noises to labels without changing inputs. Motivated by the meta-augmentation method, in this paper, we propose a cross-domain meta-augmentation technique for content-aware recommendation systems (MetaCAR) to construct ME tasks in the recommendation scenario. Our proposed method consists of two stages: meta-augmentation and meta-learning. In the meta-augmentation stage, we first conduct domain adaptation by a dual conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with a multi-view information bottleneck constraint, and then apply the learned CVAE to generate ratings for users in the target domain. In the meta-learning stage, we introduce both the true and generated ratings to construct ME tasks that enables the meta-learning recommendations to avoid meta-overfitting. Experiments evaluated in real-world datasets show the significant superiority of MetaCAR for coping with the cold-start user issue over competing baselines including cross-domain, content-aware, and meta-learning-based recommendations.

Radix Dipsaci (RD) is the dry root of the Dipsacus asper Wall. ex DC., which has the effect of strengthening muscles and bones. The purpose of this study was to find the main active ingredients that could improve the anti-osteoporosis efficacy of RD after processing with salt. The fingerprints of raw and salt-processed RD were established by HPLC-DAD to determine the common components. Then, an experimental study on the anti-osteoporosis efficacy was carried out to compared the difference in the efficacy between raw and salt-processed RD. Pharmacological results showed that, compared with the model group, both the raw and salt-processed RD were able to increase the Ca, bone mineral content, bone mineral density, trabeculae bone area and number of trabeculae bone of rats, and reduce the P, alkaline phosphatase, osteocalcin and trabecular bone separation of rats. Under the same dose, the pharmacological effect of salt-processed RD group was better than that of raw RD group. Finally, spectrum-effect relationship between fingerprints and anti-osteoporosis efficacy of RD was assessed by grey relational analysis and entropy method to screening out the ingredients that affect the anti-osteoporosis efficacy in RD after processing with salt. The results showed that the anti-osteoporosis efficacy of salt-processed RD was stronger than that of raw RD, and the pharmacologically active ingredients that improved its anti-osteoporosis efficacy after processing with salt were peak 4, peak 7 (caffeic acid), peak 8 (loganin), peak 12 (isochlorogenic acid C), peak 13 (dipsanoside A) and peak 14. As far as we known, this was the first time to establish the spectrum-effect relationship between RD and anti-osteoporosis efficacy, which laid the foundation for the follow-up research on the pharmacodynamic components and molecular mechanism of RD.

The magnetic release is a core component of a voltage-independent residual current device (RCD). Due to the sensitivity of magnetic release, it is easy to be interfered with by an external magnetic field. A new magnetic release design with high anti-interference capability is proposed in this work. First, the impact of the interference magnetic field on the magnetic release is analyzed. Second, the proposed magnetic release is detailed illustrated, including the structure and parameter design. Finally, several main factors influencing the anti-interference ability of magnetic release are analyzed, including the right torque arm and right contact area. Both simulation and experimental tests are carried out to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed magnetic release.

Rationally designing efficient nanomaterials for heterogeneous activation of peroxymonosulfate (PMS) is necessary for environmental remediation. Nitrogen-containing carbon/FeCo2O4 composites (FeCo2O4-N-C) were prepared by annealing the iron and cobalt in the ZIF-67 (Fe-Co-ZIF) precursor at different reaction temperatures. In the presence of PMS, 400 °C calcined nitrogen-containing carbon/FeCo2O4 composites (FeCo2O4-N-C-400) was used as catalyst for heterogeneous Fenton degradation of methylene blue (MB) and nearly 100% MB was removed within 10 min without pH adjustment. FeCo2O4-N-C-400 had excellent catalytic activity profiting from the uniform distribution of bimetals and nitrogen doping, which ensured the exposure of sites with high catalytic activity. Free radical quenching experiments showed that a large number of reactive oxygen species (SO4.- and .OH) were the cause of pollutant degradation. At the same time, the possible degradation mechanism of MB in FeCo2O4-N-C-400/PMS system was proposed. In addition, FeCo2O4-N-C-400 can still degrade 60% of MB after four cycles, which indicated that the catalyst had long-term catalytic durability and recyclability.

Background Glioma is the most frequent, highly aggressive primary intracranial malignant tumor. Circular RNA (circRNA) circ_0037655 has been reported to be a vital regulator in glioma. The different functional mechanism behind circ_0037655 was investigated in the current study. Methods The expression of circ_0037655, microRNA-1229-3p (miR-1229-3p) and integrin beta-8 (ITGB8) was detected via the quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Cellular research was performed via colony formation assay for cell proliferation, flow cytometry for cell cycle and cell apoptosis, scratch assay for cell migration, as well as transwell assay for cell migration and invasion. Western blot was used for detection of ITGB8 protein and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) process. Dual-luciferase reporter assay was implemented for the binding analysis of potential targets. In vivo assay was administered via xenograft in mice. Results Upregulation of circ_0037655 was affirmed in glioma samples and cells. Tumor formation and metastasis of glioma were inhibited after circ_0037655 was downregulated. miR-1229-3p acted as a target of circ_0037655, and its upregulation was responsible for the function of si-circ_0037655 in glioma cells. miR-1229-3p functioned as a tumor inhibitor in glioma progression by targeting ITGB8. circ_0037655 modulated the ITGB8 expression by targeting miR-1229-3p. In vivo knockdown of circ_0037655 also suppressed glioma tumorigenesis by acting on the miR-1229-3p/ITGB8 axis. Conclusion This study showed that downregulation of the expression of circ_0037655 could inhibit glioma progression by acting on the miR-1229-3p/ITGB8 axis. The specific circ_0037655/miR-1229-3p/ITGB8 axis was disclosed in glioma research.

As an important contributor to the habitability of our planet, the oxygen cycle is interconnected with the emergence and evolution of complex life and is also the basis to establish Earth system science. Investigating the global oxygen cycle provides valuable information on the evolution of the Earth system, the habitability of our planet in the geologic past, and the future of human life. Numerous investigations have expanded our knowledge of the oxygen cycle in the fields of geology, geochemistry, geobiology, and atmospheric science. However, these studies were conducted separately, which has led to one-sided understandings of this critical scientific issue and an incomplete synthesis of the interactions between the different spheres of the Earth system. This review presents a five-sphere coupled model of the Earth system and clarifies the core position of the oxygen cycle in Earth system science. Based on previous research, this review comprehensively summarizes the evolution of the oxygen cycle in geological time, with a special focus on the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) and the mass extinctions, as well as the possible connections between the oxygen content and biological evolution. The possible links between the oxygen cycle and biodiversity in geologic history have profound implications for exploring the habitability of Earth in history and guiding the future of humanity. Since the Anthropocene, anthropogenic activities have gradually steered the Earth system away from its established trajectory and had a powerful impact on the oxygen cycle. The human-induced disturbance of the global oxygen cycle, if not controlled, could greatly reduce the habitability of our planet.

A novel, inexpensive and eco-friendly aminated lignin/geopolymer supported with Fe nanoparticles (Fe@N-L-GM) composite was successfully synthesized using kaolin and lignin as the major precursors. The prepared Fe@N-L-GM had larger specific surface area, rich oxygen-containing and nitrogen-containing functional groups, greater electron transfer ability and interconnective porous structure. The Fe@N-L-GM could be employed as the adsorbent of Cr(VI) and the activator of potassium peroxymonosulfate (PMS) for treatment of Cr(VI) and naphthalene (NAP) in wastewater. The adsorption and degradation results indicated that the maximum adsorption capacity of Cr(VI) could reach 65.83 mg g

In this paper, three-dimensional magnetic nitrogen-doped porous carbon modified by EDTA (N-MPC-EDTA) was successfully prepared by two-step method with lignin as the precursor, and was used for the removal of Cd (II). The 3D adsorbents were characterized by SEM, TEM, BET, XRD, XPS, Zeta potential, and element mapping analysis techniques, and the performance of the materials was tested by the batch adsorption method. The influence of experimental parameters such as contact time and pH value on the adsorption capacity of N-MPC-EDTA on Cd (II) was studied. Under the optimal conditions, the equilibrium adsorption capacity of Cd (II) was 43.68 mg∙ L-1 and the adsorption equilibrium was quickly reached within 45 min. A possible adsorption mechanism was proposed, in which the chelation of EDTA as well as the electrostatic attraction of hydroxyl, carboxyl, and nitrogen-containing functional groups dominated the adsorption of Cd (II). The adsorption kinetics and isotherm data fitted well with the pseudo-second-order kinetic model and Freundlich model, respectively. In addition, the good regeneration performance suggested that N-MPC-EDTA will have a broad application prospect in water treatment.

PURPOSE To quantitatively analyze the impact of intrahepatic venovenous shunt (IHVS) on hepatic venous pressure gradient (HVPG) measurement. MATERIALS AND METHODS From 2015 to 2019, 222 HVPG measurements performed during transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt creation were eligible for this study. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) software color-coded each pixel of a two-dimensional DSA series by time-intensity curve to classify IHVS. Different degrees of IHVS were found in 36.5% of patients (81/222). Mild IHVS was found in 10.8% of patients (24/222), moderate IHVS was found in 10.8% of patients (24/222), and severe IVHS was found in 14.9% of patients (33/222). RESULTS Mean wedged hepatic vein pressure (WHVP) and HVPG were significantly lower in patients with IHVS compared with patients without IHVS (WHVP: 17.78 mm Hg ± 7.00 vs 24.89 mm Hg ± 8.69, P = .001; HVPG: 11.93 mm Hg ± 5.76 vs 18.6 mm Hg ± 6.85, P < .001). Mild IHVS had little effect on WHVP and HVPG. Mean WHVP and HVPG were 11 mm Hg lower in patients with moderate IHVS (WHVP: 20.38 mm Hg ± 8.38 vs 31.5 mm Hg ± 9.39, P = .026; HVPG: 13.88 mm Hg ± 6.33 vs 25.00 mm Hg ± 9.81, P < .001) and 15 mm Hg lower in patients with severe IHVS (WHVP: 13.45 mm Hg ± 5.28 vs 28.64 mm Hg ± 6.38, P = .017; HVPG: 8.27 mm Hg ± 3.85 vs 23.45 mm Hg ± 6.95, P < .001) than mean portal vein pressure and portal vein gradient. CONCLUSIONS For patients with moderate or severe IHVS, HVPG might greatly underestimate the actual value of portal vein pressure, and the portal vein should be catheterized to measure portal pressure.

Cold-start issues have been more and more challenging for providing accurate recommendations with the fast increase of users and items. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the intractable problems via content-aware recommendations based on auxiliary information and/or cross-domain recommendations with transfer learning. Their performances are often constrained by the extremely sparse user-item interactions, unavailable side information, or very limited domain-shared users. Recently, meta-learners with meta-augmentation by adding noises to labels have been proven to be effective to avoid overfitting and shown good performance on new tasks. Motivated by the idea of meta-augmentation, in this paper, by treating a user's preference over items as a task, we propose a so-called Diverse Preference Augmentation framework with multiple source domains based on meta-learning (referred to as MetaDPA) to i) generate diverse ratings in a new domain of interest (known as target domain) to handle overfitting on the case of sparse interactions, and to ii) learn a preference model in the target domain via a meta-learning scheme to alleviate cold-start issues. Specifically, we first conduct multi-source domain adaptation by dual conditional variational autoencoders and impose a Multi-domain InfoMax (MDI) constraint on the latent representations to learn domain-shared and domain-specific preference properties. To avoid overfitting, we add a Mutually-Exclusive (ME) constraint on the output of decoders to generate diverse ratings given content data. Finally, these generated diverse ratings and the original ratings are introduced into the meta-training procedure to learn a preference meta-learner, which produces good generalization ability on cold-start recommendation tasks. Experiments on real-world datasets show our proposed MetaDPA clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art baselines.

Background: Lectins are a diverse group of glycoproteins or glycoconjugate proteins that can be extracted from plants, invertebrates and higher animals. Cancerlectins, a kind of lectins, which play a key role in the process of tumor cells interacting with each other and are being employed as therapeutic agents. A full understanding of cancerlectins is significant because it provides a tool for the future direction of cancer therapy. Objective: To develop an accurate and practically useful timesaving tool to identify cancerlectins. A novel sequence-based method is proposed along with a correlative webserver to access the proposed tool. Methods: Firstly, protein features were extracted in a newly feature building way termed, g-gap tripeptide composition. After which a proposed cascade linear discriminant analysis (Cascade LDA) is used to alleviate the high dimensional difficulties with the Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) as a feature importance criterion. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as the classifier to identify cancerlectins. Results: The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 91.34% with sensitivity of 89.89%, specificity of 92.48% and an 0.8318 Mathew’s correlation coefficient based on only 13 fusion features in jackknife cross validation, the result of which is superior to other published methods in this domain. Conclusion: In this study, a new method based only on primary structure of protein is proposed and experimental results show that it could be a promising tool to identify cancerlectins. An openaccess webserver is made available in this work to facilitate other related works.

Objectives The study aimed to examine the anti-diabetic effects of Gynura divaricata (GD) and the underlying mechanism. Methods Information about the chemical compositions of GD was obtained from extensive literature reports. Potential target genes were predicted using PharmMapper and analyzed using Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and Gene Ontology (GO). To validate the results from bioinformatics analyses, an aqueous extract of GD was administered to type 2 diabetic rats established by feeding a high-fat and high-sugar diet followed by STZ injection. Key proteins of the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway and fatty acid metabolism signaling pathway were investigated by immunoblotting. Results The blood glucose of the rats in the GD treatment group was significantly reduced compared with the model group without treatment. GD also showed activities in reducing the levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), and creatinine (CREA). The levels of urine sugar (U-GLU) and urine creatinine (U-CREA) were also lowered after treatment with GD. Bioinformatics analysis showed that some pathways including metabolic pathways, insulin resistance, insulin signaling pathway, PPAR signaling pathway, bile secretion, purine metabolism, etc. may be regulated by GD. Furthermore, GD significantly increased the protein expression levels of PKM1/2, p-AKT, PI3K p85, and GLUT4 in the rat liver. In addition, the expression levels of key proteins in the fatty acid metabolism signaling pathway including AMPK, p-AMPK, PPARα, and CPT1α were significantly upregulated. The anti-apoptotic protein BCL-2/BAX expression ratio in rats was significantly upregulated after GD intervention. These results were consistent with the bioinformatics analysis results. Conclusions Our study suggests that GD can exert hypoglycemic effects in vivo by regulating the genes at the key nodes of the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway and fatty acid metabolism signaling pathway.

Atmospheric Oxygen (O2) is one of the dominating features that allow the earth to be a habitable planet with advanced civilization and diverse biology. However, since the late 1980s, observational data have indicated a steady decline in O2 content on the scale of parts-per-million level. The current scientific consensus is that the decline is caused by the fossil-fuel combustion; however, few works have been done to quantitatively evaluate the response of O2 cycle under the anthropogenic impact, at both the global and regional scales. This paper manages to quantify the land O2 flux and makes the initial step to quantificationally describe the anthropogenic impacts on the global O2 budget. Our estimation reveals that the global O2 consumption has experienced an increase from 33.69 ± 1.11 to 47.63 ± 0.80 Gt (gigaton, 109 t) O2 yr−1 between 2000 and 2018, while the land production of O2 (totaling 11.34 ± 13.48 Gt O2 yr−1 averaged over the same period) increased only slightly. In 2018, the combustion of fossil-fuel and industrial activities (38.45 ± 0.61 Gt O2 yr−1) contributed the most to consumption, followed by wildfires (4.97 ± 0.48 Gt O2 yr−1) as well as livestock and human respiration processes (2.48 ± 0.16 and 1.73 ± 0.13 Gt O2 yr−1, respectively). Burning of fossil-fuel that causes large O2 fluxes occurs in East Asia, India, North America, and Europe, while wildfires that cause large fluxes in comparable magnitude are mainly distributed in central Africa.

In utero electroporation (IUE) is a useful technique for gene delivery in embryonic mouse brain. IUE technique is used to investigate the mammalian brain development in vivo. However, according to recent studies, IUE methodology has some limitations like the formation of artificial ectopias and heterotopias at the micro-injection site. Thus far, the artificial heterotopias generated by physical trauma during IUE are rarely reported. Here, we reported the artificial heterotopias and ectopias generated from surgical damages of micropipette in detail, and moreover, we described the protocol to avoid these phenotypes. For the experimental purpose, we transferred empty plasmids (pCAGIG-GFP) with green fluorescent-labelled protein into the cortical cortex by IUE and then compared the structure of the cortex region between the injected and un-injected cerebral hemispheres. The coronary section showed that ectopias and heterotopias were appeared on imperfect-injected brains, and layer maker staining, which including Ctip2 and TBR1 and laminin, can differentiate the physical damage, revealing the neurons in artificial ectopic and heterotopic area were not properly arranged. Moreover, premature differentiation of neurons in ectopias and heterotopias were observed. To avoid heterotopias and ectopias, we carefully manipulated the method of IUE application. Thus, this study might be helpful for the in utero electroporator to distinguish the artificial ectopias and heterotopias that caused by the physical injury by microneedle and the ways to avoid those undesirable circumstances.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate effects of α-asarone and β-asarone on Aβ (25-35)-induced PC12 cell injury and related mechanisms. METHODS: Aβ toxic injury cell model was induced by Aβ (25-35) in PC12 cells. PC12 cells were divided into blank control group, model control group, α-asarone group (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 μg/mL), β-asarone group (6.3, 12.5, 25.0 μg/mL), vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) group, and VIP antagonist control group. Cell survival rate was detected by CCK-8 kit; cell apoptosis rate was detected by flow cytometry. The levels of inflammatory cytokines interleukin (IL)-1, IL-10, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, oxidation-related inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), nitric oxide (NO), apoptosis factors caspase-3 and p53 were detected by ELISA method. The expressions of C-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38MAPK) were detected by Western blotting. RESULTS: Compared with model control group, cell survival rates of α-asarone group, β-asarone group and VIP group increased; the cell apoptosis rate decreased; levels of apoptosis-related factors caspase-3, p53, inflammatory factors IL-1, TNF-α decreased; IL-10 level increased; levels of oxidization-related factors iNOS and NO decreased; the expression of JNK and p38MAPK protein decreased (all P0.05). CONCLUSION: α-asarone and β-asarone have protective effects on PC12 cell injury induced by Aβ (25-35). β-asarone may inhibit inflammatory factors and oxidation-related factors through promoting VIP secretion, regulating JNK/MAPK pathway, and reducing PC12 cell apoptosis; however, the effect of α-asarone may be not related to VIP secretion.