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Transcutaneous auricular vagus neural stimulation and heart rate variability: Investigation associated with details and also goals.
Due to cultivation position, climate, harvest times, storage conditions and processing method, the evaluation of intra- and inter- batches quality consistency of botanical drugs has always been a thorny problem since it concerns safety and efficacy. The combination of fingerprint based on instrumental analysis and chemometrics is a common evaluation method in recent years. The differences between groups can be judged intuitively and superficially through principal component analysis (PCA) multi-dimensional score plots, but there is a lack of scientific and quantitative index to quantify the differences between groups. How to quantify the difference between groups is basically a blank area of research. Based on traditional F-statistic, we proposed a new F*-statistic to quantify the difference between groups in PCA score plots from the perspective of statistics. As the results revealed, the calculated F*-statistic was 2.58, smaller than the critical value 3.17 (α = 0.05), which indicated that there was no significant difference between groups. Our study add another dimension for PCA application, which offers a new strategy to quantify differences between groups by a new perspective, namely, a combination of fingerprint, chemometrics and statistics to evaluate inter-batches quality consistency quantitatively and objectively. Therefore, this manuscript could provide new ideas and technical references for the quality consistency evaluation of natural drugs, thus better guarantee their clinical efficacy and safety, and better promote industrial development.Haemaphysalis longicornis is an obligate hematophagous ectoparasite that transmits a variety of pathogens causing life‑threatening diseases in humans and animals. Triosephosphate isomerase (TIM) is a key enzyme in glycometabolism, making in an interesting anti-tick vaccine candidate antigen. In this study, the open reading frame (ORF) of the TIM homologue from H. longicornis (HlTIM) was shown to consist of 747 bp encoding a protein of 248 amino acids. HlTIM gene expression was detected in all developmental stages and in all tissues of the unfed female tick by quantitative real-time PCR. The HlTIM gene was cloned and inserted into pET-32a (+) to obtain the recombinant HlTIM protein (rHlTIM) and its immunogenicity was confirmed by Western blot. ELISA results showed that rabbits immunized with rHlTIM produced a humoral immune response. A vaccine trial in rabbits against H. longicornis infestation demonstrated that the engorgement weight, oviposition and hatchability of ticks from the rH1TIM group was decreased by 8.6%, 35.4% and 17.3% respectively, compared to the histidine-tagged thioredoxin (Trx) control group. Considering the cumulative effect of vaccination on the evaluated parameters, results showed 50.9% efficacy in the rHlTIM group. The data reported here demonstrate that rHlTIM has potential for further development of a new candidate vaccine for tick control.The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of ultrasound-assisted saucing on the quality of chicken gizzards. The results showed that with the prolonging of the saucing time, the yield, water holding capacity (WHC), lightness (L*), redness (a*) and springiness of chicken gizzards significantly decreased, while the shear force, hardness and chewiness significantly increased (P less then 0.05). When the saucing time was the same, the yield, WHC, springiness and tenderness of the ultrasound group were significantly higher than those of the non-ultrasound group (P less then 0.05). In particular, when the saucing time was 30 min, the yield, WHC and springiness of the ultrasound group increased by 2.13%, 0.97% and 10.53%, and the shear force decreased by 21.22% compared with those of the non-ultrasound group, respectively. Besides, ultrasound pretreatment increased the content of aromatic compounds, short-chain alkanes, alcohols, aldehydes and ketones, and the principal component analysis displayed that C-50 (saucing for 50 min without ultrasound pretreatment) and U-30 (saucing for 30 min with ultrasound pretreatment) were similar in flavor. Therefore, ultrasound pretreatment is a potential way to improve the quality of saucing chicken gizzards and shorten the processing time.After the latest dengue and Zika outbreaks, the fight against mosquito vectors has become an emerging area of research. One tool for this combat is repellents; however, these products are composed of different toxic agents. Botanical compounds with repellent potential are an alternative; however these compounds are highly volatile. Thus, the present study aimed to synthesize zein-based polymeric nanoparticles as an efficient carrier system for the sustained release of the repellents icaridin and geraniol and evaluate the toxicity of these nanorepellents comparing two different cell models. In vitro tests were carried out due to current Brazilian legislation prohibiting animal testing for cosmetics (current classification of repellents). The cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of the nanoparticles were evaluated in 2D and co-culture cell models (A549/lung epithelium, HaCaT/keratinocytes, HT-29/intestinal epithelium, and THP-1/peripheral blood monocytes). Cell viability by mitochondrial activity, cell membrane integrity, damage to genetic material, and expression of genes involved in the allergic/inflammatory system were evaluated. The results of cytotoxicity evaluation showed cell viability above 70% in both cell models. No differences were observed in genotoxicity assessment between cells exposed to nanorepellents and controls. In contrast, gene expression analysis showed increased cytokine expression for the emulsion compounds in 2D cell cultures compared to co-cultures. These findings open perspectives that zein-based nanorepellents have potential applications due to the reduced toxicity observed when the compounds are encapsulated and emerge as an alternative for arbovirus control. In addition, the study demonstrated that depending on the analysis, different results might be observed when comparing 2D and co-culture cell models to evaluate the toxicity of new nanosystems.Synthetic microbial consortia represent a frontier of synthetic biology that promises versatile engineering of cellular functions. They are primarily developed through the design and construction of cellular interactions that coordinate individual dynamics and generate collective behaviors. Here we review recent advances in the engineering of synthetic communities through cellular-interaction programming. We first examine fundamental building blocks for intercellular communication and unidirectional positive and negative interactions. We then recap the assembly of the building blocks for creating bidirectional interactions in two-species ecosystems, which is followed by the discussion of engineering toward complex communities with increasing species numbers, under spatial contexts, and via model-guided design. We conclude by summarizing major challenges and future opportunities of engineered microbial ecosystems.This research aims at determining some free amino acids in amino acid-based infant formulas and amino acid-modified medical foods for inborn errors of metabolism to prove their quality. A method based on high-performance liquid chromatography and diode array detection was developed and validated. Then, overall uncertainty was estimated by the bottom-up approach. Applying the weighted least squares regression method suggested good linearity with coefficient of determinations ≥ 0.9960. The limits of detection were calculated between 0.01 and 0.28 μg/mL. The most repetitive recovery values were obtained in the range of 91-108%, with RSDs ≤ 15%. The expanded uncertainties were below 20% for most amino acids. The contributions of linear regression and repeatability are two main factors in estimating overall uncertainty. The results offer this method as a simple and easy procedure for analyzing free amino acids in seven powdered medical foods designed for phenylketonuria, maple syrup urine disease, methylmalonic, and propionic acidemia.Model pruning is widely used to compress and accelerate convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Conventional pruning techniques only focus on how to remove more parameters while ensuring model accuracy. This work not only covers the optimization of model accuracy, but also optimizes the model latency during pruning. When there are multiple optimization objectives, the difficulty of algorithm design increases exponentially. So latency sensitivity is proposed to effectively guide the determination of layer sparsity in this paper. We present the latency-aware automated pruning (LAP) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the layer sparsity. Latency sensitivity is used as a prior knowledge and involved into the exploration loop. Rather than relying on a single reward signal such as validation accuracy or floating-point operations (FLOPs), our agent receives the feedback on the accuracy error and latency sensitivity. We also provide a novel filter selection algorithm to accurately distinguish important filters within a layer based on their dynamic changes. Compared to the state-of-the-art compression policies, our framework demonstrated superior performances for VGGNet, ResNet, and MobileNet on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and Food-101. Our LAP allowed the inference latency of MobileNet-V1 to achieve approximately 1.64 times speedup on the Titan RTX GPU, with no loss of ImageNet Top-1 accuracy. It significantly improved the pareto optimal curve on the accuracy and latency trade-off.Large-area high-quality graphene enabled by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) can possibly pave the path for advanced flexible electronics and spintronics. CVD-grown method utilizing liquid carbon precursor has recently been demonstrated as an appealing choice for mass graphene production, thanks to its low cost and safe operation. However, the quality of the graphene film has been the major obstacle for the implementation of the liquid-precursor-based CVD method. Here we report the growth of centimeter-scale easily-transferable single-layer graphene (SLG) using acetone as a liquid carbon precursor. P5091 The dry-transfer technique was used to prepare the graphene device. The typical mobility of the dry-transferred SLG device is as high as 12 500 cm2V-1s-1at room temperature. Thanks to the high quality of the device, the robust quantum Hall effect can survive up to room temperature. The excellent device quality also enables us to observe the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillation in the low magnetic field regime and systemically study the leading scattering mechanism. We extracted both the transport scattering timeτtand the quantum scattering timeτqover a wide range of carrier density. The ratio of the scattering times suggests that the charged-impurity resided near the surface of the graphene restricted the device performance.This study explored the combined disruption mechanism of polychlorinated naphthalenes (PCNs) on the three key receptors (estrogen receptor, thyroid receptor, and adrenoceptor) of the human endocrine system. The intensity of PCN endocrine disruption on these receptors was first determined using a molecular docking method. A comprehensive index of PCN endocrine disruption to human was quantified by analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy analysis. The mode of action between PCNs and the receptors was further identified to screen the molecular characteristics influencing PCN endocrine disruption through molecular docking and fractional factorial design. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models were established to investigate the toxic mechanism due to PCN endocrine disruption. The results showed that the lowest occupied orbital energy (ELUMO) was the most important factor contributing to the toxicity of PCNs on the endocrine receptors, followed by the orbital energy difference (ΔE) and positive Millikan charge (q+).
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