[Advancements in the study of allergen-specific Th2 cell surface markers].

Allergen-specific Th2 cells refer to a subset of Th2 cells that undergo substantial expansion following allergen stimulation. They play a crucial role in allergic diseases, and an increasing amount of research has revealed a close relationship between surface molecules on allergen-specific Th2 cells and allergic diseases. In comparison to other CD4+T cells or Th2 cells, allergen-specific Th2 cells exhibit low expression of CD27 but high expression of CD154, CD69, CRTH2, CD161, ST2, hPGDs, CD49d, and COX-2. They can be used for the identification of allergen-specific Th2 cells and serve as potential targets for the prevention and treatment of specific diseases. They hold significant value in preventing the onset and exacerbation of allergic diseases.

[A retrieval method of drug molecules based on graph collapsing].

OBJECTIVE: To establish a compact and efficient hypergraph representation and a graph-similarity-based retrieval method of molecules to achieve effective and efficient medicine information retrieval. METHODS: Chemical structural formula (CSF) was a primary search target as a unique and precise identifier for each compound at the molecular level in the research field of medicine information retrieval. To retrieve medicine information effectively and efficiently, a complete workflow of the graph-based CSF retrieval system was introduced. This system accepted the photos taken from smartphones and the sketches drawn on tablet personal computers as CSF inputs, and formalized the CSFs with the corresponding graphs. Then this paper proposed a compact and efficient hypergraph representation for molecules on the basis of analyzing factors that directly affected the efficiency of graph matching. According to the characteristics of CSFs, a hierarchical collapsing method combining graph isomorphism and frequent subgraph mining was adopted. There was yet a fundamental challenge, subgraph overlapping during the collapsing procedure, which hindered the method from establishing the correct compact hypergraph of an original CSF graph. Therefore, a graph-isomorphism-based algorithm was proposed to select dominant acyclic subgraphs on the basis of overlapping analysis. Finally, the spatial similarity among graphical CSFs was evaluated by multi-dimensional measures of similarity. RESULTS: To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the proposed system was firstly compared with Wikipedia Chemical Structure Explorer (WCSE), the state-of-the-art system that allowed CSF similarity searching within Wikipedia molecules dataset, on retrieval accuracy. The system achieved higher values on mean average precision, discounted cumulative gain, rank-biased precision, and expected reciprocal rank than WCSE from the top-2 to the top-10 retrieved results. Specifically, the system achieved 10%, 1.41, 6.42%, and 1.32% higher than WCSE on these metrics for top-10 retrieval results, respectively. Moreover, several retrieval cases were presented to intuitively compare with WCSE. The results of the above comparative study demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed the existing method with regard to accuracy and effectiveness. CONCLUSION: This paper proposes a graph-similarity-based retrieval approach for medicine information. To obtain satisfactory retrieval results, an isomorphism-based algorithm is proposed for dominant subgraph selection based on the subgraph overlapping analysis, as well as an effective and efficient hypergraph representation of molecules. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Impact of strain engineering on nanoscale strained InGaAs MOSFET devices.

The strain distributions in the In(0.53)Ga(0.47)As channel regions of the In(0.4)Ga(0.6)As source/drain (S/D) with various lengths and widths were studied via 3D process simulations. The resulting mobility improvement was analyzed. The tensile strain along the transport direction was found to dominate the mobility improvement. The strain along the vertical direction perpendicular to the gate oxide was found to affect the mobility the least, while the strain along the width direction was slightly degraded. The impact of the channel width and length on the performance improvement, such as on the mobility gain, was analyzed via TCAD simulations. The novelty of this paper stems from its study of the impact of the channel width and length on the performance of InGaAs NMOSFETs, such as on their mobility gain, and from its exploration of physical insights for scaling the future III-V MOS devices.

Advances in structural modifications and biological activities of berberine: an active compound in traditional Chinese medicine.

Berberine is an isoquinoline alkaloid isolated from Chinese herbs such as Coptidis Rhizome. This paper is a systematic review of the structural modifications of berberine for different biological activities such as antitumor, antimicrobial, anti-Alzheimer's disease, antihyperglycemic, anti-inflammatory and antimalaria. The current review would provide some useful information for further studies on structural modification of berberine for discovering new drug leads.