Endoplasmic reticulum stress regulates autophagic response that is involved in Saikosaponin a-induced liver cell damage.

Saikosaponin a (Ssa) is an active ingredient of the Chinese herbal plant Radix Bupleuri (RB) and has severe hepatotoxicity. However, biomolecular mechanisms involved in Ssa-induced hepatotoxicity are not yet entirely clear. Previous studies reported that Ssd (an isomer of Ssa) as a sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase (SERCA) inhibitor can induce autophagy in apoptotic defective cells, leading to autophagy-dependent cell death. Therefore, we speculate that endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and autophagy may also play an important role in Ssa-induced hepatocyte death. This study aimed to explore the connection between ER stress and autophagy and Ssa-induced hepatotoxicity. Experiments in vitro showed that the cell viability of L-02 cells in the Ssa treatment group decreased, the level of autophagy marker LC3-II/LC3-I and Beclin1 increased, the level of p62 decreased, the colocalization of autophagosome and lysosome increased, and the cell viability was significantly increased after the application of autophagy inhibitors 3-MA. In addition, SSa can induce ER stress in L-02 cells in vitro. Further studies demonstrated that SSa activated the PERK/eIF2α/ATF4/CHOP pathway, IRE1-TRAF2 pathway, ATF6 pathway, and AMPK/mTOR pathway associated with ER stress. Application of ER stress inhibitors 4-PBA can significantly down-regulate the level of autophagy and improve cell viability. Results of in vivo experiments showed that treatment with 150 and 300 mg/kg Ssa significantly elevated the liver/body weight ratio and caused histological injury in mice liver. Furthermore, Ssa treatment induced significantly downregulated p62 expression but upregulated LC3-II, CHOP, and GRP78 expression in mice livers. Taken together, our results showed that SSa can activate endoplasmic reticulum stress, promote toxic autophagy, and then induce cell death. We revealed an alternative mechanism involving autophagy and ERs, by which Ssa induced hepatotoxicity.

Crop straw-derived biochar alleviated cadmium and copper phytotoxicity by reducing bioavailability and accumulation in a field experiment of rice-rape-corn rotation system.

Biochar has the potential to control the bioavailability and transformation of heavy metals in soil, thereby ensuring the safe crop production. A three seasons field experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of crop straw-derived biochar on the bioavailability and crop accumulation of Cd and Cu in contaminated soil. Wheat straw biochar (WSB), corn stalk biochar (CSB), and rice husk biochar (RHB) were applied at the rate of 0, 1.125, and 2.25 × 104 kg ha-1, respectively. The results showed that all types of biochar significantly increased soil pH, organic carbon and cation exchangeable capacity (CEC), compared to the control. The reduction in DTPA extractable Cd and Cu contents was much greater under high dosage biochar application, with a prominence at RHB treatment throughout the three cropping seasons, compared to the control. Moreover, the biological accumulation of Cd and Cu in the grains of rapeseed and corn significantly decreased after biochar application. Linear regression also confirmed the effective role of biochar in controlling the translocation and accumulation of Cd and Cu due to their inactive bioavailability. In addition, the sequential extraction indicated that exchangeable fraction (EXF) of Cu and Cd had decreased, while residual fraction (RSF) had increased under all biochar amendments. Contrarily, the oxidizable fraction (OXF) of Cd decreased while OXF of Cu increased under biochar treatments. Biochar application, especially RHB, could be an effective measure to enhance Cd and Cu adsorption and immobilization in polluted soils and thereby reducing its uptake and translocation to crops.

Detecting associations between dietary supplement intake and sentiments within mental disorder tweets.

Many patients with mental disorders take dietary supplement, but their use patterns remain unclear. In this study, we developed a method to detect signals of associations between dietary supplement intake and mental disorder in Twitter data. We developed an annotated dataset and trained a convolutional neural network classifier that can identify language use pattern of dietary supplement intake with an F1-score of 0.899, a precision of 0.900, and a recall of 0.900. Using the classifier, we discovered that melatonin and vitamin D were the most commonly used supplements among Twitter users who self-diagnosed mental disorders. Sentiment analysis using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count has shown that among Twitter users who posted mental disorder self-diagnosis, users who indicated supplement intake are more active and express more negative emotions and fewer positive emotions than those who have not mentioned supplement intake.

Cd accumulation and transfer in pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) grown in typical soils of China: pot experiments.

Food chain contamination by soil cadmium (Cd) through vegetable consumption poses a threat to human health. It is imperative to understand the Cd uptake and transfer in different soil-vegetable systems. The aims of this study were to understand the effect of soil characteristics on Cd accumulation and transfer in pepper and to derive regression models to predict Cd concentrations in the vegetable grown on a wide range of soils with different properties. The accumulation and transfer of Cd in the root, stem, and fruit of pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) grown in 18 typical soils of China were investigated through pot experiments. The bioavailability of Cd in soil was evaluated by using EDTA and HNO3 extraction methods. The pot experiments included a control and two concentration levels of Cd salt added to soils according to Soil Environmental Quality Standards of China. The results showed that the Cd content in pepper fruits ranged from 0.007 to 0.049 for the control, 0.045 to 0.260 for the low Cd treatment, and 0.076 to 0.345 mg/kg for the high Cd treatment, respectively. The concentrations of Cd in the different parts of pepper decreased in the order of root > stem > fruit, and there were significant correlations among the Cd concentrations in pepper root, stem, and fruit tissues. Bioaccumulation factor (BCF) and transfer factor (TF) of Cd in pepper fruits exhibited a low accumulation of Cd in the fruit of pepper. The Cd accumulation in pepper fruit could be quantitatively predicted by EDTA-extractable Cd content in soils. Multiple linear regression models proved functional in predicting Cd accumulation in different parts of pepper. The Cd content in pepper tissues was well predicted using EDTA-extractable Cd and soil variables, such as pH, EC, CEC, total phosphorus, and CaCO3 content. Soil pH and EC were major soil factors influencing Cd transfer from soil to pepper fruits, whereas total phosphorus content presented a negative effect on Cd accumulation in stem and root parts of pepper.

Analyzing Social Media Data to Understand Consumer Information Needs on Dietary Supplements.

Despite the high consumption of dietary supplements (DS), few reliable, relevant, and comprehensive online resources could satisfy information seekers. This research study aims to understand consumer information needs on DS using topic modeling, and to evaluate accuracy in correctly identifying topics from social media. We retrieved 16,095 unique questions posted on Yahoo! Answers relating to 438 unique DS ingredients mentioned in sub-section, "Alternative medicine" under the section, "Health" . We implemented an unsupervised topic modeling method, Correlation Explanation (CorEx) to unveil the various topics in which consumers are most interested. We manually reviewed the keywords of all the 200 topics generated by CorEx and assigned them to 38 health-related categories, corresponding to 12 higher-level groups. We found high accuracy (90-100%) in identifying questions that correctly align with the selected topics. The results could guide us to generate a more comprehensive and structured DS resource based on consumers' information needs.

Mining Adverse Events of Dietary Supplements from Product Labels by Topic Modeling.

The adverse events of the dietary supplements should be subject to scrutiny due to their growing clinical application and consumption among U.S. adults. An effective method for mining and grouping the adverse events of the dietary supplements is to evaluate product labeling for the rapidly increasing number of new products available in the market. In this study, the adverse events information was extracted from the product labels stored in the Dietary Supplement Label Data-base (DSLD) and analyzed by topic modeling techniques, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Among the 50 topics generated by LDA, eight topics were manually evaluated, with topic relatedness ranging from 58.8% to 100% on the product level, and 57.1% to 100% on the ingredient level. Five out of these eight topics were coherent groupings of the dietary supplements based on their adverse events. The results demonstrated that LDA is able to group supplements with similar adverse events based on the dietary supplement labels. Such information can be potentially used by consumers to more safely use dietary supplements.

Term Coverage of Dietary Supplements Ingredients in Product Labels.

As the clinical application and consumption of dietary supplements has grown, their side effects and possible interactions with prescribed medications has become a serious issue. Information extraction of dietary supplement related information is a critical need to support dietary supplement research. However, there currently is not an existing terminology for dietary supplements, placing a barrier for informatics research in this field. The terms related to dietary supplement ingredients should be collected and normalized before a terminology can be established to facilitate convenient search on safety information and control possible adverse effects of dietary supplements. In this study, the Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) was chosen as the data source from which the ingredient information was extracted and normalized. The distribution based on the product type and the ingredient type of the dietary supplements were analyzed. The ingredient terms were then mapped to the existing terminologies, including UMLS, RxNorm and NDF-RT by using MetaMap and RxMix. The large gap between existing terminologies and ingredients were found: only 14.67%, 19.65%, and 12.88% of ingredient terms were covered by UMLS, RxNorm and NDF-RT, respectively.