Comparative chemical analysis of six ancient italian sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) varieties showing antiangiogenic activity.

In this study, cherry fruits and petioles from six ancient Italian Prunus avium L. varieties (Ferrovia, Capellina, Morellina, Ciambellana, Napoletana, and Bianca), were compared by chemical and bioinformatic analyses and evaluated for their antiangiogenic activity. The highest levels of total phenols and flavonoids were found in Napoletana petioles, and Morellina and Capellina fruits. HPLC-PDA-MS analyses showed similar phenolic profiles for all fruit extracts, with cyanidin-3-O-rutinoside, flavonols glycosides, and quinic acid derivatives as major components. Flavonoid glycosides were found in all petiole extracts, while proanthocyanidins B type were predominant in Capellina, Napoletana and Bianca. Accordingly to their higher polyphenolic content, petiole extracts exhibited stronger radical scavenging activity compared to the fruits. The best antiangiogenic response was exhibited by Morellina, Ferrovia, and Ciambellana petiole extracts, and by Ferrovia, Morellina, and Capellina fruit extracts; by bioinformatic studies rutin and cyanidin 3-O-rutinoside were recognised as the best candidate bioactive compounds. In conclusion, sweet cherry varietes were confirmed as valuable sources of phenols, showing also potential angiomodulator properties.

Urban stormwater and crude oil injury pathways converge on the developing heart of a shore-spawning marine forage fish.

Understanding how aquatic organisms respond to complex chemical mixtures remains one of the foremost challenges in modern ecotoxicology. Although oil spills are typically high-profile disasters that release hundreds or thousands of chemicals into the environment, there is growing evidence for a common adverse outcome pathway (AOP) for the vulnerable embryos and larvae of fish species that spawn in oiled habitats. Molecular initiating events involve the disruption of excitation-contraction coupling in individual cardiomyocytes, which then dysregulate the form and function of the embryonic heart. Phenanthrenes and other three-ring (tricyclic) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are key drivers for this developmental cardiotoxicity and are also relatively enriched in land-based urban runoff. Similar to oil spills, stormwater discharged from roadways and other high-traffic impervious surfaces contains myriad contaminants, many of which are uncharacterized in terms of their chemical identity and toxicity to aquatic organisms. Nevertheless, given the exceptional sensitivity of the developing heart to tricyclic PAHs and the ubiquitous presence of these compounds in road runoff, cardiotoxicity may also be a dominant aspect of the stormwater-induced injury phenotype in fish early life stages. Here we assessed the effects of traffic-related runoff on the embryos and early larvae of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), a marine forage fish that spawns along the coastline of western North America. We used the well-characterized central features of the oil toxicity AOP for herring embryos as benchmarks for a detailed analysis of embryolarval cardiotoxicity across a dilution gradient ranging from 12 to 50% stormwater diluted in clean seawater. These injury indicators included measures of circulatory function, ventricular area, heart chamber looping, and the contractility of both the atrium and the ventricle. We also determined tissue concentrations of phenanthrenes and other PAHs in herring embryos. We find that tricyclic PAHs are readily bioavailable during cardiogenesis, and that stormwater-induced toxicity is in many respects indistinguishable from canonical crude oil toxicity. Given the chemical complexity of urban runoff, non-tricyclic PAH-mediated mechanisms of developmental toxicity in fish remain likely. However, from the standpoint of managing wild herring populations, our results suggest that stormwater-driven threats to individual survival (both near-term and delayed mortality) can be understood from decades of past research on crude oil toxicity. Moreover, Pacific herring embryos are promising sentinels for water quality monitoring in nearshore marine habitats, as in situand sensitive indicators of both toxic runoff and the effectiveness of pollution reduction efforts such as green stormwater infrastructure.

Subdiffraction-limited second harmonic photoacoustic microscopy based on nonlinear thermal diffusion.

We have developed a second harmonic photoacoustic microscopy (SH-PAM) for subdiffraction-limited imaging based on nonlinear thermal diffusion. When a sine-modulated Gaussian temperature field is introduced by a laser beam, the temperature dependence of the thermal diffusivity induces a nonlinear photoacoustic (PA) effect and thus results in the production of second harmonic PA signals. We demonstrate through both simulation and experiment that the second harmonic PA images can be reconstructed with a lateral resolution exceeding that of conventional optical resolution PA microscopy. The feasibility of SH-PAM was verified on phantom samples. Amphioxus zygotes and germinated pollens have been studied by SH-PAM to demonstrate its biomedical imaging capability. This method expands the scope of conventional PA imaging and opens up new possibilities for super-resolution imaging, prefiguring great potential for biological imaging and material inspection.