Hepatotoxicity of food-borne mycotoxins: molecular mechanism, anti-hepatotoxic medicines and target prediction.

Mycotoxins are metabolites produced by fungi. The widespread contamination of food and feed by mycotoxins is a global food safety problem and a serious threat to people's health. Most food-borne mycotoxins have strong hepatotoxicity. However, no effective methods have been found to prevent or treat Mycotoxin- Induced Liver Injury (MILI) in clinical and animal husbandry. In this paper, the molecular mechanisms and potential anti-MILI medicines of six food-borne MILI are reviewed, and their targets are predicted by network toxicology, which provides a theoretical basis for further study of the toxicity mechanism of MILI and the development of effective strategies to manage MILI-related health problems in the future and accelerate the development of food safety.

[Residual status, toxicity, and analytical method of banned pesticides in traditional Chinese medicines].

A total of 33 pesticides have been banned from Chinese medicinal materials and decoction pieces(plants) according to Chinese Pharmacopoeia(2020 edition). According to the chemical structures, they are mainly divided into seven categories: organophosphorus compounds, organochlorines, carbamates, amidines, sulfonylureas, phenylpyrazoles, and ethers. These banned pesticides exhibit neurotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, immune system toxicity, teratogenicity, carcinogenesis, and mutagenesis, seriously damaging human and animal health. They affect not only the quality and safety of traditional Chinese medicines and resulting products, but also their competitiveness in the international market. Due to the numerous varieties of traditional Chinese medicines and their complex substrates, it is necessary to establish a universal and highly sensitive method for pesticide residue detection. This review systematically summarized the residual status, toxicity, and analytical methods of banned pesticides in traditional Chinese medicines, and forecasted the prospects of different analytical techniques, so as to provide reference for further safety and risk assessment of banned pesticide residues in traditional Chinese medicines, thus ensuring the safe production of traditional Chinese medicines.

The Impact of Attention Mechanisms on Speech Emotion Recognition.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) plays an important role in real-time applications of human-machine interaction. The Attention Mechanism is widely used to improve the performance of SER. However, the applicable rules of attention mechanism are not deeply discussed. This paper discussed the difference between Global-Attention and Self-Attention and explored their applicable rules to SER classification construction. The experimental results show that the Global-Attention can improve the accuracy of the sequential model, while the Self-Attention can improve the accuracy of the parallel model when conducting the model with the CNN and the LSTM. With this knowledge, a classifier (CNN-LSTM×2+Global-Attention model) for SER is proposed. The experiments result show that it could achieve an accuracy of 85.427% on the EMO-DB dataset.

Distribution Characteristics of Nutritional Elements and Combined Health Risk of Heavy Metals in Medicinal Tea from Genuine Producing Area of China.

The development of the medicinal tea (MT) system has promoted the health awareness in the whole world, and the nutritional elements are also an important resource of health care delivery except for the medicinal components. Among various medicinal teas, Astragalus membranaceus (AM), Zingiberaceae rhizome (ZR), and Lonicera japonica (LJ) were the most popular ingredients in China. However, except for the nutrition value, MT was inevitably contaminated with heavy metals due to the special planting environment and processing system. This study was aimed to investigate the distribution characteristics of nutrition elements and combined health risk of heavy metals in MT sample, referring to the maximum residue limit (MRL), estimated daily intake (EDI), total target hazard quotients (TTHQs), and lifetime cancer risk (LCR). Furthermore, the bioaccessibility of gastrointestinal phase and bioavailability of human colon adeno carcinoma cell line were selected for elaborating the exact damage degree to human digestive system. The results showed that, the nutritional elements of Na, Se, K, Ca, and Mn were very rich in MT, but a total of 50% of MT were contaminated by Cr, Hg, and Cd in raw material. Although the cumulative lifetime cancer risk can be accepted under the bioaccessibility (26.62-99.27%), the heavy metals of Cr, As, Hg, and Fe in AM and LJ posed a slight threaten of non-carcinogenic risk to consumers. This study will give an exactly assessment of multiple elements in digestive system, thus further to predict the potential health risk under the consumption of MT products.

Preparation of a broad-specificity antibody against zearalenone and its primary analogues and development of immunoassay of Coicis Semen and related products.

The purpose of this study was to prepare a highly sensitive and specific zearalenone (ZEN) monoclonal antibody, which was then used to develop an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ic-ELISA) and a colloidal gold immunochromatographic assay (GICA). These techniques were used for the detection of Coicis Semen and related products (Coicis Semen flour, Yimigao, and Yishigao). Immunogens were synthesized by oxime active ester techniques and characterized via ultraviolet spectrophotometry. Immunogens were injected subcutaneously into the abdominal cavities and backs of mice. Using the prepared antibodies, we developed ic-ELISA and GICA rapid detection methods, which were then applied for the rapid detection of ZEN and its analogues from Coicis Semen and related products. For ic-ELISA, the half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50 ) values for ZEN, α-zearalenol (α-ZEL), ß-zearalenol (ß-ZEL), zearalanone (ZAN), α-zearalanol (α-ZAL), and ß-zearalanol (ß-ZAL) were determined to be 1.13, 1.69, 2.06, 0.66, 1.20, and 0.94 ng•mL-1 , respectively. For GICA, the cutoff values of ZEN, α-ZEL, ß-ZEL, α-ZAL, and ß-ZAL on test strips were 0.5 ng•mL-1 in phosphate buffer saline (0.01 M, pH 7.4), while ZAN was found to be 0.25 ng•mL-1 . Furthermore, the cutoff values of test strips were between 10 and 20 µg∙kg-1 in Coicis Semen and related products. The results of these two detection methods were in good agreement with results from liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. This study provides technical support for the preparation of broad-specificity monoclonal antibodies against ZEN and lays the foundation for the simultaneous detection of multiple mycotoxins from food and herbal medicines.

An online human-robot collaborative grinding state recognition approach based on contact dynamics and LSTM.

Collaborative state recognition is a critical issue for physical human-robot collaboration (PHRC). This paper proposes a contact dynamics-based state recognition method to identify the human-robot collaborative grinding state. The main idea of the proposed approach is to distinguish between the human-robot contact and the robot-environment contact. To achieve this, dynamic models of both these contacts are first established to identify the difference in dynamics between the human-robot contact and the robot-environment contact. Considering the reaction speed required for human-robot collaborative state recognition, feature selections based on Spearman's correlation and random forest recursive feature elimination are conducted to reduce data redundancy and computational burden. Long short-term memory (LSTM) is then used to construct a collaborative state classifier. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method can achieve a recognition accuracy of 97% in a period of 5 ms and 99% in a period of 40 ms.

CNEReg Interprets Ruminant-specific Conserved Non-coding Elements by Developmental Gene Regulatory Network.

The genetic information coded in DNA leads to trait innovation via a gene regulatory network (GRN) in development. Here, we developed a conserved non-coding element interpretation method to integrate multi-omics data into gene regulatory network (CNEReg) to investigate the ruminant multi-chambered stomach innovation. We generated paired expression and chromatin accessibility data during rumen and esophagus development in sheep, and revealed 1601 active ruminant-specific conserved non-coding elements (active-RSCNEs). To interpret the function of these active-RSCNEs, we defined toolkit transcription factors (TTFs) and modeled their regulation on rumen-specific genes via batteries of active-RSCNEs during development. Our developmental GRN revealed 18 TTFs and 313 active-RSCNEs regulating 7 rumen functional modules. Notably, 6 TTFs (OTX1, SOX21, HOXC8, SOX2, TP63, and PPARG), as well as 16 active-RSCNEs, functionally distinguished the rumen from the esophagus. Our study provides a systematic approach to understanding how gene regulation evolves and shapes complex traits by putting evo-devo concepts into practice with developmental multi-omics data.

Ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography method for separation and quantitation of saikosaponins in herbal medicine.

Saikosaponins are the main active ingredients of Bupleuri Radix and have been shown to have hepatoprotective, immunomodulatory and anti-viral activities. Among the saikosaponins, saikosaponin a (SSa), saikosaponin b1 (SSb1) and saikosaponin b2 (SSb2) are a group of isomers, which are difficult to separate by HPLC. In this study, a new method for separation and quantitation of saikosaponins was established by using ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography (UHPSFC). A Torus Diol column (100 mm × 3 mm, 1.7 µm) was applied in this study. The mobile phase CO2 (A) was the main solvent with MeOH (B) as co-solvent. The results showed that the five saikosaponins were successfully separated within 22 min through optimization of chromatographic conditions. Besides, the UHPSFC method was applied for the quantitation of saikosaponins in a patent medicine Chaihu Dropping Pills, and demonstrated a good correlation coefficient (R2) ≥ 0.9990 in the range of 0.025 - 0.25 mg/mL. The recoveries of the five saikosaponins at three different concentrations were in the range of 90.23-99.84%. This study indicates that the proposed method has high separation efficiency in analyzing saikosaponins, which provides a new way for the separation and quantitation of saikosaponins in herbal medicines.

[Synthesis of N-(solanesylpiperazine-alkyl)-9-anthracenemethylamines and its interaction with DNA].

Two novel N-solanesylpiperazine triamines (4a, 4b) were synthesized and their structures were characterized by 1H NMR, IR, MS, and elemental analysis. The preliminary in vitro tests revealed that the IC50 values of compound 4a and 4b on L1210 were 4.3 and 3.1 micromol respectively. The interaction of 4b with DNA was also investigated via UV and FL spectra with N1-(4-aminobutyl)-N4-(9-anthracenylmethyl) butane-1,4-diamine (5) as the reference compound. The results revealed that compound 5 could quench the fluorescence of DNA-EB system, while compound 4b had the opposite function. Further tests proved that the fluorescence of compound 5 and 4b could be both quenched by DNA. It was speculated that compound 4b, with the long chain and two tertiary nitrogens, interacted with DNA by the static attraction or was partially embedded into DNA, while compound 5 was typically inserted into DNA.