Dichroa febrifuga Lour.: A review of its botany, traditional use, phytochemistry, pharmacological activities, toxicology, and progress in reducing toxicity.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Dichroa febrifuga Lour., a toxic but extensively used traditional Chinese medicine with a remarkable effect, is commonly called "Changshan" in China. It has been used to treat malaria and many other parasitic diseases. AIM OF THE REVIEW: The study aims to provide a current overview of the progress in the research on traditional use, phytochemistry, pharmacological activities, toxicology, and methods of toxicity reduction of D. febrifuga. Additionally, further research directions and development prospects for the plant were put forward. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The article uses "Dichroa febrifuga Lour." "D. febrifuga" as the keyword and all relevant information on D. febrifuga was collected from electronic searches (Elsevier, PubMed, ACS, CNKI, Google Scholar, and Baidu Scholar), doctoral and master's dissertations and classic books about Chinese herbs. RESULTS: 30 chemical compounds, including alkaloids, terpenoids, flavonoids and other kinds, were isolated and identified from D. febrifuga. Modern pharmacological studies have shown that these components have a variety of pharmacological activities, including anti-malarial activities, anti-inflammatory activities, anti-tumor activities, anti-parasitic activities and anti-oomycete activities. Meanwhile, alkaloids, as the material basis of its efficacy, are also the source of its toxicity. It can cause multiple organ damage, including liver, kidney and heart, and cause adverse reactions such as nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea. In the current study, the toxicity can be reduced by modifying the structure of the compound, processing and changing the dosage forms. CONCLUSIONS: There are few studies on the chemical constituents of D. febrifuga, so the components and their structure characterization contained in it can become the focus of future research. In view of the toxicity of D. febrifuga, there are many methods to reduce it, but the safety and rationality of these methods need further study.

The emergence of a highly pathogenic porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus with additional 120aa deletion in Nsp2 region in Jiangxi, China.

Highly pathogenic porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (HP-PRRS), which emerged in China in 2006, was characterized by high fever, high morbidity and high mortality. The causative agent of the disease was a highly pathogenic variant of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (also called HP-PRRSV), which has a discontinuous deletion of 1 + 29 amino acids (aa) in the Nsp2 coding region, compared to classical PRRSV. In 2014, fattened pigs on a pig farm in Jiangxi Province suffered from clinical symptoms of high fever, dyspnoea and death. A PRRSV, termed JX2014T2, was isolated from samples of the dead pigs. Genomic analysis of the isolated PRRSV indicated that the genome of the virus was 14,960 bp in length and belonged to the North American genotype. In the Nsp2-coding region, there was a discontinuous deletion of 1 + 29 aa, similar to HP-PRRSV; however, an additional continuous deletion of 120 amino acids between aa 628 and 747 was found. Further analysis of the pathogenicity of PRRSV JX2014T2 was performed in piglets, and the results indicated that all infected piglets suffered from typical clinical symptoms of PRRS, such as high fever, cough, mental depression, anorexia, dyspnoea and palpebral swelling and died within 15 days postinfection (dpi). This demonstrated that the newly isolated PRRSV JX2014T2 strain containing an additional deletion of 120 aa is highly pathogenic to piglets, suggesting that a highly pathogenic variant with new genetic features is circulating in China.

Integrated application of uniform design and least-squares support vector machines to transfection optimization.

BACKGROUND: Transfection in mammalian cells based on liposome presents great challenge for biological professionals. To protect themselves from exogenous insults, mammalian cells tend to manifest poor transfection efficiency. In order to gain high efficiency, we have to optimize several conditions of transfection, such as amount of liposome, amount of plasmid, and cell density at transfection. However, this process may be time-consuming and energy-consuming. Fortunately, several mathematical methods, developed in the past decades, may facilitate the resolution of this issue. This study investigates the possibility of optimizing transfection efficiency by using a method referred to as least-squares support vector machine, which requires only a few experiments and maintains fairly high accuracy. RESULTS: A protocol consists of 15 experiments was performed according to the principle of uniform design. In this protocol, amount of liposome, amount of plasmid, and the number of seeded cells 24 h before transfection were set as independent variables and transfection efficiency was set as dependent variable. A model was deduced from independent variables and their respective dependent variable. Another protocol made up by 10 experiments was performed to test the accuracy of the model. The model manifested a high accuracy. Compared to traditional method, the integrated application of uniform design and least-squares support vector machine greatly reduced the number of required experiments. What's more, higher transfection efficiency was achieved. CONCLUSION: The integrated application of uniform design and least-squares support vector machine is a simple technique for obtaining high transfection efficiency. Using this novel method, the number of required experiments would be greatly cut down while higher efficiency would be gained. Least-squares support vector machine may be applicable to many other problems that need to be optimized.

[Bibliometrics study on dominant diseases in modern acupuncture clinic].

OBJECTIVE: To find out the dominant diseases in the clinic of modern acupuncture. METHODS: By means of bibliometrics, clinical acupuncture study literatures from 1978 to 2004, searched from CBM database, were sorted and counted to show the different clinical utilizing quantities and developing trends of different disease groups in the acupuncture clinic. RESULTS: Obviously dominant type: nervous system diseases; mature type: motor system diseases; developing type: 3 kind of diseases including psychosis; premature type: diseases related with surgery; steady type: 3 kind of diseases including digestive system diseases (diseases of liver and gallbladder are not included); pre-developing diseases: 5 kind of diseases including otorhinolaryngologic diseases. CONCLUSION: Among all these types, obvious advantage type and mature type are the most distinguishing. Developing type has the most significant ascending trend. Premature type has relatively strong developing potentiality.