Co-Existence of Hypertensive and Anti-Hypertensive Constituents, Synephrine, and Nobiletin in Citrus unshiu Peel.

A single herb can contain multiple constituents with diverse bioactivities. We found that the extract of Citrus unshiu peel (CUP), induced abnormal vasoconstriction responses on the freshly isolated rat aortic rings in vitro. CUP stimulated the vasoconstriction alone, and it suppressed the phenylephrine-stimulated vasoconstriction. We studied the reasons behind this abnormal vasoconstriction pattern. Major constituents of CUP were determined and evaluated for their vaso-activities. Notably, synephrine, a contractile agonist, and nobiletin, newly identified to have anti-contractile activity co-existed in CUP. Synephrine and nobiletin competitively blocked or activated the same contractile targets resulting in contradicting and abnormal vasoconstriction responses. Accordingly, the vasoconstriction pattern varies significantly depending on the relative contents of synephrine and nobiletin in CUP. Interestingly, this response pattern could be observed with another plant extract, Acorus gramineus Sol. Collectively, we demonstrated that active ingredients with contradicting bioactivities could co-exist in a single plant extract, interact and produce abnormal response patterns in bioassay, which would give an important insight into the interpretation of unusual activity patterns induced by plant extracts.

A Convergent Synthetic Strategy towards Oligosaccharides containing 2,3,6-Trideoxypyranoglycosides.

A de novo synthetic strategy for the production of oligosaccharides containing 2,3,6-trideoxypyranoglycoside is reported. The key event is the Pd-catalyzed asymmetric diastereoselective hydroalkoxylation of ene-alkoxyallene-linked glycosidic fragments. The utility of this approach was demonstrated by the activation-free, stereodivergent, and convergent synthesis of various 2-deoxyoligosaccharides, as well as their aglycon conjugates.

Wave2Vec: Vectorizing Electroencephalography Bio-Signal for Prediction of Brain Disease.

Interest in research involving health-medical information analysis based on artificial intelligence, especially for deep learning techniques, has recently been increasing. Most of the research in this field has been focused on searching for new knowledge for predicting and diagnosing disease by revealing the relation between disease and various information features of data. These features are extracted by analyzing various clinical pathology data, such as EHR (electronic health records), and academic literature using the techniques of data analysis, natural language processing, etc. However, still needed are more research and interest in applying the latest advanced artificial intelligence-based data analysis technique to bio-signal data, which are continuous physiological records, such as EEG (electroencephalography) and ECG (electrocardiogram). Unlike the other types of data, applying deep learning to bio-signal data, which is in the form of time series of real numbers, has many issues that need to be resolved in preprocessing, learning, and analysis. Such issues include leaving feature selection, learning parts that are black boxes, difficulties in recognizing and identifying effective features, high computational complexities, etc. In this paper, to solve these issues, we provide an encoding-based Wave2vec time series classifier model, which combines signal-processing and deep learning-based natural language processing techniques. To demonstrate its advantages, we provide the results of three experiments conducted with EEG data of the University of California Irvine, which are a real-world benchmark bio-signal dataset. After converting the bio-signals (in the form of waves), which are a real number time series, into a sequence of symbols or a sequence of wavelet patterns that are converted into symbols, through encoding, the proposed model vectorizes the symbols by learning the sequence using deep learning-based natural language processing. The models of each class can be constructed through learning from the vectorized wavelet patterns and training data. The implemented models can be used for prediction and diagnosis of diseases by classifying the new data. The proposed method enhanced data readability and intuition of feature selection and learning processes by converting the time series of real number data into sequences of symbols. In addition, it facilitates intuitive and easy recognition, and identification of influential patterns. Furthermore, real-time large-capacity data analysis is facilitated, which is essential in the development of real-time analysis diagnosis systems, by drastically reducing the complexity of calculation without deterioration of analysis performance by data simplification through the encoding process.

Author Correction: Investigation on the interface between Li10GeP2S12 electrolyte and carbon conductive agents in all-solid-state lithium battery.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Investigation on the interface between Li10GeP2S12 electrolyte and carbon conductive agents in all-solid-state lithium battery.

All-solid-state batteries are considered as one of the attractive alternatives to conventional lithium-ion batteries, due to their intrinsic safe properties benefiting from the use of non-flammable solid electrolytes in ASSBs. However, one of the issues in employing the solid-state electrolyte is the sluggish ion transport kinetics arising from the chemical and physical instability of the interfaces among solid components including electrode material, electrolyte and additive agents. In this work, we investigate the stability of the interface between carbon conductive agents and Li10GeP2S12 in a composite cathode and its effect on the electrochemical performance of ASSBs. It is found that the inclusion of various carbon conductive agents in composite cathode leads to inferior kinetic performance of the cathode despite expectedly enhanced electrical conductivity of the composite. We observe that the poor kinetic performance is attributed to a large interfacial impedance which is gradually developed upon the inclusions of the various carbon conductive agents regardless of their physical differences. The analysis through X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy suggests that the carbon additives in the composite cathode stimulate the electrochemical decomposition of LGPS electrolyte degrading its surface during cycling, indicating the large interfacial resistance stems from the undesirable decomposition of the electrolyte at the interface.

Flexible Tetrahydropyran Synthesis from Homopropargylic Alcohols Using Sequential Pd-Au Catalysis.

A flexible synthetic method toward highly substituted tetrahydropyran is reported. The key transformation involves atom-efficient sequential metal catalysis consisting of Pd-catalyzed addition of homopropargylic alcohols to alkoxyallene and the subsequent gold(I)-catalyzed cycloisomerization. Notably, this method gives access to both 2,6-cis- and 2,6-trans-tetrahydropyrans possessing diverse substitution patterns.

Rotationally reconfigurable metamaterials based on moiré phenomenon.

Exploiting moiré interference, we make a new type of reconfigurable metamaterials and study their transmission tunability for incident electromagnetic waves. The moiré pattern is formed by overlapping two transparent layers, each of which has a periodic metallic pattern, and the cluster size of the resulting moiré pattern can be varied by changing the relative superposition angle of the two layers. In our reconfigurable metamaterials, both the size and structural shape of the unit cell can be varied simultaneously through moiré interference. We show that the transmission of electromagnetic waves can be controlled from 90% to 10% at 11 GHz by experiments and numerical simulation. The reconfigurable metamaterial proposed here can be applied in bandpass filters and tunable modulation devices.

Pd-catalyzed asymmetric intermolecular hydroalkoxylation of allene: an entry to cyclic acetals with activating group-free and flexible anomeric control.

A ligand-directed metal-catalyzed asymmetric intermolecular hydroalkoxylation of alkoxyallene is reported. Combined with ring-closing-metathesis, this reaction offers a new atom-efficient synthetic method toward various cyclic acetals with elaborate anomeric control. Synthetic utility of the reaction was demonstrated by the atom-efficient and stereodivergent access to various mono- and disaccharides.

Prebiotics as immunostimulants in aquaculture: a review.

Prebiotics are indigestible fibers that increase beneficial gut commensal bacteria resulting in improvements of the host's health. The beneficial effects of prebiotics are due to the byproducts generated from their fermentation by gut commensal bacteria. In this review, the direct effects of prebiotics on the innate immune system of fish are discussed. Prebiotics, such as fructooligosaccharide, mannanoligosaccharide, inulin, or ß-glucan, are called immunosaccharides. They directly enhance innate immune responses including: phagocytic activation, neutrophil activation, activation of the alternative complement system, increased lysozyme activity, and more. Immunosaccharides directly activate the innate immune system by interacting with pattern recognition receptors (PRR) expressed on innate immune cells. They can also associate with microbe associated molecular patterns (MAMPs) to activate innate immune cells. However, the underlying mechanisms involved in innate immune cell activation need to be further explored. Many studies have indicated that immunosaccharides are beneficial to both finfish and shellfish.

The effects of radio frequency sputtering of TiO2 on Li[Li0.07Nio.38Co0.15Mn0.4]O2 cathode for lithium ion batteries.

A radio frequency (RF) sputtering system is used to coat nano-thick TiO2 layer on the overlithiated layered metal oxide (OLO) electrode. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) and the field emission-scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) images indicate amorphous TiO2 is coated on the top surface of the electrode with a thickness of approximately 20 nm for the 40 min sputtered sample. The sample sputtered for 40 minutes cycled at 90 mA g(-1) between 2 and 4.8 V versus Li+/Li has 15 mA h g(-1) more specific capacity at 100th cycle than that of the uncoated sample. In the voltage profiles, additional overpotential is unobservable upon sputtering TiO2 in comparison to that of the reference sample. Further analyses by the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) demonstrate the sputtered sample has less electrolyte decomposition products on the surface than that of the reference sample. Moreover, in the case of sputtering, reduced amount of transition metal and Li2O are deposited on the surface of the counter electrode, Li. In summary, the sputtered TiO2 acts as nano-sized artificial solid electrolyte interface (SEI) layer, which protects the surface of the electrode and improves kinetic properties, leading to improved performance.

Lactococcus lactis BFE920 activates the innate immune system of olive flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus), resulting in protection against Streptococcus iniae infection and enhancing feed efficiency and weight gain in large-scale field studies.

The protective effect of a food-grade lactic acid bacterium Lactococcus lactis BFE920 against disease of olive flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus) cultivated on a large scale was studied. Initially, antimicrobial activity of L. lactis against several fish pathogens was evaluated in vitro; the probiotic showed strong antibacterial activity against Streptococcus iniae, Streptococcus parauberis and Enterococcus viikkiensis, and moderate activity against Lactococcus garviae. When olive flounders were fed for two weeks with experimental diets containing varying concentrations of L. lactis (1 × 10(6), 5 × 10(6), 2.5 × 10(7) and 1.25 × 10(8) CFU/g feed), all the experimental feed groups showed 68-77% survival upon challenge with S. iniae. A field-scale feeding trial with L. lactis dietary supplement was conducted in a local fish farm (n = 12,000) for three months, and disease resistance, innate immune parameters and growth performance were evaluated. The average weight gain and feed efficiency were increased up to 6.8% and 8.5%, respectively. At the end of the feeding trial, the olive flounders were challenged with S. iniae. The L. lactis-fed group was protected from S. iniae challenge with a 66% survival rate. This disease protection is due to the flounder's innate immunity activated by the L. lactis administration: increased lysosomal activities and production of IL-12 and IFN-γ. These data clearly indicated that L. lactis BFE920 may be developed as a functional feed additive for protection against diseases, and for enhancement of feed efficiency and weight gain in olive flounder farming.