https://escholarship.org/content/qt8pq8z2jf/qt8pq8z2jf.pdf?t=qs5r88

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the treatment of COVID-19 and other viral infections: Efficacies and mechanisms.

Author(s): Wang, Ming; Chen, Dan-Qian; Chen, Lin; Cao, Gang; Zhao, Hui; Liu, Dan; Vaziri, Nosratola D; Guo, Yan; Zhao, Ying-Yong | Abstract: Background and purposeTubulo-interstitial fibrosis is the final pathway in the progression of chronic kidney disease (CKD) to kidney failure. The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) plays a major role in CKD progression. Hence, we determined the efficacy of novel RAS inhibitors isolated from Poria cocos against renal fibrosis.Experimental approachEffects of three novel tetracyclic triterpenoid compounds, poricoic acid ZC (PZC), poricoic acid ZD (PZD) and poricoic acid ZE (PZE), were investigated on TGFβ1- and angiotensin II (AngII)-treated HK-2 cells and unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) in mice. Immunofluorescence staining, quantitative real-time PCR, siRNA, co-immunoprecipitation and Western blot analyses were used to evaluate expression of key molecules in RAS, Wnt/β-catenin and TGFβ/Smad pathways.Key resultsAddition of the above compounds to culture media and their administration to UUO mice: (i) significantly attenuated epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition and extracellular matrix production in TGFβ1- and AngII-treated HK-2 cells and UUO mice by inhibiting Wnt/β-catenin pathway activation and Smad3 phosphorylation; (ii) selectively inhibited Smad3 phosphorylation by blocking the interaction of TGFBR1 with Smad3; and (iii) specifically inhibited Smad3 activation. PZC and PZD showed a strong inhibitory effect on all RAS components, and PZE showed a strong inhibitory effect on renin. Furthermore, the secolanostane tetracyclic triterpenoids, PZC and PZD, showed a stronger inhibitory effect than the lanostane tetracyclic triterpenoid PZE. Therefore, compounds with secolanostance skeleton showed stronger bioactivity than those with lanostance skeleton.Conclusion and implicationsThe secolanostane tetracyclic triterpenoids effectively blocked RAS by simultaneously targeting multiple RAS components and lanostane tetracyclic triterpenoids inhibited renin and protected against tubulo-interstitial fibrosis.

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Novel inhibitors of the cellular renin-angiotensin system components, poricoic acids, target Smad3 phosphorylation and Wnt/β-catenin pathway against renal fibrosis.

High dietary fructose is a major contributor to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, disturbing tissue and organ functions. Fructose is mainly absorbed into systemic circulation by glucose transporter 2 (GLUT2) and GLUT5, and metabolized in liver to produce glucose, lactate, triglyceride (TG), free fatty acid (FFA), uric acid (UA) and methylglyoxal (MG). Its extrahepatic absorption and metabolism also take place. High levels of these metabolites are the direct dangerous factors. During fructose metabolism, ATP depletion occurs and induces oxidative stress and inflammatory response, disturbing functions of local tissues and organs to overproduce inflammatory cytokine, adiponectin, leptin and endotoxin, which act as indirect dangerous factors. Fructose and its metabolites directly and/or indirectly cause oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, autophagy and increased intestinal permeability, and then further aggravate the metabolic syndrome with tissue and organ dysfunctions. Therefore, this review addresses fructose-induced metabolic syndrome, and the disturbance effects of direct and/or indirect dangerous factors on the functions of liver, adipose, pancreas islet, skeletal muscle, kidney, heart, brain and small intestine. It is important to find the potential correlations between direct and/or indirect risk factors and healthy problems under excess dietary fructose consumption.

/pdf/high-dietary-fructose-direct-or-indirect-dangerous-factors-4k5kx1te7n.pdf

High Dietary Fructose: Direct or Indirect Dangerous Factors Disturbing Tissue and Organ Functions.

Nelumbo nucifera, also known as sacred lotus, has primarily been used as food throughout the Asian continent, and its medicinal values have been described in Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine. The purpose of this study is to systematically characterize the chemical profiling and pharmacological activities of N. nucifera. Herein, we critically reviewed and analysed the phytochemical and pharmacological reports of N. nucifera. Our search for the keyword 'Nelumbo nucifera pharmacology' in all databases reported in Web of Science yielded 373 results excluding reviews and abstracts in document types. Two hundred and forty-three spectrum natural compounds from different parts of N. nucifera belonging to diverse chemical groups, including alkaloids, flavonoids, glycosides, terpenoids, steroids, fatty acids, proteins, minerals, and vitamins have been reported. In addition, distinct pharmacological activities, mainly against cancer, microbial infection, diabetes, inflammation, atherosclerosis, and obesity, have been associated with crude extracts, fractions, and isolated compounds. This review highlights potential use of neferine, liensinine, isoliensinine, and nuciferine in clinical trials. In depth, mechanism of the potential chemical entities from N. nucifera via structure activity relationship needs to be explored to guarantee the stability and safety for the clinical use. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Comprehensive Review on Chemical Profiling of Nelumbo Nucifera: Potential for Drug Development

Protection against COVID-19 injury by qingfei paidu decoction via anti-viral, anti-inflammatory activity and metabolic programming.

Nuciferine restores potassium oxonate-induced hyperuricemia and kidney inflammation in mice

Wuling San protects kidney dysfunction by inhibiting renal TLR4/MyD88 signaling and NLRP3 inflammasome activation in high fructose-induced hyperuricemic mice

1-bit compressive sensing (1-bit CS) refers to reconstructing a sparse signal from the sign of its measurements. Unlike compressive sensing measurements, the binary measurements in 1-bit CS can be realized using a simple comparator, thereby reducing the hardware complexity and the cost of the receiving array. Many recovery algorithms have been proposed for 1-bit CS, including recently methods based on deep learning. In this paper, we design a new method for underwater source localization by combining the matched field processing method (MFP) with 1-bit CS. We use the Fixed Point Continuation (FPC) method and a deep neural network designed by unfolding its iterations to solve the 1-bit recovery problem and evaluate their performance in the associated source localization problem. Furthermore, in order to improve the robustness of the signal recovery to noise added in the binary measurements, we propose to preprocess the received data with a simple average technique; this formulates the proposed Average FPC-ℓ1 (AVG-FPC-ℓ1) method. Our experiments show that an underwater target can be successfully located by using the sign of the measurements. Moreover, with the aid of the noise immunity method and the deep neural network (DNN) structure, the accuracy of the location estimates is greatly improved. 

Underwater localization with binary measurements: From compressed sensing to deep unfolding

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has gained considerable attention in recent years as it aims to help humans better understand machine learning decisions, making complex black-box systems more trustworthy. Visual explanation algorithms have been designed to generate heatmaps highlighting image regions that a deep neural network focuses on to make decisions. While convolutional neural network (CNN) models typically follow similar processing operations for feature encoding, the emergence of vision transformer (ViT) has introduced a new approach to machine vision decision-making. Therefore, an important question is which architecture provides more human-understandable explanations. This paper examines the explain-ability of deep architectures, including CNN and ViT models under different vision tasks. To this end, we first performed a subjective experiment asking humans to highlight the key visual features in images that helped them to make decisions in two different vision tasks. Next, using the human-annotated images, ground-truth heatmaps were generated that were compared against heatmaps generated by explanation methods for the deep architectures. Moreover, perturbation tests were performed for objective evaluation of the deep models' explanation heatmaps. According to the results, the explanations generated from ViT are deemed more trustworthy than those produced by other CNNs, and as the features of the input image are more dispersed, the advantage of the model becomes more evident.

Ying Yang

Papers

Nuciferine restores potassium oxonate-induced hyperuricemia and kidney inflammation in mice

Wuling San protects kidney dysfunction by inhibiting renal TLR4/MyD88 signaling and NLRP3 inflammasome activation in high fructose-induced hyperuricemic mice

Underwater localization with binary measurements: From compressed sensing to deep unfolding

Evaluating Quality of Visual Explanations of Deep Learning Models for Vision Tasks