Many species of endoparasitoid wasps provide biological control services in agroecosystems. Although there is a great deal of information on the ecology and physiology of host/parasitoid interactions, relatively little is known about the protein composition of venom and how specific venom proteins influence physiological systems within host insects. This is a crucial gap in our knowledge because venom proteins act in modulating host physiology in ways that favor parasitoid development. Here, we identified 37 possible venom proteins from the polydnavirus-carrying endoparasitoid Cotesia chilonis by combining transcriptomic and proteomic analyses. The most abundant proteins were hydrolases, such as proteases, peptidases, esterases, glycosyl hydrolase, and endonucleases. Some components are classical parasitoid venom proteins with known functions, including extracellular superoxide dismutase 3, serine protease inhibitor and calreticulin. The venom contains novel proteins, not recorded from any other parasitoid species, including tolloid-like proteins, chitooligosaccharidolytic β-N-acetylglucosaminidase, FK506-binding protein 14, corticotropin-releasing factor-binding protein and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2. These new data generate hypotheses and provide a platform for functional analysis of venom components. Full article

Coffee is a favorite and beverage in Western countries that is consumed daily. In the present study, capillary zone electrophoresis (CE) was applied for the separation and quantification of three isoflavones including daidzein, genistein and formononetin in coffee. Extraction of isoflavones from the coffee sample was carried out by extraction and purification process using ether after the acid hydrolysis with the antioxidant butylated hydroxy-toluene (BHT). The experimental conditions of the CE separation method were: 20 mmol/L Na₂HPO₄ buffer solution, 25 kV applied voltage, 3 s hydrodynamic injection at 30 mbar, and UV detection at 254 nm. The results show that the three compounds can be tested within 10 min with a linearity of 0.5–50 µg/mL for all three compounds. The limits of detection were 0.0642, 0.134, and 0.0825 µg/mL for daidzein, formononetin and genistein, respectively. The corresponding average recovery was 99.39% (Relative Standard Detection (RSD) = 1.76%), 98.71% (RSD = 2.11%) and 97.37% (RSD = 3.74%). Full article

This study explored the inhibiting effect and mechanism of myricanol on lung adenocarcinoma A549 xenografts in nude mice. Forty nude mice with subcutaneous A549 xenografts were randomly divided into five groups: high-dose myricanol (40 mg/kg body weight) group; middle-dose myricanol (20 mg/kg body weight) group; low-dose myricanol (10 mg/kg body weight) group; polyethylene glycol 400 vehicle group (1 mL/kg); and tumor model group. Nude mice were sacrificed after 14 days of treatment and the tumor inhibition rate (TIR, %) was then calculated. The relative mRNA expression levels of Bax, Bcl-2, VEGF, HIF-1α, and survivin in the tumor tissues were determined by real-time PCR. TUNEL assay was applied to determine cellular apoptosis, while IHC test was performed to detect the protein expression levels of Bax, Bcl-2, VEGF, HIF-1α, and survivin. The TIR of the three myricanol-treated groups ranged from 14.9% to 38.5%. The IHC results showed that the protein expression of Bcl-2, VEGF, HIF-1α, and survivin were consistently downregulated, whereas that of Bax was upregulated after myricanol treatment. Myricanol also significantly upregulated the mRNA expression of Bax and downregulated that of Bcl-2, VEGF, HIF-1α, and survivin in a dose-dependent manner (p < 0.05 to 0.001). These results are consistent with those of IHC. The TUNEL assay results indicated that apoptotic-positive cells significantly increased in the myricanol-treated tumor tissues compared with the cells of the vehicle control group (p < 0.01 to 0.001). These data suggest that myricanol could significantly decelerate tumor growth in vivo by inducing apoptosis. Full article

Seeking the optimal strategy of a multi-reservoir system is an important approach to develop hydropower energy, in which the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is commonly used as an effective tool. However, when the traditional GA is applied in solving the problem, the constraints of water balance equation, hydraulic continuity relationship and power system load demand might be violated by the crossover and mutation operator, which decreases the efficiency of the algorithm in searching for a feasible region or even leads to a convergence on an infeasible chromosome within the expected generations. A modified GA taking stochastic operators within the feasible region of variables is proposed. When determining the feasible region of constraints, the progressive optimal approach is applied to transform constraints imposed on reservoirs into a singular-reservoir constraint, and a joint solution with consideration of adjacent periods at crossover or mutation points is used to turn the singular-reservoir constraints into singular variable constraints. Some statistic indexes are suggested to evaluate the performances of the algorithms. The experimental results show that compared to GA adopting a penalty function or pair-wise comparison in constraint handling, the proposed modified GA improves the refinement of the quality of a solution in a more efficient and robust way. Full article