Applied Sciences

Gymnema lactiferum (G. lactiferum) is a medicinal plant that contains potent bioactive phytochemicals, which are prone to degradation during processing and digestion. In this study, G. lactiferum extract was prepared and encapsulated into soy lecithin primary liposomes (PL) and then coated with chitosan to form secondary liposomes (chitosomes, CS) to enhance stability. Physicochemical characteristics, morphology, thermal behavior, and storage stability were evaluated. Extract loading significantly (p < 0.05) increased the mean diameter of PL from 128.6 nm to 146.3 nm and of CS from 359.1 nm to 408.9 nm compared with unloaded liposomes. Both liposomal systems exhibited homogeneous size distributions and good colloidal stability, with zeta potentials of −39.4 mV for PL and +35.8 mV for CS and low polydispersity indices (<0.25) for both systems. Transmission electron microscopy demonstrated predominantly spherical morphologies in both systems. Chitosan coating significantly (p < 0.05) improved both encapsulation efficiency (77.3%) and encapsulation yield (82.4%) compared with PL (73.7% and 79.1%, respectively). HPLC-based quantification using rutin as a reference analyte further indicated EE-R% values of 59.8% for PL-GE and 70.3% for CS-GE, supporting improved extract retention following chitosan coating. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy confirmed successful encapsulation without apparent chemical alterations or reactions. Differential scanning calorimetry indicated that chitosan coating modified the thermal transition behavior of the liposomal membrane, consistent with altered bilayer packing and increased membrane fluidity, while incorporation of the extract partially restored thermal order within the coated system. Overall, chitosan coating effectively enhanced the encapsulation efficiency, stability, and yield of G. lactiferum extract-loaded liposomes towards their incorporation into functional food formulations.

Traditional woven fabric identification heavily depends on manual experience and subjective judgment, which limits its applicability in modern intelligent textile manufacturing. To address this issue, this paper proposes improved woven fabric recognition approaches based on the ResNet50 and ConvNeXt architectures. For the classical ResNet50, the squeeze-and-excitation network (SENet) and the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) attention mechanisms are integrated separately to boost feature representation, and adopt the Adam optimizer to accelerate convergence. For ConvNeXt, we optimize the network stacking blocks and design a warmup + cosine annealing learning rate scheduling strategy. With the transfer learning strategy, classification experiments are conducted on a self-constructed fabric dataset. The improved ResNet50 model achieves a recognition accuracy of 90.15%, while the optimized ConvNeXt model reaches 90.01%. The models outperform their baseline counterparts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed improvements. This study provides a feasible reference for the research of automatic woven fabric classification and related intelligent textile inspection.

Nitrogen-containing molecules are fundamental components of astrobiology and play a key role in planetary environments. These species are particularly important because they may serve as key precursors to prebiotic molecules and contribute to chemical complexity. Reactions involving the highly reactive species methylidyne (CH) play a key role in complex organic formation in astrochemical environments, yet their interactions with nitriles such as acetonitrile (CH₃CN) remain relatively unexplored. In this work, we investigate the reaction network of CH + CH₃CN using high-level quantum-chemical calculations with RRKM and microcanonical transition-state theories to characterize the relative energies of reactants, intermediates, transition states, and products to identify the most favorable reaction pathways. Our results reveal that the most energetically favorable reaction channels proceed via barrierless CH addition to the triple CN bond and three-membered ring opening or CH insertion into a C-H bond, followed by a hydrogen elimination to form acrylonitrile (C₂H₃CN). This route highlights an efficient pathway toward a molecule of astrobiological interest. Acrylonitrile is particularly significant due to its stability and dual functional groups, which enable molecular growth complexity, both in planetary atmospheres and on surfaces, under astrochemical conditions. In addition to acrylonitrile, we identified a few other competing channels leading to an isonitrile species, which emphasizes a previously unexplored aspect of isomerization chemistry in the atmospheric planetary science. These isonitrile products, while less abundant, provide insight to the diversity of nitrogen-containing molecules that may form in environments such as Titan’s atmosphere or the interstellar medium. In these environments, acrylonitrile may serve as a reactive precursor that facilitates cyclization and molecular growth, which enables the formation of nitrogen-containing polycyclic aromatic molecules and N-heterocycles. This, in turn, contributes to the emergence of larger, more complex organic species relevant to prebiotic chemistry and potential origin of life in our solar system.