Characteristics and upregulation of antioxidant enzymes of kitchen mint and oolong tea kombucha beverages

Kombucha is a healthy traditional beverage which is made by fermenting products with a symbiotic culture of acetic acid bacteria and yeasts. In present study, leaves of kitchen mint (Mentha cordifolia Opiz. Ex Fresen) and leaves of oolong tea (Camellia sinensis) were fermented in kombucha formula. After fermentation, titratable acidity contents and ethanol of kitchen mint, oolong tea, and mixtures of oolong tea and kitchen mint kombucha samples gradually increased with a period of fermentation time. At day 14 of fermentation, phenolic compounds and flavonoids were increased in all kombucha samples. The numbers of acetic acid bacteria and yeast in kombucha had gradually raised during 7–14 days of fermentation. DPPH and ABTS scavenging activities of these kombucha increased over a period of fermentation time and shown the highest antioxidant capacity on day 14 of fermentation. In addition, all kombucha samples exhibited the antioxidant effects by attenuating H₂O₂-induced ROS production, increasing mRNA expression of catalase, glutathione reductase (GRe), and Mn-SOD, and inducing GRe enzymatic activity in HEK-293 cells. Kombucha beverage can be used as the healthy beverages for attenuation of oxidative stress in many diseases.     

Success of electronic commerce Web sites: A comparative study in two countries

This study incorporated attitude toward a site (Ast) in the proposed model together with moderating factors like cultural effects and attitude toward online shopping (Ashop). The proposed model and hypotheses were partially supported in Taiwan's and Thailand's data. Information quality affected both user satisfaction and attitude toward the web site and was the dimension common across both countries. Ashop moderated the effects of system quality on user satisfaction in Taiwan, but moderated information quality in the Thailand. National identity moderated the effect of system quality on both user satisfaction and attitude toward the site in the Thai data.     

Thin-film organic photodiodes for integrated on-chip chemiluminescence detection – application to antioxidant capacity screening

We demonstrate that solution processed thin-film organic photodiodes (OPDs) can be used as compact and sensitive integrated detectors for antioxidant capacity screening. The OPDs were fabricated with blends of regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and (6,6)-phenyl C₆₁ butyric-acid methyl-ester (PCBM). The devices had a broadband photoresponse from 350 nm to 650 nm with a peak responsivity of 0.25 A/W at 550 nm and a dark current density of 0.59 μA/cm² under 10 mV bias for a device area of 1 mm². The signal rise and fall times of the detectors were 0.51 μs and 0.66 μs, respectively. The detectors were applied to an on-chip peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence (PO-CL) assay for antioxidant capacity determination. Antioxidant standards were injected into a stream of PO-CL reagents, resulting in a CL emission decrease that correlated with the antioxidant capacity. For the encountered CL signals the OPDs provided a comparable response to photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) commonly used in analytical applications. Antioxidant capacity screening results showed excellent consistency between the two detection methods. The compact and portable detection system is suited not only to low-cost in-the-field antioxidant capacity screening, but could have wider applications for chemiluminescence based diagnostic tests at the point-of-care.     

Harnessing the Potential of CRISPR/Cas in Atherosclerosis: Disease Modeling and Therapeutic Applications

Atherosclerosis represents one of the major causes of death globally. The high mortality rates and limitations of current therapeutic modalities have urged researchers to explore potential alternative therapies. The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) system is commonly deployed for investigating the genetic aspects of Atherosclerosis. Besides, advances in CRISPR/Cas system has led to extensive options for researchers to study the pathogenesis of this disease. The recent discovery of Cas9 variants, such as dCas9, Cas9n, and xCas9 have been established for various applications, including single base editing, regulation of gene expression, live-cell imaging, epigenetic modification, and genome landscaping. Meanwhile, other Cas proteins, such as Cas12 and Cas13, are gaining popularity for their applications in nucleic acid detection and single-base DNA/RNA modifications. To date, many studies have utilized the CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate disease models of atherosclerosis and identify potential molecular targets that are associated with atherosclerosis. These studies provided proof-of-concept evidence which have established the feasibility of implementing the CRISPR/Cas system in correcting disease-causing alleles. The CRISPR/Cas system holds great potential to be developed as a targeted treatment for patients who are suffering from atherosclerosis. This review highlights the advances in CRISPR/Cas systems and their applications in establishing pathogenetic and therapeutic role of specific genes in atherosclerosis.     

Identification of a Negative Regulator for Salt Tolerance at Seedling Stage via a Genome-Wide Association Study of Thai Rice Populations

Salt stress is a major limiting factor in crop production and yield in many regions of the world. The objective of this study was to identify the genes responsible for salt tolerance in Thai rice populations. We performed a genome-wide association study with growth traits, relative water content, and cell membrane stability at the seedling stage, and predicted 25 putative genes. Eleven of them were located within previously reported salt-tolerant QTLs (ST-QTLs). OsCRN, located outside the ST-QTLs, was selected for gene characterization using the Arabidopsis mutant line with T-DNA insertion in the orthologous gene. Mutations in the AtCRN gene led to the enhancement of salt tolerance by increasing the ability to maintain photosynthetic pigment content and relative water content, while the complemented lines with ectopic expression of OsCRN showed more susceptibility to salt stress detected by photosynthesis performance. Moreover, the salt-tolerant rice varieties showed lower expression of this gene than the susceptible rice varieties under salt stress conditions. The study concludes that by acting as a negative regulator, OsCRN plays an important role in salt tolerance in rice.     

A self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm for continuous optimization problems

This paper proposes a new self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm (DE) for continuous optimization problems. The proposed self-adaptive differential evolution algorithm extends the concept of the DE/current-to-best/1 mutation strategy to allow the adaptation of the mutation parameters. The control parameters in the mutation operation are gradually self-adapted according to the feedback from the evolutionary search. Moreover, the proposed differential evolution algorithm also consists of a new local search based on the krill herd algorithm. In this study, the proposed algorithm has been evaluated and compared with the traditional DE algorithm and two other adaptive DE algorithms. The experimental results on 21 benchmark problems show that the proposed algorithm is very effective in solving complex optimization problems.