Objective To establish method for simultaneous determination of hesperidin, cinnamaldehyde and eugenol in Chunyang Zhengqi capsules by high performance liquid chromatography. Methods The column was Agilent PorosheⅡ 120 EC-C₁₈ (4.6 mm×150 mm, 4 μm). The mobile phase was acetonitrile-water with gradient elution. The column temperature was 35℃. The flow rate was 1.0 ml/min, and the detection wavelength was 284 nm. Results The methodological verification showed that hesperidin, cinnamaldehyde and eugenol had a good linearity (r≥0.999 9). The precisions were less than 2.0%. The average recovery was between 98.0% and 101.9%. The stability and repeatability of RSD were also less than 3.0%, which met the requirements of method validation. Conclusion The method is simple, stable, reproducible and accurate, which could be used to the quality control of Chunyang Zhengqi capsules.

In this study, the chloroplast genome of Camellia insularis Orel & Curry was sequenced using high-throughput sequencing technology. The results showed that the chloroplast genome of C. insularis was 156 882 bp in length with a typical tetrad structure, encoding 132 genes, including 88 protein-coding genes, 36 tRNA genes, and 8 rRNA genes. Codon preference analysis revealed that the highest number of codons coded for leucine, with a high A/U preference in the third codon position. Additionally, 67 simple sequence repeats (SSR) loci were identified, with a preference for A and T bases. The inverted repeat (IR) boundary regions of the chloroplast genome of C. insularis were relatively conserved, except for a few variable regions. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that C. insularis was most closely related to C. fascicularis. Yellow camellia is a valuable material for genetic engineering breeding. This study provides fundamental genetic information on chloroplast engineering and offers valuable resources for conducting in-depth research on the evolution, species identification, and genomic breeding of yellow Camellia.
Genome, Chloroplast/genetics* ; Phylogeny ; Plant Breeding ; Camellia/genetics* ; Chloroplasts/genetics*

Separation and determination of chiral and achiral impurities in glimepiride tablets by supercritical fluid chromatography. Chiral and achiral impurities were separated on a ACQUITY UPC² Trefoil^TM CEL1 column (150 mm × 3.0 mm, 2.5 μm) maintained at 30 ℃ with the mobile phase containing a mixture of CO₂ and methanol-isopropanol (1∶1) at 1 mL·min^-1, and the detection wavelength was set at 228 nm. The back pressure was set at 13.8 MPa. The injection volume was 5 μL. In the chromatogram of the system suitability solution, the peaks elute in the following order: impurity Ⅳ, impurity Ⅴ, glimepiride, impurity Ⅲ, impurity Ⅰ and impurity Ⅱ. The six substances were separated successfully in 6 min using the proposed method with a resolution factor of 2.9, 1.6, 3.0, 2.0, 6.4. The impurity Ⅰ-Ⅴ detection limit (S/N = 3) was 0.17, 0.10, 0.06, 0.15, 0.10 μg·mL^-1, respectively. Good linear relationship was established between the peak response and the concentration in the range of 0.48-51.30 μg·mL^-1 for all impurities. The spiked recovery of impurity Ⅰ-Ⅴ was found to be acceptable for 99.9%, 98.9%, 102.1%, 100.1%, 96.3% (n = 9), respectively. The related substance and assay results of 11 sample batches are consistent with the results obtained using the HPLC method in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Compared to the two HPLC methods in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, the established supercritical fluid chromatography method can simultaneously separate glimepiride and its 5 impurities in a single run, and it has the following advantages: simplified sample preparation, greatly reducing the volumes of organic solvents, environmentally friendly, high accuracy and good reproducibility. It can be employed for the quality control of the chiral and achiral impurities in glimepiride tablets.

OBJECTIVE To establish the quality standard of Triadica cochinchinensis and to perform the acute toxicity study. METHODS Appearance properties, powder microscopic identification, and thin-layer chromatography(TLC) identification were researched. The specific chromatogram was established by HPLC. The content of cadmium(Cd), lead(Pb), arsenic(As), copper(Cu), and mercury(Hg) was determined by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry(ICP-MS). Acute toxicity was studied by maximum dose. RESULTS The outer skin of herbs was dark brown, and the inner surface was light yellow brown and fibrous. Besides, crystal sheath fiber was common, and calcium oxalate clusters arranges in rows. In the TLC diagram of the test product, the fluorescent spots of the same color were displayed at the corresponding position of the control product(scopoletin, isofraxidin). Five common peaks were calibrated in the characteristic map and the three characteristic peaks(scopoletin, isofraxidin, dimethylfraxetin) were recognized. The content of the measured heavy metal elements was lower than the national limit standard. The linear correlation coefficient was R2 > 0.999. The precision, stability, repetitive RSD were < 10%. The average recovery rate of the added sample was 80%−120%, and the RSD was < 10%. The maximum dose of the acute toxicity test was 184.09 g·kg−1. The 14 d internal body mass, food intake, organ-body ratios, the serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase, glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase, blood urea nitrogen, and creatinine were not significantly different by comparing with the normal controls. Therefore, no significant toxicity was observed. CONCLUSION The established standard can provide a reference for evaluating the quality of Triadica cochinchinensis. The heavy metal content of ten batches of medicinal materials is within the safe range. Acute toxicity test show that there is no obvious significant adverse teactions after oral administration, and the safe dose range is large, which can provide a reference for the subsequent development and utilization.

OBJECTIVE In the process of drug dispensing, using computer vision technology to identify drugs is vulnerable to the influence of lighting, angle, packaging and other factors, which will produce large identification errors. Therefore, this paper proposes an object detection algorithm for drug appearance recognition(YOLOv4-GhostNet-CMB). METHODS Firstly, the algorithm redesigned the backbone feature extraction network in YOLOv4 by using GhostNet. Secondly, the CA attention model was brought into the Ghost module, aggregate features along horizontal and vertical directions to enhance the precise positioning of drugs. Finally, Bi-FPN feature pyramid structure was introduced to connect with the new backbone, and added a feature graph output which could enhance feature extraction and improved the detection accuracy of drugs. RESULTS The experimental results show that the average detection accuracy of YOLOv4-GhostNet-CMB algorithm reached 92.24%, which was a significant improvement of 4.49% compared with YOLOv4 algorithm in term of detection accuracy. CONCLUSION The model size is only 150 MB, nd this algorithm can effectively identify drugs.

Background and Objectives: Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) often occurs suddenly and leads to fatal consequences. Ferroptosis is closely related to the progression of AMI.However, the specific mechanism of ferroptosis in AMI remains unclear. Methods: We constructed a cell model of AMI using AC16 cells under oxygen and glucose deprivation (OGD) conditions and a mice model of AMI using the left anterior descending (LAD) ligation. The 3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5 diphenyltetrazolium bromide was employed to determine cell viability. The levels of lactate dehydrogenase, creatine kinase, reactive oxygen species (ROS), glutathione (GSH), malondialdehyde (MDA), and iron were measured using corresponding kits. Dual luciferase reporter gene assay, RNAbinding protein immunoprecipitation, and RNA pull-down were performed to validate the correlations among AC005332.7, miR-331-3p, and cyclin D2 (CCND2). Hematoxylin and eosin staining was employed to evaluate myocardial damage. Results: AC005332.7 and CCND2 were lowly expressed, while miR-331-3p was highly expressed in vivo and in vitro models of AMI. AC005332.7 sufficiency reduced ROS, MDA, iron, and ACSL4 while boosting the GSH and GPX4, indicating that AC005332.7 sufficiency impeded ferroptosis to improve cardiomyocyte injury in AMI. Mechanistically, AC005332.7 interacted with miR-331-3p, and miR-331-3p targeted CCND2. Additionally, miR-331-3p overexpression or CCND2 depletion abolished the suppressive impact of AC005332.7 on ferroptosis in OGD-induced AC16 cells. Moreover, AC005332.7 overexpression suppressed ferroptosis in mice models of AMI. Conclusions AC005332.7 suppressed ferroptosis in OGD-induced AC16 cells and LAD ligation-operated mice through modulating miR-331-3p/CCND2 axis, thereby mitigating the cardiomyocyte injury in AMI, which proposed novel targets for AMI treatment.

Although deep learning plays an important role in cell nucleus segmentation, it still faces problems such as difficulty in extracting subtle features and blurring of nucleus edges in pathological diagnosis. Aiming at the above problems, a nuclear segmentation network combined with attention mechanism is proposed. The network uses UNet network as the basic structure and the depth separable residual (DSRC) module as the feature encoding to avoid losing the boundary information of the cell nucleus. The feature decoding uses the coordinate attention (CA) to enhance the long-range distance in the feature space and highlights the key information of the nuclear position. Finally, the semantics information fusion (SIF) module integrates the feature of deep and shallow layers to improve the segmentation effect. The experiments were performed on the 2018 data science bowl (DSB2018) dataset and the triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) dataset. For the two datasets, the accuracy of the proposed method was 92.01% and 89.80%, the sensitivity was 90.09% and 91.10%, and the mean intersection over union was 89.01% and 89.12%, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively segment the subtle regions of the nucleus, improve the segmentation accuracy, and provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis.
Cell Nucleus/pathology* ; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted/methods*

To investigate the potential molecular mechanism of the combination of Platycodonis Radix and Lilii Bulbus with the homology of medicine and food in the treatment of pneumonia by means of network pharmacology and in vitro verification experiment. Under the condition of bioavailability(OB)≥30% and drug-like(DL)≥0.18, the active components of Platycodonis Radix and Lilii Bulbus were screened in TCMSP database; the prediction targets of active components were searched from TCMSP, DrugBank and other databases, and the potential targets of pneumonia were obtained through GeneCards and OMIM database. The common targets were obtained by the intersection of drug and disease targets. The PPI network of common targets was constructed by STRING 11.0, and the core targets were obtained by topological analysis. Then the core targets received GO and KEGG analysis with use of WebGestalt and Metascape. The "component-target-pathway" network was constructed with the help of Cytoscape 3.7.1 software, and the component-target molecular docking verification was carried out with Discovery Studio 2016 software. Finally, the core targets and pathways were preliminarily verified in vitro. In this study, 12 active components were screened, 225 drug prediction targets and 420 potential diseases targets were obtained based on data mining method, and 14 core targets were obtained by topological analysis, including TNF, MMP9, AKT1, IL4 and IL2. The enrichment results of GO and KEGG showed that "Platycodonis Radix and Lilii Bulbus" drug pair may regulate inflammation, cell growth and metabolism by acting on 20 key signaling pathways such as TNF and IL-17, thereby exerting anti-pneumonia effects. The results of molecular docking showed that 12 active components had good binding ability with 14 core targets. In vitro experiment results showed that the core components of "Platycodonis Radix and Lilii Bulbus" drug pair could inhibit the expression of MMP9 and TNF-α by regulating TNF signal pathway. This study confirmed the scientificity and reliability of the prediction results of network pharmacology, and preliminarily revealed the potential molecular mechanism of the compatibility of Platycodonis Radix and Lilii Bulbus in the treatment of pneumonia. It provides a novel insight on systematically exploring the mechanism of the compatible use of Platycodonis Radix and Lilii Bulbus, and has a certain reference value for the research, development and application of new drugs.
Drugs, Chinese Herbal ; Humans ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional ; Molecular Docking Simulation ; Pneumonia/drug therapy* ; Reproducibility of Results

Objective To clarify the influence of the extraction process on its active ingredients by comparing the volatile oils of Rhizoma Chuanxiong obtained under different processes. Methods The volatile oil of Rhizoma Chuanxiong was extracted by supercritical CO₂ extraction (SFE) and steam distillation. The main chemical components and relative contents were identified by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Results A total of 18 common components were identified in the volatile oil samples of Chuanxiong from the two methods. In steam distillation samples, main components included phthalides (61%), monoterpenoids (25%) and sesquiterpenes (10%). In SFE samples, phthalides (97%) were major components, followed by monoterpenoids (1%),sesquiterpenes (0.4%) and other minor components. Conclusion The steam distillation retains highly volatile components in Rhizoma chuanxiong such as monoterpenoids and sesquiterpenes. For SFE approach, the phthalides were extracted more efficiently compared with other components. The effect of the extraction process on the active ingredients should be fully considered in obtained products of Rhizoma chuanxiong since the difference in constituents may result in varied effects.

To establish a quality constant evaluation system of Alismatis Rhizoma decoction pieces,in order to provide reference for regulating the market circulation of this decoction pieces. A total of 18 batches of Alismatis Rhizoma decoction pieces were collected from different pharmaceutical factories,and the morphological parameters of each sample were tested. The content of alisol B 23-acetate in Alismatis Rhizoma decoction pieces was determined by HPLC in the 2015 edition of Chinese Pharmacopoeia,and the parameters such as quality constant and relative quality constant were calculated. The quality constant range of 18 batches of Alismatis Rhizoma decoction pieces was 0. 390-2. 076. If 18 batches of Alismatis Rhizoma decoction pieces were divided into 3 grades,taking 80% of the maximum quality constant as first grade,50% to 80% as second grade,and the rest as third grade,then the quality constant of firstgrade samples was ≥1. 66,the quality constant of second-grade samples was ≥1. 04 and <1. 66,and the quality constant of third-grade samples was <1. 04. The established quality constant evaluation method is objective and feasible,which can be used to classify the grade of Alismatis Rhizoma decoction pieces and provide a reference method to control the quality of this decoction pieces.
Alisma ; chemistry ; Chromatography, High Pressure Liquid ; Drugs, Chinese Herbal ; standards ; Quality Control ; Rhizome ; chemistry