Cynanotophyllosides E-F, two minor pregnane glycosides from the roots of cultivated .

Cynanotophyllosides E-F, two new minor pregnane glycosides were isolated from the antidepressant active fraction of cultivated , and their structures were determined as 12--vanilloyl-deacetylmetaplexigenin 3---D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)--D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)--D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)--D-oleandropyranosyl-(1→4)--D-digitoxopyranoside, and 12--nicotinoyl-deacetylmetaplexigenin 3---D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)--D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)--D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)--D-oleandropyranosyl-(1→4)--D-cymaropyranoside respectively, with the combination of spectroscopic and chemical analysis.

Acteoside attenuates acute lung injury following administration of cobra venom factor to mice.

Background: Acteoside, a water-soluble active constituent of diverse valuable medicinal vegetation, has shown strong anti-inflammatory property. However, studies on the anti-inflammatory property of acteoside in complement-induced acute lung injury (ALI) are limited. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the anti-inflammatory activity of acteoside in cobra venom factor (CVF)-stimulated human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC) and in ALI mice model.

CIRBP Regulates Pancreatic Cancer Cell Ferroptosis and Growth by Directly Binding to p53.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most malignant gastrointestinal tumors, and it is of great significance to explore the molecular mechanism of its progression and find new biological therapeutic targets. CIRBP is a cold-induced protein that plays a key role in many physiological and pathological processes, but its role in pancreatic cancer is still unclear. The expression of CIRBP in pancreatic cancer tissues was slightly lower than that in normal tissues, and the high expression of CIRBP was beneficial to survival.

Effects of Nano-copper Oxide on Antioxidant Function of Copper-Deficient Kazakh Sheep.

Kazakh sheep are vital to the production system of the Barkol prairie. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of nano-copper oxide (Nano-CuO) on the antioxidant system of Cu-deficient Kazakh sheep in the Barkol prairie in Xinjiang, China. We analyzed mineral contents in soil, forage, and animal tissues.

Ligustrum robustum (Roxb.) blume extract modulates gut microbiota and prevents metabolic syndrome in high-fat diet-fed mice.

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: In Chinese folk medicine, Ligustrum robustum (Roxb.) Blume has been widely used as a healthy tea beverage for improvement in obesity and lipidemic metabolic disorders.

Aim Of The Study: We aimed to investigate the effect of L.

Melanin-concentrating hormone in rat nucleus accumbens or lateral hypothalamus differentially impacts morphine and food seeking behaviors.

Background: Identifying neural substrates that are differentially affected by drugs of abuse and natural rewards is key to finding a target for an efficacious treatment for substance abuse. Melanin-concentrating hormone is a polypeptide with an inhibitory effect on the mesolimbic dopamine system. Here we test the hypothesis that melanin-concentrating hormone in the lateral hypothalamus and nucleus accumbens shell is differentially involved in the regulation of morphine and food-rewarded behaviors.

Superpixel Hierarchy.

Superpixel segmentation has been one of the most important tasks in computer vision. In practice, an object can be represented by a number of segments at finer levels with consistent details or included in a surrounding region at coarser levels. Thus, a superpixel segmentation hierarchy is of great importance for applications that require different levels of image details.

Biocatalysis mechanisms and characterization of a novel denitrification process with porphyrin compounds based on the electron transfer chain.

In this research, the nitrate reduction rate increased 2-3 fold in the presence of five different porphyrin compounds (0.25 mM), among which hemin expressed the best accelerating effectiveness. Therefore, hemin was used to explore the catalytic characteristics and mechanisms during denitrification.

Two new secolignans from the roots of Urtica fissa.

Two new secolignans, 3,4-trans-3-hydroxymethyl-4-[bis(4-hydroxy-3- methoxyphenyl)methyl]butyrolactone (1) and 3,4-trans-3-hydroxymethyl-4- [bis(3,4-dimethoxyphenyl)methyl]butyrolactone (2) have been isolated from the roots of Urtica fissa E.Pritz. Their structures were determined on the basis of spectroscopic methods, especially H NMR, C NMR, 2D NMR, and HR-ESI-MS.

Colorization Using Neural Network Ensemble.

This paper investigates into the colorization problem, which converts a grayscale image to a colorful version. This is a difficult problem and normally requires manual adjustment to achieve artifact-free quality. For instance, it normally requires human-labeled color scribbles on the grayscale target image or a careful selection of colorful reference images.

Spatiotemporal GMM for Background Subtraction with Superpixel Hierarchy.

We propose a background subtraction algorithm using hierarchical superpixel segmentation, spanning trees and optical flow. First, we generate superpixel segmentation trees using a number of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) by treating each GMM as one vertex to construct spanning trees. Next, we use the -smoother to enhance the spatial consistency on the spanning trees and estimate optical flow to extend the -smoother to the temporal domain.

Divergent Synthesis of Solanidine and 22-epi-Solanidine.

A divergent synthesis of solanidine and 22-epi-solanidine, two 25S natural steroidal alkaloids, from 25R-configured diosgenin acetate, is described. Initially, solanidine was synthesized through a series of transformations including a cascade ring-switching process of furostan-26-acid, an epimerization of C25 controlled by the conformation of six-membered lactone ring, an intramolecular Schmidt reaction, and an imine reduction/intramolecular aminolysis process. To address the epimerization issue during Schmidt reaction, an improved synthesis was developed, which also led to a synthesis of 22-epi-solanidine.

RGBD Salient Object Detection via Deep Fusion.

Numerous efforts have been made to design various low-level saliency cues for RGBD saliency detection, such as color and depth contrast features as well as background and color compactness priors. However, how these low-level saliency cues interact with each other and how they can be effectively incorporated to generate a master saliency map remain challenging problems. In this paper, we design a new convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn the interaction mechanism for RGBD salient object detection.

Pregnane glycosides from the antidepressant active fraction of cultivated Cynanchum otophyllum.

Based on the bioactive screening results, four new pregnane glycosides, namely cynanotophyllosides A-D (1-4) were isolated from the anti-depressant active fraction of cultivated Cynanchum otophyllum, along with thirteen known compounds (5-17). The new compounds were characterized as qingyangshengenin 3-O-β-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-oleandropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranoside (1), qingyangshengenin-3-O-β-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-oleandropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)-α-L-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranoside (2), caudatin-3-O-β-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-thevetopyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-digitoxopyranoside (3) caudatin-3-O-β-D-glucopyranosyl -(1→4)-β-D-thevetopyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranosyl-(1→4)-β-D-cymaropyranoside (4), by detailed spectroscopic analysis and acidic hydrolysis.

Multimodal Multipart Learning for Action Recognition in Depth Videos.

The articulated and complex nature of human actions makes the task of action recognition difficult. One approach to handle this complexity is dividing it to the kinetics of body parts and analyzing the actions based on these partial descriptors. We propose a joint sparse regression based learning method which utilizes the structured sparsity to model each action as a combination of multimodal features from a sparse set of body parts.

Efficient and Robust Specular Highlight Removal.

A robust and effective specular highlight removal method is proposed in this paper. It is based on a key observation--the maximum fraction of the diffuse colour component in diffuse local patches in colour images changes smoothly. The specular pixels can thus be treated as noise in this case.

Stereo Matching Using Tree Filtering.

Matching cost aggregation is one of the oldest and still popular methods for stereo correspondence. While effective and efficient, cost aggregation methods typically aggregate the matching cost by summing/averaging over a user-specified, local support region. This is obviously only locally-optimal, and the computational complexity of the full-kernel implementation usually depends on the region size.

Recursive approximation of the bilateral filter.

This paper presents a complete proof that the bilateral filter can be implemented recursively, as long as: 1) the spatial filter can be implemented recursively and 2) the range filter can be decomposed into a recursive product. As a result, an O(ND) solution can be obtained for bilateral filtering, where N is the image size and D is the dimensionality.

Video tracking using learned hierarchical features.

In this paper, we propose an approach to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking. First, we offline learn features robust to diverse motion patterns from auxiliary video sequences. The hierarchical features are learned via a two-layer convolutional neural network.

Fast edge-preserving PatchMatch for large displacement optical flow.

The speed of optical flow algorithm is crucial for many video editing tasks such as slow motion synthesis, selection propagation, tone adjustment propagation, and so on. Variational coarse-to-fine optical flow algorithms can generally produce high-quality results but cannot fulfil the speed requirement of many practical applications. Besides, large motions in real-world videos also pose a difficult problem to coarse-to-fine variational approaches.

Hardware-Efficient Bilateral Filtering for Stereo Matching.

This paper presents a new bilateral filtering method specially designed for practical stereo vision systems. Parallel algorithms are preferred in these systems due to the real-time performance requirement. Edge-preserving filters like the bilateral filter have been demonstrated to be very effective for high-quality local stereo matching.

Tree Filtering: Efficient Structure-Preserving Smoothing With a Minimum Spanning Tree.

We present a new efficient edge-preserving filter-"tree filter"-to achieve strong image smoothing. The proposed filter can smooth out high-contrast details while preserving major edges, which is not achievable for bilateral-filter-like techniques. Tree filter is a weighted-average filter, whose kernel is derived by viewing pixel affinity in a probabilistic framework simultaneously considering pixel spatial distance, color/intensity difference, as well as connectedness.

Fusion of median and bilateral filtering for range image upsampling.

We present a new upsampling method to enhance the spatial resolution of depth images. Given a low-resolution depth image from an active depth sensor and a potentially high-resolution color image from a passive RGB camera, we formulate it as an adaptive cost aggregation problem and solve it using the bilateral filter. The formulation synergistically combines the median and bilateral filters thus it better preserves the depth edges and is more robust to noise.

Shadow removal using bilateral filtering.

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective shadow removal method using a single input image. We first derive a 2-D intrinsic image from a single RGB camera image based solely on colors, particularly chromaticity. We next present a method to recover a 3-D intrinsic image based on bilateral filtering and the 2-D intrinsic image.

The antidepressant effect of Cynanchum auriculatum in mice.

Context: Antidepressant effects of various plants are generally attributed to their anti-inflammation and antioxidant activities. Cynanchum auriculatum Royle ex Wight (Asclepiadaceae) is a traditional medicinal plant in China and India used for immunological regulation, anti-inflammation, and antioxidant purposes. However knowledge about its antidepressant activity has been poorly investigated.