• ALGAE
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.175-187
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• 2012

Hainan is the second largest and southernmost island of China, and it harbors many species of the family Gracilariaceae. In this study, we conducted molecular and morphological analyses of gracilarian specimens collected from Hainan Island, to clarify their taxonomic identity and phylogenetic relationships. Five species of Gracilariaceae in Hainan were determined through maximum likelihood and Bayesian analysis of rbcL sequence data. Based on the phylogenetic trees and morphology, Hainan specimens were identified as three species of Gracilaria, one species of Gracilariopsis, and one species of Hydropuntia, namely, G. salicornia, G. tenuistipitata, Gracilaria sp., Gp. bailiniae and H. edulis. This is the first report of the molecular phylogeny of Gracilariaceae on Hainan Island, and it helps to clarify the taxonomy and distribution of gracilarian species in the Asia-Pacific region.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.557-562
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• 2013

In contrast to the gradual reduction in the number of locally transmitted malaria cases in China, the number of imported malaria cases has been increasing since 2008. Here, we report a case of a 39-year-old Chinese man who acquired Plasmodium ovale wallikeri infection while staying in Ghana, West Africa for 6 months in 2012. Microscopic examinations of Giemsa-stained thin and thick blood smears indicated Plasmodium vivax infection. However, the results of rapid diagnostic tests, which were conducted 3 times, were not in agreement with P. vivax. To further check the diagnosis, standard PCR analysis of the small-subunit rRNA gene was conducted, based on which a phylogeny tree was constructed. The results of gene sequencing indicated that this malaria is a variant of P. ovale (P. ovale wallikeri). The infection in this patient was not a new infection, but a relapse of the infection from the one that he had contracted in West Africa.

• Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.64-75
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• 2022

This study aimed to investigate the effect of different coating materials on the quality of shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) during chilled storage for 10 days. Fresh shrimp were randomly divided into five groups: the control group, the hypotaurine treatment group (2%), the chitosan group (1%), the hypotaurine + chitosan group (2% hypotaurine solution with 1% of chitosan), and the sodium metabisulfite treatment group (1.25%). Compared with other treatments, the lower accumulation of total visible counts (TVC, 5.25 Log₁₀ CFU/g), total volatile basic nitrogen (TVB-N, 22.5 mg/100 g) and thiobarbituric acid values (TBA, 0.58 mg MDA/kg) suggested that coating of chitosan-hypotaurine could retard the microbial activity, protein degradation and lipid oxidation of shrimp. Meanwhile, results demonstrated that the chitosan coating combined with hypotaurine showed an excellent performance in inhibiting quality deterioration (pH 7.5, ∆E 7.0, hardness 393 g, and elasticity 0.69). Furthermore, the melanosis degree of shrimp was alleviated, and the sensory parameters, including appearance, odor and texture, were maintained to the acceptable level by chitosan based hypotaurine treatment during the chilled storage.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.53 no.1
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• pp.35-41
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• 2015

Pyronaridine and artesunate have been shown to be effective in falciparum malaria treatment. However, pyronaridine is rarely used in Hainan Island clinically, and artesunate is not widely used as a therapeutic agent. Instead, conventional antimalarial drugs, chloroquine and piperaquine, are used, explaining the emergence of chloroquine-resistant Plasmodium falciparum. In this article, we investigated the sensitivity of P. falciparum to antimalarial drugs used in Hainan Island for rational drug therapy. We performed in vivo (28 days) and in vitro tests to determine the sensitivity of P. falciparum to antimalarial drugs. Total 46 patients with falciparum malaria were treated with dihydroartemisinin/piperaquine phosphate (DUO-COTECXIN) and followed up for 28 day. The cure rate was 97.8%. The mean fever clearance time ($22.5{\pm}10.6hr$) and the mean parasite clearance time ($27.3{\pm}12.2hr$) showed no statistical significance with different genders, ages, temperatures, or parasite density (P>0.05). The resistance rates of chloroquine, piperaquine, pyronarididine, and artesunate detected in vitro were 71.9%, 40.6%, 12.5%, and 0%, respectively (P<0.0001). The resistance intensities decreased as follows: chloroquine>piperaquine>pyronarididine>artesunate. The inhibitory dose 50 ($IC_{50}$) was $3.77{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, $2.09{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, $0.09{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, and $0.05{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, and the mean concentrations for complete inhibition (CIMC) of schizont formation were $5.60{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, $9.26{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, $0.55{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, and $0.07{\times}10^{-6}mol/L$, respectively. Dihydroartemisinin showed a strong therapeutic effect against falciparum malaria with a low toxicity.

• Genes and Genomics
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• v.40 no.11
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• pp.1181-1197
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• 2018

Tropical plant rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) is the sole source of commercial natural rubber and low-temperature stress is the most important limiting factor for its cultivation. To characterize the gene expression profiles of H. brasiliensis under the cold stress and discover the key cold stress-induced genes. Three cDNA libraries, CT (control), LT2 (cold treatment at $4^{\circ}C$ for 2 h) and LT24 (cold treatment at $4^{\circ}C$ for 24 h) were constructed for RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) and gene expression profiling. Quantitative real time PCR (qRT-PCR) was conducted to validate the RNA-Seq and gene differentially expression results. A total of 1457 and 2328 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in LT2 and LT24 compared with CT were respectively detected. Most significantly enriched KEGG pathways included flavonoid biosynthesis, phenylpropanoid biosynthesis, plant hormone signal transduction, cutin, suberine and wax biosynthesis, Pentose and glucuronate interconversions, phenylalanine metabolism and starch and sucrose metabolism. A total of 239 transcription factors (TFs) were differentially expressed following 2 h or/and 24 h of cold treatment. Cold-response transcription factor families included ARR-B, B3, BES1, bHLH, C2H, CO-like, Dof, ERF, FAR1, G2-like, GRAS, GRF, HD-ZIP, HSF, LBD, MIKC-MADS, M-type MADS, MYB, MYB-related, NAC, RAV, SRS, TALE, TCP, Trihelix, WOX, WRKY, YABBY and ZF-HD. The genome-wide transcriptional response of rubber tree to the cold treatments were determined and a large number of DEGs were characterized including 239 transcription factors, providing important clues for further elucidation of the mechanisms of cold stress responses in rubber tree.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.1037-1043
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• 2016

Epigenetic processes in the development of skeletal muscle have been appreciated for over a decade. DNA methylation is a major epigenetic modification important for regulating gene expression and suppressing spurious transcription. Up to now, the importance of epigenetic marks in the regulation of Pax7 and myogenic regulatory factors (MRFs) expression is far less explored. In the present study, semi-quantitative the real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analyses showed MyoD and Myf5 were expressed in activated and quiescent C2C12 cells. MyoG was expressed in a later stage of myogenesis. Pax7 was weakly expressed in differentiated C2C12 cells. To further understand the regulation of expression of these genes, the DNA methylation status of Pax7, MyoD, and Myf5 was determined by bisulfite sequencing PCR. During the C2C12 myoblasts fusion process, the changes of promoter and exon 1 methylation of Pax7, MyoD, and Myf5 genes were observed. In addition, an inverse relationship of low methylation and high expression was found. These results suggest that DNA methylation may be an important mechanism regulating Pax7 and MRFs transcription in cell myogenic differentiation.

• Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.76-89
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• 2022

The Lophius litulon liver was used as raw material for the extraction of fish oil via various extraction methods. The extraction rate by water extraction, potassium hydroxide (KOH) hydrolysis and protease hydrolysis were compared and the results revealed the protease hydrolysis extraction had a higher extraction rate with good protein-lipid separation as observed by optical microscope. Furthermore, subsequent experiments determined neutrase to be the best hydrolytic enzyme in terms of extraction rate and cost. The extraction conditions of neutrase hydrolysis were optimized by single-factor experiment and response surface analysis, and the optimal extraction rate was 58.40 ± 0.25% with the following conditions: enzyme concentration 2,000 IU/g, extraction time 1.0 h, liquid-solid ratio 1.95:1, extraction temperature 40.5℃ and pH 6.5. The fatty acids composition in fish oil from optimized extraction condition was composed of 19.75% saturated fatty acids and 80.25% unsaturated fatty acids. The content of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) were 8.06% and 1.19%, respectively, with the ratio (6.77:1) surpassed to the recommendation in current researches (5:1). The results in this study suggest protease treatment is an efficient method for high-quality fish oil extraction from Lophius litulon liver with a satisfactory ratio of DHA and EPA.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.4669-4675
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• 2012

Objective: Nude mice with orthotopic transplantation of human ovarian epithelial cancer were used to investigate screening criteria for paraneoplastic normal ovarian tissue and the security of the freezing and thawing for ovarian tissue transplantation. Methods: Expression of CK-7, CA125, P53, survivin, MMP-2/TIMP-2 in paraneoplastic normal ovarian tissues were detected by RT-PCR as well as immunohistochemistry. The tissues of the groups with all negative indicators of RT-PCR, all negative indicators of immunohistochemistry, negative expression of CK-7, CA125 and survivin, positive expression of CK-7, CA125 and survivin, cancer tissues and normal ovarian tissues of nude mice were used for freezing and thawing transplantation, to analyze overt and occult carcinogenesis rates after transplantation. Results: When all indicators or the main indicators, CK-7, CA125 and survivin, were negative, tumorigenesis did not occur after transplantation. In addition the occult carcinogenesis rate was lower than in the group with positive expression of CK-7, CA125 and survivin (P<0.01). After subcutaneous and orthotopic transplantation of ovarian tissues, rates did not change (P>0.05). There was no statistical significance among rates after transplantation of ovarian tissues which were obtained under different severity conditions (P>0.05). Conclusion: Negative expression of CK-7, CA125 and survivin can be treated as screening criteria for security of ovarian tissues for transplantation. Immunohistochemical methods can be used as the primary detection approach. Both subcutaneous and orthotopic transplantation are safe. The initial severity does not affect the carcinogenesis rate after tissue transplantation. Freezing and thawing ovarian tissue transplantation in nude mice with human epithelial ovarian carcinoma is feasible and safe.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.519-528
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• 2019

The unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) is an effective custom power device that is used at the point of common coupling to protect loads from voltage and current-related PQ issues. Currently, most researchers have studied series unit and parallel unit models and an idealized transformer model. However, the interactions of the series and parallel converters in AC-link are difficult to analyze. This study utilizes an equivalent transformer model to accomplish an electric connection of series and parallel converters in the AC-link and to establishes a precise unified mathematical model of the UPQC. The strong coupling interactions of series and parallel units are analyzed, and they show a remarkable dependence on the excitation impedance of transformers. Afterward, a feed-forward decoupling method based on a unified model that contains the uncertainty components of the load impedance is applied. Thus, this study presents an adaptive method to estimate load impedance. Furthermore, simulation and experimental results verify the accuracy of the proposed modeling and decoupling algorithm.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.2012-2030
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• 2021

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is used to identify entity nouns in the corpus such as Location, Person and Organization, etc. NER is also an important basic of research in various natural language fields. The processing of Chinese NER has some unique difficulties, for example, there is no obvious segmentation boundary between each Chinese character in a Chinese sentence. The Chinese NER task is often combined with Chinese word segmentation, and so on. In response to these problems, we summarize the recognition methods of Chinese NER. In this review, we first introduce the sequence labeling system and evaluation metrics of NER. Then, we divide Chinese NER methods into rule-based methods, statistics-based machine learning methods and deep learning-based methods. Subsequently, we analyze in detail the model framework based on deep learning and the typical Chinese NER methods. Finally, we put forward the current challenges and future research directions of Chinese NER technology.