Elicitation and in situ adsorption enhanced secondary metabolites production of Tripterygium wilfordii Hook. f. adventitious root fragment liquid cultures in shake flask and a modified bubble column bioreactor.

The experiments of elicitation and in situ adsorption were conducted in shake flasks and then tested in a modified bubble column bioreactor for enhancing the productions of three active metabolites in Tripterygium wilfordii Hook. f., triptolide, wilforgine and wilforine. Methyl jasmonate was screened out as the elicitor and the non-ionic polymeric ion-exchange resin of Amberlite(®) XAD-7 was used for in situ product removal and protecting the alkaloids from degradation in the medium. In shake flask experiments, 3.55-fold, 49.11-fold, and 10.40-fold of triptolide, wilforgine, and wilforine, respectively, could be recovered from the medium and XAD-7 resin by elicitation and in situ product removal, compared with the control. The modified 10 L bubble column bioreactor had similar productions of the three active metabolites but needed a further optimization of parameters for better growth of adventitious roots.

A fast method for acoustic imaging of multiple three-dimensional objects.

This paper is concerned with the inverse problem for imaging multiple three-dimensional objects using the information of the far-field pattern of the scattered wave. A spatially dependent function, which has noticeably different values inside and outside the obstacle, is derived. A numerical method based on the characterization is developed to obtain a visualization of the obstacle. The most remarkable advantage of this method is that it does not need any prior knowledge about the geometry and physical properties of the scatterer, and requires only the information of the far-field measurements for a finite number of directions of incidence and observation distributed over a limited range. Furthermore, the scheme is very simple and fast since it avoids the use of the iterative procedure and requires only the solution of a linear system. Some numerical examples with synthetic far-field data are given showing the practicality and efficiency of this scheme.