Pericarp and seed of litchi and longan fruits: constituent, extraction, bioactive activity, and potential utilization.

Litchi (Litchi chinensis Sonn.) and longan (Dimocarpus longan Lour.) fruits have a succulent and white aril with a brown seed and are becoming popular worldwide. The two fruits have been used in traditional Chinese medicine as popular herbs in the treatment of neural pain, swelling, and cardiovascular disease. The pericarp and seed portions as the by-products of litchi and longan fruits are estimated to be approximately 30% of the dry weight of the whole fruit and are rich in bioactive constituents. In the recent years, many biological activities, such as tyrosinase inhibitory, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, anti-glycated, and anti-cancer activities, as well as memory-increasing effects, have been reported for the litchi and longan pericarp and seed extracts, indicating a potentially significant contribution to human health. With the increasing production of litchi and longan fruits, enhanced utilization of the two fruit by-products for their inherent bioactive constituents in relation to pharmacological effects is urgently needed. This paper reviews the current advances in the extraction, processing, identification, and biological and pharmacological activities of constituents from litchi and longan by-products. Potential utilization of litchi and longan pericarps and seeds in relation to further research is also discussed.

Structural, Infrared and Magnetic Properties of Nanosized Ni(x)Zn1-xFe2O4 Powders Synthesized by Sol-Gel Technique.

Ni-Zn ferrites Ni(x)Zn1-xFe2O4 (x = 0.2, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.8) powders were synthesized by sol-gel technique. Structural, infrared and magnetic properties of samples were investigated. Spinel structural characteristics are shown by XRD spectra and the morphologies observed by atomic force microscopy demonstrate the samples are in nano-range. For all the samples, FTIR spectra exhibit obvious v1 infrared absorbing bands, in the range 500-600 cm-1, corresponding to intrinsic stretching vibrations of the metal ions at the tetrahedral site (Td), Mtetra <--> O. Furthermore, the central position of v1 band is tending to shift to larger wave numbers with the increasing Ni contents in the samples. For the samples Ni(x)Zn1-xFe2O4 (x = 0.2, 0.4), the v2 infrared absorbing bands, in the range 450-385 cm(-1), corresponding to stretching vibrations of the metal ions at the octahedral-metal stretching (Oh), Mocta <--> O, were also observed. However, for samples Ni(x)Zn1-xFe2O4 with higher Ni content (x = 0.5, 0.6, 0.8), the v2 infrared absorbing bands were obscure. The magnetic hysteretic loops at room temperature obtained from vibration samples magnetometer reveal the soft magnetism of the samples. The sample with lowest Ni content, Ni0.2Zn0.8Fe2O4, presents much higher saturation field than the other samples. The coercive field rises with increased Ni content, which is ascribed to the increased magnetocrystalline anisotropy constant with Ni content.

Facile Preparation and Self-Assembly of Monodisperse Polystyrene Nanospheres for Photonic Crystals.

We have developed boiling emulsifier-free emulsion polymerization recipes for the synthesis of monodisperse polystyrene (PS) nanospheres with diameters between ca. 100 and 300 nm. The morphologies of the nanospheres during growth were characterized and the results showed that the PS nanospheres with uniform structures could be synthesized rapidly by modifying the reaction conditions. These nanospheres readily self-assemble into three-dimensionally colloidal photonic crystal film and whose photonic band-stop could be tuned over the entire visible spectral region by altering the sphere diameters.

Analysis of the relationship between postoperative ophthalmic complications and dialysis time of pre-kidney transplantation.

AIM: To determine the influence of the dialysis time before kidney transplantation on postoperative ophthalmic complications. METHODS: One hundred and eighty three patients who were given the follow-up after kidney transplantation were selected, including 124 males and 59 females. The dialysis time before kidney transplantation was (2.9±2.1) years. Among them, there were 93 cases having cadaveric renal transplantation and 90 cases having living relative renal transplantation. The conditions of ophthalmic complications in all the patients after kidney transplantation were investigated and the incidence rate on ophthalmic complications having different dialysis time before kidney transplantation was given Chi-square test and Chi-square linear trend test. RESULTS: Among 183 patients with kidney transplantation, 95 patients (51.9%) had at least one ophthalmic complication and the rest 88 patients (48.1%) had no significant abnormality at the eye region. The most common ophthalmic complications were pinguecula/conjunctival degeneration (31 cases), the following was caligo lentis (24 cases). The main manifestations were grayish white granule and plaque turbidity occurred in posterior capsule at the posterior pole of crystaline lens. The angulus iridocornealis of 5 patients (5.3%) with cataract and glaucoma were all open-angle through the detection by gonioscope. Through visual field examination, there were 2 patients with paracentral scotoma, 2 patients with arcuate scotoma and one case with nasal step. CONCLUSION: The experiments verify that the incidence of glaucomawas relates to the dialysis time before kidney transplantation, and the incidence rate might be higher if the dialysis time is longer.

[Determination of hesperidin content in guogongjiu medicinal wine based on NIR spectrometry and least squares support vector machines].

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) combined with least squares support vector machines (LS-SVM) was used to establish a new method for the determination of the hesperidin content in guogongjiu medicinal wine. Firstly, training set was partitioned by Kernard-Stone (KS) algorithm. Secondly, spectral pretreatment methods were discussed in detail, comparing smoothing, rangescaling, autoscaling, first derivative, second derivative, along with those methods combined. Smoothing, first derivative and rangescaling were used for the pretreatment of the NIR spectra of guogongjiu medicinal wine. Thirdly, the effective interval was selected for 8211-8312 and 9712-9808 cm(-1) by synergy interval partial least squares (siPLS). Finally, the model was established by LS-SVM, the root mean square error of cross validation (RMSECV) is 0.001, root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) is 0.004, and relative deviation of predicting set is less than 5%. It was compared with siPLS, radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN), and SVM, The result shows that the method is rapid, non-destructive, and credible. It is an effective measurement for determining the hesperidin content in guogongjiu medicinal wine.

[Determination of hesperidin in tangerine leaf by near-infrared spectroscopy with SPXY algorithm for sample subset partitioning and Monte Carlo cross validation].

It is very crucial that a representative training set can be extracted from a pool of real samples. Moreover, it is difficult to determine the adapted number of latent variables in PLS regression. For comparison, PLS models were constructed by SPXY, as well as by using the random sampling, duplex and Kennard-Stone methods for selecting a representative subset during the measurement of tangerine leaf. In order to choose correctly the dimension of calibration model, two methods were applied, one of which is leave-one-out cross validation and the other is Monte Carlo cross validation. The results present that the correlation coefficient of the predicted model is 0.9969, RMSECV is 0.7681, and RMSEP is 0.7369, which reveal that SPXY is superior to the other three strategies, and Monte Carlo cross validation can successfully avoid an unnecessary large model, and as a result decreases the risk of over-fitting for the calibration model.

[Study on the Chinese medicinal Qingkailing injections intermediate by support vector machines and ultraviolet spectrometry].

The first derivative and wavelet compression methods were used to eliminate the slope-background and reduce variables for the measured ultraviolet (UV) spectra of Chinese medicinal Qingkailing injections intermediate. Then, support vector machine (SVM) was used for building the classification model to discriminate qualified and unqualified samples. The effects of spectral preprocessing and model parameters were investigated. Under optimized conditions, correct classifications of 100%, 95.4%, 97.3%, and 100% were obtained for the four batches of the intermediate of Qingkailing injection samples, respectively. A percentage of 97.3% of the intermediate samples were correctly classified for all the four batches of mixture samples. Results showed that SVM technique can be a useful means for quality control of Chinese medicinal injections owing to its good accuracy and better generalization.

Geotechnical behavior of the MSW in Tianziling landfill.

The valley shaped Tianziling landfill of Hangzhou in China built in 1991 to dispose of municipal solid waste (MSW) was designed for a service life of 13 years. The problem of waste landfill slope stability and expansion must be considered from the geotechnical engineering point of view, for which purpose, it is necessary to understand the geotechnical properties of the MSW in the landfill, some of whose physical properties were measured by common geotechnical tests, such as those on unit weight, water content, organic matter content, specific gravity, coefficient of permeability, compressibility, etc. The mechanical properties were studied by direct shear test, triaxial compression test, and static and dynamic penetration tests. Some strength parameters for engineering analysis were obtained.