Antidepressant-like effects of ethanolic extract of Hericium erinaceus (HE) mycelium enriched in erinacine A on depressive mice challenged by repeated restraint stress (RS) were examined. HE at 100, 200 or 400 mg/kg body weight/day was orally given to mice for four weeks. After two weeks of HE administration, all mice except the control group went through with 14 days of RS protocol. Stressed mice exhibited various behavioral alterations, such as extending immobility time in the tail suspension test (TST) and forced swimming test (FST), and increasing the number of entries in open arm (POAE) and the time spent in the open arm (PTOA). Moreover, the levels of norepinephrine (NE), dopamine (DA) and serotonin (5-HT) were decreased in the stressed mice, while the levels of interleukin (IL)-6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α were increased. These changes were significantly inverted by the administration of HE, especially at the dose of 200 or 400 mg/kg body weight/day. Additionally, HE was shown to activate the BDNF/TrkB/PI3K/Akt/GSK-3β pathways and block the NF-κB signals in mice. Taken together, erinacine A-enriched HE mycelium could reverse the depressive-like behavior caused by RS and was accompanied by the modulation of monoamine neurotransmitters as well as pro-inflammatory cytokines, and regulation of BDNF pathways. Therefore, erinacine A-enriched HE mycelium could be an attractive agent for the treatment of depressive disorders.
The
transient photothermal process of gold nanoparticles (AuNP)
capped with different molecules, namely, citrate, cetyltrimethylammonium
bromide (CTAB), and methoxyl-polyethylene glycol thiol (mPEG), has
been investigated by time-resolved infrared emission spectroscopy
monitored with a step-scan Fourier-transform spectrometer. Upon photoexcitation
of the surface plasmonic resonance band of AuNPs with a 532 nm nanosecond
pulsed laser, the transient infrared emission was observed within
about 1 μs, referring to the duration of the laser heating and
thermalization of AuNPs. Comparing the infrared emission contours
with the blackbody radiation spectra at different temperatures revealed
that the temperature reached 400 ± 100 °C in 90–120
ns as the 24 nm mPEG-capped AuNPs were excited by a peak power of
5 × 1010 W m–2 (25 mJ cm–2 from a 5 ns pulsed laser) at 532 nm. The insignificant changes in
the morphology and size distribution of mPEG-AuNP suggested that the
surface modification via covalent bonding helped retention of the
morphology of the nanostructures after laser heating. In addition,
photoexcitation of 35 nm CTAB-AuNPs generated a higher transient temperature
than that of 89 nm CTAB-AuNP; this is consistent with the prediction
by Mie theory that smaller nanoparticles possess a higher contribution
of absorption in the extinction coefficient, which leads to higher
photothermal efficiency. This is the first time that the transient
broadband thermal infrared emission of the photoexcited gold nanoparticles
has been recorded within a submicrosecond, which is close to the nascent
condition. The duplexity in the temporal capability and broadband
spectroscopic window of the time-resolved emission infrared spectroscopy
provides a promising noncontact thermometer to illustrate the photothermal
process and quantify the transient temperatures of miscellaneous metallic
nanostructures upon photoexcitation.
Suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS3) plays an important role in mice fetal liver erythropoiesis, but the roles of SOCS3 in human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) have not been well investigated. In the present study, lentiviral small interference RNA expression vectors (shRNA) of SOCS3 were constructed and stably transferred into HSCs. We found that SOCS3 knockdown induced erythroid expansion in HSCs. Conversely, Ectopic expression of SOCS3 in progenitor cells blocked erythroid expansion and erythroid colony formation of HSCs. To further explore the involved mechanism, we compared gene expression profiles of SOCS3-shRNA tranduced HSCs with that of control HSCs by whole genome microarrays. The results indicated that cell developmental process related genes, especially hematopoietic lineage-specific genes, associated with the responses to SOCS3 in HSCs.Downexpression of SOCS3 in HSCs or differentiated erythroid progenitor cells induced a transcriptional program enriched for erythroid development relative genes. Our results proved that SOCS3 down-expression induced lineage commitment towards erythroid progenitor cell fate by activation of erythroid-specific gene in HSCs and provided new insight into the mechanism of erythropoietic development.
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