Aging is a progressive process with degenerative changes of various tissues and organs. As a classic model organism in genetics and neurobiology, Caenorhabditis elegans is also a powerful system in aging and behavioral studies and can be used at both the molecular and organismal levels to evaluate potential therapeutics for age-related neurodegeneration, owing to its short life span, relative simplicity, and high degree of experimental tractability as well as significant conservation of disease genes and signaling pathways with humans. We attempt here to summarize the use of C. elegans models in exploring traditional Chinese medicine for potential remedies against aging and neurodegeneration.
The microglia-mediated inflammatory reaction promotes neuronal damage under cerebral ischemia/hypoxia conditions. We therefore speculated that inhibition of hypoxia-induced microglial activation may alleviate neuronal damage. To test this hypothesis, we co-cultured ginsenoside Rb1, an active component of ginseng, and cortical neurons. Ginsenoside Rb1 protected neuronal morphology and structure in a single hypoxic culture system and in a hypoxic co-culture system with microglia, and reduced neuronal apoptosis and caspase-3 production. The protective effect was observable prior to placing in co-culture. Additionally, ginsenoside Rb1 inhibited levels of tumor necrosis factor-α in a co-culture system containing activated N9 microglial cells. Ginsenoside Rb1 also significantly decreased nitric oxide and superoxide production induced by N9 microglia. Our findings indicate that ginsenoside Rb1 attenuates damage to cerebral cortex neurons by downregulation of nitric oxide, superoxide, and tumor necrosis factor-α expression in hypoxia-activated microglia.
RSA key generation is of great concern for implementation of RSA cryptosystem on embedded system due to its long processing latency. In this paper, a novel architecture is presented to provide high processing speed to RSA key generation for embedded platform with limited processing capacity. In order to exploit more data level parallelism, Residue Number System (RNS) is introduced to accelerate RSA key pair generation, in which these independent elements can be processed simultaneously. A cipher processor based on Transport Triggered Architecture (TTA) is proposed to realized the parallelism at the architecture level. In the meantime, division is avoided in the proposed architecture, which reduces the expense of hardware implementation remarkably. The proposed design is implemented by Verilog HDL and synthesized in a 0.18µm CMOS process. A rate of 3 pairs per second can be achieved for 1024-bit RSA key generation at the frequency of 100 MHz.
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