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Four novel, rare carbon-bridged citrinin dimers, namely dicitrinones G–J (1–4), and five known analogs (5–9) were isolated from the starfish-derived fungus Penicillium sp. GGF 16-1-2. Their structures were elucidated by extensive spectroscopic analysis and quantum chemical calculations. Compounds 1–9 exhibited strong antifungal activities against Colletotrichum gloeosporioides with LD50 values from 0.61 μg/mL to 16.14 μg/mL. Meanwhile, all compounds were evaluated for their cytotoxic activities against human pancreatic cancer BXPC-3 and PANC-1 cell lines; as a result, compound 1 showed more significant cytotoxicities than the positive control against both cell lines. In addition, based on the analyses of the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and Western blot, 1 could induce apoptosis by activating caspase 3 proteins (CASP3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have attracted a lot of attention during the last decade. VANETs can not only improve driving safety, but also convenience, and support most future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Due to the highly dynamic network topology of VANETs, many geographic routing protocols have been proposed and use real-time traffic information as an important metric to select a reliable forwarding path. However, most of the existing works do not describe how to gather real-time traffic. They either assume this information is already available, or can query an existing traffic center. Few studies have noticed this issue but the proposed solutions only consider a small region. In this paper, we propose a Comprehensive Real-Time Traffic Map (CRT Map) to collect wide-ranging real-time traffic information with low overhead. In the design of a CRT Map, the concept of Crowdsensing is adopted. Vehicles cooperatively gather traffic information and share it with each other to construct an overview of the whole road network traffic. In addition, we design a CRT Map Based Routing (CBR), which takes into account the connectivity of consecutive roads in routing decisions. Simulation results show that the CBR can achieve a lower end-to-end delay and a higher packet delivery ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was aimed at investigating the antioxidant, whitening, and moisture-retention properties of Lactobacillus rhamnosus spent culture supernatant (Lr-SCS) in cosmetic applications. Results reveal that Lr-SCS effectively and gradually scavenges 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl as well as 2,2-azino-bis-(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) radical cations, and increases reducing power in a dose-dependent manner. Additionally, Lr-SCS can also suppress tyrosinase activity in vitro and effectively promote moisture retention. Heat treatment at 100 °C for 30 min does not influence the functions of Lr-SCS. We conclude that Lr-SCS can be used effectively in skin care cosmetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]