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Walnut protein isolate (WPI) is a nutritious protein with poor solubility, which severely limits its application. In this study, composite nanoparticles were prepared from WPI and soy protein isolate (SPI) using the pH-cycle technology. The WPI solubility increased from 12.64 to 88.53% with a WPI: SPI ratio increased from 1: 0.01 to 1: 1. Morphological and structural analyses illustrated that interaction forces with hydrogen bonding as the main effect jointly drive the binding of WPI to SPI and that protein co-folding occurs during the neutralization process, resulting in a hydrophilic rigid structure. In addition, the interfacial characterization showed that the composite nanoparticle with a large surface charge enhanced the affinity with water molecules, prevented protein aggregation, and protected the new hydrophilic structure from damage. All these parameters helped to maintain the stability of the composite nanoparticles in a neutral environment. Amino acid analysis, emulsification capacity, foaming, and stability analysis showed that the prepared WPI-based nanoparticles exhibited good nutritional and functional properties. Overall, this study could provide a technical reference for the value-added use of WPI and an alternative strategy for delivering natural food ingredients.

Objective. To investigate the effect of downregulated matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) gene on the proliferation, apoptosis, cell cycle, migration, and invasion of human retinoblastoma (RB) cell line in vitro. Methods. Small hairpin RNA (shRNA) targeting MMP-2/MMP-9 was designed and transfected into WER1-Rb-1 cells. 48 hours after transfection, qRT-PCR and western blot technique were used to investigate the inhibitory effect of MMP-2 and MMP-9 shRNAs. Cell viability was examined by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. Cell cycle arrest was detected using a flow cytometer while apoptosis was tested with Annexin V/PI kit. Transwell chamber assay was performed to detect the migration and invasion ability of the WER1-Rb-1 cells. Results. After transfection of MMP-2/MMP-9 shRNA, there was a significant decrease in the expressions of both mRNA and protein in the shRNA groups compared with the negative and vector controls. The results of MTT assay suggested that the cell viability was significantly decreased in shRNA groups (p<0.05). Cell apoptosis also increased significantly in shRNA groups compared with the negative and vector controls (p<0.05). The flow cytometer analysis proved that the proportion of the G1 phase increased and the proportion of the G0 phase reduced significantly by the transfection of MMP-2/MMP-9 shRNA (p<0.05). The migration and invasion ability were also significantly decreased in the groups of MMP-2/MMP-9 shRNA (p<0.05). Conclusions. Cell viability, migration, and invasion ability of RB cells are inhibited, and apoptosis is induced after downregulation of MMP-2/MMP-9 through RNA interference. MMP-2 and MMP-9 may be potential targets in the gene therapy of RB.

The traffic block port monitors and manages the road traffic by shooting and recording the motor vehicles. However, due to the complex factors such as shooting angle, light condition, environmental background, etc., the recognition rate of license plate is not high enough. High light and low light under complex lighting conditions are symmetry problems. This paper analyzes and solves the low light problem in detail, an image adaptive enhancement algorithm under low light conditions is proposed in the paper. The algorithm mainly includes four modules, among which, the fast image classification module uses the deep and separable convolutional neural network to classify low-light images into low-light images by day and low-light images by night, greatly reducing the computation burden on the basis of ensuring the classification accuracy. The image enhancement module inputs the classified images into two different image enhancement algorithms and adopts the idea of dividing and ruling; the image quality evaluation module adopts a weighted comprehensive evaluation index. The final experiment shows that the comprehensive evaluation indexes are all greater than 0.83, which can improve the subsequent recognition of vehicle face and license plate.