Background: Ganoderma lucidum, a double-walled basidiospore produced by porous basidiomycete fungi, has been used as a traditional medicine for thousands of years. It is considered a valuable Chinese medicine for strengthening body resistance, invigorating the spleen, and replenishing Qi. G. lucidum contains a variety of active ingredients, such as polysaccharides, triterpenoids, nucleosides, sterols, alkaloids, polypeptides, fatty acids, steroids, and inorganic elements, and has anticancer, anti-inflammatory, hepatoprotection, hypoglycemic, anti-melanogenesis, anti-aging, and skin barrier-repairing activity. Conclusions: The review summarizes the traditional usages, distribution, active constituents, structure, and biological effects of G. lucidum, with an aim to offer directions for further research and better usage of G. lucidum as a medicinal raw material.

W e study a modified newsvendor model in which the newsvendor obtains a revenue from sales to end users as well as from an advertiser paying to obtain access to those end users. We study the optimal decisions for both a price-taking and a price-setting newsvendor when the advertiser has private information about its willingness to pay for advertisements. We find that the newsvendor's optimal policy excludes advertisers with low willingness to pay and distorts the price and quantity from its system-efficient level to screen the advertiser. Our analysis reveals the different roles that pricing and production quantity play as screening instruments. We perform a numerical analysis to investigate the value of information and the impact of the model parameters.

A two-stage serial supply chain in which a retailer and his supplier are operating in make-to-stock environments and the retailer faces uncertain demands from the end-customers is studied. When this supply chain is centrally managed, the optimal policy is an extension of the Clark-Scarf echelon base stock policy. Since these supply chains are usually operated in a decentralized manner, an operational change is proposed that reduces the inefficiency associated with decentralization. The policy, which is called Periodic Flexibility (PF), provides the retailer with structural flexibility to order any amount in one period of a cycle, while requiring that the retailer receives a fixed-quantity shipment in the other periods. Optimal policies and their associated costs for the non-stationary inventory control problems faced by the retailer and the supplier under PF are characterized. A detailed computational study shows that PF improves the supply chain performance by about 11% on average. This improvement is a 43% (on average) reduction in the efficiency gap between centralized and decentralized control. The improvement of PF is due to information sharing, i.e., the retailer passing her end-customer demand information to the supplier. The PF strategy is compared to the well-known quantity flexibility scheme and it is shown that the PF approach tends to be more efficient.

W e consider a multi-stage inventory system with stochastic demand and processing capacity constraints at each stage, for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon, discounted-cost settings. For a class of such systems characterized by having the smallest capacity at the most downstream stage and system utilization above a certain threshold, we identify the structure of the optimal policy, which represents a novel variation of the order-up-to policy. We find the explicit functional form of the optimal order-up-to levels, and show that they depend (only) on upstream echelon inventories. We establish that, above the threshold utilization, this optimal policy achieves the decomposition of the multidimensional objective cost function for the system into a sum of single-dimensional convex functions. This decomposition eliminates the curse of dimensionality and allows us to numerically solve the problem. We provide a fast algorithm to determine a (tight) upper bound on this threshold utilization for capacity-constrained inventory problems with an arbitrary number of stages. We make use of this algorithm to quantify upper bounds on the threshold utilization for three-, four-, and five-stage capacitated systems over a range of model parameters, and discuss insights that emerge.

To determine in vitro anti-aging activity and identify the active chemical constituents in Ginkgo leaf extracts. The antioxidant properties of Ginkgo biloba leaves extracts were evaluated using 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl radical (DPPH) scavenging and 2,2'-azino-bis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline)-6 sulfonic acid radical (ABTS) scavenging assays. The inhibitory effects of extracts and chemical constituents on reactive oxygen species, matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) and collagen tpye O level were tested using human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs). Reverse-phase liquid chromatography (RPLC) and ultra-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectroscopy (UPLC/MS/MS) were used to quantitatively analyze flavonoids and terpene trilactones in the extraction. The established quantitative analysis method was validated according to the regulatory guidelines. The extraction and compounds kaempferol 3-D-β-D-glucopyranoside, isorhamnetin-3-D-glucoside, myricetin, ginkgolide A and bilobalide could have potential anti-aging activities of G. biloba. The results suggest that G. biloba could be used as anti-aging products and as a cosmetic and medicinal raw material.