The enzyme activities of the fungus Lasiodiplodia theobromae (L. theobromae) were studied during degradation of benzoapyrene (BaP). The L. theobromae was isolated from a polycyclic aromatic ...hydrocarbons (PAHs) contaminated soil collected from the Beijing Coking Plant in China and can potentially use BaP as its sole carbon source with a degradation ratio of up to 53% over 10 days. The activities of lignin peroxidase (LiP) and laccase (LAC) could be detected during BaP biodegradation; while manganese peroxidase (MnP) was not detected. Both glucose and salicylic acid enhanced BaP biodegradation slightly. In contrast, the coexistence of phenanthrene (PHE) inhibited BaP degradation. These metabolic substrates all enhanced the secretion of LiP and LAC. The addition of Tween 80 (TW-80) enhanced BaP biodegradation as well as the LiP and LAC activities. At the same time, TW-80 was degraded by the L. theobromae. In addition, the L. theobromae was compared to Phanerochaete chrysosporium (P. chrysosporium), which is a widely studied fungus for degrading PAH. P. chrysosporium was unable to use BaP as its sole carbon source. The activities of LiP and LAC produced by the P. chrysosporium were less than those of the L. theobromae. Additionally, the four intermediates formed in the BaP biodegradation process were monitored using GC-MS analysis. Four metabolite concentrations first increased and then decreased or obtained the platform with prolonged BaP biodegradation time. Therefore, this study shows that the L. theobromae may be explored as a new strain for removing PAHs from the environment.
This research for the first time examines the influence of the financial development, stock market, globalization, institutional quality, economic growth, electricity, and renewable energy ...consumption on carbon dioxide emission from 1985 to 2018 in thirty-six (OECD) countries. Cointegrations exist in the used variables based on the examined findings of the Kao, Westerlund, and Pedroni cointegration. Findings of the pooled mean group (PMG) indicate that renewable energy consumption, globalization, and institutional quality assist to reduce the carbon dioxide emission that improve the environment while financial development, stock market, electricity consumption, and economic growth cause to increase the carbon dioxide emission in OECD countries both in the long and in the short run. To reduce carbon dioxide emission, important policy implications are suggested for OECD countries.
Sarin, used as chemical warfare agents (CWAs) for terrorist attacks, can induce a number of virulent effects. Therefore, countermeasures which could realize robust and convenient detection of sarin ...are in exigent need. A concise charge-transfer colorimetric and fluorescent probe (4-(6-(tert-butyl)pyridine-2-yl)-N,N-diphenylaniline, TBPY-TPA) that could be capable of real-time and on-site monitoring of DCP vapor was reported in this contribution. Upon contact with DCP, the emission band red-shifted from 410 to 522 nm upon exposure to DCP vapor. And the quenching rate of TBPY-TPA reached up to 98% within 25 s. Chemical substances such as acetic acid (HAc), dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), pinacolyl methylphosphonate (PAMP), and triethyl phosphate (TEP) do not interfere with the detection. A detection limit for DCP down to 2.6 ppb level is remarkably achieved which is below the Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health concentration. NMR data suggested that a transformation of the pyridine group into pyridinium salt via a cascade reaction is responsible for the sensing process which induced the dramatic fluorescent red shift. All of these data suggest TBPY-TPA is a promising fluorescent sensor for a rapid, simple, and low-cost method for DCP detection, which could be easy to prepare as a portable chemosensor kit for its practical application in real-time and on-site monitoring.
Obtaining high-spatial–high-temporal (HTHS) resolution remote sensing images from a single sensor remains a great challenge due to the cost and technical limitations. Spatiotemporal fusion (STF) ...technology breaks through the technical limitations of existing sensors and provides a convenient and economical solution for obtaining HTHS resolution images. At present, most STF methods use stacked convolutional layers to extract image features and then obtain fusion images by using a summation strategy. However, these convolution operations may lead to the loss of feature information, and the summation strategy results in poorly fused images due to a lack of consideration of global spatial feature information. To address these issues, this article proposes a STF network architecture based on multiscale and attention mechanisms (MANet). The multiscale mechanism module composed of dilated convolutions is used to extract the detailed features of low-spatial resolution remote sensing images at multiple scales. The channel attention mechanism adaptively adjusts the weights of the feature map channels to retain more temporal and spatial information in the upsampling process, while the non-local attention mechanism adjusts the initial fusion images to obtain more accurate predicted images by calculating the correlation between pixels. We use two datasets with different characteristics to conduct the experiments, and the results prove that the proposed MANet method with fewer parameters obtains better fusion results than the existing machine learning-based and deep learning-based fusion methods.
T-cell receptor (TCR) is crucial in T cell-mediated virus clearance. To date, TCR bias has been observed in various diseases. However, studies on the TCR repertoire of COVID-19 patients are lacking. ...Here, we used single-cell V(D)J sequencing to conduct comparative analyses of TCR repertoire between 12 COVID-19 patients and 6 healthy controls, as well as other virus-infected samples. We observed distinct T cell clonal expansion in COVID-19. Further analysis of VJ gene combination revealed 6 VJ pairs significantly increased, while 139 pairs significantly decreased in COVID-19 patients. When considering the VJ combination of α and β chains at the same time, the combination with the highest frequency on COVID-19 was TRAV12-2-J27-TRBV7-9-J2-3. Besides, preferential usage of V and J gene segments was also observed in samples infected by different viruses. Our study provides novel insights on TCR in COVID-19, which contribute to our understanding of the immune response induced by SARS-CoV-2.
•We performed single-cell V(D) J sequencing for 12 COVID-19 patients.•Comparative analyses of TCR repertoire between COVID-19 patients and controls, as well as other virus-infected samples.•TCR clonal diversity is significantly reduced in COVID-19 patients.•Preferential usage of T cell receptor is significantly different in several viral infections.
Neuropeptide Phe-Met-Arg-Phe-NH
(FMRFamide), specifically existing in invertebrates, plays pivotal roles in various physiological processes. The involvement in neuroendocrine-immune regulation was ...explored in recent years, and it could modulate nitric oxide (NO) production under immune stress. However, detailed knowledge is still little known. In this study, we identified FMRFamide as an inhibitory factor on NO production in the immune reaction of
. Firstly,
incubation caused significantly upregulated expression of FMRFamide precursor and NO synthase (NOS) in just hatched cuttlefish with quantitative Real-time PCR (qRT-PCR), which indicated that both were likely to be involved in the immune defense. The whole-mount
hybridization (ISH) detected FMRFamide precursor and NOS-positive signals appeared colocalization, suggesting that at histological and anatomical levels FMRFamide might interact with NOS. Next, NOS mRNA was highly significantly upregulated at 72 h when FMRFamide precursor mRNA was knocked down effectively with the RNA interference (RNAi) method; the results hinted that FMRFamide was likely to regulate NO production. Continuously, the inflammatory model was constructed in RAW 264.7 cells induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS), FMRFamide administration resulted in a highly significant reduction of the NO level in dose- and time-response manners. Although the addition of the selected inducible NOS (iNOS) inhibitor had inhibited the NO production induced by LPS, the additional FMRFamide could still furtherly sharpen the process. Collectively, it was concluded that neuropeptide FMRFamide could indeed inhibit NO production to serve as feedback regulation at the late stage of immune response to protect hosts from excessive immune cytotoxicity. The inhibitory effect on NO production could not only be mediated by the NOS pathway but also be implemented through other pathways that needed to be furtherly explored. The results will provide data for comparing the structure and immune function of neuroendocrine-immune system (NEIS) between "advanced" cephalopods and other invertebrates and will provide new information for understanding the NEIS of cephalopods.
To achieve non-contact measurement of human heart rate and improve its accuracy, this paper proposes a method for measuring human heart rate based on multi-channel radar data fusion. The radar data ...were firstly extracted by human body position identification, phase extraction and unwinding, phase difference, band-pass filtering optimized by power spectrum entropy, and fast independent component analysis for each channel data. After overlaying and fusing the four-channel data, the heartbeat signal was separated using frost-optimized variational modal decomposition. Finally, a chirp Z-transform was introduced for heart rate estimation. After validation with 40 sets of data,the average root mean square error of the proposed method was 2.35 beats per minute, with an average error rate of 2.39%,a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97, a confidence interval of –4.78, 4.78 beats per minute, and a consistency error of–0.04. The experimental results show that the proposed measurement method performs well in terms
Neuropeptide pedal peptide (PP) and orcokinin (OK), which are structurally related active peptides, have been widely discovered in invertebrates and constitute the PP/OK neuropeptide family. They ...have complex structures and play myriad roles in physiological processes. To date, there have been no related reports of PP/OK-type neuropeptide in cephalopods, which possess a highly differentiated multi-lobular brain.
Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends (RACE) was employed to obtain the open reading frame (ORF) of PP/OK-type neuropeptide in
(termed as
). Various software were used for sequence analysis. Semi-quantitative PCR was applied to analyze the tissue distribution profile, quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was used to study spatio-temporal expression throughout the entire growth and development period, and in situ hybridization (ISH) was employed to observe the tissue location of
.
in the present study, we identified the ORF of
. The putative precursor of Sj-PP/ OK encodes 22 mature peptides, of which only tridecapeptides could undergo post-translationally amidated at C-terminus. Each of these tridecapeptides possesses the most conserved and frequent N-terminus Asp-Ser-Ile (DSI). Sequence analysis revealed that
shared comparatively low identity with other invertebrates PP or OK. The tissue distribution profile showed differences in the expression level of
between male and female. qRT-PCR data demonstrated that
was widely distributed in various tissues, with its expression level increasing continuously in the brain, optic lobe, liver, and nidamental gland throughout the entire growth and development stages until gonad maturation. ISH detected that
positive signals existed in almost all regions of the optic lobe except the plexiform zone, the outer edge of all functional lobes in the brain, epithelial cells and the outer membrane layer of the accessory nidamental gland. These findings suggest that
might play a role in the regulation of reproduction, such as vitellogenin synthesis, restoration, and ova encapsulation.
The study indicated that
may be involved in the neuroendocrine regulation in cephalopods, providing primary theoretical basis for further studies of its regulation role in reproduction.
Given the chronic inflammatory nature of Parkinson's disease (PD), T cell immunity may be important for disease onset. Here, we performed single-cell transcriptome and TCR sequencing, and conducted ...integrative analyses to decode composition, function and lineage relationship of T cells in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid of PD. Combined expression and TCR-based lineage tracking, we discovered a large population of CD8
T cells showing continuous progression from central memory to terminal effector T cells in PD patients. Additionally, we identified a group of cytotoxic CD4
T cells (CD4 CTLs) remarkably expanded in PD patients, which derived from Th1 cells by TCR-based fate decision. Finally, we screened putative TCR-antigen pairs that existed in both blood and cerebrospinal fluid of PD patients to provide potential evidence for peripheral T cells to participate in neuronal degeneration. Our study provides valuable insights and rich resources for understanding the adaptive immune response in PD.
Atherosclerosis remains the most common cause of deaths worldwide. Endothelial cell apoptosis is an important process in the progress of atherosclerosis, as it can cause the endothelium to lose their ...capability in regulating the lipid homeostasis, inflammation, and immunity. Endothelial cell injury can disrupt the integrity and barrier function of an endothelium and facilitate lipid deposition, leading to atherogenesis. Chinese medicine techniques for preventing and treating atherosclerosis are gaining attention, especially natural products. In this study, we demonstrated that gypenoside could decrease the levels of serum lipid, alleviate the formation of atherosclerotic plaque, and lessen aortic intima thickening. Gypenoside potentially activates the PI3K/Akt/Bad signal pathway to modulate the apoptosis-related protein expression in the aorta. Moreover, gypenoside downregulated mitochondrial fission and fusion proteins, mitochondrial energy-related proteins in the mouse aorta. In conclusion, this study demonstrated a new function of gypenoside in endothelial apoptosis and suggested a therapeutic potential of gypenoside in atherosclerosis associated with apoptosis by modulating mitochondrial function through the PI3K/Akt/Bad pathway.
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