Asparagus belongs to the Liliaceae family and has important economic and pharmacological value. Lignin plays a crucial role in cell wall structural integrity, stem strength, water transport, ...mechanical support and plant resistance to pathogens. In this study, various biological methods were used to study the mechanism of shading on the asparagus lignin accumulation pathway. The physiological results showed that shading significantly reduced stem diameter and cell wall lignin content. Microstructure observation showed that shading reduced the number of vascular bundles and xylem area, resulting in decreased lignin content, and thus reducing the lignification of asparagus. Cinnamic acid, caffeic acid, ferulic acid and sinapyl alcohol are crucial intermediate metabolites in the process of lignin synthesis. Metabolomic profiling showed that shading significantly reduced the contents of cinnamic acid, caffeic acid, ferulic acid and sinapyl alcohol. Transcriptome profiling identified 37 differentially expressed genes related to lignin, including
,
,
,
,
,
,
, and
related enzyme activity regulation genes. The expression levels of
,
, and
genes were significantly decreased under shading treatment, while the expression levels of
and
genes exhibited no significant difference with increased shading. The downregulation of
,
genes and the decrease in
gene expression levels inhibited the activities of the corresponding enzymes under shading treatment, resulting in decreased downstream content of caffeic acid, ferulic acid, sinaperol, chlorogenic acid and coniferin. A significant decrease in upstream cinnamic acid content was observed with shading, which also led to decreased downstream metabolites and reduced asparagus lignin content. In this study, transcriptomic and metabolomic analysis revealed the key regulatory genes and metabolites of asparagus lignin under shading treatment. This study provides a reference for further understanding the mechanism of lignin biosynthesis and the interaction of related genes.
Regional logistics has become an important direction of logistics development. The rationality of regional logistics network layout will affect the regional development. And the measurement and ...calculation of node gravity is an important aspect affecting the layout of logistics network. Nowadays, the traditional gravity model cannot measure the condition of a network properly. This paper focuses on the nodal gravity measurement in the logistics network and constructs an improved gravity model considering the role of policy. Quantifying the policy factors makes the measurement more realistic. We test our model on a famous regional logistics network in China. Result shows that cities are greatly influenced by policies, which change the node gravity obviously and even change the gravity level of logistics. This paper shows that the traditional gravity model ignores the impact of policy quantification on logistics gravity, and the improved gravity model that proposed in this paper has more practical significance.
We compared intestinal microbes in anterior noninfectious scleritis patients with and without rheumatoid arthritis. Active noninfectious anterior scleritis patients without other immune diseases (G ...group, 16 patients) or with active rheumatoid arthritis (GY group, seven patients) were included in this study. Eight age- and sex-matched healthy subjects served as controls (N group). DNA was extracted from fecal samples. The V3-V4 16S rDNA region was amplified and sequenced by high-throughput 16S rDNA analysis, and microbial contents were determined. A significant decrease in species richness in the GY group was revealed by α- and β-diversity analyses (
p
= 0.02 and
p
= 0.004, respectively). At the genus level, 14 enriched and 10 decreased microbes in the G group and 13 enriched and 18 decreased microbes in the GY group were identified. Among them, four microbes were enriched in both the G and GY groups, including
Turicibacter
,
Romboutsia
,
Atopobium
, and
Coprobacillus
. Although two microbes (
Lachnospiraceae_ND3007_group
and
Eggerthella
) exhibited similar tendencies in the G and GY groups, changes in these microbes were more significant in the GY group (
p
< 0.05). Interaction analysis showed that
Intestinibacter
,
Romboutsia
, and
Turicibacter
, which were enriched in both the G and GY groups, correlated positively with each other. In addition, nine microbes were decreased in the GY group, which demonstrates a potential protective role for these microbes in the pathogenesis of scleritis
via
interactions with each other.
In recent years, the scale of rural land transfer has gradually expanded, and the phenomenon of non-grain-oriented cultivated land has emerged. Obtaining crop planting information is of the utmost ...importance to guaranteeing national food security; however, the acquisition of the spatial distribution of crops in large-scale areas often has the disadvantages of excessive calculation and low accuracy. Therefore, the IO-Growth method, which takes the growth stage every 10 days as the index and combines the spectral features of crops to refine the effective interval of conventional wavebands for object-oriented classification, was proposed. The results were as follows: (1) the IO-Growth method obtained classification results with an overall accuracy and F1 score of 0.92, and both values increased by 6.98% compared to the method applied without growth stages; (2) the IO-Growth method reduced 288 features to only 5 features, namely Sentinel-2: Red Edge1, normalized difference vegetation index, Red, short-wave infrared2, and Aerosols, on the 261st to 270th days, which greatly improved the utilization rate of the wavebands; (3) the rise of geographic data processing platforms makes it simple to complete computations with massive data in a short time. The results showed that the IO-Growth method is suitable for large-scale vegetation mapping.
Depression and anxiety symptoms are two common psychological disturbances in cervical cancer patients. We tested whether sense of coherence (SOC) mediates the association of perceived social support ...(PSS) with depression and anxiety symptoms among cervical cancer patients in China.
We conducted a survey involving 294 cervical cancer patients aged ≥ 18 years from July to December 2020 at three hospitals in Liaoning Province, China; 269 patients completed the survey. We included a demographic questionnaire, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), Antonovsky's Sense of Coherence Scale, the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, and the Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) in this study. We used hierarchical regression analysis to examine the relationship among PSS, SOC, and symptoms of depression and anxiety. We used asymptotic and resampling strategies to explore the mediating effect of SOC.
PSS was negatively associated with depressive symptoms (r = - 0.439, P < 0.01) and anxiety symptoms (r = - 0.325, P < 0.01). SOC was negatively related to depressive symptoms (r = - 0.627, P < 0.01) and anxiety symptoms (r = - 0.411, P < 0.01). SOC partially mediated the association between PSS and depressive symptoms (a*b = - 0.23, BCa95% CI: - 0.31, - 0.14) and anxiety symptoms (a*b = - 0.15, BCa95% CI: - 0.23, - 0.08). The proportions of the mediating effect accounting for SOC were 49.78% and 41.73% for depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms, respectively.
The study showed that SOC could mediate the association between PSS and symptoms of depression and anxiety. This suggests that SOC might serve as a potential target for intervention in symptoms of depression and anxiety that accompany cervical cancer.
As an important part of the Earth’s environmental system, sandy soils are particularly sensitive to changes in the climatic environment. As one of the four major desert regions in China, the MuUs ...desert has transformed from a desert to an oasis after more than half a century of ecological management. In this paper, we analyzed the spatial and temporal patterns of surface albedo, evapotranspiration, and fraction vegetation cover in the MuUs desert based on the Global Land Surface Satellite (GLASS) product with high spatial and temporal resolution and assessed the relationships between their variability and snow cover, air temperature, and precipitation. It is of great significance to understand the effect of desertification control and climate change after the conversion of land surface types in the MuUs region. The results show that the desertification control in the MuUs area has achieved remarkable results since 1982. The fraction vegetation coverage of the MuUs desert showed a significant increasing trend, with an interannual change rate of 1.32% each decade−1. The surface albedo of MuUs desert decreased significantly. Affected by vegetation and snow cover, it was lower in summer and higher in winter. The evapotranspiration showed a significant upward trend, higher in summer and lower in winter, which is significantly correlated with the changes in surface albedo, air temperature, and vegetation. In addition, the local-scale biophysical effects caused by vegetation change have influenced the climate of the MuUs region, manifested as the increase in precipitation and air temperature. In general, with the support of relevant policies and human construction projects, the overall ecological environment in the MuUs desert is developing in a good way.
Predicting urban morphology based on local attributes is an important issue in urban science research. The deep generative models represented by generative adversarial network (GAN) models have ...achieved impressive results in this area. However, in such methods, the urban morphology is assumed to follow a specific probability distribution and be able to directly approximate the distribution via GAN models, which is not a realistic strategy. As demonstrated by the score-based model, a better strategy is to learn the gradient of the probability distribution and implicitly approximate the distribution. Therefore, in this paper, an urban morphology prediction method based on the conditional diffusion model is proposed. Implementing this approach results in the decomposition of the attribute-based urban morphology prediction task into two subproblems: estimating the gradient of the conditional distribution, and gradient-based sampling. During the training stage, the gradient of the conditional distribution is approximated by using a conditional diffusion model to predict the noise added to the original urban morphology. In the generation stage, the corresponding conditional distribution is parameterized based on the noise predicted by the conditional diffusion model, and the final prediction result is generated through iterative sampling. The experimental results showed that compared with GAN-based methods, our method demonstrated improvements of 5.5%, 5.9%, and 13.2% in the metrics of low-level pixel features, shallow structural features, and deep structural features, respectively.
How to early distinguish the severity of Mycoplasma pneumoniae pneumonia (MPP) is a worldwide concern in clinical practice. We therefore conducted this study to assess the relationship between levels ...of serum inflammatory chemokines and the severity of MPP.
In this prospective study, we enrolled 39 children with MPP, whose clinical information was collected, blood samples were assayed for cytokines and chemokines by ELISA.
The levels of serum CXCL10 in children with severe MPP were significantly higher than those in children with mild MPP (2500.0 1580.9-2500.0 vs. 675.7 394.7-1134.9, P < 0.001). Measurement of CXCL10 levels in serum enabled the differentiation of children with severe MPP with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.885 (95 % CI 0.779-0.991, P < 0.001), with a sensitivity of 81.0 % and a specificity of 83.3 %.
Serum CXCL10 level may be a potential biomarker for severe MPP in children.
Reusing reclaimed water through drip irrigation offers an effective way to overcome freshwater scarcity. However, biofilm accumulation in the flow channel of drip emitters is the primary obstacle. So ...far, biofilm development in the emitters remains largely unknown. Here, industrial computed tomography was used to quantify the emitter biofilm developments. Results showed that biofilm typically accumulated in the inlet of the emitter flow channel and decreased toward the flow direction. Biofilm was also typically accumulated in dead areas having low flow velocities, such as edge, corner, and adjacent surface zones in flow channels. The dynamics of the emitter biofilm variation mechanisms were also elucidated. Specifically, particle and nutrient transport appeared to be dominant in shaping the initial biofilm formation (i.e., 5% emitter clogging degree), resulting in biofilm abundant in the inlet of the flow channel. However, it changed the hydraulic conditions in emitter flow channels, increased local water shear stress, which made the biofilm easier to be washed away in the inlet, and caused biofilm to grow faster in the middle and outlet regions of the flow channel at 20% emitter clogging degree. At 50% clogging degree, biofilm in inlet regions grew faster again. Finally, some biofilm control approaches such as water quality management and emitter flow channel structure optimization were proposed. This study provided a better understanding of biofilm formation mechanisms in the emitter flow channels, which is critical for designing appropriate biofilm control technologies and will facilitate the reuse of reclaimed water in agricultural irrigation.
Display omitted
•The biofilm developments in drip irrigation emitters were visualized and quantified.•The critical regions of biofilm accumulation in the emitter channel were identified.•The dynamics of the emitter biofilm variation mechanisms were elucidated.•Some approaches for controlling the biofilm in the emitter channel were proposed.
Abstract
Long noncoding RNAs are widely implicated in diverse disease processes. Nonetheless, their regulatory roles in bone resorption are undefined. Here, we identify lncRNA Nron as a critical ...suppressor of bone resorption. We demonstrate that osteoclastic Nron knockout mice exhibit an osteopenia phenotype with elevated bone resorption activity. Conversely, osteoclastic Nron transgenic mice exhibit lower bone resorption and higher bone mass. Furthermore, the pharmacological overexpression of Nron inhibits bone resorption, while caused apparent side effects in mice. To minimize the side effects, we further identify a functional motif of Nron. The delivery of Nron functional motif to osteoclasts effectively reverses bone loss without obvious side effects. Mechanistically, the functional motif of Nron interacts with E3 ubiquitin ligase CUL4B to regulate ERα stability. These results indicate that Nron is a key bone resorption suppressor, and the lncRNA functional motif could potentially be utilized to treat diseases with less risk of side effects.
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