As the second largest carbon (C) flux between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems, soil respiration (Rs) plays vital roles in regulating atmospheric CO2 concentration (CO2) and climatic ...dynamics in the earth system. Although numerous manipulative studies and a few meta‐analyses have been conducted to determine the responses of Rs and its two components i.e., autotrophic (Ra) and heterotrophic (Rh) respiration to single global change factors, the interactive effects of the multiple factors are still unclear. In this study, we performed a meta‐analysis of 150 multiple‐factor (≥2) studies to examine the main and interactive effects of global change factors on Rs and its two components. Our results showed that elevated CO2 (E), nitrogen addition (N), irrigation (I), and warming (W) induced significant increases in Rs by 28.6%, 8.8%, 9.7%, and 7.1%, respectively. The combined effects of the multiple factors, EN, EW, DE, IE, IN, IW, IEW, and DEW, were also significantly positive on Rs to a greater extent than those of the single‐factor ones. For all the individual studies, the additive interactions were predominant on Rs (90.6%) and its components (≈70.0%) relative to synergistic and antagonistic ones. However, the different combinations of global change factors (e.g., EN, NW, EW, IW) indicated that the three types of interactions were all important, with two combinations for synergistic effects, two for antagonistic, and five for additive when at least eight independent experiments were considered. In addition, the interactions of elevated CO2 and warming had opposite effects on Ra and Rh, suggesting that different processes may influence their responses to the multifactor interactions. Our study highlights the crucial importance of the interactive effects among the multiple factors on Rs and its components, which could inform regional and global models to assess the climate–biosphere feedbacks and improve predictions of the future states of the ecological and climate systems.
Biochar application to soils may increase carbon (C) sequestration due to the inputs of recalcitrant organic C. However, the effects of biochar application on the soil greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes ...appear variable among many case studies; therefore, the efficacy of biochar as a carbon sequestration agent for climate change mitigation remains uncertain. We performed a meta‐analysis of 91 published papers with 552 paired comparisons to obtain a central tendency of three main GHG fluxes (i.e., CO2, CH4, and N2O) in response to biochar application. Our results showed that biochar application significantly increased soil CO2 fluxes by 22.14%, but decreased N2O fluxes by 30.92% and did not affect CH4 fluxes. As a consequence, biochar application may significantly contribute to an increased global warming potential (GWP) of total soil GHG fluxes due to the large stimulation of CO2 fluxes. However, soil CO2 fluxes were suppressed when biochar was added to fertilized soils, indicating that biochar application is unlikely to stimulate CO2 fluxes in the agriculture sector, in which N fertilizer inputs are common. Responses of soil GHG fluxes mainly varied with biochar feedstock source and soil texture and the pyrolysis temperature of biochar. Soil and biochar pH, biochar applied rate, and latitude also influence soil GHG fluxes, but to a more limited extent. Our findings provide a scientific basis for developing more rational strategies toward widespread adoption of biochar as a soil amendment for climate change mitigation.
As a popular and valuable technique, grafting is widely used to protect against soil-borne diseases and nematodes in vegetable production. Growing evidences have revealed that long intergenic ncRNAs ...(lincRNAs) are strictly regulated and play essential roles in plants development and stress responses. Nevertheless, genome-wide identification and function deciphering of pepper lincRNAs, especially for their roles in improving grafting pepper resistance to Phytophthora capsici is largely unknown.
In this study, RNA-seq data of grafting and control pepper plants with or without P. capsici inoculation were used to identify lincRNAs. In total, 2,388 reliable lincRNAs were identified. They were relatively longer and contained few exons than protein-coding genes. Similar to coding genes, lincRNAs had higher densities in euchromatin regions; and longer chromosome transcribed more lincRNAs. Expression pattern profiling suggested that lincRNAs commonly had lower expression than mRNAs. Totally, 607 differentially expressed lincRNAs (DE-lincRANs) were identified, of which 172 were found between P. capsici resistance grafting pepper sample GR and susceptible sample LDS. The neighboring genes of DE-lincRNAs and miRNAs competitively sponged by DE-lincRNAs were identified. Subsequently, the expression level of DE-lincRNAs was further confirmed by qRT-PCR and regulation patterns between DE-lincRNAs and neighboring mRNAs were also validated. Function annotation revealed that DE-lincRNAs increased the resistance of grafting prepper to P. capsici by modulating the expression of disease-defense related genes through cis-regulating and/or lincRNA-miRNA-mRNA interaction networks.
This study identified pepper lincRNAs and suggested their potential roles in increasing the resistance level of grafting pepper to P. capsici.
To compare image quality and diagnostic performance using different b-values for the zooming technique with diffusion-weighted imaging (ZOOMit-DWI) in thyroid nodules.
A total of 51 benign thyroid ...nodules and 50 thyroid papillary carcinomas were included. ZOOMit-DWI was performed with b-values of 0, 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 s/mm
. The sharpness was evaluated as subjective index. The signal intensity ratio (SIR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) were measured as objective indices. Pairwise comparisons were performed among the different b-value groups using the
test. A receiver operating characteristic curve of the ADC value was used to evaluate diagnostic performance. The DeLong test was used to compare diagnostic effectiveness among the different b-value groups.
In both the papillary carcinoma group (
= 0.670) and the benign nodule group (
= 0.185), the sharpness of nodules was similar between b-values of 1000 s/mm
and 1500 s/mm
. In the papillary carcinoma group, the SIR
was statistically higher in DWI images with a b-value of 1500 s/mm
than in DWI images with b-values of 500 s/mm
(
= 0.004), 1000 s/mm
(
= 0.002), and 2000 s/mm
(
= 0.003). When the b-values were 1500 s/mm
(
= 0.008) and 2000 s/mm
(
= 0.009), the SIR
significantly differed between the papillary carcinoma group and the benign nodule group. When b = 500 s/mm
, the ADC had an AUC of 0.888. When b = 1000 s/mm
, the ADC had an AUC of 0.881. When b = 1500 s/mm
, the ADC had an AUC of 0.896. When b = 2000 s/mm
, the ADC had an AUC of 0.871. The DeLong test showed comparable diagnostic effectiveness among the different b-value groups except for between b-values of 2000 s/mm
and 1500 s/mm
, with a b-value of 2000 s/mm
showing lower effectiveness.
This study suggests that 1500 s/mm
may be a suitable b-value to differentiate benign and malignant thyroid nodules in ZOOMit-DWI images, which yielded better image quality.
Approximately 40% of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) are refractory or relapse to standard chemotherapy, and most of them are activated B cell-like DLBCLs (ABC-DLBCL) and germinal ...center B cell-like DLBCLs (GCB-DLBCL). SNS-032, a novel and selective CDK7/9 inhibitor, that the first phase clinical trials approved by US FDA for cancer treatment have been completed. In this study, we investigated the anti-tumor effect of SNS-032 in ABC- and GCB-DLBCL subtypes. We report that SNS-032 induced growth inhibition and cell apoptosis in both DLBCL cells in vitro, and inhibited the growth of both DLBCL xenografts in nude mice. Mechanistically, SNS-032 inhibited RNA polymerase II, which led to transcriptional-dependent suppression of NF-κB signaling pathway and its downstream targets involved in cell survival; SNS-032 also downregulates BCL-2 and c-MYC in both mRNA and protein levels. Significantly, these findings provide pre-clinical evidence for application of targeting the CDK7/9 in DLBCL.
Lycium ruthenicum
Murr. is an important ecological and economic species in the Qaidam Basin of Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Its black fruits (BF) are rich in anthocyanins, which have health-promoting ...properties for humans and thus provide nutritional benefits for this plant. Although the fruit quality of natural white fruit (WF) is affected by the disappearance of pigmentation in phenotypes, this phenomenon provides an opportunity to unravel the complex color metabolic networks. In this study, anthocyanin profiling confirmed that WF was formed due to anthocyanin loss. Transcriptome analysis of BF and WF revealed 101,466 unigenes, 261 of which were identified as the putative homologs of color-related genes in other species. Genes encoding the enzymes involved in flavonoid biosynthesis were also identified systematically. The structural gene expression levels of
chalcone synthase
(
CHS
),
chalcone isomerase
(
CHI
),
flavonoid 3′5′-hydroxylase
(
F3′5′H
),
dihydroflavonol 4-reductase
(
DFR
),
anthocyanidin synthase
(
ANS
), and
anthocyanidin 3-O-glucosyltransferase
(
UFGT
) were highly similar and significantly positively correlated with anthocyanin accumulation rate in BF. In particular,
F3′5′H
,
UFGT
,
ANS
, and
DFR
expression levels in BF were 2391, 119, 96, and 85 times higher than those in WF at S3 (35 days after anthesis), respectively. This result strongly suggests that the low expression of these genes in WF is responsible for the anthocyanin loss. Meanwhile, the expression patterns of the anthocyanin regulatory genes were also investigated by qRT-PCR. Mass sequencing data were obtained and annotated by deep sequencing and provided a platform for future function and molecular biological research on
L. ruthenicum
Murr.
Knowledge graph (KG) embedding is to embed the entities and relations of a KG into a low-dimensional continuous vector space while preserving the intrinsic semantic associations between entities and ...relations. One of the most important applications of knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is link prediction (LP), which aims to predict the missing fact triples in the KG. A promising approach to improving the performance of KGE for the task of LP is to increase the feature interactions between entities and relations so as to express richer semantics between them. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have thus become one of the most popular KGE models due to their strong expression and generalization abilities. To further enhance favorable features from increased feature interactions, we propose a lightweight CNN-based KGE model called IntSE in this paper. Specifically, IntSE not only increases the feature interactions between the components of entity and relationship embeddings with more efficient CNN components but also incorporates the channel attention mechanism that can adaptively recalibrate channel-wise feature responses by modeling the interdependencies between channels to enhance the useful features while suppressing the useless ones for improving its performance for LP. The experimental results on public datasets confirm that IntSE is superior to state-of-the-art CNN-based KGE models for link prediction in KGs.
Automatic License Plate detection and Recognition (ALPR) is a key problem in intelligent transportation systems with wide applications in traffic monitoring, electronic toll collection (ETC), ...intelligent parking lots (IPLs), and elsewhere. Although numerous methods have been proposed in the literature, it is still challenging to strike a good balance between the accuracy and efficiency of ALPR. In this paper, a novel end‐to‐end CNN‐based model is proposed, called Fast and Accurate Network with Feature Enhancement (FAFEnet), to jointly detect the license plates and recognize the characters with high accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, the FAFEnet model seamlessly integrates two CNN‐based models, namely the detection and recognition modules, into a unified framework to reduce accumulated errors and computational overheads in two separate steps. The detection module is a lightweight model with only seven convolutional layers yet achieves over 99.8% accuracy rates for license plate detection across all datasets. The recognition module utilizes two feature enhancement blocks to compensate and enhance the shallow character features extracted by the detection module. Furthermore, the joint optimization of detection and recognition modules exploits the feature association in two modules, and thus improves the prediction accuracy while reducing the execution time. Finally, extensive experimental results on several real‐world datasets demonstrate that FAFEnet outperforms all the competitors in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
The first line therapy for patients with diffuse large B cell (DLBCL) is R-CHOP. About half of DLBCL patients are either refractory to, or will relapse, after the treatment. Therefore, identifying ...novel drug targets and effective therapeutic agents is urgently needed for improving DLBCL patient survival. b-AP15, a selective small molecule inhibitor of proteasomal USP14 and UCHL5 deubiquitinases (DUBs), has shown selectivity and efficacy in several other types of cancer cells. This is the first study to report the effect of b-AP15 in DLBCL.
Cell lines of two DLBCL subtypes, Germinal Center B Cell/ GCB (SU-DHL-4, OCI-LY-1, OCI-LY-19) and Activated B Cell/ABC (SU-DHL-2), were used in the current study. Cell viability was measured by MTS assay, proliferation by trypan blue exclusion staining assay, cellular apoptosis by Annexin V-FITC/PI staining and mitochondrial outer membrane permeability assays, the activities of 20S proteasome peptidases by cleavage of specific fluorogenic substrates, and cell migration was detected by transwell assay in these GCB- and ABC-DLBCL cell lines. Mouse xenograft models of SU-DHL-4 and SU-DHL-2 cells were used to determine in vivo effects of b-AP15 in DLBCL tumors.
b-AP15 inhibited proteasome DUB activities and activated cell death pathway, as evident by caspase activation and mitochondria apoptosis in GCB- and ABC- DLBCL cell lines. b-AP15 treatment suppressed migration of GCB- and ABC-DLBCL cells via inhibiting Wnt/β-catenin and TGFβ/Smad pathways. Additionally, b-AP15 significantly inhibited the growth of GCB- and ABC DLBCL in xenograft models.
These results indicate that b-AP15 inhibits cell migration and induces apoptosis in GCB- and ABC-DLBCL cells, and suggest that inhibition of 19S proteasomal DUB should be a novel strategy for DLBCL treatment.
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