Fungal contamination of food and animal feed, especially by mycotoxigenic fungi, is not only a global food quality concern for food manufacturers, but it also poses serious health concerns because of ...the production of a variety of mycotoxins, some of which present considerable food safety challenges. In today's mega‐scale food and feed productions, which involve a number of processing steps and the use of a variety of ingredients, fungal contamination is regarded as unavoidable, even good manufacturing practices are followed. Chemical preservatives, to some extent, are successful in retarding microbial growth and achieving considerably longer shelf‐life. However, the increasing demand for clean label products requires manufacturers to find natural alternatives to replace chemically derived ingredients to guarantee the clean label. Lactic acid bacteria (LAB), with the status generally recognized as safe (GRAS), are apprehended as an apt choice to be used as natural preservatives in food and animal feed to control fungal growth and subsequent mycotoxin production. LAB species produce a vast spectrum of antifungal metabolites to inhibit fungal growth; and also have the capacity to adsorb, degrade, or detoxify fungal mycotoxins including ochratoxins, aflatoxins, and Fusarium toxins. The potential of many LAB species to circumvent spoilage associated with fungi has been exploited in a variety of human food and animal feed stuff. This review provides the most recent updates on the ability of LAB to serve as antifungal and anti‐mycotoxigenic agents. In addition, some recent trends of the use of LAB as biopreservative agents against fungal growth and mycotoxin production are highlighted.
Technology is a complex system with technologies relating to each other in a space that can be mapped as a network. The technology network’s structure can reveal properties of technologies and of ...human behavior, if it can be mapped accurately. Technology networks have been made from patent data using several measures of proximity. These measures, however, are influenced by factors of the patenting system that do not reflect technologies or their proximity. We introduce a method to precisely normalize out multiple impinging factors in patent data and extract the true signal of technological proximity by comparing the empirical proximity measures with what they would be in random situations that remove the impinging factors. With this method, we created technology networks, using data from 3.9 million patents. After normalization, different measures of proximity became more correlated with each other, approaching a single dimension of technological proximity. The normalized technology networks were sparse, with few pairs of technology domains being significantly related. The normalized network corresponded with human behavior: We analyzed the patenting histories of 2.8 million inventors and found they were more likely to invent in two different technology domains if the pair was closely related in the technology network. We also analyzed the patents of 250,000 firms and found that, in contrast with inventors, firms’ inventive activities were only modestly associated with the technology network; firms’ portfolios combined pairs of technology domains about twice as often as inventors. These results suggest that controlling for impinging factors provides meaningful measures of technological proximity for patent-based mapping of the technology space, and that this map can be used to aid in technology innovation planning and management.
Xylo-oligosaccharides (XOS) enriched with high fractions of X2-X3 are regarded as an effective prebiotic for regulating the intestinal microflora. In this study, the original XOS solution was ...obtained from bamboo shoots through hydrothermal pretreatment under optimized conditions. Subsequently, enzymatic hydrolysis with endo-xylanase was performed on the original XOS solution to enhance the abundance of the X2-X3 fractions. The results demonstrated that hydrothermal pretreatment yielded 21.24% of XOS in the hydrolysate solution, and subsequent enzymatic hydrolysis significantly increased the proportion of the X2-X3 fractions from 38.87% to 68.21%. Moreover, the XOS solutions with higher amounts of X2-X3 fractions exhibited superior performance in promoting the growth of probiotics such as Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Lactobacillus acidophilus in vitro, leading to increased production of short-chain fatty acids. In the in vivo colitis mouse model, XOS solutions with higher contents of X2-X3 fractions demonstrated enhanced efficacy against intestinal inflammation. Compared with the colitis mice (model group), the XOS solution with higher X2-X3 fractions (S1 group) could significantly increase the number of Streptomyces in the intestinal microflora, while the original XOS solution (S2 group) could significantly increase the number of Bacteroides in the intestinal microflora of colitis mice. In addition, the abundances of Alcaligenes and Pasteurella in the intestinal microflora of the S1 and S2 groups were much lower than in the model group. This effect was attributed to the ability of these XOS solutions to enhance species diversity, reversing the imbalance and disorder within the intestinal microflora. Overall, this work highlights the outstanding potential of XOS enriched with high contents of X2-X3 fractions as a regulator of the intestinal microbiota and as an anti-colitis agent.
Hotels are implementing green human resource management to achieve sustainable development in response to increasingly stringent environmental policies and to meet stakeholder expectations. This ...study aims to elucidate the impact of green human resource management (GHRM) on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) implemented by hospitality employees in organizational, interpersonal, and customer contexts, respectively. Specifically, a mediation model with dual moderation from employees' personality, perceptual and cognitive perspectives simultaneously is proposed, which supported by organizational support theory, social identity theory and social cognitive theory. Structural equation modeling is used to evaluate 440 data collected from the Chinese hospitality industry based on conditional sampling method. This paper finds that GHRM can promote OCBs towards the organization and customers and perceived CSR has a mediating effect. Employees' environmental value positively moderates the promotion of perceived CSR through GHRM implementation, and the proactive personality positively moderates the relationship between perceived CSR and OCBs towards the organization and customers. The original value of the study lies in the simultaneous consideration of the three aspects of employees' cognition, perception, and personality, expanding the research perspective of GHRM and discovering the benefits beyond green that this green management model can bring. For hotel managers, this study helps them understand that GHRM brings hotels more than just green. Hotels should focus on matching potential employees' attributes with the organizational culture during recruitment and on improving employees' environmental value and proactive personality level during their subsequent training.
Polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1) and PRC2 are the major complexes composed of polycomb-group (PcG) proteins in plants. PRC2 catalyzes trimethylation of lysine 27 on histone 3 to silence target ...genes. Like Heterochromatin Protein 1/Terminal Flower 2 (LHP1/TFL2) recognizes and binds to H3K27me3 generated by PRC2 activities and enrolls PRC1 complex to further silence the chromatin through depositing monoubiquitylation of lysine 119 on H2A. Mutations in PcG genes display diverse developmental defects during shoot apical meristem (SAM) maintenance and differentiation, seed development and germination, floral transition, and so on so forth. PcG proteins play essential roles in regulating plant development through repressing gene expression. In this review, we are focusing on recent discovery about the regulatory roles of PcG proteins in SAM maintenance, root development, embryo development to seedling phase transition, and vegetative to reproductive phase transition.
Many meteorological systems are chaotic in nature, which inevitably limits its predictability. Accurate prediction of meteorological variables depends primarily on properly diagnosing the complex ...underlying dynamics. Nonlinear dynamic analysis has shown to be particularly useful for such purpose. In this study, the concept of recurrence analysis was extended to investigate and characterize the underlying dynamics of meteorological time series (i.e., wind speed, temperature, pressure and relative humidity) based on daily observation in Hong Kong during a period from 1998 to 2018. The existence of chaos was clearly identified based on the phase space reconstruction diagram and the recurrence plot. It was shown that the underlying dynamics associated with wind speed appears to indicate higher level of complexity as compared to those of pressure and temperature, which, in consequence, may lead to more irregular time‐dependent behaviour and lower predictability. Moreover, season‐to‐seasonal variability in the dynamics of meteorological time series was evident, particularly for wind speed and temperature. Overall, this study shows that the recurrence analysis can be well applied as a useful diagnostic tool to investigate the dynamics of meteorological systems, which is expected to provide a new avenue regarding the modelling and prediction of the behaviour of meteorological parameters.
The existence of chaos in meteorological time series was identified. The underlying dynamics of wind speed exhibits higher level of complexity than other parameters of consideration. Season‐to‐season variability in the underlying dynamics of meteorological time series was also observed, particularly for wind speed and temperature.
The Liutex vector is new quantity introduced to represent the rigid-body rotation part of fluid motion and thus to define and identify vortices in various flows. In this work, the intermittency and ...power-law similarity of the Liutex vector in homogeneous, isotropic turbulence and a turbulent channel are explored. First, we found that the Liutex vector is more intermittent than the vorticity vector in the considered turbulent flows, which indicates that an iso-surface of a Liutex magnitude with an appropriate threshold could capture the major rotating motions or vortical motions of the flow. Second, the three-dimensional energy spectrums of velocity, vorticity (enstrophy spectrum) and the Liutex vector in homogeneous isotropic turbulence are shown to exhibit power laws of -5/3, 1/3 and 1/3 in the inertial subrange, respectively, whilst the Liutex energy spectrum particularly satisfies an additional -10/3 power law in the viscous subrange. This viscous similarity of the Liutex vector is the only power law that survived from the wall presence and is argued to originate from the fact that the Liutex vector represents the rigid part of fluid motion and is free from any shear contamination. The existence of such a viscous similarity law indicates a certain coherence of the small scales of turbulence and could possibly help understand and model turbulence.
Modelling and forecasting of rainfall behaviour are of essential importance in various hydrological and meteorological studies, which depends largely on properly understanding the underlying rainfall ...dynamics. In this paper, 20‐years (i.e., 2000–2019) measurements of daily rainfall data at 6 rain gauge stations in Hong Kong were analysed in the framework of nonlinear dynamic analysis. Phase space reconstruction (PSR), recurrence plot (RP) and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) were carried out to identify and characterize the chaotic nature of rainfall dynamics. The results of this study underscore the complex processes and variability that is associated with Hong Kong's rainfall data. The existence of chaos in rainfall process was well recognized across various stations. The rainfall dynamics were further investigated with respect to its inter‐annual and monthly variability. The dependence of rainfall dynamics on different temporal scales was likewise examined, which indicates that the rainfall dynamics at finer resolution are less complex than those at coarser resolution, thus the consequent rainfall variability is less pronounced.
This paper extended the concept of the chaos theory and nonlinear dynamic analysis to the daily rainfall data recorded at six weather stations in Hong Kong, with a view to characterize the rainfall dynamics and variability. The existence of chaos in rainfall process was clearly identified. The rainfall dynamics were investigated in detail using phase space reconstruction, recurrence plot and recurrence quantification analysis. Station‐to‐station variability of rainfall dynamics was noticeable. The dependence of rainfall dynamics on monthly variation and different temporal scales were likewise examined.
TP53 mutations (TP53mut) in AML patients associate with poor prognosis that may affect therapy and outcome. In addition to TP53 mut patients, TCGA AML patient sequencing data show that there are ...around 3% of patients have detectable low-frequency TP53mut reads. Importantly, these patients showed worse outcome as compared with the TP53 wild type (TP53wt) patients. We have studied the effect of low-frequency TP53mut in two AML cell lines, OCI-AML2 and MV4-11. Both cells have low-frequency single hotspot TP53mut. Interestingly, the resistant cells derived from both lines have homogeneous TP53mut. TP53mut clones isolated from the parental cells also show increased chemoresistance potential and have higher population of leukemia stem cell (LSC) maker positive cells, a characteristic of chemoresistant cells. When mixed with TP53wt cells, the TP53mut cells show survival advantage suggesting its potential to develop chemoresistance. We previously showed that histone deacetylase inhibitor Romidepsin can re-sensitize chemoresistant cells by eradicating LSC marker positive cells. Here we further show that Romidepsin can reactivate p53 targeted genes which are dysregulated in TP53mut cells and preferentially targets TP53mut subpopulation. Therefore, our study shows that low-frequency TP53mut is linked to chemoresistance and sheds light on therapeutic strategies for treatments on chemoresistance.
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