Heat stress at the pollen mother cell (PMC) meiotic stage leads to pollen sterility in rice, in which the reactive oxygen species (ROS) and sugar homeostasis are always adversely affected. This ...damage is reversed by abscisic acid (ABA), but the mechanisms underlying the interactions among the ABA, sugar metabolism, ROS and heat shock proteins in rice spikelets under heat stress are unclear. Two rice genotypes, Zhefu802 (a recurrent parent) and fgl (its near‐isogenic line) were subjected to heat stress of 40°C after pre‐foliage sprayed with ABA and its biosynthetic inhibitor fluridone at the meiotic stage of PMC. The results revealed that exogenous application of ABA reduced pollen sterility caused by heat stress. This was achieved through various means, including: increased levels of soluble sugars, starch and non‐structural carbohydrates, markedly higher relative expression levels of heat shock proteins (HSP24.1 and HSP71.1) and genes related to sugar metabolism and transport, such as sucrose transporters (SUT) genes, sucrose synthase (SUS) genes and invertase (INV) genes as well as increased antioxidant activities and increased content of adenosine triphosphate and endogenous ABA in spikelets. In short, exogenous application of ABA prior to heat stress enhanced sucrose transport and accelerated sucrose metabolism to maintain the carbon balance and energy homeostasis, thus ABA contributed to heat tolerance in rice.
Given the severity of today’s environmental issues, companies are increasingly making green concepts a key component of their operational strategies. As an essential complement to corporate ...environmental strategy, employees’ green behavior has received attention from all sectors of society. Based on resource conservation theory, this study explores the formation mechanism of employees’ green behaviors in enterprises starting from two green management tools: green human resource management (HRM) practices and green transformational leadership. Through two-stage questionnaire research, 296 sample data points were obtained, and the research hypotheses were tested by using linear regression analysis. The results showed that green HRM practices in enterprises enhance employees’ green mindfulness and thus stimulate their green behaviors and that green transformational leadership and green self-efficacy play a positive moderating role in the above relationship. These results support the applicability of resource conservation theory in green management and suggest that green HRM practices and green transformational leadership can be used together in the process of green management.
A novel nanocomplex displaying single-excitation and dual-emission fluorescent properties has been developed through a crown-like assembly of dye-encapsulated silica particles decorated with ...satellite AuNCs for live cell imaging of highly reactive oxygen species (hROS), including •OH, ClO– and ONOO–. The design of this nanocomplex is based on our new finding that the strong fluorescence of AuNCs can be sensitively and selectively quenched by these hROS. The nanocomplex is demonstrated to have excellent biocompatibility, high intracellular delivery efficiency, and stability for long-time observations. The results reveal that the nanocomplex provides a sensitive sensor for rapid imaging of hROS signaling with high selectivity and contrast.
Multiple cancer immunotherapies including chimeric antigen receptor T cell and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have been successfully developed to treat various cancers by motivating the adaptive ...anti-tumor immunity. Particularly, the checkpoint blockade approach has achieved great clinic success as evidenced by several U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved anti-programmed death receptor 1/ligand 1 or anti-cytotoxic T lymphocyte associated protein 4 antibodies. However, the majority of cancers have low clinical response rates to these ICIs due to poor tumor immunogenicity. Indeed, the cyclic guanosine monophosphate-adenosine monophosphate synthase‒stimulator of interferon genes‒TANK-binding kinase 1 (cGAS‒STING‒TBK1) axis is now appreciated as the major signaling pathway in innate immune response across different species. Aberrant signaling of this pathway has been closely linked to multiple diseases, including auto-inflammation, virus infection and cancers. In this perspective, we provide an updated review on the latest progress on the development of small molecule modulators targeting the cGAS‒STING‒TBK1 signaling pathway and their preclinical and clinical use as a new immune stimulatory therapy. Meanwhile, highlights on the clinical candidates, limitations and challenges, as well as future directions in this field are also discussed. Further, small molecule inhibitors targeting this signaling axis and their potential therapeutic use for various indications are discussed as well.
The cGAS‒STING‒TBK1 axis is appreciated as the major signaling pathway in innate immune response, which is closely linked to multiple diseases. This review summarizes the latest progress on the development of small molecule modulators targeting the cGAS‒STING‒TBK1 signaling pathway and their clinical use as a new immune stimulatory therapy. Display omitted
The gut microbiota of individuals are dominated by different fiber-utilizing bacteria, which ferment dietary fiber into short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) known to be important for human health. Here, ...we show that the dominance of Prevotella versus Bacteroides in fecal innocula, identified into two different enterotypes, differentially impacts in vitro fermentation profiles of SCFAs from fibers with different chemical structures. In a microbiome of the Prevotella enterotype, fructooligosaccharides, and sorghum and corn arabinoxylans significantly promoted one single Prevotella OTU with equally high production of total SCFAs with propionate as the major product. Conversely, in the Bacteroides-dominated microbiota, the three fibers enriched different OTUs leading to different levels and ratios of SCFAs. This is the first report showing how individual differences in two enterotypes cause distinctly different responses to dietary fiber. Microbiota dominated by different fiber-utilizing bacteria may impact host health by way of producing different amounts and profiles of SCFAs from the same carbohydrate substrates.
Low-carbon tourism behaviors by tourists can directly reduce carbon emissions and resource consumption, providing an effective way to promote the high-quality development of tourism. Therefore, ...promoting low-carbon tourism behaviors among tourists has become a key concern in academia. Most existing studies have investigated the influence of tourists' cognitive, emotional and normative drivers of low-carbon tourism behavior from the perspective of tourists. However, the nature of tourism activities is social interaction, which can have a significant impact on tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior. Moreover, the study of Chinese tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior requires attention to the core elements of Chinese culture. Thus, there is an urgent need to study the low-carbon tourism behavior of tourists as it is embedded in social interactions and strongly influenced by the local Chinese culture. The sense of mianzi and the sense of group consistency are two key Chinese cultural norms that have self-regulatory (personal norms) and other-regulatory (social norms) effects on Chinese social interaction behaviors. This paper uses VBN (value-belief-norm) theory as the basic framework, incorporates two normative factors that reflect Chinese cultural characteristics, mianzi consciousness and group consistency consciousness, and modifies the general VBN model based on Chinese cultural characteristics to construct an integrated model to explain Chinese tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior. The results show that tourists' traditional values have a significant effect on their low-carbon tourism intention through beliefs and personal norms. In addition, we find that the more sensitive tourists' sense of mianzi (personal norms) is, the more significant the effect of perceived group consistency pressure (social norms) is on their low-carbon tourism behavior. This study integrates Chinese cultural normative factors and classical Western environmental behavior theoretical models to extend the study of the influence of Chinese cultural factors on Chinese tourists' low-carbon tourism behavior.
With growing dependence of industrial robots, a failure of an industrial robot may interrupt current operation or even overall manufacturing workflows in the entire production line, which can cause ...significant economic losses. Hence, it is very essential to maintain industrial robots to ensure high-level performance. It is widely desired to have a real-time technique to constantly monitor robots by collecting time series data from robots, which can automatically detect incipient failures before robots totally shut down. Model-based methods are typically used in anomaly detection for robots, yet explicit domain knowledge and accurate mathematical models are required. Data-driven techniques can overcome these limitations. However, a major difficulty for them is the lack of sufficient fault data of industrial robots. Besides, the used technique for anomaly detection of robots should be required to not only capture the temporal dependency in collected time series data, but also the inter-correlations between different metrics. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised anomaly detection for industrial robots, sliding-window convolutional variational autoencoder (SWCVAE), which can realize real-time anomaly detection spatially and temporally by coping with multivariate time series data. This method has been verified by a KUKA KR6R 900SIXX industrial robot, and the results prove that the proposed model can successfully detect anomaly in the robot. Thus, this work presents a promising tool for condition-based maintenance of industrial robots.
The Genome Sequence Archive (GSA) is a data repository for archiving raw sequence data, which provides data storage and sharing services for worldwide scientific communities. Considering explosive ...data growth with diverse data types, here we present the GSA family by expanding into a set of resources for raw data archive with different purposes, namely, GSA (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gsa/), GSA for Human (GSA-Human, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gsa-human/), and Open Archive for Miscellaneous Data (OMIX, https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/omix/). Compared with the 2017 version, GSA has been significantly updated in data model, online functionalities, and web interfaces. GSA-Human, as a new partner of GSA, is a data repository specialized in human genetics-related data with controlled access and security. OMIX, as a critical complement to the two resources mentioned above, is an open archive for miscellaneous data. Together, all these resources form a family of resources dedicated to archiving explosive data with diverse types, accepting data submissions from all over the world, and providing free open access to all publicly available data in support of worldwide research activities.
With the rapid development of sequencing technologies towards higher throughput and lower cost, sequence data are generated at an unprecedentedly explosive rate. To provide an efficient and ...easy-to-use platform for managing huge sequence data, here we present Genome Sequence Archive （GSA; http：//bigd.big.ac.cn/gsa or http：//gsa.big.ac.cn）, a data repository for archiving raw sequence data. In compliance with data standards and structures of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration （INSDC）, GSA adopts four data objects （BioProject, BioSample, Experiment, and Run） for data organization, accepts raw sequence reads produced by a variety of sequencing platforms, stores both sequence reads and metadata submitted from all over the world, and makes all these data publicly available to worldwide scientific communities. In the era of big data, GSA is not only an important complement to existing INSDC members by alleviating the increasing burdens of handling sequence data deluge, but also takes the significant responsibility for global big data archive and provides free unrestricted access to all publicly available data in support of research activities throughout the world.
The emergence of numerous variants of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, has presented new challenges to the global efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we obtain two ...cross-neutralizing antibodies (7D6 and 6D6) that target Sarbecoviruses' receptor-binding domain (RBD) with sub-picomolar affinities and potently neutralize authentic SARS-CoV-2. Crystal structures show that both antibodies bind a cryptic site different from that recognized by existing antibodies and highly conserved across Sarbecovirus isolates. Binding of these two antibodies to the RBD clashes with the adjacent N-terminal domain and disrupts the viral spike. Both antibodies confer good resistance to mutations in the currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants. Thus, our results have direct relevance to public health as options for passive antibody therapeutics and even active prophylactics. They can also inform the design of pan-sarbecovirus vaccines.
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