Food preferences are often influenced by environmental cues such as temperature, scent, and sound. Although air pollution is a subtle but daily presence in consumers’ lives, a lack of marketing ...research exists on whether and how it affects food preferences. This article theorizes that as a natural stressor, air pollution can induce bad moods in people and in turn lead to an increase in unhealthy food preferences. We combine three complementary methodologies to test our hypotheses. Based on large-scale, daily search data, the results of our econometric analysis reveal that people are more prone to search for unhealthy foods when local air pollution is higher. A field study demonstrates that air pollution increases consumer purchases of unhealthy food. Finally, we validate the proposed mechanism through a randomized experiment.
Although nutrition information informs consumer decisions at the point of sale in offline stores, it is unclear whether such information affects online food sales. Using a field experiment, we ...examine three issues: (1) the impact of nutrition information in online food shopping; (2) the interaction effects between nutrition information and seller reputation; and (3) the different effects of healthy and unhealthy food sales. Results indicate that nutrition information significantly increases food sales in online conditions and that seller reputation can strengthen the impact of such information. Furthermore, nutrition information creates more sales of healthy (versus unhealthy) food. Using an eye-tracking experiment to measure whether purchasers pay attention to nutrition information, we find that participants who look at nutrition information longer tend to choose foods with nutrition-fact labels.
This paper investigates whether and how emerging markets reward firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. We focus on the socially responsible investment (SRI) index, which lists the ...top CSR performers and serves as a tool to help investors make investment decisions based on financial and social criteria. We empirically test the financial market responses to the announcements of pioneering SRI indices recently launched in Brazil, China, and South Africa. We find that inclusion on an SRI index in these markets is associated with positive abnormal returns. However, inclusion on an SRI index does not benefit all firms equally: the positive financial response is strengthened by R&D expenditures but weakened by advertising expenditures; it is stronger for firms that have expanded globally to developing countries than those to developed countries.
Brand crisis not only damages customer equity of the affected brand, but also spill over to non-affected competitors when perceived as guilty by association. Therefore, understanding about the ...indirect financial costs of brand crisis spillover is critical, because customer equity puts much emphasis on the bottom-line financial value. However, little is understood about financial costs to competitors associated with the spillover effect. This study investigates the spillover effect of brand crisis on non-affected competing firms' financial values in emerging markets. The main research questions address: (1) whether and how brand crisis spillover influences non-affected competitors' financial market values in emerging markets, and (2) how marketing strategies by rival firms prior to the crisis influence spillover effects on their financial values in emerging markets. The paper conducts an event study to investigate whether and how the stock values of rival firms within the same product category—food brands—are affected by brand crisis released in China from 2001 to 2011. The results show that rival firms report negative abnormal returns at the time of the brand crisis and furthermore, the harm varies depending on three marketing strategies before crisis. Specifically, advertising expenditures of rival firms strengthens, but charity donation (as signal of corporate social responsibility) and the product diversity of rival firms weaken the spillover effect of a brand crisis in a financial market. Accordingly, the findings have provided managerial implications and recommendations regarding future directions.
Exosomal microRNAs (miRNAs) have been suggested to participate in the pathogenesis of neuropsychiatric diseases, but their role in major depressive disorder (MDD) is unknown. We performed a ...genome-wide miRNA expression profiling of blood-derived exosomes from MDD patients and control subjects and revealed the top differentially expressed exosomal miRNA, i.e. hsa-miR-139-5p (upregulation), had good performance to differentiate between MDD patients and controls. Tail vein injection of blood exosomes isolated from MDD patients into normal mice caused their depressive-like behaviors as determined by the forced swimming, tail suspension, and novelty suppressed feeding tests, and injection of blood exosomes isolated from healthy volunteers into unpredictable mild stress (CUMS)-treated mice alleviated their depressive-like behaviors. CUMS mice also showed significantly increased blood and brain levels of exosomal miR-139-5p. Furthermore, the depressive-like behaviors in CUMS-treated mice were rescued by intranasal injection of miR-139-5p antagomir, suggesting that increased exosomal miR-139-5p levels may mediate stress-induced depression-like behavior in mice. Both exosome treatment and miR-139-5p antagomir treatment increased hippocampal neurogenesis in the CUMS-treated mice, and treatment of exosome from MDD patients decreased hippocampal neurogenesis in the normal mice. The role of miR-139-5p in neurogenesis was validated by in vitro experiments, demonstrating that miR-139-5p is a negative regulator for neural stem cell proliferation and neuronal differentiation. Our findings together suggest that exosomes from patients with major depression caused depressive-like behaviors in mice with involvement of miR-139-5p-regulated neurogenesis. Therefore, exosomal miRNAs are promising targets for the diagnosis and treatment of MDD.
Mapping the subcellular organization of proteins is crucial for understanding their biological functions. Herein, we report a reactive oxygen species induced protein labeling and identification ...(RinID) method for profiling subcellular proteome in the context of living cells. Our method capitalizes on a genetically encoded photocatalyst, miniSOG, to locally generate singlet oxygen that reacts with proximal proteins. Labeled proteins are conjugated in situ with an exogenously supplied nucleophilic probe, which serves as a functional handle for subsequent affinity enrichment and mass spectrometry-based protein identification. From a panel of nucleophilic compounds, we identify biotin-conjugated aniline and propargyl amine as highly reactive probes. As a demonstration of the spatial specificity and depth of coverage in mammalian cells, we apply RinID in the mitochondrial matrix, capturing 477 mitochondrial proteins with 94% specificity. We further demonstrate the broad applicability of RinID in various subcellular compartments, including the nucleus and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The temporal control of RinID enables pulse-chase labeling of ER proteome in HeLa cells, which reveals substantially higher clearance rate for secreted proteins than ER resident proteins.
Abstract
Stress granules (SGs) are highly dynamic cytoplasmic membrane-less organelles that assemble when cells are challenged by stress. RNA molecules are sorted into SGs where they play important ...roles in maintaining the structural stability of SGs and regulating gene expression. Herein, we apply a proximity-dependent RNA labeling method, CAP-seq, to comprehensively investigate the content of SG-proximal transcriptome in live mammalian cells. CAP-seq captures 457 and 822 RNAs in arsenite- and sorbitol-induced SGs in HEK293T cells, respectively, revealing that SG enrichment is positively correlated with RNA length and AU content, but negatively correlated with translation efficiency. The high spatial specificity of CAP-seq dataset is validated by single-molecule FISH imaging. We further apply CAP-seq to map dynamic changes in SG-proximal transcriptome along the time course of granule assembly and disassembly processes. Our data portray a model of AU-rich and translationally repressed SG nanostructure that are memorized long after the removal of stress.
With the great interests in the discovery and development of drug products containing nanoparticles, there is a great demand of quantitative tools for assessing quality, safety, and efficacy of these ...products. Physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling and simulation approaches provide excellent tools for describing and predicting
in vivo
absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) of nanoparticles administered through various routes. PBPK modeling of nanoparticles is an emerging field, and more than 20 PBPK models of nanoparticles used in pharmaceutical products have been published in the past decade. This review provides an overview of the ADME characteristics of nanoparticles and how these ADME processes are described in PBPK models. Recent advances in PBPK modeling of pharmaceutical nanoparticles are summarized. The major challenges in model development and validation and possible solutions are also discussed.
Magnetic flux ropes (MFRs) are thought to be the central structures of solar eruptions, and their ideal MHD instabilities can trigger the eruption. Here we performed a study of all the MFR ...configurations that lead to major solar flares, either eruptive or confined, from 2011 to 2017 near the solar disk center. The coronal magnetic field is reconstructed from observed magnetograms, and based on magnetic twist distribution, we identified the MFR, which is defined as a coherent group of magnetic field lines winding an axis with more than one turn. It is found that 90% of the events possess pre-flare MFRs, and their three-dimensional structures are much more complex in details than theoretical MFR models. We further constructed a diagram based on two parameters, the magnetic twist number which controls the kink instability (KI), and the decay index which controls the torus instability (TI). It clearly shows lower limits for TI and KI thresholds, which are ncrit = 1.3 and , respectively, as all the events above ncrit and nearly 90% of the events above erupted. Furthermore, by such criterion, over 70% of the events can be discriminated between eruptive and confined flares, and KI seems to play a nearly equally important role as TI in discriminating between the two types of flares. More than half of the events with both parameters are below the lower limits, and 29% are eruptive. These events might be triggered by magnetic reconnection rather than MHD instabilities.
SUMMARY
The scattered teleseismic body waves have been used intensively to characterize the receiver-side lithospheric structures. The routinely used ray-theory-based methods have limitations to ...image complex structures and tackle strong heterogeneities. The newly developed wave-equation based, passive-source reverse time migration (RTM) approach can overcome such limitations. To date, passive-source RTM has been developed only for isotropic media. However, at least to the first-order, most lithospheric structures possess effective transverse isotropy with spatially variable symmetry directions. It is important to know the magnitudes of imaging errors that may be introduced by passive-source RTM when seismic anisotropy is treated in an incorrect way. In this paper, we investigate the influence of elastic anisotropy on teleseismic P-to-S conversions at the lithospheric discontinuities and explain why an isotropic RTM may fail to focus the converted wavefields from the perspective of relative arrival time variations with backazimuth and shear wave splitting. Accordingly, we extend the passive-source RTM approach for imaging 3-D lithospheric targets possessing transverse isotropy from the following two aspects: First, the teleseismic recordings with direct P and converted S phases are reverse-time extrapolated using rotated staggered grid (RSG) pseudospectral method, which can tackle strong heterogeneity and transverse isotropies with symmetry axes in arbitrary direction; Secondly, the backward elastic wavefields are efficiently decomposed into vector anisotropic P and S modes to support accurate imaging.
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