In recent years, people have been paying more and more attention to air quality because it directly affects people's health and daily life. Effective air quality prediction has become one of the hot ...research issues. However, this paper is suffering many challenges, such as the instability of data sources and the variation of pollutant concentration along time series. Aiming at this problem, we propose an improved air quality prediction method based on the LightGBM model to predict the PM2.5 concentration at the 35 air quality monitoring stations in Beijing over the next 24 h. In this paper, we resolve the issue of processing the high-dimensional large-scale data by employing the LightGBM model and innovatively take the forecasting data as one of the data sources for predicting the air quality. With exploring the forecasting data feature, we could improve the prediction accuracy with making full use of the available spatial data. Given the lack of data, we employ the sliding window mechanism to deeply mine the high-dimensional temporal features for increasing the training dimensions to millions. We compare the predicted data with the actual data collected at the 35 air quality monitoring stations in Beijing. The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other schemes and prove the advantage of integrating the forecasting data and building up the high-dimensional statistical analysis.
Display omitted
•An acidic polysaccharide (RBAPS) was gained from fermented burdock residue mediated by R. nigricans.•The structural characteristics of RBAPS were clarified.•RBAPS promoted cell ...viability and phagocytosis of macrophages.•RBAPS induced the macrophages polarization and pro-inflammatory cytokines secretion.
An acidic heteropolysaccharide (RBAPS) with a relative molecular weight of 140.9 kDa was extracted from Rhizopus nigricans mediated burdock residue fermentation. Structural analysis indicated that RBAPS was mainly composed of Rha, Ara, Gal, GalA, GlcA, Glc and Xyl in a molar ratio of 14.5: 14.3: 30.1: 31.0: 5.5: 0.8: 3.8. The dominant backbone of RBAPS consisted of α-Rhap, α-GalAp, and α-Galp with the branched chains of β-Galp and α-Araf. In macrophage RAW264.7 cells, RBAPS promoted proliferation, enhanced phagocytosis, hindered apoptosis, and promoted cytokines (NO, IL-6, TNF-α, and IL-1β) secretion. RBAPS also promoted M1 macrophage transformation and induced the secretion of NO and IL-6 in differentiated macrophages. The findings suggested that RBAPS has the potential immunomodulatory and anti-tumor effects, giving it application prospect in the health and pharmaceutical fields.
Display omitted
•BFO can protect the liver to maintain mice cholesterol homeostasis.•BFO can balance inflammatory response to protect the blood vessels.•Treatment with BFO inhibited the proliferation ...of foam cells induced by ox-LDL.•BFO can reduce the risk of the occurrence and development of hypercholesterolemia.
Burdock fructooligosaccharide (BFO) is a type of linear inulin extracted from burdock root. In this study, we studied the effect of BFO in hypercholesterolemic mice model and found that BFO could decrease the total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and oxidized LDL (ox-LDL). BFO also reduce the hepatocyte damage, improve the antioxidant enzymes activity and regulate genes related to the cholesterol homeostasis in liver. Besides, we found that BFO protected the blood vessels by significantly balancing inflammatory cytokines and alleviating the up-regulation of TLR4/MyD88/NF-κB pathway in aorta. Furthermore, we established a foam cells model induced by ox-LDL in vitro and found that 500 and 1000 μg/mL BFO could effectively inhibit cell proliferation and reduce the production of intracellular lipids and inflammatory cytokines. Therefore, BFO can reduce the risk of hypercholesterolemia by maintaining cholesterol homeostasis, reducing vascular inflammation and alleviating macrophage foaming to prevent its further development into cardiovascular diseases.
Background
Ulcerative colitis, a typical subtype of inflammatory bowel disease, can cause many serious complications. Burdock fructooligosaccharide (BFO), a linear inulin with a purity of 99.439% and ...a molecular weight of 2345 Da, demonstrates anti‐inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties.
Methods
The Kunming mice were divided into two experimental models: a normal pretreatment model and a colitis experimental model. During the experimental treatment period, we assessed changes in weight and disease activity index (DAI), quantified the intestinal index, and determined myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity and reactive oxide species (ROS) levels in colitis mice. We also photographed colon morphology to investigate alterations in the integrity of the intestinal barrier function. Finally, we performed ELISA and qRT‐PCR to evaluate the anti‐inflammatory effect of BFO treatment on colitis mice.
Result
The long‐term oral administration of BFO alone exhibited protective effects by preventing disruption of the intestinal functional structure and increasing the colon index in mice. However, in a dextran sodium sulfate (DSS)‐induced colitis mouse model, BFO administration facilitated quick recovery of body weight and effectively reduced the DAI, especially in the BFO‐H group (500 mg/kg/day). BFO treatment maintained the integrity of the intestinal barrier by attenuating the crypt distortion and increasing the goblet cells count It restored the DSS‐induced colon shortening and reduced the symptoms of colitis. These effects may be attributed to the appropriate concentrations of BFO effectively inhibiting MPO activity, clearing excessive ROS, and relieving spleen abnormalitie. BFO also attenuated the overexpression and excessive secretion of inflammatory cytokines (TNF‐α, IL‐1β, IL‐6, and MCP‐1) induced by DSS, reduced intestinal inflammation, and consequently protected the intestinal barrier function.
Conclusion
BFO effectively alleviated the symptoms of DSS‐induced colitis by mediating anti‐inflammatory effects and protecting the intestinal barrier integrity, thereby potentially facilitating the utilization of safer and more efficacious polysaccharides for managing chronic inflammatory diseases.
Burdock fructooligosaccharide (BFO) attenuated the overexpression of inflammatory cytokines induced by dextran sodium sulfate (DSS). BFO treatment prevented the disruption of the intestinal functional structure. BFO can effectively reduce the severity of DSS‐induced colitis.
Geographic information, especially represented by points of interest (POIs), is critical for identifying locations and provides the basis for various location-based services. Currently, geospatial ...data of POI are available through some open map services (e.g., Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, etc.). However, the data supporting these services are either collected through the expensive commercial purchasing and company investment or gathered by the volunteered contribution of high uncertainty. With the rapid geospatial data growing on the Web, we propose an automatic approach of extracting geographic information for building up POI resources-based on the results obtained by the Web search engines to mitigate the negative effect from the traditional means. According to the approach, we first put the types of POIs extracted from Google Maps and the street names obtained from OpenStreetMap into the Google search engine, and then retrieve the potential addresses of POIs through parsing the search results. Second, the Google search engine is employed again with the retrieved addresses of POIs to extract the potential place names. Finally, the Google search engine is employed for a third time with learning both the place names and the corresponding addresses to verify whether the place names are correct. The contributed output of the work is a place-name data set. We respectively select 20 blocks in Chicago and Houston in USA to execute our approach for verifying the research contribution. In the experiments, we choose Google Map that is of high data quality as the reference and compare the results with those from OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia. The final results indicate that the proposed approach could effectively produce the place-name data sets on a par with Google Maps and outperform OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia.
With the rapid development of China’s industrialization, the air pollution is becoming more and more serious. It is vital for us to predict the air quality for determining the further prevention ...measures of avoiding the brought disasters. In this paper, we are going to propose an approach of predicting the air quality based on the multiple data features through fusing the multiple machine learning models. The approach takes the meteorological data and air quality data for the past six days as one batch of input (the whole data set is for 46 days) and employs a multi-model fusion to provide an improved 24-hour prediction of PM2.5 pollutant concentration all over Beijing. During the above process, two focal feature groups are composed. The first focal feature group contains the historical meteorological data, while the second group includes the statistical information, the date information and the polynomial variations. Besides the two groups, we complement one million more data items by employing the time sliding means. Among the supplementary data, we select the most critical 500 features with Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) model and send the features as the input to Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) and LightGBM models. Meanwhile, we screen the most critical 300 features with eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model and send them as the input to the three prediction models. Referring to each of the models, we respectively gain the optimal parameters through grid search methods and then fuse the models’ contribution with the linear weighting. The experiments indicate that the proposed approach based on the weighting fusion is better than that provided by a single modeling scheme, and the loss value is 0.4158 under the SMAPE index.
•An approach of predicting air quality with fusing the multiple machine learning models.•The machine learning solutions to model PM2.5 pollutant concentration distribution feature.•The time sliding means for developing one million more data items.•The fusion of multiple models under linear weighting strategy. The experiments indicate that the approach based on the weighting fusion is better than that provided by the single modeling scheme, and the loss value is 0.4158 under the SMAPE index.
Aims
To study the effects of mixed culture fermentation (MCF) of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens and Trichoderma longibrachiatum on its constituent strains and the application values for agricultural ...production, with the intention of developing efficient and environmentally friendly biocontrol agents.
Methods and results
In this study, an in vitro antifungal growth experiment showed that the inhibitory rate of the MCF broth on pathogenic fungi (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici, Botrytis cinerea, Trichothecium roseum and Colletotrichum gloeosporioides) was less than that of B. amyloliquefaciens culture fermentation (BCF). Moreover, the content and gene expression of lipopeptide antibiotics were also lower than that in the BCF group. However, the pot experiments based on irrigation with appropriately diluted fermentation broth showed that the biocontrol effect of MCF on tomato Fusarium wilt was significantly higher than that of TCF (T. longibrachiatum culture fermentation) and BCF, and was approximately 15.79% higher than that of the BTF group which made by mixing equivalent amounts of BCF and TCF. In MCF broth, two micro‐organisms antagonized and coexisted, and the growth of T. longibrachiatum was inhibited. Using transcriptomic analysis, we speculated that MCF can upregulate the expression of genes related to carbon and nitrogen metabolism, oxidation–reduction activity, sporulation, environmental information response and chemotaxis, and biosynthesis of secondary metabolites of B. amyloliquefaciens, which might enhance the nutrient substances metabolism and competitiveness, survival ability, colonization and adaptability to the environment to increase its biocontrol potential.
Conclusions
Mixed culture fermentation could promote the more reasonable and effective utilization of biocontrol micro‐organisms though improving biocontrol effect, enhancing strains survival and competitiveness, increasing beneficial metabolites, combined with resistance induction or synergistic control.
Significance and Impact of the Study
Using MCF agronomically utilizes biocontrol agents in an efficient way, which has a good potential for commercial implementation and could reduce production costs.
The involvement of jasmonic acid (JA) in the plant response to cadmium (Cd) stress has been addressed in some publications by application experiments or analysis of endogenous contents of JA. In this ...study, we comparatively investigated the response of tomato wild type (WT) and its JA-deficient mutant
spr2
to Cd stress aimed at clarifying the role of JA. One-month-old potted plants were exposed to CdCl
2
at final concentrations of 5, 25, and 50 mg kg
−1
in soil, respectively, for 15 days. The root and leaf Cd contents were dramatically increased, especially in the
spr2
plants, in a CdCl
2
dose-effect manner. In the Cd dose-dependent inhibitory effect on plant growth,
spr2
plants were more obvious than WT plants. This was also reflected by certain physiological and biochemical metabolisms. We analyzed photosynthesis-related parameters including total chlorophyll, actual efficiency of PS2, ratio of variable to maximum chlorophyll fluorescence, and net photosynthetic rate; relative water content, soluble sugar and proline contents, and starch accumulation; oxidative stress and antioxidative defense including malondialdehyde production, electrolyte leakage, H
2
O
2
levels, activities of superoxide dismutase, peroxidase, and catalase, and their isoform expression profiles. The Cd-induced changes in all these parameters supported the conclusion that endogenous JA deficiency enhanced tomato seedling sensitivity to Cd. This implies that JA positively regulates the tomato plant response to Cd stress.
Display omitted
•The rhizosphere soil was treated with mixed culture fermentation broth (MCF).•Irrigation with MCF prolonged the shelf life of kiwi fruits.•Irrigation with MCF improved the size and ...quality of kiwi fruits.•Analysis of metabolites in kiwi fruit by metabolomics.
The effects of pre-harvest treatment of the rhizosphere soil of kiwifruit trees with mixed culture fermentation broth (MCF) of Trichoderma pseudokoningii and Rhizopus nigricans on post-harvest shelf life and fruit quality were investigated. The soil was irrigated with MCF in April, June, September, and November every year for two consecutive years. This agronomic measure significantly improved the productive parameters and quality traits of kiwi fruit and increased the total phenol and flavonoid content and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and peroxidase (POD) activities to different degrees on days 0, 10, and 15 during storage at 25 ℃. Further, the protein bands at different storage periods increased or decreased with the gradient of fermentation broth. Metabolomics analysis of LC-MS/MS data revealed that treatment with MCF altered several metabolites, including phytohormone, amino acids, vitamins, and flavonoids. These findings highlight the importance of further investigating the utility of pre-harvest MCF treatment in prolonging the shelf life and improving the quality of fruit, which may promote more reasonable and effective utilization of biocontrol agents in the future.
Fusarium wilt, caused by Fusarium oxysporum, is a devastating soilborne fungal disease. Compared to traditional chemical pesticides, biological control has been attracting increasing attention ...recently, owing to its eco-friendly features. This study investigated the potential use of mixed culture fermentation of Rhizopus nigricans and Trichoderma pseudokoningii (MCF) to control Fusarium oxysporum f.sp.cucumerinum (FOC). At first, the tablet confrontation experiment using bio-control fungi and F. oxysporum showed that the suppression rate of R. nigricans and T. pseudokoningii were more than 60% higher than that of individual fermentations. Furthermore, the inhibitory effect of MCF on the pathogen was higher than that of single fermentation broth, both in vitro and in greenhouse experiment. At the molecular level, MCF had better control on the number of pathogens in the plant tissue and soil, as seen by the real-time PCR assay. In the pot experiment, increased activities of the defense enzymes involved in PAL, SOD, and POD indicated that mixed broth treatment could increase the plant-induced resistance. In the field experiment, after two-year treatment by the mixed broth, the relative control effect on cucumber Fusarium wilt was 76.5%. Through this study, we demonstrated that co-fermentation of R. nigricans and T. pseudokoningii has synergistic effect on the control of F. oxysporum, which may promote more reasonable and effective utilization of biocontrol agents in future.
•We used mixed culture fermentation (MCF) for biological control of Fusarium wilt.•MCF of Rhizopus nigricans and Trichoderma pseudokoningii was used.•The relative control effect on cucumber Fusarium wilt was 76.5%.•Co-fermentation of R. nigricans and T. pseudokoningii showed a synergistic effect.
PDF
