Pathological Impact on the Phyllosphere Microbiota of Artemisia argyi by Haze.

The pathological impact of haze upon the phyllosphere microbiota awaits investigation. A moderate degree of haze environment and a clean control were selected in Chengdu, China. Artemisia argyi, a ubiquitously distributed and extensively applied Chinese herb, was also chosen for experiment. Total genome DNA was extracted from leaf samples, and for metagenome sequencing, an Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform was applied. The results showed that the gene numbers of phyllosphere microbiota derived from haze leaves were lower than those of the clean control. The phyllosphere microbiota derived from both haze and clean groups shared the same top ten phyla; the abundances of Proteobacteria, Actinomycetes and Anorthococcuso of the haze group were substantially increased, while Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes decreased. At the genus level, the abundances of Nocardia, Paracoccus, Marmoricola and Knoelia from haze leaves were markedly increased, while the yeasts were statistically decreased. KEGG retrieval demonstrated that the functional genes were most annotated to metabolism. An interesting find of this work is that the phyllosphere microbiota responsible for the synthesis of primary and secondary metabolites in A. argyi were significantly increased under a haze environment. Relatively enriched genes annotated by eggNOG belong to replication, recombination and repair, and genes classified into the glycoside hydrolase and glycosyltransferase enzymes were significantly increased. In summary, we found that both structure and function of phyllosphere microbiota are globally impacted by haze, while primary and secondary metabolites responsible for haze tolerance were considerably increased. These results suggest an adaptive strategy of plants for tolerating and confronting haze damage.

[Establishing the norm of cognitive adaptive test/clinical linguistic and auditory milestone scale in the children from 4 to 36 months of age in Shanghai, China].

OBJECTIVE: To meet the need for instrument assessing the cognitive abilities of infants and young children as well as discriminating between global developmental delay and particular deficits in either language or problem-solving skills, we intended to introduce Cognitive Adaptive Test/Clinical Linguistic and Auditory Milestone Scale (CAT/CLAMS) into China. METHODS: CAT/CLAMS were administered to 1604 normative children aged 4-36 months (in 16 age groups, about 100 children per age group) in Shanghai during the period from December 2003 to June 2004. In the meantime, Gesell Developmental Diagnosis was applied for 100 of these children, respectively aged 4, 6, 12, 18 and 30 months (20 children per age group). Interclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were adopted to analyze data in terms of inter-rater reliability and re-test reliability of the scales of CAT/CLAMS. Cronbach alpha coefficients were calculated to assess the inter consistency of the scales. Pearson correlation coefficients(r) were adopted to analyze the concurrent validity of the scales. The normative percentile graphs of CAT/CLAMS in the children from 4 to 36 Months of age in Shanghai, China were adopted. RESULTS: Administrations of the CAT/CLAMS for each subject usually took 10-20 minutes. Individual scores (CLAMS, CAT, and CAT/CLAMS) increased with ages (Pearson correlation coefficients were 0.96, 0.98 and 0.98, respectively, P < 0.01 for all). ICCs (intraclass correlation coefficient) in terms of individual scores for the inter-rater reliability test and the re-test reliability test were respectively > or = 0.96 (P < 0.01) and > or = 0.95 (P < 0.01), all the Cronbach alpha coefficients were > or = 0.98; in 100 children of the 5 age groups, there was significantly positive correlation between CAT/CLAMS and Gesell Developmental Diagnosis in terms of language skill DQ and adaptive skill DQ, and Full Scale DQ (r = 0.517, 0.703, 0.613, respectively, P < 0.01 for all). Moreover, this significant positive correlation was observed in each of the 5 age groups (r = 0.455-0.827, P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: CAT/CLAMS is suitable for discriminating between global developmental delay and particular deficits in either language or problem-solving skills. It is a quick, reliable, and valid instrument, with refined and quantified results. It is a good tool for developmental surveillance and screening of infants and young children.