The methyl-CpG-binding protein MBD7 facilitates active DNA demethylation to limit DNA hyper-methylation and transcriptional gene silencing.

DNA methylation is a conserved epigenetic mark that plays important roles in plant and vertebrate development, genome stability, and gene regulation. Canonical Methyl-CpG-binding domain (MBD) proteins are important interpreters of DNA methylation that recognize methylated CG sites and recruit chromatin remodelers, histone deacetylases, and histone methyltransferases to repress transcription. Here, we show that Arabidopsis MBD7 and Increased DNA Methylation 3 (IDM3) are anti-silencing factors that prevent gene repression and DNA hypermethylation. MBD7 preferentially binds to highly methylated, CG-dense regions and physically associates with other anti-silencing factors, including the histone acetyltransferase IDM1 and the alpha-crystallin domain proteins IDM2 and IDM3. IDM1 and IDM2 were previously shown to facilitate active DNA demethylation by the 5-methylcytosine DNA glycosylase/lyase ROS1. Thus, MBD7 tethers the IDM proteins to methylated DNA, which enables the function of DNA demethylases that in turn limit DNA methylation and prevent transcriptional gene silencing.

Use of minimal working memory in visual comparison: An eye-tracking study.

In this study, we used a novel application of the previous paradigm provided by Pomplun to examine the eye movement strategies of using minimal working memory in visual comparison. This paradigm includes two tasks: one is a free comparison and the other is a single sequential comparison. In the free comparison, participants can freely view two horizontally presented stimuli until they judge whether the two stimuli are the same or not. In the single sequential comparison, participants can only view the left-side stimuli one time, and when their eyes cross the invisible boundary at the center of the screen, the left-side stimuli disappear and the right-side stimuli appear. Participants need to judge whether the right-side stimuli are the same as the disappeared left-side stimuli. Eye movement data showed significant differences between the single sequential comparison and free comparison tasks that suggests the use of minimal working memory in free comparison. Moreover, when the number of items was more than three, an average of 2.87 items would be processed in each view sequence. Participants also used the alternating left-right reference strategy that made the shortest scan path with the use of minimal working memory. The typical eye movement strategy in visual comparison and its theoretical significance were discussed.

Dynamic attentional bias for pictorial and textual food cues in the visual search paradigm.

Previous studies have found that individuals have an attentional bias for food cues, which may be related to the energy level or the type of stimulus (e.g., pictorial or textual food cues) of the food cues. However, the available evidence is inconsistent, and there is no consensus about how the type of stimulus and food energy modulate food-related attentional bias. Searching for food is one of the most important daily behaviors. In this study, a modified visual search paradigm was used to explore the attentional bias for food cues, and eye movements were recorded. Food cues consisted of both food words and food pictures with different energy levels (i.e., high- and low-calorie foods). The results showed that there was an attentional avoidance in the early stage but a later-stage attentional approach for all food cues in the pictorial condition. This was especially true for high-calorie food pictures. Participants showed a later-stage conflicting attentional bias for foods with different energy levels in the textual condition. They showed an attentional approach to high-calorie food words but an attentional avoidance of low-calorie food words. These data show that food-related attentional bias varied along with different time courses, which was also modulated by the type of stimulus and food energy. These findings regarding dynamic attentional bias could be explained using the Goal Conflict Model of eating behavior.

Advantages of graphical nutrition facts label: faster attention capture and improved healthiness judgement.

Consumers have to rely on the traditional back-of-package nutrition facts label (NFL) to obtain nutrition information in many countries. However, traditional NFLs have been criticised for their poor visualisation and low efficiency. This study redesigned back-of-package NFLs integrated with bar graphs (black or coloured) to visually indicate nutrient reference values (NRVs). Two eye movement studies were performed to evaluate the ergonomic advantages of the graphical NFLs. Our findings suggested that the newly designed NFLs led to faster and better healthiness evaluation performance. The newly designed graphical labels led to a shorter time to first fixation duration and offered a higher percentage of fixation time in the nutrient reference values region compared with that observed using traditional text labels. Nowadays, many chronic diseases are associated with poor eating habits, therefore, the importance of visualisation design to nudge healthier food choices could be paid more attention to by policymakers and food manufacturers.Practitioner summary: To improve the ergonomic design of traditional nutrition facts panel (NFL), this study assessed a newly designed graphical NFL. The results showed that graphical NFL captured consumers' attention faster and improved their healthiness judgement. Moreover, a brief nutrition education can improve consumers' attention and understanding of nutrition information.

The chromatin remodeler BRAHMA recruits HISTONE DEACETYLASE6 to regulate root growth inhibition in response to phosphate starvation in Arabidopsis.

Plasticity in root system architecture (RSA) allows plants to adapt to changing nutritional status in the soil. Phosphorus availability is a major determinant of crop yield, and RSA remodeling is critical to increasing the efficiency of phosphorus acquisition. Although substantial progress has been made in understanding the signaling mechanism driving phosphate starvation responses in plants, whether and how epigenetic regulatory mechanisms contribute is poorly understood. Here, we report that the Switch defective/sucrose non-fermentable (SWI/SNF) ATPase BRAHMA (BRM) is involved in the local response to phosphate (Pi) starvation. The loss of BRM function induces iron (Fe) accumulation through increased LOW PHOSPHATE ROOT1 (LPR1) and LPR2 expression, reducing primary root length under Pi deficiency. We also demonstrate that BRM recruits the histone deacetylase (HDA) complex HDA6-HDC1 to facilitate histone H3 deacetylation at LPR loci, thereby negatively regulating local Pi deficiency responses. BRM is degraded under Pi deficiency conditions through the 26 S proteasome pathway, leading to increased histone H3 acetylation at the LPR loci. Collectively, our data suggest that the chromatin remodeler BRM, in concert with HDA6, negatively regulates Fe-dependent local Pi starvation responses by transcriptionally repressing the RSA-related genes LPR1 and LPR2 in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Nutrition label processing in the past 10 years: Contributions from eye tracking approach.

Healthy eating plays a critical role in preventing diet-related chronic diseases. To promote healthy eating, nutrition labels have been mandated to certain foods in many countries. To test how different designs of nutrition labels affect consumer behavior, eye tracking technique has been increasingly used to overcome the limitations of subjective report which are susceptible to different biases and a poor indicator of nutrition label use in reality. In this review, we reviewed 45 eye-tracking studies on nutrition label processing. Besides a summary of eye tracking methodology, we found three emerged topics from these studies: attention capture, nutrition label comprehension and food choice. Overall, updated designs of nutrition labels improve attention capture and nutrition label comprehension, but it does not necessarily lead to healthier food choices. The discrepancy between attention capture and food choice also indicate potential limitation in promoting healthy food choice via the indirect attention route (exposure - attention - nutrition label processing - food choice). Instead, actual food choice may be a consequence of a direct heuristic route and modulated by person-, product- and context-related factors. These findings can not only guide future studies, but also have implications on making nutrition label policy and improving human health in eastern developing countries.

Do visual word segmentation cues improve reading performance in Chinese reading？.

It is controversial whether providing visual word segmentation cues can improve Chinese reading performance. This study investigated this topic by examining how visual word segmentation cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influence global sentence reading and local word recognition during reading Chinese text in three experiments. The results showed that interword spacing could facilitate local word recognition but could not increase reading speed. In contrast, grey highlighting and red colour could improve neither local word recognition nor global sentence reading performance. Instead, these cues increased the number of fixations and saccades, resulting in slower reading speed. These results suggest that even red colour is not a practically visual cue for Chinese word segmentation and the corresponding mechanisms were discussed. Practitioner Summary: We studied how visual cues such as grey highlighting, red colour and interword spacing influenced Chinese reading performance. Our data showed that even the red colour was not an efficient cue for Chinese word segmentation. The corresponding mechanisms and future direction were discussed regarding how to improve Chinese reading performance.

MultiSite Gateway-Compatible Cell Type-Specific Gene-Inducible System for Plants.

A powerful method to study gene function is expression or overexpression in an inducible, cell type-specific system followed by observation of consequent phenotypic changes and visualization of linked reporters in the target tissue. Multiple inducible gene overexpression systems have been developed for plants, but very few of these combine plant selection markers, control of expression domains, access to multiple promoters and protein fusion reporters, chemical induction, and high-throughput cloning capabilities. Here, we introduce a MultiSite Gateway-compatible inducible system for Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) plants that provides the capability to generate such constructs in a single cloning step. The system is based on the tightly controlled, estrogen-inducible XVE system. We demonstrate that the transformants generated with this system exhibit the expected cell type-specific expression, similar to what is observed with constitutively expressed native promoters. With this new system, cloning of inducible constructs is no longer limited to a few special cases but can be used as a standard approach when gene function is studied. In addition, we present a set of entry clones consisting of histochemical and fluorescent reporter variants designed for gene and promoter expression studies.

The Arabidopsis WRINKLED1 transcription factor affects auxin homeostasis in roots.

WRINKLED1 (WRI1) is a key transcriptional regulator of fatty acid biosynthesis genes in diverse oil-containing tissues. Loss of function of Arabidopsis WRI1 leads to a reduction in the expression of genes for fatty acid biosynthesis and glycolysis, and concomitant strong reduction of seed oil content. The wri1-1 loss-of-function mutant shows reduced primary root growth and decreased acidification of the growth medium. The content of a conjugated form of the plant growth hormone auxin, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA)-Asp, was higher in wri1-1 plants compared with the wild-type. GH3.3, a gene encoding an enzyme involved in auxin degradation, displayed higher expression in the wri1-1 mutant. EMSAs demonstrated that AtWRI1 bound to the promoter of GH3.3. Specific AtWRI1-binding motifs were identified in the promoter of GH3.3. In addition, wri1-1 displayed decreased auxin transport. Expression of some PIN genes, which encode IAA carrier proteins, was reduced in wri1-1 plants as well. Correspondingly, AtWRI1 bound to the promoter regions of some PIN genes. It is well known that auxin exerts its maximum effects at a specific, optimal concentration in roots requiring a finely balanced auxin homeostasis. This process appears to be disrupted when the expression of WRI1 and in turn a subset of its target genes are misregulated, highlighting a role for WRI1 in root auxin homeostasis.

Cell wall targeted in planta iron accumulation enhances biomass conversion and seed iron concentration in Arabidopsis and rice.

Conversion of nongrain biomass into liquid fuel is a sustainable approach to energy demands as global population increases. Previously, we showed that iron can act as a catalyst to enhance the degradation of lignocellulosic biomass for biofuel production. However, direct addition of iron catalysts to biomass pretreatment is diffusion-limited, would increase the cost and complexity of biorefinery unit operations and may have deleterious environmental impacts. Here, we show a new strategy for in planta accumulation of iron throughout the volume of the cell wall where iron acts as a catalyst in the deconstruction of lignocellulosic biomass. We engineered CBM-IBP fusion polypeptides composed of a carbohydrate-binding module family 11 (CBM11) and an iron-binding peptide (IBP) for secretion into Arabidopsis and rice cell walls. CBM-IBP transformed Arabidopsis and rice plants show significant increases in iron accumulation and biomass conversion compared to respective controls. Further, CBM-IBP rice shows a 35% increase in seed iron concentration and a 40% increase in seed yield in greenhouse experiments. CBM-IBP rice potentially could be used to address iron deficiency, the most common and widespread nutritional disorder according to the World Health Organization.

Sterols and sphingolipids differentially function in trafficking of the Arabidopsis ABCB19 auxin transporter.

The Arabidopsis ATP-binding cassette B19 (ABCB19, P-glycoprotein19) transporter functions coordinately with ABCB1 and PIN1 to motivate long-distance transport of the phytohormone auxin from the shoot to root apex. ABCB19 exhibits a predominantly apolar plasma membrane (PM) localization and stabilizes PIN1 when the two proteins co-occur. Biochemical evidence associates ABCB19 and PIN1 with sterol- and sphingolipid-enriched PM fractions. Mutants deficient in structural sterols and sphingolipids exhibit similarity to abcb19 mutants. Sphingolipid-defective tsc10a mutants and, to a lesser extent, sterol-deficient cvp1 mutants phenocopy abcb19 mutants. Live imaging studies show that sterols function in trafficking of ABCB19 from the trans-Golgi network to the PM. Pharmacological or genetic sphingolipid depletion has an even greater impact on ABCB19 PM targeting and interferes with ABCB19 trafficking from the Golgi. Our results also show that sphingolipids function in trafficking associated with compartments marked by the VTI12 syntaxin, and that ABCB19 mediates PIN1 stability in sphingolipid-containing membranes. The TWD1/FKBP42 co-chaperone immunophilin is required for exit of ABCB19 from the ER, but ABCB19 interactions with sterols, sphingolipids and PIN1 are spatially distinct from FKBP42 activity at the ER. The accessibility of this system to direct live imaging and biochemical analysis makes it ideal for the modeling and analysis of sterol and sphingolipid regulation of ABCB/P-glycoprotein transporters.

Time-restricted eating improves health because of energy deficit and circadian rhythm: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Time-restricted eating (TRE) is an effective way to lose weight and improve metabolic health in animals. Yet whether and how these benefits apply to humans is unclear. This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the effect of TRE in people with overweight and obesity statuses. The results showed that TRE led to modest weight loss, lower waist circumference and energy deficits. TRE also improved body mass index, fat mass, lean body mass, systolic blood pressure, fasting glucose levels, fasting insulin levels, and HbA1c%. Subgroup analysis demonstrated more health improvements in the TRE group than the control group under the ad libitum intake condition than in the energy-prescribed condition. Eating time-of-day advantages were only seen when there was considerable energy reduction in the TRE group than the control group (ad libitum condition), implying that the benefits of TRE were primarily due to energy deficit, followed by alignment with eating time of day.

Food word processing in Chinese reading: A study of restrained eaters.

Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. Eye movements were recorded when they performed a naturalistic sentence-reading task. The results of later-stage analyses showed that food words were fixated on for less time than non-food words, which indicated a superiority of foveal food-word processing for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. The results of early-stage analyses showed that restrained eaters spent more time on pre-target regions in the food-word valid preview conditions, which indicated a parafoveal food-word processing superiority for restrained eaters (i.e. the parafoveal-on-foveal effect). The superiority of foveal food-word processing provides new insights into explaining food-related attentional bias in general groups. Additionally, the enhanced food-word attentional bias in parafoveal processing for restrained eaters illustrates the importance of individual characteristics in studying word recognition.

Segmentation of Spoken Overlapping Ambiguity Strings in Chinese: An Eye-Tracking Study.

PURPOSE: Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or independently. METHOD: In this study, participants listened to a four-character spoken OAS (ABCD) and were presented with a visual display composed of a semantic associate of the "middle word" (BC; Experiments 1 and 2) or the "left word" (AB; Experiment 3) and two distractors. In Experiment 1, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be higher than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 2, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be either higher or lower than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 3, participants listened to either spoken OASs (ABCD) or spoken unambiguous strings (ABEF). RESULTS: In Experiment 1, we observed a significant semantic competition effect; that is, more fixations fell on the semantic competitors than on distractors, suggesting that the semantic information of the middle words in the spoken OASs was activated. In Experiment 2, the semantic competition effect was only observed in the high-frequency condition and was absent in the low-frequency condition. In Experiment 3, the results showed significant semantic competition effects for the left words under both conditions, and the observed effect was similar between the ambiguity condition and the control condition. CONCLUSIONS: These findings show that multiple words in spoken OASs are all activated and the activation level is modulated by word frequency. In addition, multiple words in the spoken OASs may be processed independently during spoken comprehension.

Pedestrians' road-crossing behavior towards eHMI-equipped autonomous vehicles driving in segregated and mixed traffic conditions.

Pedestrians' road-crossing behavior can be influenced by eHMIs (external Human-Machine Interfaces) on autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this research, we developed a novel eHMI concept that aimed to support pedestrians' risk evaluation by displaying predicted real-time risk levels. In a virtual reality environment, we measured pedestrians' road-crossing behavior when they encountered AVs with this eHMI and manual-driven vehicles (MVs) in the same lane. Results showed that pedestrians exhibited typical crossing behaviors based on gap size for both vehicle types. In segregated traffic conditions, compared to MVs, eHMI-equipped AVs made pedestrians more sensitive to the changes in gap size by rejecting more small gaps and accepting more large gaps. Pedestrians also walked faster and kept larger safety margins for smaller gaps. Similar results were observed for AVs in mixed traffic conditions. However, in mixed traffic conditions, pedestrians faced more challenges when interacting with MVs as they tended to accept smaller gaps, walk more slowly, and maintain smaller safety margins. These findings indicate that dynamic risk information could be conducive to pedestrians' road-crossing behavior, but the use of eHMIs on AVs might disrupt pedestrians' interactions with MVs in complex traffic conditions. This potential risk shift among vehicles also poses the question of whether AVs should use segregated lanes to reduce their indirect impacts on pedestrian-MV interactions.

The database of eye-movement measures on words in Chinese reading.

Eye movements are one of the most fundamental behaviors during reading. A growing number of Chinese reading studies have used eye-tracking techniques in the last two decades. The accumulated data provide a rich resource that can reflect the complex cognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese reading. This article reports a database of eye-movement measures of words during Chinese sentence reading. The database contains nine eye-movement measures of 8,551 Chinese words obtained from 1,718 participants across 57 Chinese sentence reading experiments. All data were collected in the same experimental environment and from homogenous participants, using the same protocols and parameters. This database enables researchers to test their theoretical or computational hypotheses concerning Chinese reading efficiently using a large number of words. The database can also indicate the processing difficulty of Chinese words during text reading, thus providing a way to control or manipulate the difficulty level of Chinese texts.

Repetition causes confusion: Insights to word segmentation during Chinese reading.

Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters repeated characters). In the present study, we examined how Chinese readers process words when there are repeated characters. In 3 experiments, we compared how Chinese readers process 4-character strings including 2 repeated characters (e.g. , pinyin: xíngdòng dòngji, meaning behavioral motivation) with a control condition where none of the characters repeat (e.g. , pinyin: xíngdòng yùwàng, meaning behavioral desire). In Experiment 1, the 4-character strings were presented for 40 ms and participants were asked to report as many characters as possible. Participants reported the second and third characters less accurately in the repeated condition than the control condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we embedded 2 different types of 4-character strings, compound Chinese characters and simple Chinese characters, into the same sentence frames, and asked participants to read these sentences normally. Gaze duration and total time on the second word were significantly longer in the repeated condition. These results suggest that the repeated characters increased the difficulty of word processing. Moreover, the results are consistent with the predictions of serial models, which assumes that words are processed serially in reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Development and Validity of a General Nutrition Knowledge Questionnaire (GNKQ) for Chinese Adults.

Nutrition knowledge refers to understanding concepts and processes related to nutrition and health, proven to be an essential determinant of healthy eating. However, partially due to the lack of nutrition knowledge and unhealthy eating patterns, more and more Chinese people face overweight, obesity, and a high risk of suffering from various chronic diseases. This study aimed to develop a general nutritional knowledge questionnaire (GNKQ) in a Chinese context to diagnose and improve nutrition knowledge education for Chinese people. The newly adapted questionnaire was based on the Turkey version of GNKQ, and absorbed dietary recommendations in a Chinese context. It was first validated by four nutrition experts, then tested by eleven volunteers (one public nutritionist, one preventive medicine graduate student, and nine psychology graduate students). Finally, the questionnaire was tested by 278 participants, including 175 adults, to determine internal consistency, content validity, and convergent validity. Moreover, the construct validity was evaluated by comparing the differences between 50 students in nutrition-related majors and 53 students in nutrition-unrelated majors. The final Chinese version of GNKQ kept 32 questions with 68 items after deleting some questions based on item difficulty and discrimination. The data showed that the overall internal consistency coefficient was 0.885, and the test-retest reliability was 0.769, p < 0.001. Students majoring in nutrition had larger scores than in nutrition-unrelated majors. The convergent validity for each demographic variable was consistent with previous studies, such as larger nutrition knowledge scores for females and those with a higher education. Therefore, the revised Chinese version of GNKQ showed good reliability and validity, indicating that it could be an effective tool to assess the nutrition knowledge of Chinese adults.

Transparent Windows on Food Packaging Do Not Always Capture Attention and Increase Purchase Intention.

Transparent windows on food packaging can effectively highlight the actual food inside. The present study examined whether food packaging with transparent windows (relative to packaging with food- and non-food graphic windows in the same position and of the same size) has more advantages in capturing consumer attention and determining consumers' willingness to purchase. In this study, college students were asked to evaluate prepackaged foods presented on a computer screen, and their eye movements were recorded. The results showed salience effects for both packaging with transparent and food-graphic windows, which were also regulated by food category. Both transparent and graphic packaging gained more viewing time than the non-food graphic baseline condition for all the three selected products (i.e., nuts, preserved fruits, and instant cereals). However, no significant difference was found between transparent and graphic window conditions. For preserved fruits, time to first fixations was shorter in transparent packaging than other conditions. For nuts, the willingness to purchase was higher in both transparent and graphic conditions than the baseline condition, while the packaging attractiveness played a key role in mediating consumers' willingness to purchase. The implications for stakeholders and future research directions are discussed.

Pedestrian estimation of their crossing time on multi-lane roads.

Estimation of one's own crossing time is an important process in making road-crossing decisions. This study evaluated the pedestrian's (esp. the elderly) ability to estimate crossing time in a field experiment. The estimated crossing time was measured by an interval production method (participants produced an interval to represent their estimated crossing time) and an imagined crossing method. The results showed that while young pedestrians generally had an accurate estimation of their crossing time, old pedestrians consistently underestimated the crossing time in both methods, especially at a wider road. What's worse, even fast walking cannot compensate for the large underestimation. Further analysis showed that although old pedestrians had the declined motor imagery ability and the worse general timing accuracy, none of them can account for the inaccuracy of estimation. These findings suggest that underestimation of crossing time may be one of the important reasons for the acknowledged risky road crossing decision-making in old pedestrians. It also calls for studies on assistive roadway designs and intervention programs targeting old pedestrians.