Organic mulch can suppress litchi downy blight through modification of soil microbial community structure and functional potentials.

BACKGROUND: Organic mulch is an important management practice in agricultural production to improve soil quality, control crop pests and diseases and increase the biodiversity of soil microecosystem. However, the information about soil microbial diversity and composition in litchi plantation response to organic mulch and its attribution to litchi downy blight severity was limited. This study aimed to investigate the effect of organic mulch on litchi downy blight, and evaluate the biodiversity and antimicrobial potential of soil microbial community of litchi plantation soils under organic mulch. RESULTS: Organic mulch could significantly suppress the disease incidence in the litchi plantation, and with a reduction of 37.74% to 85.66%. As a result of high-throughput 16S rRNA and ITS rDNA gene illumine sequencing, significantly higher bacterial and fungal community diversity indexes were found in organic mulch soils, the relative abundance of norank f norank o Vicinamibacterales, norank f Vicinamibacteraceae, norank f Xanthobacteraceae, Unclassified c sordariomycetes, Aspergillus and Thermomyces were significant more than that in control soils. Isolation and analysis of antagonistic microorganism showed that 29 antagonistic bacteria strains and 37 antagonistic fungi strains were unique for mulching soils. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, we believe that organic mulch has a positive regulatory effect on the litchi downy blight and the soil microbial communities, and so, is more suitable for litchi plantation.

The correlation between neck circumference and risk factors in patients with hypertension: What matters.

It is necessary to identify the relationship between neck circumference and cardiovascular risk factors in patients with hypertension.Patients with hypertension treated in our hospital were included. The height, weight, neck circumference, waist circumference, fasting blood glucose, 2 h blood glucose (2hPPG), density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) were analyzed and compared.A total of 2860 patients with hypertension were included. There were significant differences between male and female patients in the neck circumference, waist circumference, fasting blood glucose, Total cholesterol, triacylglycerol, HDL-C, LDL-C, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, dyslipidemia, drinking and smoking (all P < .05); the neck circumference was positively correlated with waist circumference, body mass index (BMI), fasting blood glucose, 2hPPG, HbA1c, triacylglycerol and LDL-C (all P < .05), and negatively correlated with HDL-C (P = .014); as the neck circumference increases, the risk of hypertension, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, abdominal obesity, and dyslipidemia increases accordingly (all P < .05); the area under curve (AUC) was 0.827 and 0.812, and the neck circumference of 37.8 and 33.9 cm was the best cut-off point for male and female patients, respectively.Neck circumference is closely related to cardiovascular risk factors in patients with hypertension, which should be promoted in the screening of cardiovascular diseases.