Marine heatwaves are not a dominant driver of change in demersal fishes.

Marine heatwaves have been linked to negative ecological effects in recent decades1,2. If marine heatwaves regularly induce community reorganization and biomass collapses in fishes, the consequences could be catastrophic for ecosystems, fisheries and human communities3,4. However, the extent to which marine heatwaves have negative impacts on fish biomass or community composition, or even whether their effects can be distinguished from natural and sampling variability, remains unclear. We investigated the effects of 248 sea-bottom heatwaves from 1993 to 2019 on marine fishes by analysing 82,322 hauls (samples) from long-term scientific surveys of continental shelf ecosystems in North America and Europe spanning the subtropics to the Arctic. Here we show that the effects of marine heatwaves on fish biomass were often minimal and could not be distinguished from natural and sampling variability. Furthermore, marine heatwaves were not consistently associated with tropicalization (gain of warm-affiliated species) or deborealization (loss of cold-affiliated species) in these ecosystems. Although steep declines in biomass occasionally occurred after marine heatwaves, these were the exception, not the rule. Against the highly variable backdrop of ocean ecosystems, marine heatwaves have not driven biomass change or community turnover in fish communities that support many of the world's largest and most productive fisheries.

Four ways blue foods can help achieve food system ambitions across nations.

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich1, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats2, and contribute to the health3, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities4. The Blue Food Assessment recently evaluated nutritional, environmental, economic and justice dimensions of blue foods globally. Here we integrate these findings and translate them into four policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. To account for how context-specific environmental, socio-economic and cultural aspects affect this contribution, we assess the relevance of each policy objective for individual countries, and examine associated co-benefits and trade-offs at national and international scales. We find that in many African and South American nations, facilitating consumption of culturally relevant blue food, especially among nutritionally vulnerable population segments, could address vitamin B12 and omega-3 deficiencies. Meanwhile, in many global North nations, cardiovascular disease rates and large greenhouse gas footprints from ruminant meat intake could be lowered through moderate consumption of seafood with low environmental impact. The analytical framework we provide also identifies countries with high future risk, for whom climate adaptation of blue food systems will be particularly important. Overall the framework helps decision makers to assess the blue food policy objectives most relevant to their geographies, and to compare and contrast the benefits and trade-offs associated with pursuing these objectives.

Enabling conditions for an equitable and sustainable blue economy.

The future of the global ocean economy is currently envisioned as advancing towards a 'blue economy'-socially equitable, environmentally sustainable and economically viable ocean industries1,2. However, tensions exist within sustainable development approaches, arising from differing perspectives framed around natural capital or social equity. Here we show that there are stark differences in outlook on the capacity for establishing a blue economy, and on its potential outcomes, when social conditions and governance capacity-not just resource availability-are considered, and we highlight limits to establishing multiple overlapping industries. This is reflected by an analysis using a fuzzy logic model to integrate indicators from multiple disciplines and to evaluate their current capacity to contribute to establishing equitable, sustainable and viable ocean sectors consistent with a blue economy approach. We find that the key differences in the capacity of regions to achieve a blue economy are not due to available natural resources, but include factors such as national stability, corruption and infrastructure, which can be improved through targeted investments and cross-scale cooperation. Knowledge gaps can be addressed by integrating historical natural and social science information on the drivers and outcomes of resource use and management, thus identifying equitable pathways to establishing or transforming ocean sectors1,3,4. Our results suggest that policymakers must engage researchers and stakeholders to promote evidence-based, collaborative planning that ensures that sectors are chosen carefully, that local benefits are prioritized, and that the blue economy delivers on its social, environmental and economic goals.

Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate.

The ocean contains unique biodiversity, provides valuable food resources and is a major sink for anthropogenic carbon. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an effective tool for restoring ocean biodiversity and ecosystem services1,2, but at present only 2.7% of the ocean is highly protected3. This low level of ocean protection is due largely to conflicts with fisheries and other extractive uses. To address this issue, here we developed a conservation planning framework to prioritize highly protected MPAs in places that would result in multiple benefits today and in the future. We find that a substantial increase in ocean protection could have triple benefits, by protecting biodiversity, boosting the yield of fisheries and securing marine carbon stocks that are at risk from human activities. Our results show that most coastal nations contain priority areas that can contribute substantially to achieving these three objectives of biodiversity protection, food provision and carbon storage. A globally coordinated effort could be nearly twice as efficient as uncoordinated, national-level conservation planning. Our flexible prioritization framework could help to inform both national marine spatial plans4 and global targets for marine conservation, food security and climate action.

Identifying SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses in Malayan pangolins.

The ongoing outbreak of viral pneumonia in China and across the world is associated with a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-21. This outbreak has been tentatively associated with a seafood market in Wuhan, China, where the sale of wild animals may be the source of zoonotic infection2. Although bats are probable reservoir hosts for SARS-CoV-2, the identity of any intermediate host that may have facilitated transfer to humans is unknown. Here we report the identification of SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses in Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) seized in anti-smuggling operations in southern China. Metagenomic sequencing identified pangolin-associated coronaviruses that belong to two sub-lineages of SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses, including one that exhibits strong similarity in the receptor-binding domain to SARS-CoV-2. The discovery of multiple lineages of pangolin coronavirus and their similarity to SARS-CoV-2 suggests that pangolins should be considered as possible hosts in the emergence of new coronaviruses and should be removed from wet markets to prevent zoonotic transmission.

Accurate and interpretable gene expression imputation on scRNA-seq data using IGSimpute.

Single-cell ribonucleic acid sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables the quantification of gene expression at the transcriptomic level with single-cell resolution, enhancing our understanding of cellular heterogeneity. However, the excessive missing values present in scRNA-seq data hinder downstream analysis. While numerous imputation methods have been proposed to recover scRNA-seq data, high imputation performance often comes with low or no interpretability. Here, we present IGSimpute, an accurate and interpretable imputation method for recovering missing values in scRNA-seq data with an interpretable instance-wise gene selection layer (GSL). IGSimpute outperforms 12 other state-of-the-art imputation methods on 13 out of 17 datasets from different scRNA-seq technologies with the lowest mean squared error as the chosen benchmark metric. We demonstrate that IGSimpute can give unbiased estimates of the missing values compared to other methods, regardless of whether the average gene expression values are small or large. Clustering results of imputed profiles show that IGSimpute offers statistically significant improvement over other imputation methods. By taking the heart-and-aorta and the limb muscle tissues as examples, we show that IGSimpute can also denoise gene expression profiles by removing outlier entries with unexpectedly high expression values via the instance-wise GSL. We also show that genes selected by the instance-wise GSL could indicate the age of B cells from bladder fat tissue of the Tabula Muris Senis atlas. IGSimpute can impute one million cells using 64 min, and thus applicable to large datasets.

dynDeepDRIM: a dynamic deep learning model to infer direct regulatory interactions using time-course single-cell gene expression data.

Time-course single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data have been widely used to explore dynamic changes in gene expression of transcription factors (TFs) and their target genes. This information is useful to reconstruct cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks (GRNs). However, the existing tools are commonly designed to analyze either time-course bulk gene expression data or static scRNA-seq data via pseudo-time cell ordering. A few methods successfully utilize the information from multiple time points while also considering the characteristics of scRNA-seq data. We proposed dynDeepDRIM, a novel deep learning model to reconstruct GRNs using time-course scRNA-seq data. It represents the joint expression of a gene pair as an image and utilizes the image of the target TF-gene pair and the ones of the potential neighbors to reconstruct GRNs from time-course scRNA-seq data. dynDeepDRIM can effectively remove the transitive TF-gene interactions by considering neighborhood context and model the gene expression dynamics using high-dimensional tensors. We compared dynDeepDRIM with six GRN reconstruction methods on both simulation and four real time-course scRNA-seq data. dynDeepDRIM achieved substantially better performance than the other methods in inferring TF-gene interactions and eliminated the false positives effectively. We also applied dynDeepDRIM to annotate gene functions and found it achieved evidently better performance than the other tools due to considering the neighbor genes.

Large potential impacts of marine heatwaves on ecosystem functioning.

Ocean warming is driving significant changes in the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems, shifting species' biogeography and phenology, changing body size and biomass and altering the trophodynamics of the system. Particularly, extreme temperature events such as marine heatwaves (MHWs) have been increasing in intensity, duration and frequency. MHWs are causing large-scale impacts on marine ecosystems, such as coral bleaching, mass mortality of seagrass meadows and declines in fish stocks and other marine organisms in recent decades. In this study, we developed and applied a dynamic version of the EcoTroph trophodynamic modelling approach to study the cascading effects of individual MHW on marine ecosystem functioning. We simulated theoretical user-controlled ecosystems and explored the consequences of various assumptions of marine species mortality along the food web, associated with different MHW intensities. We show that an MHW can lead to a significant biomass reduction of all consumers, with the severity of the declines being dependent on species trophic levels (TLs) and biomes, in addition to the characteristics of MHWs. Biomass of higher TLs declines more than lower TLs under an MHW, leading to changes in ecosystem structure. While tropical ecosystems are projected to be sensitive to low-intensity MHWs, polar and temperate ecosystems are expected to be impacted by more intense MHWs. The estimated time to recover from MHW impacts is twice as long for polar ecosystems and one-third longer for temperate biomes compared with tropical biomes. This study highlights the importance of considering extreme weather events in assessing the effects of climate change on the structures and functions of marine ecosystems.

Climate change alters social-ecological trade-offs in achieving ocean futures' targets.

The effects of climate change on marine ecosystems are causing cascading impacts on livelihood, food security, and culture through fisheries. Such impacts interact and exacerbate the effects of overfishing on marine social-ecological systems, complicating the rebuilding of ecosystems to achieve desirable and sustainable ocean futures. Developing effective pathways for ecosystem rebuilding requires consideration of the co-benefits and trade-offs between ecological and social dimensions and between fishing sectors. However, the effects of intensifying climate change on such co-benefits or trade-offs are yet to be well understood, particularly in regions where ecosystem rebuilding is urgently needed. We applied a numerical optimization routine to define the scope for improvement toward the Pareto-frontier for ecological robustness and economic benefits of the northern South China Sea (NSCS) and the East China Sea (ECS) ecosystems. These two ecosystems were used to represent over-exploited low- and mid-latitude systems, respectively, and the optimization aimed to improve their status through fisheries management. We find that the ECS ecosystem has the possibility of increasing the economic benefits generated by the fisheries it supports under climate change by 2050 while increasing the uncertainty of achieving biodiversity objectives. Nevertheless, climate change is projected to reduce the scope to restore ecosystem structures and the potential economic benefits in the NSCS ecosystem. This study highlights the contrasting impacts of climate change on the co-benefits/trade-offs in ecosystem rebuilding and the benefits obtainable by different fishing sectors even in neighboring ecosystems. We conclude that consideration at the nexus of climate-biodiversity-fisheries is a key to developing effective ecosystem rebuilding plan.

The Provision and Perceptions of Telemedicine Services Among Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners During COVID-19: A Cross-Sectional Study in Hong Kong, China.

Objectives: Telemedicine has been widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other health care professionals, Chinese medicine practitioners (CMPs) face practical challenges in providing telemedicine consultations. This study aims to explore CMPs' experience and perceptions of telemedicine service provision before and during the pandemic. Methods: A territory-wide cross-sectional online survey was conducted in Hong Kong between April and May 2022. A structured questionnaire with open-ended questions was used to investigate the provision of and perception on telemedicine service, as well as usability of telemedicine among CMPs. Results: A total of 195 CMPs participated the survey. Before COVID-19, 42% (81/195) had been providing telemedicine services, and the proportion doubled during COVID-19. CMPs in the private sector are the main providers. Mobile apps including WhatsApp, WeChat, and Zoom were commonly used for consultations (75%, 120/161). Barriers in providing telemedicine included inability of conducting physical examination on patients (69%, 134/195), legal and ethical concerns over medical negligence (61%, 118/195), and patients' incompetence on e-literacy (50%, 98/195). Respondents urged professional and regulatory bodies to provide an explicit clinical guideline that demonstrate best practice in traditional Chinese medicine telemedicine, and to clarify legal and ethical implications of such practice. Conclusions: CMPs demonstrated their competency in telemedicine, and most of them provided telemedicine during COVID-19. Development of appropriate guidelines on the provision of telemedicine would support CMPs to continue provision after the pandemic, whereas a user-friendly and comprehensive telemedicine e-platform would enhance quality of such service. Facilitating patients with lower e-literacy to access telemedicine is key to reduce disparities.

DeepDRIM: a deep neural network to reconstruct cell-type-specific gene regulatory network using single-cell RNA-seq data.

Single-cell RNA sequencing has enabled to capture the gene activities at single-cell resolution, thus allowing reconstruction of cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks (GRNs). The available algorithms for reconstructing GRNs are commonly designed for bulk RNA-seq data, and few of them are applicable to analyze scRNA-seq data by dealing with the dropout events and cellular heterogeneity. In this paper, we represent the joint gene expression distribution of a gene pair as an image and propose a novel supervised deep neural network called DeepDRIM which utilizes the image of the target TF-gene pair and the ones of the potential neighbors to reconstruct GRN from scRNA-seq data. Due to the consideration of TF-gene pair's neighborhood context, DeepDRIM can effectively eliminate the false positives caused by transitive gene-gene interactions. We compared DeepDRIM with nine GRN reconstruction algorithms designed for either bulk or single-cell RNA-seq data. It achieves evidently better performance for the scRNA-seq data collected from eight cell lines. The simulated data show that DeepDRIM is robust to the dropout rate, the cell number and the size of the training data. We further applied DeepDRIM to the scRNA-seq gene expression of B cells from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of the patients with mild and severe coronavirus disease 2019. We focused on the cell-type-specific GRN alteration and observed targets of TFs that were differentially expressed between the two statuses to be enriched in lysosome, apoptosis, response to decreased oxygen level and microtubule, which had been proved to be associated with coronavirus infection.

Extreme and compound ocean events are key drivers of projected low pelagic fish biomass.

Ocean extreme events, such as marine heatwaves, can have harmful impacts on marine ecosystems. Understanding the risks posed by such extreme events is key to develop strategies to predict and mitigate their effects. However, the underlying ocean conditions driving severe impacts on marine ecosystems are complex and often unknown as risks to marine ecosystems arise not only from hazards but also from the interactions between hazards, exposure and vulnerability. Marine ecosystems may not be impacted by extreme events in single drivers but rather by the compounding effects of moderate ocean anomalies. Here, we employ an ensemble climate-impact modeling approach that combines a global marine fish model with output from a large ensemble simulation of an Earth system model, to identify the key ocean ecosystem drivers associated with the most severe impacts on the total biomass of 326 pelagic fish species. We show that low net primary productivity is the most influential driver of extremely low fish biomass over 68% of the ocean area considered by the model, especially in the subtropics and the mid-latitudes, followed by high temperature and low oxygen in the eastern equatorial Pacific and the high latitudes. Severe biomass loss is generally driven by extreme anomalies in at least one ocean ecosystem driver, except in the tropics, where a combination of moderate ocean anomalies is sufficient to drive extreme impacts. Single moderate anomalies never drive extremely low fish biomass. Compound events with either moderate or extreme ocean conditions are a necessary condition for extremely low fish biomass over 78% of the global ocean, and compound events with at least one extreme variable are a necessary condition over 61% of the global ocean. Overall, our model results highlight the crucial role of extreme and compound events in driving severe impacts on pelagic marine ecosystems.

Recent Advances in Aerobic Oxidative of C-H Bond by Molecular Oxygen Focus on Heterocycles.

Aerobic oxidative cross-coupling represents one of the most straightforward and atom-economic methods for construction of C-C and C-X (X=N, O, S, or P) bonds using air as a sustainable external oxidant. The oxidative coupling of C-H bonds in heterocyclic compounds can effectively increase their molecular complexity by introducing new functional groups through C-H bond activation, or by formation of new heterocyclic structures through cascade construction of two or more sequential chemical bonds. This is very useful as it can increase the potential applications of these structures in natural products, pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, and functional materials. This is a representative overview of recent progress since 2010 on green oxidative coupling reactions of C-H bond using O2 or air as internal oxidant focus on Heterocycles. It aims to provide a platform for expanding the scope and utility of air as green oxidant, together with a brief discussion on research into the mechanisms behind it.

The effects of substituting red and processed meat for mycoprotein on biomarkers of cardiovascular risk in healthy volunteers: an analysis of secondary endpoints from Mycomeat.

PURPOSE: Mycoprotein is a relatively novel food source produced from the biomass of Fusarium venenatum. It has previously been shown to improve CVD risk markers in intervention trials when it is compared against total meat. It has not hitherto been assessed specifically for benefits relative to red and processed meat. METHODS: We leveraged samples from Mycomeat, an investigator-blind randomised crossover controlled trial in metabolically healthy male adults (n = 20), randomised to consume 240 g/day of red and processed meat for 14 days followed by mycoprotein, or vice versa. Blood biochemical indices were a priori defined secondary endpoints. RESULTS: Mycoprotein consumption led to a 6.74% reduction in total cholesterol (P = 0.02) and 12.3% reduction in LDL cholesterol (P = 0.02) from baseline values. Change in fasted triglycerides was not significantly different between diets (+ 0.19 ± 0.11 mmol/l with mycoprotein, P = 0.09). There was a small but significant reduction in waist circumference for mycoprotein relative to meat (- 0.95 ± 0.42 cm, P = 0.04). Following the mycoprotein diet, mean systolic (- 2.41 ± 1.89 mmHg, P = 0.23) and diastolic blood pressure (- 0.80 ± 1.23 mmHg, P = 0.43) were reduced from baseline. There were no statistically significant effects of the intervention on urinary sodium, nitrite or TMAO; while urinary potassium (+ 126.12 ± 50.30 mmol/l, P = 0.02) and nitrate (+ 2.12 ± 0.90 mmol/l, P = 0.04) were both significantly higher with mycoprotein relative to meat. The study population comprised metabolically healthy adults, therefore, changes in plasma lipids had little effect on cardiovascular risk scores (- 0.34% FRS for mycoprotein P = 0.24). CONCLUSIONS: These results confirm potential cardiovascular benefits when displacing red and processed meat with mycoprotein in the diet. Longer trials in higher risk study populations are needed to fully elucidate suggested benefits for blood pressure and body composition. CLINICALTRIALS: gov Identifier: NCT03944421.

Substituting meat for mycoprotein reduces genotoxicity and increases the abundance of beneficial microbes in the gut: Mycomeat, a randomised crossover control trial.

PURPOSE: The high-meat, low-fibre Western diet is strongly associated with colorectal cancer risk. Mycoprotein, produced from Fusarium venanatum, has been sold as a high-fibre alternative to meat for decades. Hitherto, the effects of mycoprotein in the human bowel have not been well considered. Here, we explored the effects of replacing a high red and processed meat intake with mycoprotein on markers of intestinal genotoxicity and gut health. METHODS: Mycomeat (clinicaltrials.gov NCT03944421) was an investigator-blind, randomised, crossover dietary intervention trial. Twenty healthy male adults were randomised to consume 240 g day-1 red and processed meat for 2 weeks, with crossover to 2 weeks 240 g day-1 mycoprotein, separated by a 4-week washout period. Primary end points were faecal genotoxicity and genotoxins, while secondary end points comprised changes in gut microbiome composition and activity. RESULTS: The meat diet increased faecal genotoxicity and nitroso compound excretion, whereas the weight-matched consumption of mycoprotein decreased faecal genotoxicity and nitroso compounds. In addition, meat intake increased the abundance of Oscillobacter and Alistipes, whereas mycoprotein consumption increased Lactobacilli, Roseburia and Akkermansia, as well as the excretion of short chain fatty acids. CONCLUSION: Replacing red and processed meat with the Fusarium-based meat alternative, mycoprotein, significantly reduces faecal genotoxicity and genotoxin excretion and increases the abundance of microbial genera with putative health benefits in the gut. This work demonstrates that mycoprotein may be a beneficial alternative to meat within the context of gut health and colorectal cancer prevention.

Surveillance of Rodent Pests for SARS-CoV-2 and Other Coronaviruses, Hong Kong.

We report surveillance conducted in 217 pestiferous rodents in Hong Kong for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). We did not detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA but identified 1 seropositive rodent, suggesting exposure to a virus antigenically similar to SARS-CoV-2. Potential exposure of urban rodents to SARS-CoV-2 cannot be ruled out.

Projecting global mariculture production and adaptation pathways under climate change.

The sustainability of global seafood supply to meet increasing demand is facing several challenges, including increasing consumption levels due to a growing human population, fisheries resources over-exploitation and climate change. Whilst growth in seafood production from capture fisheries is limited, global mariculture production is expanding. However, climate change poses risks to the potential seafood production from mariculture. Here, we apply a global mariculture production model that accounts for changing ocean conditions, suitable marine area for farming, fishmeal and fish oil production, farmed species dietary demand, farmed fish price and global seafood demand to project mariculture production under two climate and socio-economic scenarios. We include 85 farmed marine fish and mollusc species, representing about 70% of all mariculture production in 2015. Results show positive global mariculture production changes by the mid and end of the 21st century relative to the 2000s under the SSP1-2.6 scenario with an increase of 17%±5 and 33%±6, respectively. However, under the SSP5-8.5 scenario, an increase of 8%±5 is projected, with production peaking by mid-century and declining by 16%±5 towards the end of the 21st century. More than 25% of mariculture-producing nations are projected to lose 40%-90% of their current mariculture production potential under SSP5-8.5 by mid-century. Projected impacts are mainly due to the direct ocean warming effects on farmed species and suitable marine areas, and the indirect impacts of changing availability of forage fishes supplies to produce aquafeed. Fishmeal replacement with alternative protein can lower climate impacts on a subset of finfish production. However, such adaptation measures do not apply to regions dominated by non-feed-based farming (i.e. molluscs) and regions losing substantial marine areas suitable for mariculture. Our study highlights the importance of strong mitigation efforts and the need for different climate adaptation options tailored to the diversity of mariculture systems, to support climate-resilient mariculture development.