Phase-Transition-Induced Surface Reconstruction of Rh1 Site in Intermetallic Alloy for Propane Dehydrogenation.

The fine-tuning of the geometric and electronic structures of active sites plays a crucial role in catalysis. However, the intricate entanglement between the two aspects results in a lack of interpretable design for active sites, posing a challenge in developing high-performance catalysts. Here, we find that surface reconstruction induced by phase transition in intermetallic alloys enables synergistic geometric and electronic structure modulation, creating a desired active site microenvironment for propane dehydrogenation. The resulting electron-rich four-coordinate Rh1 site in the RhGe0.5Ga0.5 intermetallic alloy can accelerate the desorption of propylene and suppress the side reaction and thus exhibits a propylene selectivity of ∼98% with a low deactivation constant of 0.002 h-1 under propane dehydrogenation at 550 °C. Furthermore, we design a computational workflow to validate the rationality of the microenvironment modulation induced by the phase transition in an intermetallic alloy.

The potential role of eyestalk in the immunity of Litopenaeus vannamei to Vibrio parahaemolyticus infection II. From the perspective of long non-coding RNA.

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been linked to immunological modulation. Unfortunately, little is known about the processes of immune control in shrimp. In crustaceans such as Litopenaeus vannamei, a prominent aquaculture species, the X-organ-sinus gland complex (XO-SG) in the eyestalk is an essential neuroendocrine regulatory organ. Eyestalk ablation is commonly employed in aquaculture to accelerate ovarian maturation in shrimp. It does, however, have a negative impact on the shrimps' immunocompetence and causes death. As a result, we used RNA-seq to profile the transcriptomes of L. vannamei hemocytes infected with Vibrio parahaemolyticus after the eyestalk ablation. Following strict transcript screening procedures, 2307 lncRNAs were identified from L. vannamei hemocytes in this study. Pearson correlation analysis was finally used to uncover 535 DElncRNAs and 1566 DEmRNA targets. According to the Venn diagram analysis, 326 non-eyestalk regulatory lncRNAs (NElncRNAs) with a target of 1014 non-eyestalk regulatory genes (NEmRNAs), 47 eyestalk negative regulatory lncRNAs (ENRlncRNAs) with a target of 95 eyestalk negative regulatory genes (ENRmRNAs), and 162 eyestalk positive regulatory lncRNAs (EPRlncRNAs) with a target of 457 eyestalk positive regulatory genes (EPRmRNAs) were screened. The bioinformatics analysis revealed that lncRNAs were associated with Axon regeneration, Rap1 signaling pathway, Thyroid hormone signaling pathway, TGF-beta signaling pathway, and PI3K-Akt signaling pathway, implying that lncRNAs may play a role in the regulation of the neuroendocrine-immune (NEI) system. Furthermore, several lncRNAs targeting HSP70, YWHAZ, FER2, HIF1α, and Notch were discovered and verified by qRT-PCR. These findings showed that regulation of lncRNAs in hemocytes which were controlled by the eyestalk might be one of the impact variables in controlling the differential expression of mRNAs associated with immune response in L. vannamei infected with V. parahaemolyticus.

The potential role of eyestalk in the immunity of Litopenaeus vannamei to Vibrio infection.

The X-organ-sinus gland complex (XO-SG) in the eyestalk is an important neuroendocrine regulatory organ of crustaceans such as Litopenaeus vannamei, a prominent aquaculture species. The current study found significant changes in the enzyme activities of ALP, ACP, and T-SOD of hepatopancreatic in response to Vibrio parahaemolyticus exposure following eyestalk ablation, indicating that they were all involved in the immunological regulation of shrimps against V. parahaemolyticus infection. A total of 52,656 unigenes were obtained after RNA-Seq, with an average length of 1036 bp and an N50 of 1847 bp. Subsequently, 1899 eyestalk positive regulation genes (EPRGs), 745 eyestalk negative regulation genes (ENRGs), and 2077 non-eyestalk regulatory genes (NEGs) were identified. KEGG analysis of EPRGs revealed that eyestalk ablation might activate the neuroendocrine-immune (NEI) system. The RNA-Seq data were validated using quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR). The findings suggested that eyestalk ablation might affect the expression of genes involved in the prophenoloxidase-activating system, the TLR signaling pathway, and numerous other immune-related genes in L. vannamei. All of these findings revealed that the eyestalk might have a role in the immune response of L. vannamei. The genes and pathways discovered in this study will help to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of hemocytes' immune response to V. parahaemolyticus following eyestalk ablation in shrimp, as well as provide the framework for building crustacean immunity theory.

Homotopic Convex Transformation: A New Landscape Smoothing Method for the Traveling Salesman Problem.

This article proposes a novel landscape smoothing method for the symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP). We first define the homotopic convex (HC) transformation of a TSP as a convex combination of a well-constructed simple TSP and the original TSP. The simple TSP, called the convex-hull TSP, is constructed by transforming a known local or global optimum. We observe that controlled by the coefficient of the convex combination, with local or global optimum: 1) the landscape of the HC transformed TSP is smoothed in terms that its number of local optima is reduced compared to the original TSP and 2) the fitness distance correlation of the HC transformed TSP is increased. Furthermore, we observe that the smoothing effect of the HC transformation depends highly on the quality of the used optimum. A high-quality optimum leads to a better smoothing effect than a low-quality optimum. We then propose an iterative algorithmic framework in which the proposed HC transformation is combined within a heuristic TSP solver. It works as an escaping scheme from local optima aiming to improve the global searchability of the combined heuristic. Case studies using the 3-Opt and the Lin-Kernighan local search as the heuristic solver show that the resultant algorithms significantly outperform their counterparts and two other smoothing-based TSP heuristic solvers on most of the test instances with up to 20 000 cities.

Improving Pareto Local Search Using Cooperative Parallelism Strategies for Multiobjective Combinatorial Optimization.

Pareto local search (PLS) is a natural extension of local search for multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems (MCOPs). In our previous work, we improved the anytime performance of PLS using parallel computing techniques and proposed a parallel PLS based on decomposition (PPLS/D). In PPLS/D, the solution space is searched by multiple independent parallel processes simultaneously. This article further improves PPLS/D by introducing two new cooperative process techniques, namely, a cooperative search mechanism and a cooperative subregion-adjusting strategy. In the cooperative search mechanism, the parallel processes share high-quality solutions with each other during the search according to a distributed topology. In the proposed subregion-adjusting strategy, a master process collects useful information from all processes during the search to approximate the Pareto front (PF) and redivide the subregions evenly. In the experimental studies, three well-known NP-hard MCOPs with up to six objectives were selected as test problems. The experimental results on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer verified the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Effect of the oat ß-glucan on the development of functional quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa wild) milk.

This study aimed to produce novel plant-based milk from quinoa with the addition of oat ß-glucan (OGB). The stability of quinoa milk was characterized by zeta potential, particle size, separation index (SI), rheological property, backscattered light intensity (ΔBS), and microstructure. Results showed that OGB addition efficiently prevented the phase separation of quinoa milk, and the highest SI and zeta potential values were obtained at the optimal pH 6.0. Quinoa milk presented a higher apparent viscosity and a narrower particle distribution with the increased OGB concentration, however, it did not affect the zeta potential. Moreover, OGB improved the storage stability with an increased SI and a ΔBS. Microstructure analysis suggested that OGB could prevent phase separation by constructing a network structure, and an increased amount of OGB led to forming a gel-like structure. An excessive viscosity would decrease the sensory acceptance, therefore the final OGB concentration of 16% was selected.

PPLS/D: Parallel Pareto Local Search Based on Decomposition.

Pareto local search (PLS) is a basic building block in many metaheuristics for a multiobjective combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, an enhanced PLS variant called parallel PLS based on decomposition (PPLS/D) is proposed. PPLS/D improves the efficiency of PLS using the techniques of parallel computation and problem decomposition. It decomposes the original search space into L subregions and executes L parallel processes searching in these subregions simultaneously. Inside each subregion, the PPLS/D process is guided by a unique scalar objective function. PPLS/D differs from the well-known two phase PLS in that it uses the scalar objective function to guide every move of the PLS procedure in a fine-grained manner. In the experimental studies, PPLS/D is compared against the basic PLS and a recently proposed PLS variant on the multiobjective unconstrained binary quadratic programming problems and the multiobjective traveling salesman problems with, at most, four objectives. The experimental results show that regardless of whether the initial solutions are randomly generated or generated by heuristic methods, PPLS/D always performs significantly better than the other two PLS variants.

Transcriptome analysis provides insights into differentially expressed genes and long noncoding RNAs involved in sex-related differences in Amur sturgeon (Acipenser schrenckii).

In the present study, the next-generation sequencing technology was used to develop a transcriptome database of gonad and liver from 3-year-old male and female Amur sturgeons (Acipenser schrenckii). A total of 139,406 unigenes were generated after the Illumina Hiseq. 2500 sequence and assembled by Trinity. The differential expression analysis between male and female obtained 5,199 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in gonad and 457 DEGs in liver. Gene Ontology enrich analysis showed that the specific DEGs of gonad play a dominant role in reproductive processes. Although the specific DEGs of liver indicated their primary responsibility for energy metabolism, the DEGs of liver and gonad co-own enriched in terms associated with reproduction suggested that liver also plays a role in sex-related differences in Amur sturgeon. Furthermore, genes related to sex-related differences were selected to validate among the four different tissues by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). In addition, by trans-acting analysis, a total of 5,206 putative long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and 3,490 target genes of lncRNAs were predicted from gonad and liver. Moreover, several lncRNAs targeting Mea1, Piwil1, Tdrd1, Nanos2, Ankrd49, and ZP3 may have potential regulatory effect related to gametogenesis and gonadal differentiation were identified and validated by qRT-PCR. These results suggested for the first time that lncRNAs might be one of the effect factors in regulating the differential expression of messenger RNAs associated with sex-related differences in Amur sturgeon.

Integrative transcriptome analysis and discovery of genes involving in immune response of hypoxia/thermal challenges in the small abalone Haliotis diversicolor.

In recent years, the abalone aquaculture industry has been threatened by the deteriorating environmental conditions, such as hypoxia and thermal stress in the hot summers. It is necessary to investigate the molecular mechanism in response to these environmental challenges, and subsequently understand the immune defense system. In this study, the transcriptome profiles by RNA-seq of hemocytes from the small abalone Haliotis diversicolor after exposure to hypoxia, thermal stress, and hypoxia plus thermal stress were established. A total of 103,703,074 clean reads were obtained and 99,774 unigenes were assembled. Of the 99,774 unigenes, 47,154 and 20,455 had homologous sequences in the Nr and Swiss-Prot protein databases, while 16,944 and 10,840 unigenes could be classified by COG or KEGG databases, respectively. RNAseq analysis revealed that the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) after challenges of hypoxia, thermal stress, or hypoxia plus thermal stress were 24,189, 29,165 and 23,665, among which more than 3000 genes involved in at least 230 pathways, including several classical immune-related pathways. The genes and pathways that were involved in immune response to hypoxia/thermal challenges were identified by transcriptome analysis and further validated by quantitative real-time PCR and RNAi technology. The findings in this study can provide information on H. diversicolor innate immunity to improve the abalone aquaculture industry, and the analysis of the potential immune-related genes in innate immunity signaling pathways and the obtained transcriptome data can provide an invaluable genetic resource for the study of the genome and functional genes.