Growth and non-structural carbohydrates response patterns of Eucommia ulmoides under salt and drought stress.

Introduction: Salinity and droughts are severe abiotic stress factors that limit plant growth and development. However, the differences and similarities of non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) responses patterns of trees under the two stress conditions remain unclear. Methods: We determined and compared the growth, physiology, and NSCs response patterns and tested the relationships between growth and NSCs concentrations (or pool size) of Eucommia ulmoides seedlings planted in field under drought and salt stress with different intensities and durations. Results and discussion: We found that drought and salt stress can inhibit the growth of E. ulmoides, and E. ulmoides tended to enhance its stress resistance by increasing proline concentration and leaf thickness or density but decreasing investment in belowground biomass in short-term stress. During short-term drought and salt stress, the aboveground organs showed different NSCs response characteristics, while belowground organs showed similar change characteristics: the starch (ST) and NSCs concentrations in the coarse roots decreased, while the ST and soluble sugar (SS) concentrations in the fine roots increased to enhance stress resistance and maintain water absorption function. As salt and drought stress prolonged, the belowground organs represented different NSCs response patterns: the concentrations of ST and SS in fine roots decreased as salt stress prolonged; while ST in fine roots could still be converted into SS to maintain water absorption as drought prolonged, resulting in an increase of SS and a decrease of ST. Significant positive relationships were found between growth and the SS and total NSCs concentrations in leaves and branches, however, no significant correlations were found between growth and below-ground organs. Moreover, relationships between growth and NSCs pool size across organs could be contrast. Conclusion: Our results provide important insights into the mechanisms of carbon balance and carbon starvation and the relationship between tree growth and carbon storage under stress, which were of great significance in guiding for the management of artificial forest ecosystem under the context of global change.

Immune Responses and Protection Profiles in Mice Induced by Subunit Vaccine Candidates Based on the Extracellular Domain Antigen of Respiratory Syncytial Virus G Protein Combined with Different Adjuvants.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a leading cause of severe lower respiratory tract disease of infants and older people. There is an urgent need for safe and effective vaccines against RSV infection. In this study, we analyzed the effects of the immune response and protection with the RSV recombinant G protein extracellular domain (Gecto) combined with various adjuvants as novel subunit vaccines in mice. All groups receiving RSV Gecto combined with adjuvants exhibited robust humoral and cellular immunity compared to those receiving an adjuvant alone or inactivated RSV vaccine. The greatest effect was observed in mice receiving Gecto combined with a CpG ODN + Alum salt adjuvant, resulting in the highest production of neutralizing antibodies against both RSV A and B subtypes, G-specific IgG and IFN-γ production in splenocytes, and interleukin-2 and interferon-γ expression in CD4+ T cells. Significant humoral and cellular immune responses were observed in mice immunized with Gecto combined with AddaS03™ or cyclosporin A adjuvants. The vaccine containing the AddaS03™ adjuvant showed significantly high expression of interleukin-4 in CD4+ T cells. Cross-protection against a challenge with either RSV A or B subtypes was observed in the Gecto plus adjuvant groups, resulting in a significant decrease in viral load and reduced pathological damage in the mouse lungs. These findings offer valuable insights into the development and application of recombinant RSV G-subunit vaccines with adjuvants.

A Kundu-nonlinear Schrödinger equation: Rogue waves, breathers, and mixed interaction solutions.

A Kundu-nonlinear Schrödinger equation that can be utilized to simulate the pulse propagation in optical fibers is researched in this paper. First, the Lax integrability of the above equation is proved and its modulational instability (i.e., the main mechanism for producing the rogue wave solutions and the breather solutions) is calculated. Subsequently, using the generalized perturbation (n,N-n)-fold Darboux transformation, the rogue waves, breathers, and mixed interaction solutions are acquired, as well as the impact of various parameters on the solutions is examined. In particular, when we assume that the coefficient of the equation is θ=mx+dt, some new wave structures are found based on parameter variations, such as the rotational separation of first-order rogue waves, scale-like structures generated by second-order breathers, etc., which offer novel ideas for producing different signals via optical fibers. Ultimately, the classification numbers of mixed solutions of rogue waves and breathers are provided, which can better observe how the two types of the local waves are combined, in accordance with the distributions of the increasing numbers of algebraic equations.

Balancing the Kinetic and Thermodynamic Synergetic Effect of Doped Carbon Molecular Sieves for Selective Separation of C2H4/C2H6.

Selective separation of ethylene and ethane (C2H4/C2H6) is a formidable challenge due to their close molecular size and boiling point. Compared to industry-used cryogenic distillation, adsorption separation would offer a more energy-efficient solution when an efficient adsorbent is available. Herein, a class of C2H4/C2H6 separation adsorbents, doped carbon molecular sieves (d-CMSs) is reported which are prepared from the polymerization and subsequent carbonization of resorcinol, m-phenylenediamine, and formaldehyde in ethanol solution. The study demonstrated that the polymer precursor themselves can be a versatile platform for modifying the pore structure and surface functional groups of their derived d-CMSs. The high proportion of pores centered at 3.5 Å in d-CMSs contributes significantly to achieving a superior kinetic selectivity of 205 for C2H4/C2H6 separation. The generated pyrrolic-N and pyridinic-N functional sites in d-CMSs contribute to a remarkable elevation of Henry selectivity to 135 due to the enhancement of the surface polarity in d-CMSs. By balancing the synergistic effects of kinetics and thermodynamics, d-CMSs achieve efficient separation of C2H4/C2H6. Polymer-grade C2H4 of 99.71% purity can be achieved with 75% recovery using the devised d-CMSs as reflected in a two-bed vacuum swing adsorption simulation.

Effects and mechanisms of proanthocyanidins-derived carbon dots on alleviating salt stress in rice by muti-omics analysis.

Carbon dots (CDs) with different structures were prepared by electrolysis (PE-CDs) and hydrothermal (PH-CDs) methods using proanthocyanidins as precursors. The smaller size and lower zeta potential enabled the PE-CDs treated rice seedlings to exhibit greater resistance to salt stress. The fresh weight of rice seedlings under salt stress was significantly increased by spraying CDs every other day for two weeks. PE-CDs treated group exhibited a faster electron transport rate, and the SOD activity and flavonoid content were 2.5-fold and 0.23-fold higher than those of the salt stress-treated group. Furthermore, the metabolomics and transcriptomics analysis revealed that the PsaC gene of photosystem I was significantly up-regulated under PE-CDs treatment, which accelerated electron transfer in photosystem I. The up-regulation of BX1 and IGL genes encoding indole synthesis allowed rice to enhance stress tolerance through tryptophan and benzoxazine biosynthesis pathways. These findings offer help in purposefully synthesizing CDs and boosting food production.

Hydrological time series prediction based on IWOA-ALSTM.

The prediction of hydrological time series is of great significance for developing flood and drought prevention approaches and is an important component in research on smart water resources. The nonlinear characteristics of hydrological time series are important factors affecting the accuracy of predictions. To enhance the prediction of the nonlinear component in hydrological time series, we employed an improved whale optimisation algorithm (IWOA) to optimise an attention-based long short-term memory (ALSTM) network. The proposed model is termed IWOA-ALSTM. Specifically, we introduced an attention mechanism between two LSTM layers, enabling adaptive focus on distinct features within each time unit to gather information pertaining to a hydrological time series. Furthermore, given the critical impact of the model hyperparameter configuration on the prediction accuracy and operational efficiency, the proposed improved whale optimisation algorithm facilitates the discovery of optimal hyperparameters for the ALSTM model. In this work, we used nonlinear water level information obtained from Hankou station as experimental data. The results of this model were compared with those of genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation algorithms and whale optimisation algorithms. The experiments were conducted using five evaluation metrics, namely, the RMSE, MAE, NSE, SI and DR. The results show that the IWOA is effective at optimising the ALSTM and significantly improves the prediction accuracy of nonlinear hydrological time series.

Layerwised multimodal knowledge distillation for vision-language pretrained model.

The transformer-based model can simultaneously learn the representation for both images and text, providing excellent performance for multimodal applications. Practically, the large scale of parameters may hinder its deployment in resource-constrained devices, creating a need for model compression. To accomplish this goal, recent studies suggest using knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from a larger trained teacher model to a small student model without any performance sacrifice. However, this only works with trained parameters of the student model by using the last layer of the teacher, which makes the student model easily overfit in the distillation procedure. Furthermore, the mutual interference between modalities causes more difficulties for distillation. To address these issues, the study proposed a layerwised multimodal knowledge distillation for a vision-language pretrained model. In addition to the last layer, the intermediate layers of the teacher were also used for knowledge transfer. To avoid interference between modalities, we split the multimodality into separate modalities and added them as extra inputs. Then, two auxiliary losses were implemented to encourage each modality to distill more effectively. Comparative experiments on four different multimodal tasks show that the proposed layerwised multimodality distillation achieves better performance than other KD methods for vision-language pretrained models.

Design of a recombinant asparaginyl ligase for site-specific modification using efficient recognition and nucleophile motifs.

Asparaginyl ligases have been extensively utilized as valuable tools for site-specific bioconjugation or surface-modification. However, the application is hindered by the laborious and poorly reproducible preparation processes, unstable activity and ambiguous substrate requirements. To address these limitations, this study employed a structure-based rational approach to obtain a high-yield and high-activity protein ligase called OaAEP1-C247A-aa55-351. It was observed that OaAEP1-C247A-aa55-351 exhibits appreciable catalytic activities across a wide pH range, and the addition of the Fe3+ metal ion effectively enhances the catalytic power. Importantly, this study provides insight into the recognition and nucleophile peptide profiles of OaAEP1-C247A-aa55-351. The ligase demonstrates a higher recognition ability for the "Asn-Ala-Leu" motif and an N-terminus "Arg-Leu" as nucleophiles, which significantly increases the reaction yield. Consequently, the catalytic activity of OaAEP1-C247A-aa55-351 with highly efficient recognition and nucleophile motif, "Asn-Ala-Leu" and "Arg-Leu" under the buffer containing Fe3+ is 70-fold and 2-fold higher than previously reported OaAEP1-C247A and the most efficient butelase-1, respectively. Thus, the designed OaAEP1-C247A-aa55-351, with its highly efficient recognition and alternative nucleophile options, holds promising potential for applications in protein engineering, chemo-enzymatic modification, and the development of drugs.

Mixed-state ptychography for quantitative optical properties measurement of vector beam.

Recent advances in ptychography have extended to anisotropic specimens, but vectorial reconstruction of probes owing to polarization aliasing remains a challenge. A polarization-sensitive ptychography that enables full optical property measurement of vector light is proposed. An optimized reconstruction strategy, first calibrating the propagation direction and then performing faithful retrieval, is established. This method avoids multiple image acquisitions with various polarizer configurations and significantly improves the measurement accuracy by correlating the intensity and position of different polarization components. The capability of the proposed method to quantify anisotropic parameters of optical materials and polarization properties of vector probe is demonstrated by experiment.

Fe(II) coordination transition regulates reductive dechlorination: The overlooked abiotic role of lactate.

The coordination environment of Fe(II) significantly affect the reductive reactivity of Fe(II). Lactate is a common substrate for enhancing microbial dechlorination, but its effect on abiotic Fe(II)-driven reductive dechlorination is largely ignored. In this study, the structure-reactivity relationship of Fe(II) is investigated by regulating the ratio of lactate:Fe(II). This work shows that lactate-Fe(II) complexing enhances the abiotic Fe(II)-driven reductive dechlorination with the optimum lactate:Fe(II) ratio of 10:20. The formed hydrogen bond (Fe-OH∙∙∙∙∙∙O = C-) and Fe-O-C metal-ligand bond result in a reduced Fe(II) coordination number from six to four, which lead to the transition of Fe(II) coordination geometry from octahedron to tetrahedron/square planar. Coordinatively unsaturated Fe(II) results in the highest reductive dechlorination reactivity towards carbon tetrachloride (k1 = 0.26254 min-1). Excessive lactate concentration (> 10 mM) leads to an increased Fe(II) coordination number from four to six with a decreased reductive reactivity. Electrochemical characterization and XPS results show that lactate-Fe(II)-I (C3H5O3-:Fe(II) = 10:20) has the highest electron-donating capacity. This study reveals the abiotic effect of lactate on reductive dechlorination in a subsurface-reducing environment where Fe(II) is usually abundant.

Thyroid allostasis in drug-free affective disorder patients.

AIM: To assess the thyroid allostasis in drug-free patients with affective disorder. METHODS: Patients with major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder as drug-free, defined as those without psychiatric drugs exposure for at least 4 months before admission, from a tertiary hospital were recruited in this cross-sectional study. The primary outcomes were "structure parameters of thyroid homeostasis", which include "thyroid's secretory capacity" (SPINA-GT), "sum step-up activity of deiodinases" (SPINA-GD), the ratio of total to free thyroxine and "thyroid homeostasis central set point" (TSH index and "thyroid feedback quantile-based index" [TFQI]), calculated by TSH and thyroid hormones measured at admission. A healthy population and non-affective psychiatric disorder (schizophrenia) from the same catchment area were recruited as two comparison groups. RESULTS: A total of 1263 cases of major depressive disorder, 1619 cases of bipolar disorder, 1186 cases of schizophrenia, and 162 healthy controls were included in the study. Compared to healthy control, GD and ratio of total to free thyroxine were lower in affective disorders. Bipolar with mania episode had higher GT than bipolar with depressive episode and major depressive disorder (median level at 3.70 vs. 3.04 and 3.03, respectively). Compared with healthy control, schizophrenia had higher TSH index and TFQI, but no increase in these parameters in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. CONCLUSION: Affective disorders have a unique profile of thyroid allostasis with impaired step-up deiodinase activity and reduced serum protein binding of thyroid hormones, but no change in thyroid homeostasis central set point. Mania episode may be associated with higher thyroid secretory capacity.

Determination of six heavy metals in peanuts using microwave-assisted digestion-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry with an octopole reaction system / 预防医学

Objective @#To establish a microwave-assisted digestion-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) with an octopole reaction system for simultaneous determination of six heavy metals in peanuts, including Cr, Ni, As, Cd, Pb, Hg. @*Methods @#Peanut samples were shelled and crushed evenly, and 0.350 0 g was accurately weighed and digested with 5 mL nitric acid and 1 mL hydrogen peroxide in a digestion tank. Following microwave-assisted digestion, pure water was used to quantify the samples, and internal standards and an octopole reaction system were used to remove the interference. Then, the contents of six heavy metals were determined in peanuts by ICP-MS. The accuracy and precision of ICP-MS were evaluated using national criteria ( GBW 10013 and GBW 10044 ) and spike-and-recovery testing. @*Results @#The six heavy metals showed good linearity at the selected linear range ( r≥0.999 8 ). The detection limits of ICP-MS ranged from 0.001 4 to 0.023 8 ng/mL, and the spike-and-recovery rates ranged from 94.7% to 98.8%, with the relative standard deviations ranging from 0.7% to 3.6%. In addition, the determination results of the standard reference materials were all within the normal reference range. The detection of six heavy metals was 100.0% in 60 peanut samples, and the contents of six heavy metals were all low.@*Conclusion @#The established ICP-MS assay is feasible for simultaneous determination of multiple heavy metals in peanuts.

Comparison of two methods for hemodynamic assessment in children with tetralogy of Fallot after radical surgery / 中国胸心血管外科临床杂志

@#Objective To explore the hemodynamic assessment after radical surgery in children with tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) by both echocardiography and Mostcare monitor. Methods Clinical data of 63 children with TOF who underwent radical surgery in our hospital from February 2016 to June 2018 were retrospectively analyzed, including 34 males and 29 females, aged 6-24 (9.82±5.77) months. There were 19 patients undergoing transannular patch reconstruction of the right ventricular outflow tract (a transannular patch group) while 44 patients retained the pulmonary valve annulus (a non-transannular patch group) . The echocardiography and Mostcare monitor parameters were recorded and brain natriuretic peptide was tested at the time points of 0, 8, 12, 24 and 48 hours after operation (T 0, T 1, T 2, T 4) to analyze their correlations and the change trend at different time points after radical surgery. Results The left ventricular ejection fraction at T 1 (43.49%±3.82%) was lower than that at T 0 (48.29%±4.55%), T 2 (45.83%±3.69%), T 3 (53.76%±4.43%) and T 4 (60.54%±3.23%, P<0.05). The cardiac index at T 1 (1.85±0.35 L·min−1·m−2) was lower than that at T 0 (2.11±0.38 L·min−1·m−2), T 2 (2.07±0.36 L·min−1·m−2), T 3 (2.42±0.37 L·min−1·m−2) and T 4 (2.82±0.42 L·min−1·m−2, P<0.05). The cardiac circulation efficiency at T1 (0.19±0.05) was lower than that at T 0 (0.22±0.06), T 2 (0.22±0.05), T 3 (0.28±0.06) and T 4 (0.34±0.06, P<0.05). The right ventricular two-chambers view fraction area change at T 1 (23.17%±3.11%) was lower than that at T 0 (25.81%±3.74%), T 2 (25.38%±3.43%), T 3 (30.60%±4.50%) and T 4 (36.94%±5.85%, P<0.05). The pulse pressure variability was the highest at T 0 (18.76%±3.58%), followed by T 1 (14.81%±3.32%), T 2 (12.44%±2.94%), T 3 (10.39%±2.96%) and T 4 (9.18%±1.92%, P<0.05). The blood brain natriuretic peptide was higher at T 1 (846.67±362.95 pg/ml) than that at T 0 (42.60±18.06 pg/ml), T 2 (730.95±351.09 pg/ml), T 3 (510.98±290.39 pg/ml) and T 4 (364.41±243.56 pg/ml, P<0.05). There was no significant difference in left ventricular ejection fraction, cardiac circulation efficiency and heart index between the two groups (P>0.05). The right ventricular two-chambers view fraction area change of the transannular patch group was significantly lower than that of the nontransannular patch group at each time point (P<0.05). The blood brain natriuretic peptide and pulse pressure variability of the transannular patch group were significantly higher than those of the non-transannular patch group (P<0.05). Left ventricular ejection fraction was positively correlated with cardiac index (r=0.637, P=0.001) and cardiac circulation efficiency (r=0.462, P=0.001) while was significantly negatively correlated with blood brain natriuretic peptide (r=–0.419, P=0.001). Conclusion Both methods can accurately reflect the state of cardiac function. Mostcare monitor has a good consistency with echocardiography. Using transannular patch to recontribute right ventricular outflow tract in operation has more influence on right ventricular systolic function. The Mostcare monitor can guide the hemodynamic management after surgery in real time, continuously and accurately.