Comprehensive Transcriptome Analysis of Responses during Cold Stress in Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.).

Wheat production is often impacted by pre-winter freezing damage and cold spells in later spring. To study the influences of cold stress on wheat seedlings, unstressed Jing 841 was sampled once at the seedling stage, followed by 4 °C stress treatment for 30 days and once every 10 days. A total of 12,926 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified from the transcriptome. K-means cluster analysis found a group of genes related to the glutamate metabolism pathway, and many genes belonging to the bHLH, MYB, NAC, WRKY, and ERF transcription factor families were highly expressed. Starch and sucrose metabolism, glutathione metabolism, and plant hormone signal transduction pathways were found. Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network Analysis (WGCNA) identified several key genes involved in the development of seedlings under cold stress. The cluster tree diagram showed seven different modules marked with different colors. The blue module had the highest correlation coefficient for the samples treated with cold stress for 30 days, and most genes in this module were rich in glutathione metabolism (ko00480). A total of eight DEGs were validated using quantitative real-time PCR. Overall, this study provides new insights into the physiological metabolic pathways and gene changes in a cold stress transcriptome, and it has a potential significance for improving freezing tolerance in wheat.

The impact of empathy with nature on green purchase behavior: An ERP study.

Due to the attitude-behavior gap in green consumption, it is necessary to conduct more research on consumers' actual purchase behavior. At present, few studies have been conducted on the impact of empathy with nature on green purchase behavior. This research explored the underlying neural mechanism of empathy with nature on consumers' green purchase decisions by applying the event-related potentials (ERPs) approach. Behaviorally, compared with the control group, the experimental group had a higher purchase rate of green products and spent less time when buying green products. For the experimental group, buying green products required less time than buying traditional products. At the neural level, when buying green products, the N2 and N400 amplitudes of the experimental group were smaller than those of the control group. For the experimental group, buying green products elicited a smaller N2 amplitude than buying traditional products. These findings suggested that empathy with nature could reduce consumers' decision conflict when buying green products, thereby promoting consumers' green purchase behavior.