Exercise ameliorates lipid droplet metabolism disorder by the PLIN2-LIPA axis-mediated lipophagy in mouse model of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Excessive hepatic lipid droplets (LDs) accumulation-induced lipid metabolism disorder contributes to the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Exercise is a promising therapeutic strategy for NAFLD. However, the mechanism by which exercise ameliorates NAFLD through regulating the catabolism of hepatic LDs remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated the effect of perilipin2 (PLIN2)-lysosomal acid lipase (LIPA) axis mediating exercise-triggered lipophagy in a high-fat diet (HFD)-induced NAFLD mouse model. Our results showed that exercise could reduce HFD-induced hepatic LDs accumulation and change the expression of lipolysis-related enzymes. Moreover, exercise upregulated the expression of microtubule associated protein 1 light chain 3 (LC3) and autophagy-related proteins, and downregulated sequestosome 1 (P62) expression and promoted autophagosomes formation. Interestingly, exercise downregulated PLIN2 expression, upregulated LIPA expression, and increased the activity of hepatic LIPA and serum levels of LIPA in the NAFLD mouse model. Further mechanistic studies demonstrated that adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) activator-5-Aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide ribonucleoside (AICAr) treatment significantly increased mRNA levels and protein expression of LIPA and LC3II and decreased levels of PLIN2 and P62 in palmitic acid (PA)-treated HepG2 cells. PLIN2 silencing and LIPA overexpression notably increased the mRNA level and protein expression of LC3II and decreased the mRNA level and protein expression of p62, respectively. In summary, our findings reveal novel insights into the effect of exercise on improving lipid droplet metabolism disorder in NAFLD. Enhancing the PLIN2-LIPA axis-mediated lipophagy may be one of the key mechanisms involved in NAFLD alleviation by exercise.

Boosting adversarial robustness via self-paced adversarial training.

Adversarial training is considered one of the most effective methods to improve the adversarial robustness of deep neural networks. Despite the success, it still suffers from unsatisfactory performance and overfitting. Considering the intrinsic mechanism of adversarial training, recent studies adopt the idea of curriculum learning to alleviate overfitting. However, this also introduces new issues, that is, lacking the quantitative criterion for attacks' strength and catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate such issues, we propose the self-paced adversarial training (SPAT), which explicitly builds the learning process of adversarial training based on adversarial examples of the whole dataset. Specifically, our model is first trained with "easy" adversarial examples, and then is continuously enhanced by gradually adding "complex" adversarial examples. This way strengthens the ability to fit "complex" adversarial examples while holding in mind "easy" adversarial samples. To balance adversarial examples between classes, we determine the difficulty of the adversarial examples locally in each class. Notably, this learning paradigm can also be incorporated into other advanced methods for further boosting adversarial robustness. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed model against various attacks on widely-used benchmarks. Especially, on CIFAR100, SPAT provides a boost of 1.7% (relatively 5.4%) in robust accuracy on the PGD10 attack and 3.9% (relatively 7.2%) in natural accuracy for AWP.

Correlation Analysis of Staphylococcus aureus Drug Resistance and Virulence Factors with Blood Cell Counts and Coagulation Indexes.

Objective: The influence of different Staphylococcus aureus variants on blood cells and coagulation system was evaluated by investigating the carrying status of drug resistance genes and virulence genes of methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-sensitiveStaphylococcus aureus (MSSA). Methods: A total of 105 blood culture-derivedStaphylococcus aureus strains were collected. The carrying status of drug resistance genes mecA and three virulence genes tst, pvl, and sasX was analyzed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The changes in routine blood routine counts and coagulation indexes of patients infected with different strains were analyzed. Results: The results showed that the positive rate of mecA was consistent with that of MRSA. Virulence genes tst and sasX were detected only in MRSA. Compared with MSSA, patients infected with MRSA or MSSA patients infected with virulence factor, leukocyte count and neutrophil count in peripheral blood were significantly increased, and the platelet count decreased to a higher degree. Part thromboplastin time increased, D-dimer increased, but fibrinogen content decreased more. The changes of erythrocyte and hemoglobin had no significant correlation with whether Staphylococcus aureus carried virulence genes. Conclusion: The detection rate of MRSA in patients with positive Staphylococcus aureus in blood culture had exceeded 20%. The detected MRSA bacteria carried three virulence genes, tst, pvl, and sasX, which were more likely than MSSA. MRSA, which carries two virulence genes, is more likely to cause clotting disorders.

Is Green Spread? The Spillover Effect of Community Green Interaction on Related Green Purchase Behavior.

In the era of digital economy and mobile internet, many platforms or brands have built various online or offline green communities to guide customers or fans to engage in green interactions. Obviously, community green interaction can enhance brand emotional value and enhance customer stickiness, but whether community green interaction can further have a spillover effect on related or other green purchase behaviors has become an important topic for the theoretical and practical departments. This paper selects the "Little Bear Fuel Consumption Community" as the research object. Based on the theoretical framework of "Green Interaction-Environmental Emotion-Related Green Purchasing Behavior", this paper examines the spillover effect and impact mechanism of community green interaction on consumers' related green purchasing behavior. This paper uses a structural equation model and bootstrapping method to test the causal relationship between variables. This study lasted for 6 months, and a total of 348 valid questionnaires were collected in this study. We used SPSS 25 and AMOS 24 for data analysis. The results showed that the two dimensions of community green interaction (community green information interaction and community green interpersonal interaction) have a positive spillover effect on consumers' related green purchase behavior; community green interaction can positively spill over to consumers' related green purchase behavior through the psychological path of environmental emotion; community green information interaction and community green interpersonal interaction have positive effects on consumers' positive and negative environmental emotions; positive and negative environmental emotions positively affect consumers' related green purchase behavior; and in the two paths of community green information interaction-related green purchase behavior and community green interpersonal interaction-related green purchase behavior, both positive environmental emotion and negative environmental emotion play a role of partial mediation; product involvement has a negative moderating effect on the path of "community green interaction-environmental emotion". This paper opens the "black box" of the diffusion mechanism of community green interaction and provides a new explanatory framework for the spillover effect of community green interaction on related green purchase behavior.

The Impact of Positive Emotional Appeals on the Green Purchase Behavior.

The practice of green consumption has become a common initiative of the international community. Existing studies have shown that emotional factors have an important impact on consumer behavior, but few scholars in the field of green consumption behavior have explored the relationship between positive emotions and green purchase behavior in specific dimensions. This study creatively put forward two dimensions and four kinds of positive emotional appeals which include the cherishing appeal, the yearning appeal, the proud appeal, and the admiring appeal. Through the conceptual model analysis based on the data, the effects of different four positive emotional appeals on consumers' perceived green value, perceived green responsibility, and green purchase behaviors were confirmed. The results indicated that the four kinds of positive emotional appeals, perceived green value, perceived green responsibility, and green purchase behavior were positively correlated. Perceived green responsibility and perceived green value have significant mediating effect on the relationship between positive emotional appeals and green purchase behaviors. Middle doctrine significantly moderates the relationship between positive emotional appeals (Cherishing VS. Yearning) and perceived green value.

Dynamic and epistatic QTL mapping reveals the complex genetic architecture of waterlogging tolerance in chrysanthemum.

MAIN CONCLUSION: 37 unconditional QTLs, 51 conditional QTLs and considerable epistatic QTLs were detected for waterlogging tolerance, and six favourable combinations were selected accelerating the possible application of MAS in chrysanthemum breeding. Chrysanthemum is seriously impacted by soil waterlogging. To determine the genetic characteristics of waterlogging tolerance (WAT) in chrysanthemum, a population of 162 F1 lines was used to construct a genetic map to identify the dynamic and epistatic quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for four WAT traits: wilting index (WI), dead leaf ratio (DLR), chlorosis score (Score) and membership function value of waterlogging (MFVW). The h B2 for the WAT traits ranged from 0.49 to 0.64, and transgressive segregation was observed in both directions. A total of 37 unconditional consensus QTLs with 5.81-18.21% phenotypic variation explanation (PVE) and 51 conditional consensus QTLs with 5.90-24.56% PVE were detected. Interestingly, three unconditional consensus QTLs were consistently identified across different stages, whereas no conditional consensus QTLs were consistently expressed. In addition, considerable epistatic QTLs, all with PVE values ranging from 0.01 to 8.87%, were detected by a joint analysis of WAT phenotypes. These results illustrated that the QTLs (genes) controlling WAT were environmentally dependent and selectively expressed at different times and indicated that both additive and epistatic effects underlie the inheritance of WAT in chrysanthemum. The findings of the current study provide insights into the complex genetic architecture of WAT, and the identification of favourable alleles represents an important step towards the application of molecular marker-assisted selection (MAS) and QTL pyramiding in chrysanthemum WAT breeding programmes.

The effect of microdroplet size on the surface tension and Tolman length.

A monomolecular layer model of the surface phase of microdroplets was proposed, and the exact expression for Tolman length was derived in this paper. The Tolman lengths of water, n-pentane, and n-heptane were calculated by the expression, and the values are quite in agreement with the experimental values. By use of the Gibbs-Tolman-Kening-Buff equation, the exact relationship between the microdroplet surface tension and the radius is obtained, and the predicted values agree well with the simulated values. The results show that there is an obvious effect of the size of microdroplets (or nanoparticles) on the surface tension, and the surface tension decreases with decreasing droplet size. For the microdroplets of general liquid, only if their radius approaches or reaches 10(-9) m does the effect become significant.