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With the improvement of living standards and the change of dietary habits, metabolic syndrome has become a major global public health problem. The gut microbiota is one of the research hotspots in recent years. More and more studies have shown that the gut microbiota can conduct bidirectional signal transduction with different body tissues and organs such as the brain, liver and heart through various pathways, which is closely related to body health. Medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs) exist in coconut oil, palm kernel oil and dairy products mainly in the form of medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs). MCFAs can be rapidly metabolized for energy in the body, and has good regulatory effects on glucose and lipid metabolism. This article reviews the effects of MCTs on gut microbes and their positive effects on metabolic syndrome in order to provide a reference for future research.

Food preservatives are widely used in the food industry for their broad antibacterial spectrum and strong antibacterial properties. While the effects of dietary food preservatives on the gut microbiota and host health have been studied, a systematic review is lacking. In this paper, the latest research on food preservatives and the gut microbiota is reviewed. It has been found that food preservatives affect lipid metabolism, immunity and intestinal inflammation by altering the diversity of the gut microbiota and regulating the abundance of conditioned pathogens and beneficial bacteria. The future research trends are also discussed. Through this review, we hope that the ‘food preservatives-gut microbiota-host health’ chain can arouse the attention of researchers and readers, and provide a new perspective for the existing safety evaluation system of food preservatives, which may be of guiding significance for the maintenance of human health.

It has become a hotspot and keystone in gene engineering and bioengineering to produce recombinant proteins through heterologous expression systems. Unfortunately, not all the genes could be successfully and effectively expressed in heterologous hosts. The role of gene itself in regulating translation process through its intrinsic sequence characteristics such as codon bias, codon pair bias, GC content, mRNA secondary structure and mRNA stability, has been gradually elucidated. Here we review these factors that influence the translation processes and their corresponding optimization methods in the process of gene design. We emphatically discussed codon bias and codon pair bias and their optimization methods. In particular, the latest theories of codon harmonization and codon pair harmonization were discussed and compared with the traditional codon and codon pair optimization strategies in gene design.