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The road traffic has become one of the main sources of urban pollution and could directly affect roadside soils. To understand the level of contamination and potential sources of trace metals in roadside soils of Shanghai, 10 trace metals (Sb, Cr, Co, Ni, Cu, Cd, Pb, Hg, Mn and Zn) from two urban/rural roads (Hutai Road and Wunign-Caoan Road) were analyzed in this study. Antimony, Ni, Cu, Cd, Pb, Hg and Zn concentrations were higher than that of soil background values of Shanghai, whereas accumulation of Cr, Co and Mn were minimal. Significantly higher Sb, Cd, Pb contents were found in samples from urban areas than those from suburban area, suggesting the impact from urbanization. The concentrations of Sb and Cd in older road (Hutai) were higher than that in younger road (Wunign-Caoan). Multivariate statistical analysis revealed that Sb, Cu, Cd, Pb and Zn were mainly controlled by traffic activities (e.g. brake wear, tire wear, automobile exhaust) with high contamination levels found near traffic-intensive areas; Cr, Co, Ni and Mn derived primarily from soil parent materials; Hg was related to industrial activities. Besides, the enrichment of Sb, Cd, Cu, Pb and Zn showed a decreasing trend with distance to the road edges. According to the enrichment factors (EF s ), 78.5% of Sb, Cu, Cd, Pb and Zn were in moderate or significant pollution, indicating considerable traffic contribution. In particular, recently introduced in automotive technology, accumulation of Sb has been recognized in 42.9% samples of both roads. The accumulation of these traffic-derived metals causes potential negative impact to human health and ecological environment and should be concerned, especially the emerging trace elements like Sb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fibroblast heterogeneity has long been recognized in mouse and human lungs, homeostasis, and disease states. However, there is no common consensus on fibroblast subtypes, lineages, biological properties, signaling, and plasticity, which severely hampers our understanding of the mechanisms of fibrosis. To comprehensively classify fibroblast populations in the lung using an unbiased approach, single-cell RNA sequencing was performed with mesenchymal preparations from either uninjured or bleomycin-treated mouse lungs. Single-cell transcriptome analyses classified and defined six mesenchymal cell types in normal lung and seven in fibrotic lung. Furthermore, delineation of their differentiation trajectory was achieved by a machine learning method. This collection of single-cell transcriptomes and the distinct classification of fibroblast subsets provide a new resource for understanding the fibroblast landscape and the roles of fibroblasts in fibrotic diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elevation in toxic trace metal concentration found in coastal sediments in recent years (2013–2016) increased the risk to the aquaculture industry in south Hangzhou bay. This study assessed the main factors controlling the metal distribution and mobility in sediments by sampling from 20 sites along the bank. Spatial distribution and cluster analysis indicated that Cd, As, Hg and Sb attributed to anthropogenic terrestrial sources; while Cr, Co, Cu, Ni, Zn, and Pb, carried by fine-grained sediments and accumulated on tidal flat, were inputted from marine sources. High mobility of Cd was expected because of its considerable proportion (~ 50%) associated with the acid extractable fraction. Pb, Cu and Co in redox sensitive fraction should also be taken into concern in management of reclaimed area affected by tide. Risk assessments by potential ecological risk index (PERI) emphasised the importance of further monitor and proper treatment of 4 terrestrial generated metals in sediments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Methanosarcina, Anaeromyxobacter and Geobacter were identified as V-reducing microorganisms. • V(V)-reducing bacteria and archaea may use different pathways to reduce V(V). • V-reducing bacteria use NarG and NapA to perform respiratory V(V) reduction. • Methanosarcina may mediate V(V) reduction coupled with anaerobic methane oxidation. Vanadium (V) is a transitional metal that poses health risks to exposed humans. Microorganisms play an important role in remediating V contamination by reducing more toxic and mobile vanadate (V(V)) to less toxic and mobile V(IV). In this study, DNA-stable isotope probing (SIP) coupled with metagenomic-binning was used to identify microorganisms responsible for V(V) reduction and determine potential metabolic mechanisms in cultures inoculated with a V-contaminated river sediment. Anaeromyxobacter and Geobacter spp. were identified as putative V(V)-reducing bacteria, while Methanosarcina spp. were identified as putative V(V)-reducing archaea. The bacteria may use the two nitrate reductases NarG and NapA for respiratory V(V) reduction, as has been demonstrated previously for other species. It is proposed that Methanosarcina spp. may reduce V(V) via anaerobic methane oxidation pathways (AOM-V) rather than via respiratory V(V) reduction performed by their bacterial counterparts, as indicated by the presence of genes associated with anaerobic methane oxidation coupled with metal reduction in the metagenome assembled genome (MAG) of Methanosarcina. Briefly, methane may be oxidized through the "reverse methanogenesis" pathway to produce electrons, which may be further captured by V(V) to promote V(V) reduction. More specially, V(V) reduction by members of Methanosarcina may be driven by electron transport (CoMS-SCoB heterodisulfide reductase (HdrDE), F 420 H 2 dehydrogenases (Fpo), and multi-heme c-type cytochrome (MHC)). The identification of putative V(V)-reducing bacteria and archaea and the prediction of their different pathways for V(V) reduction expand current knowledge regarding the potential fate of V(V) in contaminated sites. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arsenite (As(III)) is more toxic, mobilizable and bioavailable than arsenate (As(V)). Hence, the transformations between As(III) and As(V) are crucial for the toxicity and mobility of arsenic (As). However, As transformation and microbial communities involved in alkaline soils are largely unknown. Here we investigate two major pathways of As transformation, i.e., As(III) oxidation and As(V) reduction, and identify the bacteria involved in the alkaline soil by combining stable isotope probing with shotgun metagenomic sequencing. As(III) oxidation and significant increase of the aioA genes copies were observed in the treatments amended with As(III) and NO 3 −, suggesting that As(III) oxidation can couple with nitrate reduction and was mainly catalyzed by the microorganisms containing aioA genes. As(V) reduction was detected in the treatments amended with As(V) and acetate where the abundance of arrA gene significantly increased, indicating that microorganisms with arrA genes were the key As(V) reducers. Acidovorax , Hydrogenophaga , and Ramlibacter were the putative nitrate-dependent As(III) oxidizers, and Deinococcus and Serratia were the putative respiratory As(V) reducers. These findings will improve our understanding of As metabolism and are meaningful for mapping out bioremediation strategies of As contamination in alkaline environment. [Display omitted] • Anaerobic As(III) oxidation mainly catalyzed by microbes with aioA genes. • Microbes with arrA gene were the key drivers of respiratory As(V) reduction. • Acidovorax , Hydrogenophaga and Ramlibacter mediated anaerobic As(III) oxidation. • Deinococcus and Serratia were the putative As(V) reducers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Three deep neural network models are compared and analyzed. The results show that convolutional neural network is more suitable for automatic sleep staging task based on heart rate variability. • By adjusting and optimizing the model architecture, the accuracy of the four categories is improved. • Focus loss function alleviates the negative effect of sleep sample size imbalance. • Heart rate variability is easy to obtain, which provides a feasible scheme for family sleep monitoring. The fluctuation of heart rate is regulated by autonomic nervous system. In human sleep, the autonomic nervous system plays a leading role. Therefore, we can use heart-rate variability (HRV) to stage the sleep process. Based on two independent public datasets, we construct three end-to-end automatic sleep staging models: fully connected neural networks (FCN), convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM). Only the HRV sequence was used to classify and identify the four sleep stages of the subject's sleep process: wake(W), light sleep (LS), slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM), and the confusion matrix was calculated. The three models were compared by performance index (precision, accuracy, F1, Kappa statistic) and Friedman test. Among these models, the CNN has the best classification effect. The precision of W, REM, LS and SWS were 88.31%, 98.07%, 81.16% and 99.36%, respectively. It's the average accuracy, average F1 value and Kappa statistic were 91.72%, 0.8850 and 0.8844 ± 0.0095, respectively. The experimental results show that the convolutional neural network can achieve good sleep staging effect based on the signal of HRV solely, which is suitable for sleep detection in the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The mechanical response of cohesionless granular materials under monotonic loading has been investigated using a three-dimensional numerical simulation of a standard plane-strain compression test. This paper studies the influence of micro-properties of granular material on the macroscopic stress-strain behaviour observed in the numerical simulation with the discrete element method (DEM). The numerical simulation results are compared with laboratory test on Toyoura sand using model particles of different shapes and sizes with a similar relative particle size distribution. The simulations show that particle properties have a great effect on the soil stress-strain behaviour. The shear strength and friction angle of the sample increase when the particle friction coefficient increases. As the particles become less rotund, the sample shows higher shear strength due to interlocking. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Dietary protection from mammary cancer is likely coordinated through multiple signaling pathways, based on the known heterogeneity of the disease and the distinct origins of mammary tumor cells. The present study examined the modulatory effects of dietary intake of whey protein hydrolysate (WPH) relative to casein (CAS), on mammary epithelial cell resistance to endogenous DNA damage using Tp53 gene expression and signaling as a read-out, and on systemic proapoptotic and immune surveillance activity, in young adult female Sprague-Dawley rats. Rats were fed AIN-93G diets made with CAS or WPH as the sole protein source beginning at gestation d 4. At postnatal day (PND) 50, mammary glands of rats fed WPH had lower levels of activated Tp53 and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase proteins, and reduced transcript levels for Tp53-associated DNA damage repair, growth arrest, and proapoptotic genes than those of CAS-fed rats. Serum from WPH-fed rats had greater apoptotic activity in MCF-7 tumor cells than that from rats fed CAS. Serum levels of monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1 were higher in WPH- than in CAS-fed rats. MCF-7 cells treated with CAS serum + recombinant rat MCP-1 had apoptotic activity and Tp53 and p21 gene expression levels comparable to those treated with WPH serum or recombinant MCP-1. Results indicate that mammary glands of rats fed a WPH diet are more protected from endogenous DNA damage than are those of CAS-fed rats, and identify MCP-1 as a potential serum biomarker for the positive effects of healthy diets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have found that AIN-93G diets made with whey protein hydrolysate (WPH) reduce 7,12-dimethyl-benz[a]anthracene (DMBA)-induced tumor incidence in Sprague-Dawley (Harlan) rats relative to those fed a diet with casein (CAS). Herein, we replicated these findings in another Sprague-Dawley substrain (Charles River) and examined whether WPH protective effects were associated with altered mammary gland differentiation status and expression of the tumor suppressor phosphatase and tensin homolog deleted in chromosome ten (PTEN). Mammary tumor incidence was lower in DMBA-treated rats fed WPH than in those fed CAS. Mammary glands of WPH- and CAS-fed rats were isolated at weaning [postnatal day (PND) 21-28] and at an early adult stage (PND 50-53) and analyzed for proliferative (proliferating cell nuclear antigen immunoreactivity), apoptotic (terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated deoxy-UTP nick-end labeling), and differentiation (beta-casein) indices, as well as for PTEN mRNA and protein levels. PND 50-53 rats fed WPH showed decreased proliferation and increased apoptosis in mammary structures, coincident with increased mammary beta-casein gene expression, decreased terminal end-bud numbers, and increased ductal lengths, relative to same-age CAS-fed rats. When challenged with DMBA for 24 h, mammary glands of PND 53 CAS-fed rats had decreased cell survival in both terminal end buds and ductal epithelium, while the mammary glands of WPH-fed rats were not altered from pre-DMBA levels. At 7 d post-DMBA, mammary glands of CAS- and WPH-fed rats exhibited comparable apoptotic indices. Mammary PTEN expression was higher in WPH- than in CAS-fed rats at PND 21-28, but was not different in young adults fed either diet. Results demonstrate that dietary WPH advances mammary gland differentiation during neonatal development and suggest that the transiently increased expression of the pro-apoptotic signal PTEN during a sensitive developmental window may partly underlie the cancer protective effects of WPH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Ultrafiltration is a separation process for purifying and concentrating macromolecular solutions. Using Baiyu yam (Dioscorea opposita Thunb) as the raw material, single-factor experiments, Box–Behnken design (BBD) and response surface methodology (RSM) were employed to investigate the effects of the ultrafiltration pH, temperature and pressure on the extraction rate of Chinese yam polysaccharide (CYP). The constructed regression model is highly significant, and the optimal ultrafiltration-assisted extraction conditions were determined to be the following: pH 6.5, 20 °C and 0.03 MPa. Under these optimal conditions, a CYP extraction rate of 88.7% was achieved. After purification with anion exchange (DE-52) and size-exclusion (Sephadex G-100) columns, the monosaccharide composition of CYP was determined to be 50.8% glucose, 24.2% mannose and 11.8% galactose. Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy characterization of CYP confirmed the characteristic absorption peaks of the polysaccharides. The microstructure of CYP exhibited characteristics typical of amorphous powders. CYP also exhibited antioxidant activities, including the scavenging of DPPH radicals, hydroxyl radicals and superoxide anion radicals. Moreover, CYP exhibited a relatively strong inhibitory effect on BGC-823 cell growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, the Communist Party of China developed the first "ecological civilization construction" national strategy, with a special focus on ecosystem environments and natural resources. The aim of this strategy is to manage ecology, environmental challenges, and resource depletion occurring under rapid economic development. However, research has not been conducted to assess the progress of ecological civilization after the implementation of this national strategy across China's provinces and over time, and the comparison in ecological civilization progress before and after the implementation of the national strategy is still unknown. This information is critically important as it can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the national strategy and provide useful guidelines for future policy-making to better manage national ecology and environment. To address this knowledge gap, we assessed ecological civilization progress across China's provinces in 2012–2017 and 2007–2012. Comprehensive assessments were based on a synthetical weight-based index consisting of 33 indicators that focus on ecosystem conservation, environmental quality improvement, and rational utilization of resource. The results demonstrated that at a national level, the general progress rate of ecological civilization reached 14.94% in 2012–2017, which was 2.3 times of the levels recorded in 2007–2012. Unexpectedly, the growth rate of progress in the most important dimension—ecosystem conservation (7.54%)—was far lower than that of environmental quality improvement (19.46%) and rational utilization of resource progress (17.11%). Moreover, large variations existed among ecological civilization progress across provinces. After the implementation of the ECC strategy, developing provinces made more improvement in ecological civilization progress than developed provinces. The results of our study demonstrate the improvement in progress of China's ecological civilization construction and indicate that ecosystem conservation should be further highlighted for ecological civilization development policy. • The first spatial-temporal dynamically analysis of China's ecological civilization progress after implementing national strategy. • The growth rate of China's ecological civilization progress was 2.3 times as much as previous level in 2012-2017. • Developing provinces made more improvements in ecological civilization progress than developed province after 2012. • Progress of the dimension of ecosystem conservation was far lower than those of environmental quality and resource utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]