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Probiotics play an important role in the host and have attracted widespread attention as an alternative to antibiotics. Arbor Acres broilers were used in the present experiment and fed different doses of compound probiotics at 1, 5, and 10g kgWe discovered 425 differentially expressed genes (DEGs; upregulated: 256, downregulated: 169) in the cecal transcriptome study. These DEGs were assigned to fat metabolic pathways, such as the PPAR signaling pathway, according to KEGG analysis. Probiotics downregulated LPL and up-regulated PPARα expression in the cecum. In metabolome analysis of broilers cecum, we screened 86 differential metabolites and performed KEGG enrichment analysis of these metabolites. The KEGG analysis showed that these differentially expressed metabolites were annotated to nucleotide metabolism-related pathways, such as purine metabolism. In the cecum, probiotics upregulated the content of guanine, AMP, 3'-AMP, adenylosuccinate, deoxyguanosine, and ADP-ribose, whereas downregulated the content of 5-hydroxyisourate. Comprehensive transcriptome and metabolome analysis revealed that glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, and glycerophospholipid metabolism pathways were jointly enriched in cecum of broilers fed probiotics-containing diet.This study provides valuable information for studying the regulation and gene metabolism network of probiotics on caecal metabolism in broilers. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors play an important role in a wide range of metabolic and developmental processes in eukaryotes, and bHLH proteins also participate in immune responses, especially in plants. However, their roles in insects upon entomopathogen infection are unknown. In this study, 54 bHLH genes in 41 families were identified in a polyphagous pest, Spodoptera litura, including a new bHLH gene in group B, which is specifically present in Lepidoptera and was thus named Lep. The conserved amino acids in the bHLH domain, structural architecture, and chromosomal distribution of bHLH genes in S. litura were analyzed. The bHLH genes in Plutella xylostella and Apis mellifera were also updated, and genome-wide comparison and phylogenetic analysis of bHLH members in five holometabolous insects were performed. The expression profiles of S. litura bHLH (SlbHLH) genes in three tissues at different developmental stages and their responses to S. litura nucleopolyhedrovirus (SpltNPV), Nomuraea rileyi (Nr), and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) infection were investigated. More SlbHLHs in group B were expressed and differentially expressed during pathogen infections, and SlbHLHs tended to be downregulated in the midgut of S. litura larvae after B. thuringiensis treatment. Our study provides an overview of bHLH family members in S. litura and their responses to different pathogens used for pest biocontrol. These findings on bHLH members may contribute to uncovering the mechanism of host-pathogen interaction. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Using observational data for 1979–2010, the temporal and spatial variations of wintertime (December–February) snow water equivalent (SWE) over China and their relations to the November SWE, wintertime snowfall, snow evaporation, sublimation and melting are investigated. The results revealed that the SWE is principally distributed in four snow regions of northwestern (NW) China, northeastern (NE) China, the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and the Yangtze–Huaihe River valley (YH). It is found that the impact of the November SWE is confined to the north of 42°N, while the impact of snowfall are relevant over all China, and the impacts of snow evaporation and sublimation are limited to NW, NE and the TP. The effect of snow melting is large in the YH but weak in other regions. On the inter-annual timescale, the snow mass balance shows different features in different snow regions. The wintertime SWE is in line with snowfall. The November SWE has a major effect on the wintertime SWE in NW and NE but not in the TP and YH. The effect of meteorological factors on snow evaporation, sublimation and melting differs in different snow regions. Evaporation is mainly affected by vapour pressure deficit in NW and wind speeds in NE and the TP. Sublimation is controlled by air temperature in NW, wind speeds in NE, vapour pressure deficit in YH and air temperature, pressure and vapour pressure deficit in the TP. Melting is closely related with air temperature in the TP and net radiation in the YH.

We study the quadratic bottleneck problem (QBP) which generalizes several well-studied optimization problems. A weak duality theorem is introduced along with a general purpose algorithm to solve QBP. An example is given which illustrates duality gap in the weak duality theorem. It is shown that the special case of QBP where feasible solutions are subsets of a finite set having the same cardinality is NP-hard. Likewise the quadratic bottleneck spanning tree problem (QBST) is shown to be NP-hard on a bipartite graph even if the cost function takes 0–1 values only. Two lower bounds for QBST are derived and compared. Efficient heuristic algorithms are presented for QBST along with computational results. When the cost function is decomposable, we show that QBP is solvable in polynomial time whenever an associated linear bottleneck problem can be solved in polynomial time. As a consequence, QBP with feasible solutions form spanning trees, s-t paths, matchings, etc., of a graph are solvable in polynomial time with a decomposable cost function. We also show that QBP can be formulated as a quadratic minsum problem and establish some asymptotic results. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011

Suzuki—Miyaura cross-coupling reaction is used for the monoarylation of the monobrominated (I), bis-arylation of the bis-brominated (IV) and a step-wise bisarylation of (IV) using two different boronic acids.

A versatile method for the synthesis of novel brominated 4-alkyl-2(5H)-furanones under mild reaction conditions is described. This synthetic strategy requires only one chromatographic separation over six steps and employs the cyclodehydration of brominated levulinic acid as the key transformation.