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Abstract Pluripotent stem cells have the potential to generate embryo models that can recapitulate developmental processes in vitro. Large animals such as pigs may also benefit from stem-cell-based embryo models for improving breeding. Here, we report the generation of blastoids from porcine embryonic stem cells (pESCs). We first develop a culture medium 4FIXY to derive pESCs. We develop a 3D two-step differentiation strategy to generate porcine blastoids from the pESCs. The resulting blastoids exhibit similar morphology, size, cell lineage composition, and single-cell transcriptome characteristics to blastocysts. These porcine blastoids survive and expand for more than two weeks in vitro under two different culture conditions. Large animal blastoids such as those derived from pESCs may enable in vitro modeling of early embryogenesis and improve livestock species’ breeding practices.

Sustainable development of the economy is the goal of every country in the world. The eco¬nomic growth of China is accepted worldwide, but the Chinese economy also suffers from an economic crisis. The role of the Chinese government is important for chinses businesses and the economic sus¬tainability of the country. The theoretical framework of this study is designed to determine the impact of globalization and sustainable development policy on fair trade and economic sustainability in China. A questionnaire based on Likert scale were employed with a random sampling technique to collect the cross-sectional data for this research and 1094 responses were collected at the rate of 55%. AMOS sta-tistics tool was employed for the findings of this study based on a research questionnaire. The research concludes that globalization and sustainable development policy have a significant impact on fair trade and economic sustainability in China. This study introduced a new framework related to economic sus¬tainability in the body of knowledge. The theoretical and practical implications of this study have signif¬icance for literature and practitioners in China to achieve sustainability in the economy. The research is novel as it highlighted the importance of globalization and sustainable development policy for fair trade and economic development in China. Accordingly, it would be helpful for the policy makers to have reli¬able decisions for sustainable development and promotion of fair trade.

ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to compare the effects of Leymus chinensis hay and alfalfa hay as the roughage on the rumen bacterial and the meat metabolomics in lambs.MethodsFourteen male lambs were randomly assigned to two dietary treatments (one group was fed with concentrate and Leymus chinensis hay; another was fed with concentrate and alfalfa hay) with seven replicates per treatment. The feeding experiment lasted for 60 days. Lambs were slaughtered at the end of the feeding experiment. Growth performance, carcass performance, and weights of various viscera were determined. The longissimus dorsi and rumen contents were collected for untargeted metabolomics and 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing analysis, respectively.ResultsThe lambs fed with alfalfa hay showed a significantly increased in average daily gain, carcass weight, dressing percentage, loin-eye area, and kidney weight. Feeding Leymus chinensis hay and alfalfa hay diets resulted in different meat metabolite deposition and rumen bacterial communities in the lambs. The relative abundance of phyla Fibrobacteres, Bacteroidetes, and Spirochaetes were greater in the Leymus Chinensis hay group, while, the relative abundance of Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Fusobacteria, and Verrucomicrobia were greater in the alfalfa hay group. Based on untargeted metabolomics, the main altered metabolic pathways included alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism, D-glutamine and D-glutamate metabolism, phenylalanine metabolism, nitrogen metabolism, and tyrosine metabolism. Several bacteria genera including BF31, Alistipes, Faecalibacterium, Eggerthella, and Anaeroplasma were significantly correlated with growth performance and meat metabolites.ConclusionAlfalfa hay improved growth performance and carcass characteristics in lambs. Leymus chinensis hay and alfalfa hay caused different meat metabolite deposition by modifying the rumen bacterial community. These findings will be beneficial to future forage utilization for sheep growth, carcass performance, and meat quality improvement.

Objective The current study aimed to perform whole-genome resequencing of Chinese indigenous Mongolian sheep breeds including Ujimqin, Sunit, and Wu Ranke sheep breeds (UJMQ, SNT, WRK) and deeply analyze genetic variation, population structure, domestication, and selection for domestication traits among these Mongolian sheep breeds. Methods Blood samples were collected from a total of 60 individuals comprising 20 WRK, 20 UJMQ, and 20 SNT. For genome sequencing, about 1.5 μg of genomic DNA was used for library construction with an insert size of about 350 bp. Pair-end sequencing were performed on Illumina NovaSeq platform, with the read length of 150 bp at each end. We then investigated the domestication and signatures of selection in these sheep breeds. Results According to the population and demographic analyses, WRK and SNT populations were very similar, which were different from UJMQ populations. Genome wide association study identified 468 and 779 significant loci from SNT vs UJMQ, and UJMQ vs WRK, respectively. However, only 3 loci were identified from SNT vs WRK. Genomic comparison and selective sweep analysis among these sheep breeds suggested that genes associated with regulation of secretion, metabolic pathways including estrogen metabolism and amino acid metabolism, and neuron development have undergone strong selection during domestication. Conclusion Our findings will facilitate the understanding of Chinese indigenous Mongolian sheep breeds domestication and selection for complex traits and provide a valuable genomic resource for future studies of sheep and other domestic animal breeding.

The Arbas cashmere goat is a unique biological resource that plays a vital role in livestock husbandry in China. LCDM is a medium with special small molecules (consisting of human LIF, CHIR99021, (S)-(+)-dimethindene maleate, and minocycline hydrochloride) for generation pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) with bidirectional developmental potential in mice, humans, pigs, and bovines. However, there is no report on whether LCDM can support for generation of PSCs with the same ability in Arbas cashmere goats. In this study, we applied LCDM to generate goat induced PSCs (giPSCs) from goat fetal fibroblasts (GFFs) by reprogramming. The derived giPSCs exhibited stem cell morphology, expressing pluripotent markers, and could differentiate into three germ layers. Moreover, the giPSCs differentiated into the trophectoderm lineage by spontaneous and directed differentiation in vitro. The giPSCs contributed to embryonic and extraembryonic tissue in preimplantation blastocysts and postimplantation chimeric embryos. RNA-sequencing analysis showed that the giPSCs were very close to goat embryos at the blastocyst stage and giPSCs have similar properties to typical extended PSCs (EPSCs). The establishment of giPSCs with LCDM provides a new way to generate PSCs from domestic animals and lays the foundation for basic and applied research in biology and agriculture.

Intergenerational support is bidirectional, and reverse intergenerational support refers to parents providing financial support, time support, and spiritual support to their offspring. The emergence of reverse intergenerational support has created role conflicts among different groups of older adults. Based on survey data from 3,170 elderly people in eight sample provinces in China, this paper empirically investigates the relationship between reverse intergenerational support and the happiness of the elderly in contemporary China and the moderating effect of role conflict in it, using an ordered logit model. It was found that, first, reverse economic support reduces the happiness of the elderly, and reverse time support and reverse spiritual support can significantly enhance the happiness of the elderly. Second, in the presence of role conflict, the effect of reverse time support and reverse spiritual support on the enhancement of older adults’ happiness was suppressed; in the presence of role enhancement, the effect of reverse economic support on the reduction of older adults’ happiness was mitigated. The above findings provide new empirical evidence for understanding the relationship between reverse intergenerational support and the happiness of the elderly, which is prevalent in contemporary China, and offer new insights for enhancing happiness.

Mutton is one of the most widely consumed meats globally. The Chinese Mongolian sheep (MS) breed is an indigenous breed of sheep characterised by high-quality meat and strong adaptability. Dorper × Chinese Mongolian crossbred sheep (DS) is an improved breed with a rapid growth rate and high mutton yield found in parts of China. The rumen microbiota is known to play a key role in shaping host nutrition and health. However, the carcass traits and meat nutritional qualities of DS and MS remain poorly defined, as does how rumen microbes affect these characteristics. The objective of this study was to compare carcass profiles, rumen bacterial communities, and meat nutritional qualities between MS and DS and clarify the associations between rumen microbiota and meat nutritional composition. We found that DS had a faster growth rate and better carcass traits than MS, including BW, carcass weight, meat weight, and loin-eye area. We further found that metabolite and rumen bacterial community composition differed between the two sheep breeds. First, compared with MS, DS had lower contents of some sweet amino acids, monounsaturated fatty acids, n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, and beneficial metabolites. Secondly, MS and DS had distinct rumen bacterial compositions, and these differential bacteria were related to carcass traits as well as to contents of meat amino acids, free fatty acids, and other metabolites. Taken together, our data showed that DS had better carcass characteristics but lower meat nutritional quality, parameters that were associated with differences in rumen bacterial community composition. These findings may benefit future breeding strategies aimed at improving sheep carcass performance and meat quality worldwide.

The lattice-based CRYSTALS-Dilithium scheme is one of the three thirdround digital signature finalists in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process. Due to the complex calculations and highly individualized functions in Dilithium, its hardware implementations face the problems of large area requirements and low efficiency. This paper proposes several optimization methods to achieve a compact and high-performance hardware architecture for round 3 Dilithium. Specifically, a segmented pipelined processing method is proposed to reduce both the storage requirements and the processing time. Moreover, several optimized modules are designed to improve the efficiency of the proposed architecture, including a pipelined number theoretic transform module, a SampleInBall module, a Decompose module, and three modular reduction modules. Compared with state-of-the-art designs for Dilithium on similar platforms, our implementation requires 1.4×/1.4×/3.0×/4.5× fewer LUTs/FFs/BRAMs/DSPs, respectively, and 4.4×/1.7×/1.4× less time for key generation, signature generation, and signature verification, respectively, for NIST security level 5.

The low-cost, highly efficient online finance credit provides underfunded individuals and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with an indispensable credit channel. Most of the previous studies focus on the client crediting and screening of online finance. Few have studied the risk rating under a complete credit risk management system. This paper introduces the improved neural network technology to the credit risk rating of online finance. Firstly, the study period was divided into the early phase and late phase after the launch of an online finance credit product. In the early phase, there are few manually labeled samples and many unlabeled samples. Therefore, a cold start method was designed for the credit risk rating of online finance, and the similarity and abnormality of credit default were calculated. In the late phase, there are few unlabeled samples. Hence, the backpropagation neural network (BPNN) was improved for online finance credit risk rating. Our strategy was proved valid through experiments.

Abstract It is not fully clear why there is a higher contribution of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) to the chimera produced by injection of PSCs into 4-cell or 8-cell stage embryos compared with blastocyst injection. Here, we show that not only embryonic stem cells (ESCs) but also induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can generate F0 nearly 100% donor cell-derived mice by 4-cell stage embryo injection, and the approach has a “dose effect”. Through an analysis of the PSC-secreted proteins, Activin A was found to impede epiblast (EPI) lineage development while promoting trophectoderm (TE) differentiation, resulting in replacement of the EPI lineage of host embryos with PSCs. Interestingly, the injection of ESCs into blastocysts cultured with Activin A (cultured from 4-cell stage to early blastocyst at E3.5) could increase the contribution of ESCs to the chimera. The results indicated that PSCs secrete protein Activin A to improve their EPI competency after injection into recipient embryos through influencing the development of mouse early embryos. This result is useful for optimizing the chimera production system and for a deep understanding of PSCs effects on early embryo development.

In this paper, a three-component decomposition algorithm is proposed for processing compact polarimetric SAR images. By using the correspondence between the covariance matrix and the Stokes vector, three-component scattering models for CTLR and DCP modes are established. The explicit expression of decomposition results is then derived by setting the contribution of volume scattering as a free parameter. The degree of depolarization is taken as the upper bound of the free parameter, for the constraint that the weighting factor of each scattering component should be nonnegative. Several methods are investigated to estimate the free parameter suitable for decomposition. The feasibility of this algorithm is validated by AIRSAR data over San Francisco and RADARSAT-2 data over Flevoland.

Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), including embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced PSCs (iPSCs), can differentiate into cells of the three germ layers, suggesting that PSCs have great potential for basic developmental biology research and wide applications for clinical medicine. Genuine ESCs and iPSCs have been derived from mice and rats, but not from livestock such as the pig─an ideal animal model for studying human disease and regenerative medicine due to similarities with human physiologic processes. Efforts to derive porcine ESCs and iPSCs have not yielded high-quality PSCs that can produce chimeras with germline transmission. Thus, exploration of the unique porcine gene regulation network of preimplantation embryonic development may permit optimization of in vitro culture systems for raising porcine PSCs. Here we summarize the recent progress in porcine PSC generation as well as the problems encountered during this progress and we depict prospects for generating porcine naive PSCs.

Large numbers of lipids exist in the porcine oocytes and early embryos and have the positive effects on their development, suggesting that the lipids may play an important role in pluripotency establishment and maintenance in pigs. However, the effects of lipids and their metabolites, such as fatty acids on reprogramming and the pluripotency gene expression of porcine-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), are unclear. Here, we generated the porcine iPSCs that resemble the mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) under lipid and fatty-acid-enriched cultural conditions (supplement of AlbuMAX). These porcine iPSCs show positive for the ESCs pluripotency markers and have the differentiation abilities to all three germ layers, and importantly, have the capability of aggregation into the inner cell mass (ICM) of porcine blastocysts. We further confirmed that lipid and fatty acid enriched condition can promote the cell proliferation and improve reprogramming efficiency by elevating cAMP levels. Interestingly, this lipids supplement promotes mesenchymal–epithelial transition (MET) through the cAMP/PKA/CREB signal pathway and upregulates the E-cadherin expression during porcine somatic cell reprogramming. The lipids supplement also makes a contribution to lipid droplets accumulation in the porcine iPSCs that resemble porcine preimplantation embryos. These findings may facilitate understanding of the lipid metabolism in porcine iPSCs and lay the foundation of bona fide porcine embryonic stem cell derivation.

BACKGROUND: Tumor recurrence is a major problem after curative resection of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The current study evaluated the effects of adjuvant iodine-125 ((125)I) brachytherapy on postoperative recurrence of HCC. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: From July 2000 to June 2004, 68 HCC patients undergoing curative hepatectomy were randomly assigned into a (125)I adjuvant brachytherapy group (n = 34) and a group of best care (n = 34). Patients in the (125)I adjuvant brachytherapy group received (125)I seed implantation on the raw surface of resection. Patients in the best care control group received identical treatments except for the (125)I seed implantation. Time to recurrence (TTR) and 1-, 3- and 5-year overall survival (OS) were compared between the two groups. The follow-up ended in January 2010, and lasted for 7.7-106.4 months with a median of 47.6 months. TTR was significantly longer in the (125)I group (mean of 60.0 months vs. 36.7 months in the control). The 1-, 3- and 5-year recurrence-free rates of the (125)I group were 94.12%, 76.42%, and 73.65% vs. 88.24%, 50.00%, and 29.41% compared with the control group, respectively. The 1-, 3- and 5-year OS rates of the (125)I group were 94.12%, 73.53%, and 55.88% vs. 88.24%, 52.94%, and 29.41% compared with the control group, respectively. The (125)I brachytherapy decreased the risk of recurrence (HR = 0.310) and the risk of death (HR = 0.364). Most frequent adverse events in the (125)I group included nausea, vomiting, arrhythmia, decreased white blood cell and/or platelet counts, and were generally mild and manageable. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Adjuvant (125)I brachytherapy significantly prolonged TTR and increased the OS rate after curative resection of HCC. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12610000081011.

In the environment of cloud computing, real-time mass data about high-speed rail which is based on the intense monitoring of large scale perceived equipment provides strong support for the safety and maintenance of high-speed rail. In this paper, we focus on the Top- k algorithm of continuous distribution based on Multisource distributed data stream for high-speed rail monitoring. Specifically, we formalized Top- k monitoring model of high-speed rail and proposed DTMR that is the Top- k monitoring algorithm with random, continuous, or strictly monotone aggregation functions. The DTMR was proved to be valid by lots of experiments.

As an important component of China’s transportation data sharing system, high-speed railway data sharing is a typical application of data-intensive computing. Currently, most high-speed railway data is shared in cloud computing environment. Thus, there is an urgent need for an effective cloud-computing-based data placement strategy in high-speed railway. In this paper, a new data placement strategy named hierarchical structure data placement strategy is proposed. The proposed method combines the semidefinite programming algorithm with the dynamic interval mapping algorithm. The semi-definite programming algorithm is suitable for the placement of files with various replications, ensuring that different replications of a file are placed on different storage devices, while the dynamic interval mapping algorithm ensures better self-adaptability of the data storage system. A hierarchical data placement strategy is proposed for large-scale networks. In this paper, a new theoretical analysis is provided, which is put in comparison with several other previous data placement approaches, showing the efficacy of the new analysis in several experiments.