Search

Plagiorchis elegans (Trematoda: Digenea) is mainly parasitic in the intestines of vertebrate animals, including humans, causing irreversible pathological damage and herd-spherical influences. However, little information is available about its molecular epidemiology, population genetics, and phylogeny. In the present study, we sequenced, assembled, and annotated the complete mitochondrial (mt) genome of P. elegans. Combining with the available mitochondrial data of subclass Digenea, phylogenetic analysis was performed based on Bayesian inference (BI). These results showed that the complete length of P. elegans is 13,862 bp, including 12 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 2 ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), 22 transfer RNAs (tRNAs), and one non-coding region (NCR). There was an obvious A + T content from 61.0% to 71.3% and the values of the Ka/Ks ratio ranged from 0.119 (cox1) to 1.053 (nad6). In the BI analysis, different from previous studies, phylogenetic analysis showed genus Glypthelmins was paraphyletic rather than monophyletic and had a closer relationship with Plagiorchis and Orientocreadium. Additionally, the BI tree also presented that the genus Echinostoma was monophyletic. Our results provided molecular data in the family Plagiorchiidae proposing new insight within Xiphidiata and Echinostomata.

Contracaecum spp. is a zooparasitic anisakid nematode and occurs in gastrointestinal tracts of vertebrate/invertebrate animals, humans included, causing gastrointestinal pain, diarrhea, and increasingly severe vomiting. To date, thousands of sequences have been published in GenBank, while complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenome) of Contracaecum spp. are still limited. Although the complete mitogenome of Contracaecum species isolated from night herons in Beijing has been reported, the detailed information about it is still puzzling. In the present study, we describe the detailed characteristics within the complete mt DNA Contracaecum sp.. The AT-content in the complete mitogenome of Contracaecum sp. was 72.2%. The nucleotide diversity (Pi) among genus Contracaecum ranged from 0.124 (cox1) to 0.181 (nad4). Based on the computational algorithms Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian Inference (BI) within Ascaridoidea and Heterakoidea, the results supported Contracacum sp. Beijing isolate was a new species in the genus Contracaecum, and supported the family Ascaridiidae was paraphyletic.

Postmenopausal depression has been shown to be related to the reduction of ovarian hormones produced as a woman transitions from a menopausal to a post-menopausal stage. What remains to be known is which type of estrogen receptor plays a key role in estrogen neuroprotection, a process that may be mediated by potentiating brain mitochondrial function and inhibiting mitochondria-associated apoptosis. In order to better imitate the condition of postmenopause, we conducted our research on aged female rats. Plasma estrogen levels declined significantly in ovariectomized rats and 16-month-old female rats, while anxiety and depression-like behavior increase. Moreover, ERα, ERβ, GPER, Bcl2 and UCP2 expression decreased significantly in hippocampus in female rats following ovariectomy. In our study, the anxiety and depression-like behavior in aged female rats were significantly relieved after the treatment of G-1, the GPER agonist. Furthermore, G-1 could reverse the reduction of ERα, ERβ, GPER, Bcl2 and UCP2 expression within the hippocampus. Mitochondrial JC-1 staining indicated that mitochondrial membrane potential increased after G-1 treatment. In addition, total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and superoxide dismutase activity (SOD) were found to be elevated in aged female rats following G-1 treatment. Taken together, estrogen receptors, especially GPER, may activate anti-apoptotic signaling and accelerate mitochondrial function. Therefore, GPER could be the potential therapeutic target for estrogen deficiency-related affective disorders.

Background Spotted-leaf mutants are important to reveal programmed cell death and defense-related pathways in rice. We previously characterized the phenotype performance of a rice spotted-leaf mutant spl21 and narrowed down the causal gene locus spl21(t) to an 87-kb region in chromosome 12 by map-based cloning. Result We showed that a single base substitution from A to G at position 836 in the coding sequence of Oryza sativa beta-1,6-N-acetylglucosaminyl transferase (OsGCNT), effectively mutating Tyr to Cys at position 279 in the translated protein sequence, was responsible for the spotted-leaf phenotype as it could be rescued by functional complementation. Compared to the wild type IR64, the spotted-leaf mutant spl21 exhibited loss of chlorophyll, breakdown of chloroplasts, down-regulation of photosynthesis-related genes, and up-regulation of senescence associated genes, which indicated that OsGCNT regulates premature leaf senescence. Moreover, the enhanced resistance to the bacterial leaf blight pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae, up-regulation of pathogenesis-related genes and increased level of jasmonate which suggested that OsGCNT is a negative regulator of defense response in rice. OsGCNT was expressed constitutively in the leaves, sheaths, stems, roots, and panicles, and OsGCNT-GFP was localized to the Golgi apparatus. High throughput RNA sequencing analysis provided further evidence for the biological effects of loss of OsGCNT function on cell death, premature leaf senescence and enhanced disease resistance in rice. Thus, we demonstrated that the novel OsGCNT regulated rice innate immunity and immunity-associated leaf senescence probably by changing the jasmonate metabolic pathway. Conclusions These results reveal that a novel gene Oryza sativa beta-1,6-N-acetylglucosaminyl transferase (OsGCNT) is responsible for the spotted-leaf mutant spl21, and OsGCNT acts as a negative-regulator mediating defense response and immunity-associated premature leaf senescence probably by activating jasmonate signaling pathway. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12870-018-1489-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

To evaluate the methodological quality and reporting quality of Meta-analysis literature published by acupuncture journals included in Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), and to provide references and demonstration for relevant studies.The Meta-analysis literature published before December 2017 inA total of 69 literature was included. Among them, the co-authorship rate was 100% and the cooperation degree was 5.45. The first authors came from 32 institutions, and 29 literature (42.0%) was funded. The cited rate was 98.6%, and averagely each paper was cited 16.3 times. The mean score of methodology quality evaluation was (7.78±1.14) points, including 14 high-quality literature (20.3%), 50 moderate-quality literature (72.5%) and 5 low-quality literature (7.2%). The average score of reporting quality evaluation was (20.33±2.36) points, including 24 relatively complete literature (34.8%), 41 literature with certain defects (59.4%) and 4 literature with serious defects (5.8%).The Meta-analysis reports published by acupuncture journals in CSCD have relatively high methodological quality and reporting quality, which could provide evidence for clinical decision making, but still the quality level needed to be further enhanced according to the writing standard of Meta-analysis report. At the same time, the overall level of experimental research should be constantly improved to promote the development of evidence-based research on acupuncture and promote the formation of high-quality evidence.

We previously reported a spotted-leaf mutant pelota (originally termed HM47) in rice displaying arrested growth and enhanced resistance to multiple races of Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. Here, we report the map-based cloning of the causal gene OsPELOTA (originally termed splHM47 ). We identified a single base substitution from T to A at position 556 in the coding sequence of OsPELOTA, effectively mutating phenylalanine to isoleucine at position 186 in the translated protein sequence. Both functional complementation and over-expression could rescue the spotted-leaf phenotype. OsPELOTA, a paralogue to eukaryotic release factor 1 (eRF1), shows high sequence similarity to Drosophila Pelota and also localizes to the endoplasmic reticulum and plasma membrane. OsPELOTA is constitutively expressed in roots, leaves, sheaths, stems, and panicles. Elevated levels of salicylic acid and decreased level of jasmonate were detected in the pelota mutant. RNA-seq analysis confirmed that genes responding to salicylic acid were upregulated in the mutant. Our results indicate that the rice PELOTA protein is involved in bacterial leaf blight resistance by activating the salicylic acid metabolic pathway.

Taking into the consideration of dirt cleaning activities, a common practice in IC manufacturing industry.Prove the positional weights in a given sequence including processing and cleaning activities are V-shaped.Using the V-shaped and properties, an effective heuristic is developed. This paper considers a new single machine scheduling problem with several unavailability periods, where the machine has to be stopped in order to remove the dirt. The problem appears in the process in wafer manufacturing company. During the processing of a wafer on a specific machine, the dirt, including particle, organic materials and metal-salts, etc., on the surface of the wafer while processing, has to be taken away by a cleaning agent. Once the accumulation of dirt is over a threshold value, it is necessary to interrupt the machine processing and replace the cleaning agent in order to avoid damaging the wafer. The objective is to minimize the total absolute deviation of job completion times (TADC). The problem integrates production scheduling and cleaning activities and is strongly NP-hard. Many properties for solving the problem efficiently are explored. A mixed binary integer programming model is developed to find the optimal solution. Based on the properties explored, symmetry of the V-shaped rule, and the dynamic programming on scheduling the cleaning activities, an effective heuristic is developed. Computational results indicate that the performance of the heuristic is robust and significantly outperforms the modified TADC solution in the literature. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mixed binary integer programming model and the impact of the dirt accumulation as well as cleaning time are explored in detail.

In this study, green and efficient deep eutectic solvent-based negative pressure cavitation-assisted extraction (DES-NPCE) followed by macroporous resin column chromatography was developed to extract and separate four main isoflavonoids, i.e. prunetin, tectorigenin, genistein and biochanin A from Dalbergia odorifera T. Chen leaves. The extraction procedure was optimized systematically by single-factor experiments and a Box-Behnken experimental design combined with response surface methodology. The maximum extraction yields of prunetin, tectorigenin, genistein and biochanin A reached 1.204, 1.057, 0.911 and 2.448mg/g dry weight, respectively. Moreover, the direct enrichment and separation of four isoflavonoids in DES extraction solution was successfully achieved by macroporous resin AB-8 with recovery yields of more than 80%. The present study provides a convenient and efficient method for the green extraction and preparative separation of active compounds from plants.

Precipitation events spanning multiple days may have consequences different from those limited to a single day. In the present paper, the authors analyze circulation anomalies and precursory signals associated with long-duration (over 14 days) summer precipitation events over southern China. The results show that the over-14-day precipitation events are induced by an anomalous lower-tropospheric (850-hPa) cyclone over the South China Sea (SCS) and southern China. The anomalous westerly winds to the south of the anomalous cyclone can be traced to north of New Guinea 30 days before. To the north of anomalous westerly winds, anomalous easterly winds appear later. The anomalous westerly and easterly winds form a cyclonic anomaly, moving northward and slightly westward during the following days and eventually controlling the SCS and southern China. The northward movement of anomalous westerly and easterly winds can also be found in the 30–60-day filtered wind field. This implies that the northward propagating 30–60-day intraseasonal oscillation from the equatorial western Pacific has an important contribution to over-14-day precipitation events over southern China.

An enzymatic mild acidic hydrolysis was used to separate and purify residual lignin from alkaline peroxide mechanical pulp (APMP). Using the optimum conditions for the laccase treatment (pH 4.5, temperature 50 °C, lignin consistency of 1%, a reaction time of 60 min, and a laccase dosage of 8 μ/g), oven-dried lignin was treated with laccase and in a laccase mediator system (LMS) to explore the mechanism for laccase and the LMS modification of APMP. The changes of functional groups in lignin were analyzed using nuclear magnetic resonance (31P-NMR and 13C-NMR). The molecular weight distributions of the lignin samples were confirmed by gel permeation chromatography (GPC). The 31P-NMR and 13C-NMR spectra revealed that the lignin structure changed significantly with the laccase and the LMS treatments. Meanwhile, GPC demonstrated that laccase without a mediator could lead to the polymerization of lignin, while the LMS could degrade the lignin. Hence, it was concluded that laccase is an attractive enzyme for lignin modification.

Eleven undescribed diarylheptanoids, amomutsaokols A‒K (1–11), together with 13 known ones (13–24), were isolated from the active fraction of the fruits of Amomum tsao-ko. The structures of the undescribed compounds were determined by extensive 1D and 2D NMR, HRESIMS and ECD calculations. Compounds 3–5, 7, 8, 12, 14 and 19 showed obviously α-glucosidase inhibitory activity with IC50 values ranging from 12.9 to 48.8 μM. An enzyme kinetic analysis indicated that compounds 8 and 9 were α-glucosidase noncompetitive inhibitors with Ki values of 18.5 and 213.0 μM, respectively. This study supported diarylheptanoids as the active constituents of A. tsao-ko with α-glucosidase inhibitory effects.

A premature senescence and death 128 (psd128) mutant was isolated from an ethyl methane sulfonate-induced rice IR64 mutant bank. The premature senescence phenotype appeared at the six-leaf stage and the plant died at the early heading stage. psd128 exhibited impaired chloroplast development with significantly reduced photosynthetic ability, chlorophyll and carotenoid contents, root vigor, soluble protein content and increased malonaldehyde content. Furthermore, the expression of senescence-related genes was significantly altered in psd128. The mutant trait was controlled by a single recessive nuclear gene. Using map-based strategy, the mutation Oryza sativa cell division cycle 48 (OsCDC48) was isolated and predicted to encode a putative AAA-type ATPase with 809 amino-acid residuals. A single base substitution at position C2347T in psd128 resulted in a premature stop codon. Functional complementation could rescue the mutant phenotype. In addition, RNA interference resulted in the premature senescence and death phenotype. OsCDC48 was expressed constitutively in the root, stem, leaf and panicle. Subcellular analysis indicated that OsCDC48:YFP fusion proteins were located both in the cytoplasm and nucleus. OsCDC48 was highly conserved with more than 90% identity in the protein levels among plant species. Our results indicated that the impaired function of OsCDC48 was responsible for the premature senescence and death phenotype.

This paper considers the scheduling problem observed in chip sorting operation of LED manufacturing, where each lot (job) with release time have four operations to be processed on a set of processing stages without pre-determined necessary route. Each stage has one and more identical sorting machines. The sorting machines scheduling problem can be treated as a four-stage multiprocessor open shop problem with dynamic job release, and the objective is minimizing the makespan in the paper. This problem is formulated into a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and empirically shows its computational intractability. Due to the computational intractability, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. A series of computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed PSO in comparison with exact solution on various small-size problem instances. The results show that the PSO algorithm could finds most optimal or better solutions in one second.

In this research, the laccase mediator system (LMS) was used to modify the unbleached triploid populus tomentosa alkaline hydrogen peroxide pulp (APMP). The changes of pulp brightness were measured and the effects of LMS on the subsequent hydrogen peroxide bleaching were also determined. Besides, the fiber morphology was analyzed by ESEM, and then the obvious changes of pulp have been recovered. In a word, the LMS has obvious effect on cellulose.

We previously reported a spotted-leaf mutant pelota (originally termed HM47) in rice displaying arrested growth and enhanced resistance to multiple races of Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. Here, we report the map-based cloning of the causal gene OsPELOTA (originally termed spl

This paper considers the parallel batch-processing machines with incompatible job families, that is, jobs with the same recipe can be processed together as a batch, and the sizes of these jobs in a batch should not exceed the capacity limit of a machine. Additionally, setups are required between batches with different families on a machine. Jobs come from the same customer have identical due dates, and according to contracts, penalty occurs when orders are delivered early or late. Thus, in this paper we attempt to formulate a constrained programming model to find a schedule for minimizing the weighted earliness and tardiness. By examining the model using two instances, the results showed that it requires a lot of computation time to find the optimal solution for the given examples due to its inherent complexity. It leads us to develop some heuristic algorithms to obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions efficiently in the future.

This paper is motivated by a sterilization operation in a professional waste disposal services, and models the operation as the problem of single batch-processing machine (BPM) scheduling with the objectives of minimizing the makespan and the total weighted number of tardy orders that has not been considered in the literature. The considered problem is NP-hard such that two simulated annealing algorithms (SA1 and SA2) are developed in this work. SA1 uses multi-search directions to find Pareto-optimal solutions by eleven combinations of weights, as to SA2 applied the SMOSA of Suman to solve the considered problem. A computational experiment is conducted and the solutions for each instance obtained by SA1 and SA2 respectively are compared. Computational results reveal that SA1 is significantly better than SA2 because SA1 changes different search directions by two parameters.

A simple, green and efficient extraction method named modified-solvent free microwave extraction (M-SFME) was employed for the extraction of essential oils (EOs) from Amomun tsao-ko. The process of M-SFME was optimized with the prominent preponderance of such higher extraction yield (1.13%) than those of solvent free microwave extraction (SFME, 0.91%) and hydrodistillation (HD, 0.84%) under the optimal parameters. Thirty-four volatile substances representing 95.4% were identified. The IC50 values of EOs determined by DPPH radical scavenging activity and β-carotene/linoleic acid bleaching assay were 5.27 and 0.63mg/ml. Furthermore, the EOs exhibited moderate to potent broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity against all tested strains including five gram-positive and two gram-negative bacteria (MIC: 2.94-5.86mg/ml). In general, M-SFME is a potential and desirable alternative for the extraction of EOs from aromatic herbs, and the EOs obtained from A. tsao-ko can be explored as a potent natural antimicrobial and antioxidant preservative ingredient in food industry from the technological and economical points of view.

A spotted-leaf mutant of rice HM143 was isolated from an EMS-induced IR64 mutant bank. Brown lesions randomly distributed on leaf blades were observed about 3 wk after sowing. The symptom lasted for the whole plant growth duration. Histochemical analysis indicated that cell death occurred in and around the site of necrotic lesions accompanied with accumulation of hydrogen hyperoxide. Agronomic traits were largely similar to the wild type IR64 except seed setting rate and 1 000-grain weight which were significantly decreased in the mutant. Disease resistance of the mutant to multiple races of Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae was significantly enhanced. Genetic analysis showed that the mutation was controlled by a single recessive gene, tentatively termed splHM143. In addition, using molecular markers and 1 023 mutant type individuals from an F2 segregating population derived from the cross HM143/R9308, the spotted-leaf gene was finally delimited to an interval of 149 kb between markers XX25 and ID40 on the long arm of chromosome 4. splHM143 is likely a novel rice spotted-leaf gene since no other similar genes have been identified near the chromosomal region.

为在水稻育种中快速与高效利用稻瘟病抗性基因Pi25, 本文利用该基因不同等位基因编码区序列差异开发了4套CAPS标记(CAP1/ Hinc II、CAP3/ Bgl II、CAP3/ Nde I和CAP3/ Hpy 99I), 并利用169份稻种资源、98个重组自交系(RIL)以及217个水稻转基因后代, 对4套标记的准确性和选择效果进行了验证。结果表明, 4套标记均能准确地检测 Pi25 / pi25 座位。其中, 标记CAP1/ Hinc II和CAP3/ Hpy 99I特异性识别并酶切显性等位基因, 而标记CAP3/ Bgl II和CAP3/ Nde I特异性识别并酶切隐性等位基因。利用稻瘟病菌株JS001-20接种RIL与转基因材料, 抗性表现与标记检测的结果完全一致, 表明该CAPS标记准确可靠。分析稻种资源后发现, Pi25 基因频率较低(1.2%), 说明该基因在我国水稻稻瘟病抗性育种中还没有被充分利用。本文的研究结果特别是开发的2对识别并酶切显性等位基因的CAPS标记可用于分子标记辅助选择, 改良我国早籼稻的稻瘟病抗性。