Search

Halophytes have evolved unique strategies to cope with salinity. Salicornia europaea, a succulent euhalophyte plant, show optimal reproduction under 200 mM NaCl. However, the role of lipid metabolism caused by salinity in S. europaea is not fully understood. To gain insight into this, we conducted a combined lipidomic and transcriptomic analysis to investigate the molecular basis of lipid metabolism in response to 0 and 200 mM NaCl. GO and KEGG analysis revealed that salt treatment mainly affected glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchored biosynthesis, secondary metabolite synthesis, plant hormone signal transduction, peroxisome, and glycosphingoipid biosynthesis. We identifited 485 lipid compounds, 27 of which showed altered abundances under salt treatment. Notably, lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC) and phytosphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) significantly increased, while polyunsaturated monogalactosyldiacylglycerols (PA), lysophosphatidylinositol (LPI), phytoceramides with hydroxylated fatty acyl (PhytoCer-OHFA), phyto-glucosylceramide (Phyto-GluCer), sphingosine (Sph), and phytosphingosine (PhytoSph) markedly decreased. Additionally, the increase in DBI index was mostly phospholipids and sphingolipids, indicating that the lipid saturation was reduced, and the fluidity was higher, which may be related to the strong salt resistance of S. europaea. By comparing the average carbon chain length (ACL), it can be seen that the ACL coefficient of S1P is significantly reduced with 200 mM NaCl concentration, so we speculate that S1P may be related to the salt resistance.

Secalonic acid F (SAF) is a fungal secondary metabolite exhibited interesting pharmacological effect. In this study, a simple and sensitive ultra-performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometric (UPLC–MS/MS) method was developed and validated for the determination of SAF in rat plasma. Emodin was selected as the internal standard (IS), and plasma samples were prepared by liquid–liquid extraction with ethyl acetate. Chromatographic separation was operated on an Agilent SB-C18 column, and the mobile phase was a mixture of 0.5% formic acid in water and methanol (V:V = 20:80) at a flow rate of 0.3 mL/min. Detection was carried out with a 6460 triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer using electrospray ionization in the multiple-reaction monitoring mode. The MS/MS ion transitions monitored were m/z 639.3 → 415.4 and 269.0 → 225.1 for SAF and IS, respectively. Results showed the calibration curve of SAF was linear in the range of 2–500 ng·mL−1 with the correlation coefficient > 0.99. The matrix effect, extraction recovery, dilution effect, intraday and inter-day precision and accuracy were all in acceptable limits. The analytes were also stable under different conditions. The validated method was successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic study after oral administration in Sprague-Dawley rats at a dose of 10 mg/kg.

Quinoa is a kind of pseudocereal with rich nutrient, unique flavor and antioxidant ingredients. In recent years, it has received widespread attention all over the world, however, the problem of single quinoa product is increasingly prominent. Tea is one of the most popular functional beverages globally, so the development of quinoa tea has a broad market prospect. In the present review, the preparation methods of quinoa seed tea, quinoa malt tea, quinoa leaf tea, quinoa whole plant tea, quinoa fermented tea and quinoa compound tea were summarized, and the current situation and existing problems were analyzed. Based on the above investigations, some suggestions for improving the product performance were put forward.

Environmental constraints are not only important aspects that affect the cultivated land quality but also necessary factors that shall be considered when evaluating the cultivated land quality scientifically. Moreover, identifying the quality condition of cultivated land accurately is the premise for guaranteeing food security. Based on the case study of diluvial fan terrain in Jimsar County, Xinjiang in the arid region of Northwest China, this study utilizes a geographic information system spatial analysis and a multifactor comprehensive evaluation method and constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system for cultivated land quality on account of three dimensions, namely soil properties, farming conditions, and natural environmental conditions. To reduce the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) effect and improve the accuracy of the quality evaluation results of cultivated land, this study compares the spatial interpolation methods of Inverse Distance Weighted Matrix (IDW), Ordinary Kriging (OK), and Spline Functions (Spline) based on different cultivated land evaluation units. Through the assessment on the comparison results, we finally adopted large-scale cultivated land as the quality evaluation unit of cultivated land and Ordinary Kriging (OK) as the spatial interpolation method. The results indicated that the average grade of the quality index of cultivated land in the diluvial fan terrain of Jimsar County is 6.66 at the middle or lower level, the quality of cultivated land and natural environment conditions reduce with the rise of elevation of the diluvial fan terrain, indicating a vertical zonality differentiation rule, the farming conditions keep sliding from the middle part of diluvial fan terrain to the edge of the diluvial fan terrain and the piedmont slope. The major factors affecting the quality of the cultivated land include the soil capacity, soil pH, soil organic matter, the quantity of straw returning to the field, source of irrigation water, water delivery method, part of the diluvial fan, groundwater level depth, and geomorphic type. Therefore, the measures to improve the quality of the cultivated land are put forward, mainly including improving the soil, carrying out land consolidation projects, and developing highly efficient water-saving irrigation agriculture. This study provides favorable references and directions for the sustainable utilization and quality improvement of cultivated land resources in arid regions.

Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is one of the most promising candidates for emerging nonvolatile memory technology. Much effort has been devoted to exploring the resistive switching (RS) mechanism of multioxide films in the RRAM, especially perovskite oxide films. In this letter, we adopted a hydrothermal method to prepare a BaxSr1-xTiO3 barium strontium titanate (BST) thin film as a perovskite intermediate layer sandwiched between a top Pt electrode and a bottom TiN/Pt electrode in the RRAM cell. Based on current–voltage measurements, the result illustrated a typical bipolar RS characteristic, and with the increasing cycle count, the clockwise switching mode transformed to a counterclockwise switching mode. The double-logarithm current–voltage curves indicated different mechanisms, including ohmic conduction and space-charge-limited current, in both the set and reset states. A conductive filament (CF) model in which the RS behaviors are dominated by the movement of oxygen vacancies (VO) in the BST was adopted. In addition, the influence of the compliance current and maximum voltage is considered.

Background: Peniciketal A (Pe-A), a spiroketal compound, shows potent anticancer activities in human acute monocytic leukemia. However, the detailed mechanisms and potent targets of Pe-A remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the differentially expressed proteins between the Pe-A-treated group and the control group on human acute monocytic leukemia cell line THP-1. Methods: The DEPs were analyzed by the liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) with TMT label. The function and feature of the identified proteins were analyzed by the bioinformatic analysis. Western blotting was used to evaluate protein expression. Results: The DEPs were primarily sub located in the cytoplasm and the nucleus by regulating 21 pathways enriched through the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Moreover, we preliminarily demonstrated that glucose-6-phosphate 1-dehydrogenase (G6PD), prolow-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1) and Calreticulin (CALR) might be the potent targets of Pe-A on death induction of THP-1 cells. Conclusion: Collectively, this study not only provides a global proteomic profile as the supplementary data of our previous studies but also provides interesting information that Pe-A may exert more bio-activities.

Background: Peniciketal A (Pe-A) is a spiroketal compound isolated from saline soil-derived fungus Penicillium raistrickii. However, its role for biological processes has not been clarified. In this study, we for the first time investigated the anticancer effects and the underlying mechanisms of Pe-A in A549 lung cancer cells. Metheds: Cell proliferation was tested by MTT assay and colony formation assay. Flow cytometry was performed to examine the cell cycle, apoptosis and mitochondrial membrane potential. Invasion and migration were analyzed using transwell assay and wound healing analysis. Immunofluorescence staining and western blotting were used to evaluate the protein expression. Results: Pe-A effectively inhibited proliferation, with IC50 values was 22.33 μM for 72 h. Mechanistic studies revealed that Pe-A caused cell cycle arrest at the G0-G1 phase by decreasing cyclinD1 expression and induced apoptosis through accelerating the mitochondrial apoptotic pathway. Moreover, Pe-A significantly inhibited A549 cell migration and invasion by reducing the protein levels of MMP-2 and MMP-9, while the Epithelial- Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) property was also changed. Importantly, Pe-A exhibited much lower toxicity towards L02, normal liver cells, and MRC5, normal fibroblast cells, compared to A549 cells. Conclusion: Collectively, the current results indicate that Pe-A may offer effective potentials and insights for lung cancer treatment and drug design.

Starch is the main storage carbohydrate in rice seed. The amylose and amylopectin content differ among varieties. A transgenic rice line was obtained by T-DNA insertion of ascorbate peroxidase 2 (apx2), resulting in decrease of thousand kernel weight. In this study, starches were isolated from apx2 and wild type seeds. Morphology, physical and chemical properties of starch granules were analyzed. The seed micro-surface in apx2 showed distinct textures, compared with that of wild type. The morphology of starch granules in apx2 exhibited irregular shapes, while the wild type starch granules presented regular polyhedral shapes. Additionally, the length and width of starch granules in apx2 were significantly decreased, compared with that of wild type. Further analysis found that apx2 starch showed low crystallinity and high amylose with the methods of X-ray diffraction pattern, iodine binding and blue value analysis, fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrum and thermogravimetric investigation. This study broadened our knowledge of relationship between antioxidant enzyme and rice seed starch formation.

Human pose estimation is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, which aims at localizing human anatomical keypoints. However, unlike human vision that is robust to various data corruptions such as blur and pixelation, current pose estimators are easily confused by these corruptions. This work comprehensively studies and addresses this problem by building rigorous robust benchmarks, termed COCO-C, MPII-C, and OCHuman-C, to evaluate the weaknesses of current advanced pose estimators, and a new algorithm termed AdvMix is proposed to improve their robustness in different corruptions. Our work has several unique benefits. (1) AdvMix is model-agnostic and capable in a wide-spectrum of pose estimation models. (2) AdvMix consists of adversarial augmentation and knowledge distillation. Adversarial augmentation contains two neural network modules that are trained jointly and competitively in an adversarial manner, where a generator network mixes different corrupted images to confuse a pose estimator, improving the robustness of the pose estimator by learning from harder samples. To compensate for the noise patterns by adversarial augmentation, knowledge distillation is applied to transfer clean pose structure knowledge to the target pose estimator. (3) Extensive experiments show that AdvMix significantly increases the robustness of pose estimations across a wide range of corruptions, while maintaining accuracy on clean data in various challenging benchmark datasets., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2021

Regression analysis is a predictive modeling technique that studies the relationship between dependent variables and independent variables. It is usually used for predictive analysis, time series models, and to discover the causal relationship between variables. This paper uses professional statistical software SPAA24.0 to process and analyze the causal relationship between the profitability of coal enterprises, financial risks and safety responsibility performance. Data analysis shows that the profitability of coal companies can promote the performance of corporate safety responsibilities, while financial risks can inhibit the performance of corporate safety responsibilities. To a certain extent, profitability can reduce the restraint of financial risks on the company's safety responsibility.

Escherichia coli MinE is required for placement of a division septum. A nucleus-encoded and plastidtargeted MinE homologue, CrMinE, was identified from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Similar to the Arabidopsis nucleus-encoded AtMinE, the CrMinE protein possesses extra N-terminal and C-terminal extensions relative to the eubacterial and other algal plastid-encoded MinE proteins. The CrMinE protein functions in plastids, as revealed by a transient expression assay using a full-length CrMinE protein fused to enhanced green fluorescent protein. In addition, the overexpressed CrMinE:EGFP in wild-type E. coli with clear coiled structures could still recognize the cell division site of the host cell, which suggests evolutionary conservation of the MinE mode of action. No MinE homologue was found in a search of all researched plastid genome sequences of land plants; moreover, the researched MinEs of land plants are encoded by nuclear genomes. Thus, the identification of the CrMinE located in the nuclear genome implies that the transfer events of MinE from plastid to nucleus might have occurred before the evolution of land plants and during the evolution of green algae.

Peniciketal A (Pe-A), a spiroketal compound, is isolated from the saline soil-derived fungus Penicillium raistrickii. However, the underlying molecular mechanistic basis for the effects of Pe-A on leukemia is poorly understood. Here, we investigated that Pe-A reduced cell proliferation in three leukemia cell lines (THP-1, K562 and HL60). Importantly, Pe-A showed little cytotoxicity in primary mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) cells in a long-duration treatment. For the mechanistic research, we identified 3449 differentially expressed Pe-A-induced proteins through liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) with TMT label in THP-1 cells. Results showed that many identified proteins were involved in apoptosis and/or autophagy. Then, we confirmed that Pe-A induced not only apoptosis via the mitochondrial pathway but also cytoprotective autophagy by activating the AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK)/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway indeed. In addition, Pe-A also arrested the cell cycle at the G0-G1 phase by regulating the expressions of checkpoint protein. Collectively, these results provide new insights into the mechanisms that Pe-A may target autophagy-related or apoptosis-related pathways to suppress the development of human leukemia.

A new sesquiterpenoid derivative, named aspergiketone (1), along with seven known compounds (2-8) were isolated from the coastal saline soil fungus Aspergillus fumigatus. Their structures were elucidated by spectroscopic analysis, and by comparison of experimental and reported data. The absolute configuration of compound 1 was defined by X-ray diffraction analysis. Compound 1 was cytotoxic towards HL-60 and A549 cell lines with IC 50 values of 12.4 and 22.1 μ M , respectively.

A novel Nyquist filter was proposed to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in the interleaved single carrier orthogonal frequency division multiple access (SC-IFDMA) system based on pulse shaping. The proposed filter has a piece-wise rectangular frequency characteristic composed of six nonzero linear segments with variable-length projections onto the frequency axis, which are used as a set of independent design parameters from roll-off factor $\alpha$ . Simulation results show that the novel filter has a better PAPR reduction performance and lower symbol error rate compared to some recently proposed filters, and it has lower computational complexity.

The foreign army researchers analyzed all working classification of hundreds of combat missions and carried out assessments on the traditional physical test standards to determine the abilities such as “lifting and handling, digging, walking and running,” as common tasks. Based on the above research from several countries, common military tasks were identified that provided the preference physical fitness in general goals set of the training program. The enlightenment to our army’s military training scheme is as follows: (1) Should follow the military training policy and directives; (2) Should be combined with the platform for development and reform, and the requirements of military physical training program; (3) Post the actual analysis of physical quality of common needs, develop optimal military physical training plans. In particular grassroots units, units engaged in combat missions for physical task analysis are relatively easy to operate, can fully demonstrate the common physical tasks, according to the physical needs, take the appropriate military physical education courses as a means of training, so as to improve the fitness level for army, and meet the needs to carry out combat missions.

China’s cotton market is affected by the subsidy policy obviously. In different policy background, Chinese cotton market price volatility presents different characteristics, and benefits transfer between cotton producers and consumers showing a clear policy features. This paper analyzes the effect of Chinese cotton subsidies by cotton market price support and consumer single commodity transfers value from 1993 to 2014, and provides an in-depth analysis of Temporary Storage Policies and Target Price Policy. Through the analysis of historical data, this paper can draw the following conclusions: “Unified Purchase and Sale” cotton retractable mechanism would distort the cotton industry chain profit distribution mechanism, target price mechanism is conducive to promoting China’s cotton market reform, China’s cotton production will further concentrated in Xinjiang.