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يستعرض هذا الكتاب الجوانب التاريخية والسياسية والثقافية للعلاقات بين الصين وسلطنة عمان، منذ العصور القديمة وحتى العصر الحديث، مع تركيز خاص على التبادل التجاري والبحري الذي ازدهر بين الجانبين عبر طريق الحرير البحري. يبرز الكتاب كيف شكل التواصل الحضاري بين الصين وعمان أحد أقدم النماذج للعلاقات السلمية في التاريخ، حيث ساهم البحارة العمانيون في نقل السلع والثقافات بين الشرق الأقصى والجزيرة العربية. كما يتناول العلاقات الدبلوماسية الحديثة بين البلدين، وتطورها في إطار الشراكات الاقتصادية ومبادرة الحزام والطريق، مؤكدا على الاحترام المتبادل والتعاون المتوازن بين البلدين عبر القرون.

Background The relationship between human gut microbiota and high-altitude hypoxia acclimatization remains highly controversial. This stems primarily from uncertainties regarding both the potential temporal changes in the microbiota under such conditions and the existence of any dominant or core bacteria that may assist in host acclimatization. Results To address these issues, and to control for variables commonly present in previous studies which significantly impact the results obtained, namely genetic background, ethnicity, lifestyle, and diet, we conducted a 108-day longitudinal study on the same cohort comprising 45 healthy Han adults who traveled from lowland Chongqing, 243 masl, to high-altitude plateau Lhasa, Xizang, 3658 masl, and back. Using shotgun metagenomic profiling, we study temporal changes in gut microbiota composition at different timepoints. The results show a significant reduction in the species and functional diversity of the gut microbiota, along with a marked increase in functional redundancy. These changes are primarily driven by the overgrowth of Blautia A , a genus that is also abundant in six independent Han cohorts with long-term duration in lower hypoxia environment in Shigatse, Xizang, at 4700 masl. Further animal experiments indicate that Blautia A -fed mice exhibit enhanced intestinal health and a better acclimatization phenotype to sustained hypoxic stress. Conclusions Our study underscores the importance of Blautia A species in the gut microbiota’s rapid response to high-altitude hypoxia and its potential role in maintaining intestinal health and aiding host adaptation to extreme environments, likely via anti-inflammation and intestinal barrier protection.

Fumonisin toxins are produced by Fusarium fungal pathogens. Fumonisins are structural analogs of sphingosine and potent inhibitors of ceramide synthases (CerSs); they disrupt sphingolipid metabolism and cause disease in plants and animals. Over the past three decades, researchers have used fumonisin B1 (FB1), the most common fumonisin, as a probe to investigate sphingolipid metabolism in yeast and animals. Although the physiological effects of FB1 in plants have yet to be investigated in detail, forward and reverse genetic approaches have revealed many genes involved in these processes. In this review, we discuss the intricate network of signaling pathways affected by FB1, including changes in sphingolipid metabolism and the effects of these changes, with a focus on our current understanding of the multiple effects of FB1 on plant cell death and plant growth. We analyze the major findings that highlight the connections between sphingolipid metabolism and FB1-induced signaling, and we point out where additional research is needed to fill the gaps in our understanding of FB1-induced signaling pathways in plants.

A general south-north genetic divergence has been observed among Han Chinese in previous studies. However, these studies, especially those on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), are based either on partial mtDNA sequences or on limited samples. Given that Han Chinese comprise the world’s largest population and reside around the whole China, whether the north-south divergence can be observed after all regional populations are considered remains unknown. Moreover, factors involved in shaping the genetic landscape of Han Chinese need further investigation. In this study, we dissected the matrilineal landscape of Han Chinese by studying 4,004 mtDNA haplogroup-defining variants in 21,668 Han samples from virtually all provinces in China. Our results confirmed the genetic divergence between southern and northern Han populations. However, we found a significant genetic divergence among populations from the three main river systems, that is, the Yangtze, the Yellow, and the Zhujiang (Pearl) rivers, which largely attributed to the prevalent distribution of haplogroups D4, B4, and M7 in these river valleys. Further analyses based on 4,986 mitogenomes, including 218 newly generated sequences, indicated that this divergence was already established during the early Holocene and may have resulted from population expansion facilitated by ancient agricultures along these rivers. These results imply that the maternal gene pools of the contemporary Han populations have retained the genetic imprint of early Neolithic farmers from different river basins, or that river valleys represented relative migration barriers that facilitated genetic differentiation, thus highlighting the importance of the three ancient agricultures in shaping the genetic landscape of the Han Chinese.

The rapid development of information technology accelerates the modernization of distance education. To realize the unified organization and management of learning resources as well as improve the utilization rate of resources, this paper proposes the design of a mobile online education resource sharing system from the perspective of man-machine cooperation. This paper analyzes the main body and scope of collaboration, constructs a man-machine collaborative resource sharing model with large-scale man-machine cooperation as the main model; defines the system design principle, comprehensively considers the software layering idea and user usage, and determines the overall framework including client, presentation layer and business logic layer; divides resource sharing into three stages: production, registration, audit and release, and uses “centralized management”, to protect the intellectual property rights of distance education resources. The role access control mechanism is used to manage user rights, and the settlement incentive algorithm is introduced to protect the intellectual property rights of distance education resources. Our experimental results show that the system can be used as a key technology to promote the development of distance education information, improve the efficiency of resource sharing, and enhance the enthusiasm of users to contribute educational resources.

Anthocyanins spatiotemporally accumulate in certain tissues of particular species in the banana plant, and MYB transcription factors (TFs) serve as their primary regulators. However, the precise regulatory mechanism in banana remains to be determined. Here, we report the identification and characterization of MaMYB4 , an R2R3-MYB repressor TF, characterized by the presence of EAR (ethylene-responsive element binding factor–associated amphiphilic repression) and TLLLFR motifs. MaMYB4 expression was induced by the accumulation of anthocyanins. Transgenic banana plants overexpressing MaMYB4 displayed a significant reduction in anthocyanin compared to wild type. Consistent with the above results, metabolome results showed that there was a decrease in all three identified cyanidins and one delphinidin, the main anthocyanins that determine the color of banana leaves, whereas both transcriptome and reverse transcription–quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis showed that many key anthocyanin synthesis structural genes and TF regulators were downregulated in MaMYB4 overexpressors. Furthermore, dual-luciferase assays showed that MaMYB4 was able to bind to the CHS , ANS , DFR , and bHLH promoters, leading to inhibition of their expression. Yeast two-hybrid analysis verified that MaMYB4 did not interact with bHLH, which ruled out the possibility that MaMYB4 could be incorporated into the MYB-bHLH-WD40 complex. Our results indicated that MaMYB4 acts as a repressor of anthocyanin biosynthesis in banana, likely due to a two-level repression mechanism that consists of reduced expression of anthocyanin synthesis structural genes and the parallel downregulation of bHLH to interfere with the proper assembly of the MYB-bHLH-WD40 activation complex. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first MYB TF that regulates anthocyanin synthesis that was identified by genetic methods in bananas, which will be helpful for manipulating anthocyanin coloration in banana programs in the future.

Human activity recognition without equipment plays a vital role in smart home applications, freeing humans from the shackles of wearable devices. In this paper, by using the channel state information (CSI) of the WiFi signal, semi-supervised transfer learning with dynamic associate domain adaptation is proposed for human activity recognition. In order to improve the CSI quality and denoising of CSI, we carried out missing packet filling, burst noise removal, background estimation, feature extraction, feature enhancement, and data augmentation in the data pre-processing stage. This paper considers the problem of environment-independent human activity recognition, also known as domain adaptation. The pre-trained model is trained from the source domain by collecting a complete labeled dataset of all of the CSI of human activity patterns. Then, the pre-trained model is transferred to the target environment through the semi-supervised transfer learning stage. Therefore, when humans move to different target domains, a partial labeled dataset of the target domain is required for fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a dynamic associate domain adaptation called DADA. By modifying the existing associate domain adaptation algorithm, the target domain can provide a dynamic ratio of labeled dataset/unlabeled dataset, while the existing associate domain adaptation algorithm only allows target domains with the unlabeled dataset. The advantage of DADA is that it provides a dynamic strategy to eliminate different effects on different environments. In addition, we further designed an attention-based DenseNet model, or AD, as our training network, which is modified by an existing DenseNet by adding the attention function. The solution we proposed was simplified to DADA-AD throughout the paper. The experimental results show that for domain adaptation in different domains, the accuracy of human activity recognition of the DADA-AD scheme is 97.4%. It also shows that DADA-AD has advantages over existing semi-supervised learning schemes.

Introduction Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are promising candidates for cell-based therapies. Human platelet lysate represents an efficient alternative to fetal bovine serum for clinical-scale expansion of MSCs. Different media used in culture processes should maintain the biological characteristics of MSCs during multiple passages. However, bone marrow-derived MSCs and adipose tissue-derived MSCs have not yet been directly compared with each other under human platelet lysate conditions. This study aims to conduct a direct head-to-head comparison of the biological characteristics of the two types of MSCs under human platelet lysate-supplemented culture conditions for their ability to be used in regenerative medicine applications. Methods The bone marrow- and adipose tissue-derived MSCs were cultured under human platelet lysate conditions and their biological characteristics evaluated for cell therapy (morphology, immunophenotype, colony-forming unit-fibroblast efficiency, proliferation capacity, potential for mesodermal differentiation, secreted proteins, and immunomodulatory effects). Results Under human platelet lysate-supplemented culture conditions, bone marrow- and adipose tissue-derived MSCs exhibited similar fibroblast-like morphology and expression patterns of surface markers. Adipose tissue-derived MSCs had greater proliferative potential than bone marrow-derived MSCs, while no significantly difference in colony efficiency were observed between the two types of cells. However, bone marrow-derived MSCs possessed higher capacity toward osteogenic and chondrogenic differentiation compared with adipose tissue-derived MSCs, while similar adipogenic differentiation potential wase observed between the two types of cells. There were some differences between bone marrow- and adipose tissue-derived MSCs for several secreted proteins, such as cytokine (interferon-γ), growth factors (basic fibroblast growth factor, hepatocyte growth factor, and insulin-like growth factor-1), and chemokine (stem cell-derived factor-1). Adipose tissue-derived MSCs had more potent immunomodulatory effects than bone marrow-derived MSCs. Conclusions Adipose tissue-derived MSCs have biological advantages in the proliferative capacity, secreted proteins (basic fibroblast growth factor, interferon-γ, and insulin-like growth factor-1), and immunomodulatory effects, but bone marrow-derived MSCs have advantages in osteogenic and chondrogenic differentiation potential and secreted proteins (stem cell-derived factor-1 and hepatocyte growth factor); these biological advantages should be considered systematically when choosing the MSC source for specific clinical application.

Background Thaumatin-like proteins (TLPs) are crucial pathogenesis-related proteins that significantly contribute to plant defense rection. Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense ( Foc ) causes Fusarium wilt of bananas, a serious threat to global production. However, the role of TLPs in disease resistance remains unclear. Results This study identified 49 TLP genes in banana, predominantly localized in the extracellular space, and distributed across 11 chromosomes. The ancestor–descendant relationship was explained, six genes remained remarkably conserved across species could represent the ancestral genes of the TLP gene family. Promoter regions, transcriptome and qRT-PCR analysis suggested that MaTLP16 might be involved in disease resistance. Furthermore, transcriptional silencing of MaTLP16 resulted in more severe leaf damage compared to the control, indicating that MaTLP16 is an important Foc resistance-related gene. Conclusion This study conducted a comprehensive genome-wide identification and systematic analysis of the TLP gene family in bananas. Our findings establish a foundation for further functional studies of MaTLP genes and highlight MaTLP16 as a strong candidate for use in breeding programs aimed at enhancing resistance to Musa diseases.

BackgroundA large number of new causative and risk genes for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have been identified mostly in patients of European ancestry. In contrast, we know relatively little regarding the genetics of ALS in other ethnic populations. This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the genetics of ALS in an unprecedented large cohort of Chinese mainland population and correlate with the clinical features of rare variants carriers.MethodsA total of 1587 patients, including 64 familial ALS (FALS) and 1523 sporadic ALS (SALS), and 1866 in-house controls were analysed by whole-exome sequencing and/or testing for G4C2 repeats in C9orf72. Forty-one ALS-associated genes were analysed.Findings155 patients, including 26 (40.6%) FALS and 129 (8.5%) SALS, carrying rare pathogenic/likely pathogenic (P/LP) variants of ALS causative genes were identified. SOD1 was the most common mutated gene, followed by C9orf72, FUS, NEK1, TARDBP and TBK1. By burden analysis, rare variants in SOD1, FUS and TARDBP contributed to the collective risk for ALS (p<2.5e-6) at the gene level, but at the allelic level TARDBP p.Gly294Val and FUS p.Arg521Cys and p.Arg521His were the most important single variants causing ALS. Clinically, P/LP variants in TARDBP and C9orf72 were associated with poor prognosis, in FUS linked with younger age of onset, and C9orf72 repeats tended to affect cognition.ConclusionsOur data provide essential information for understanding the genetic and clinical features of ALS in China and for optimal design of genetic testing and evaluation of disease prognosis.