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Under such growths of global population and development of urbanization, Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) generation has increased drastically and become a vital issue all over the world. Efficient MSW management and recovery of MSW play a critical role in reducing its negative impacts on the environment and human health. The review has illustrated a general perspective of MSW background and current issues related to the MSW management by explaining some examples of the negative impacts from different methods of disposing MSW. The paper presents an in-depth analysis the characteristics of MSW and methods for classifying MSW, as well as the advantages and limitations of physical, chemical, and biological disposal techniques, such as landfill, hazardous waste disposal, chemical treatment, immobilization, anaerobic digestion, and composting. Furthermore, the review highlights the importance of an integrated waste management approach that combines these methods with waste reduction, reuse, and recycling strategies to minimize the environmental and public health impacts of waste disposal.

A catalyst system with dedicated selectivity toward a single hydrocarbon or oxygenate product is essential to enable the industrial application of electrochemical conversion of CO 2 to high-value chemicals. Cu is the only known metal catalyst that can convert CO 2 to high-order hydrocarbons and oxygenates. However, the Cu-based catalysts suffer from diverse selectivity. Here, we report that the functionalized graphene quantum dots can direct CO 2 to CH 4 conversion with simultaneous high selectivity and production rate. The electron-donating groups facilitate the yield of CH 4 from CO 2 electro-reduction while electron-withdrawing groups suppress CO 2 electro-reduction. The yield of CH 4 on electron-donating group functionalized graphene quantum dots is positively correlated to the electron-donating ability and content of electron-donating group. The graphene quantum dots functionalized by either –OH or –NH 2 functional group could achieve Faradaic efficiency of 70.0% for CH 4 at −200 mA cm −2 partial current density of CH 4 . The superior yield of CH 4 on electron-donating group- over the electron-withdrawing group-functionalized graphene quantum dots possibly originates from the maintenance of higher charge density of potential active sites (neighboring C or N) and the interaction between the electron-donating group and key intermediates. This work provides insight into the design of active carbon catalysts at the molecular scale for the CO 2 electro-reduction. Electrochemical conversion of CO 2 to fuels is a promising strategy to reduce the ever-increasing CO 2 emission. Here, the authors developed graphene quantum dots (GQDs) catalysts to efficiently convert CO 2 to CH 4 and revealed the significance of electron-donating functional groups in regulating the reactivity of GQDs.

Plants that are fighting microbial pathogens often divert resources that could be used for growth into the immune response. For crops, this translates into lower yield when plant immunity is activated. Wang et al. show that, in rice, reversible phosphorylation of a key transcription factor allows the plant to defend against fungal attack when needed but then, within days, reallocate resources back to growth (see the Perspective by Greene and Dong). Thus, both pathogen defense and crop yield can be sustained. Science , this issue p. 1026 ; see also p. 976 A transcription factor that builds a high-yielding rice plant also supports immune responses. Plant immunity often penalizes growth and yield. The transcription factor Ideal Plant Architecture 1 (IPA1) reduces unproductive tillers and increases grains per panicle, which results in improved rice yield. Here we report that higher IPA1 levels enhance immunity. Mechanistically, phosphorylation of IPA1 at amino acid Ser 163 within its DNA binding domain occurs in response to infection by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae and alters the DNA binding specificity of IPA1. Phosphorylated IPA1 binds to the promoter of the pathogen defense gene WRKY45 and activates its expression, leading to enhanced disease resistance. IPA1 returns to a nonphosphorylated state within 48 hours after infection, resuming support of the growth needed for high yield. Thus, IPA1 promotes both yield and disease resistance by sustaining a balance between growth and immunity.

High-photoluminescence (PL) graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were synthesized by a simple one-pot hydrothermal process, then separated by dialysis bags of different molecular weights. Four separated GQDs of varying sizes were obtained and displayed different PL intensities. With the decreasing size of separated GQDs, the intensity of the emission peak becomes much stronger. Finally, the GQDs of the smallest size revealed the most energetic PL intensity in four separated GQDs. The PL energy of all the separated GQDs shifted slightly, supported by density functional theory calculations.

Hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) is a ubiquitous signal regulating many biological processes, including innate immunity, in all eukaryotes. However, it remains largely unknown that how transcription factors directly sense H 2 O 2 in eukaryotes. Here, we report that rice basic/helix-loop-helix transcription factor bHLH25 directly senses H 2 O 2 to confer resistance to multiple diseases caused by fungi or bacteria. Upon pathogen attack, rice plants increase the production of H 2 O 2 , which directly oxidizes bHLH25 at methionine 256 in the nucleus. Oxidized bHLH25 represses miR397b expression to activate lignin biosynthesis for plant cell wall reinforcement, preventing pathogens from penetrating plant cells. Lignin biosynthesis consumes H 2 O 2 causing accumulation of non-oxidized bHLH25. Non-oxidized bHLH25 switches to promote the expression of Copalyl Diphosphate Synthase 2 ( CPS2 ), which increases phytoalexin biosynthesis to inhibit expansion of pathogens that escape into plants. This oxidization/non-oxidation status change of bHLH25 allows plants to maintain H 2 O 2 , lignin and phytoalexin at optimized levels to effectively fight against pathogens and prevents these three molecules from over-accumulation that harms plants. Thus, our discovery reveals a novel mechanism by which a single protein promotes two independent defense pathways against pathogens. Importantly, the bHLH25 orthologues from available plant genomes all contain a conserved M256-like methionine suggesting the broad existence of this mechanism in the plant kingdom. Moreover, this Met-oxidation mechanism may also be employed by other eukaryotic transcription factors to sense H 2 O 2 to change functions.

With the development of deep learning, the performance of image semantic segmentation in remote sensing has been constantly improved. However, the performance usually degrades while testing on different datasets because of the domain gap. To achieve feasible performance, extensive pixel-wise annotations are acquired in a new environment, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been proposed to alleviate the effort of labeling. However, most previous approaches are based on outdated network architectures that hinder the improvement of performance in UDA. Since the effects of recent architectures for UDA have been barely studied, we reveal the potential of Transformer in UDA for remote sensing with a self-training framework. Additionally, two training strategies have been proposed to enhance the performance of UDA: (1) Gradual Class Weights (GCW) to stabilize the model on the source domain by addressing the class-imbalance problem; (2) Local Dynamic Quality (LDQ) to improve the quality of the pseudo-labels via distinguishing the discrete and clustered pseudo-labels on the target domain. Overall, our proposed method improves the state-of-the-art performance by 8.23% mIoU on Potsdam→Vaihingen and 9.2% mIoU on Vaihingen→Potsdam and facilitates learning even for difficult classes such as clutter/background.

IntroductionAstigmatism is a common refractive error associated with myopia, yet its molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study aimed to identify and validate differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) in corneal astigmatism through a label-free quantitative proteomic approach, followed by biomarker validation using parallel reaction monitoring (PRM).MethodsThis two-phase, retrospective case–control study aimed to identify and verify differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) associated with corneal astigmatism. Phase I (discovery) employed label-free quantitative (LFQ) proteomics to compare stromal samples from 9 patients (10 eyes) with compound myopic astigmatism (Group A) and 8 patients (10 eyes) with simple myopia (Group B). Phase II (verification) involved targeted parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) in an independent cohort comprising 13 patients (15 eyes) in Group A and 14 patients (15 eyes) in Group B, quantifying discovery-prioritized proteins. Bioinformatic analyses including COG, GO, KEGG, and protein–protein interaction mapping were performed to characterize enriched pathways and guide PRM target selection.ResultsA total of 127 DEPs were identified, with 31 upregulated and 96 downregulated in Group A. Bioinformatic analysis of the discovery dataset showed enrichment of proteins associated with wound healing, blood coagulation, and lipid metabolism; these enrichments were exploratory and were used only to prioritize candidates for targeted verification. Targeted PRM verified a significant reduction in APOA4 in astigmatism; other candidates showed concordant trends without statistical significance.ConclusionAfter targeted verification, APOA4 was the only protein that remained significantly reduced in corneal astigmatism, supporting reduced APOA4 as a candidate biomarker that warrants further study. The discovery-phase associations with coagulation, lipid metabolism, and wound-healing pathways were not confirmed at the protein level and should be regarded as hypothesis-generating, requiring confirmation in larger, adequately powered cohorts.

The Ideal Plant Architecture 1 (IPA1) transcription factor promotes rice yield and immunity through phosphorylation at its amino acid residue Ser163 as a switch. Although phosphorylated IPA1 mimic, IPA1(S163D), directly targets the promoter of immune response gene WRKY45 , it cannot activate its expression. Here, we identified a co-activator of IPA1(S163D), a RING-finger E3 ligase IPA1 interactor 7 (IPI7), which fine-tunes the transcriptional activity of IPA1 to timely promote plant immunity and simultaneously maintain growth for yield. IPI7 interacts with IPA1 and promotes K29-polyubiquitination of IPA1 in vitro and in vivo. However, the stability of IPA1 protein is not affected by IPI7-mediated ubiquitination. The IPI7-promoted K29-polyubiquitination of IPA1 is induced by Magnaporthe oryzae infection and required for phosphorylated IPA1 to transactivate WRKY45 expression for immune response but not for plain IPA1 to transactivate DENSE AND ERECT PANICLES 1 ( DEP1 ) expression for panicle development. IPI7 knockout impairs IPA1-mediated immunity but not yield. Our study reveals that plants utilize non-proteolytic K29-ubiquitination as a response to pathogen infection to fine-tune IPA1 transactivation activity for promoting immunity. In this paper, the E3 ubiquitin ligase IPI7 is found to fine-tune the transactivation activity of IPA1 through non-hydrolyzed K29-ubiquitination chain, thereby timely regulating rice disease resistance during Magnaporthe oryzae infection.

Fungal pathogens typically use secreted effector proteins to suppress host immune activators to facilitate invasion. However, there is rarely evidence supporting the idea that fungal secretory proteins contribute to pathogenesis by transactivating host genes that suppress defense. We previously found that pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae induces rice Bsr-d1 to facilitate infection and hypothesized that a fungal effector mediates this induction. Here, we report that MoSPAB1 secreted by M. oryzae directly binds to the Bsr-d1 promoter to induce its expression, facilitating pathogenesis. Amino acids 103-123 of MoSPAB1 are required for its binding to the Bsr-d1 promoter. Both MoSPAB1 and rice MYBS1 compete for binding to the Bsr-d1 promoter to regulate Bsr-d1 expression. Furthermore, MoSPAB1 homologues are highly conserved among fungi. In particular, Colletotrichum fructicola CfSPAB1 and Colletotrichum sublineola CsSPAB1 activate kiwifruit AcBsr-d1 and sorghum SbBsr-d1  respectively, to facilitate pathogenesis. Taken together, our findings reveal a conserved module that may be widely utilized by fungi to enhance pathogenesis. Magnaporthe oryzae effector MoSPAB1 enters rice nuclei to bind to the promoter of the immunity-brake gene Bsr-d1 and activates its expression by competing with rice MYBS1, which constitute a conserved module that facilitates fungal pathogenesis.

Field plot experiments were conducted over 3 years (from April 2014 to November 2016) in a double-rice ( ) cropping system in subtropical China to evaluate the effects of N fertilizer placement on grain yield and N recovery efficiency (NRE). Different N application methods included: no N application (CK); N broadcast application (NBP); N and NPK deep placement (NDP and NPKDP, respectively). Results showed that grain yield and apparent NRE significantly increased for NDP and NPKDP as compared to NBP. The main reason was that N deep placement (NDP) increased the number of productive panicle per m . To further evaluate the increase, a pot experiment was conducted to understand the N supply in different soil layers in NDP during the whole rice growing stage and a N tracing technique was used in a field experiment to investigate the fate of urea- N in the rice-soil system during rice growth and at maturity. The pot experiment indicated that NDP could maintain a higher N supply in deep soil layers than N broadcast for 52 days during rice growth. The N tracing study showed that NDP could maintain much higher fertilizer N in the 5-20 cm soil layer during rice growth and could induce plant to absorb more N from fertilizer and soil than NBP, which led to higher NRE. One important finding was that NDP and NPKDP significantly increased fertilizer NRE but did not lead to N declined in soil compared to NBP. Compared to NPK, NPKDP induced rice plants to absorb more fertilizer N rather than soil N.