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The templating method holds great promise for fabricating surface nanopatterns. To enhance the manufacturing capabilities of complex surface nanopatterns, it is important to explore new modes of the templates beyond their conventional masking and molding modes. Here, we employed the metal-organic framework (MOF) microparticles assembled monolayer films as templates for metal electrodeposition and revealed a previously unidentified guiding growth mode enabling the precise growth of metallic films exclusively underneath the MOF microparticles. The guiding growth mode was induced by the fast ion transportation within the nanochannels of the MOF templates. The MOF template could be repeatedly used, allowing for the creation of identical metallic surface nanopatterns for multiple times on different substrates. The MOF template-guided electrochemical growth mode provided a robust route towards cost-effective fabrication of complex metallic surface nanopatterns with promising applications in metamaterials, plasmonics, and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) sensing fields. Templating method holds great promise for fabricating surface nanopatterns. Here authors present a guiding growth mode using metal-organic framework microparticles as templates during metal electrodeposition, where metals exclusively grow underneath the microparticles.

Nisin is used as a natural food preservative because of its broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity against Gram-positive bacteria. However, free nisin is susceptible to various factors that reduce its antimicrobial activity. Milk protein, a protein derived from milk, has self-assembly properties and is a good carrier of bioactive substances. In this study, lactoferrin–nisin nanoparticles (L-N), bovine serum albumin–nisin nanoparticles (B-N), and casein–nisin nanoparticles (C-N) were successfully prepared by a self-assembly technique, and then their properties were investigated. The studies revealed that lactoferrin (LF) and nisin formed L-N mainly through hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen bonding, and L-N had the best performance. The small particle size (29.83 ± 2.42 nm), dense reticular structure, and good thermal stability, storage stability, and emulsification of L-N laid a certain foundation for its application in food. Further bacteriostatic studies showed that L-N enhanced the bacteriostatic activity of nisin, with prominent inhibitory properties against Listeria monocytogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacillus cereus, which mainly disrupted the cell membrane of the bacteria. The above results broaden our understanding of milk protein–nisin nanoparticles, while the excellent antibacterial activity of L-N makes it promising for application as a novel food preservative, which will help to improve the bioavailability of nisin in food systems.

Fish as an important food source, with the increase of consumption rate, the resulting allergic phenomenon increased year by year. Food allergen in aquatic products was an important allergy-inducing factor, which had a great impact on the body’s tissue, inflammatory factors, immunoglobulin and intestinal flora. The research objective of this study was to evaluate the allergenic risk of turbot parvalbumin (PV) and provided effective biological reference markers for the safety assessment of aquatic products. Results showed PV has high purity, high binding capacity with IgE and IgG, influenced release of inflammatory factors in DCs (IL-6/10/12p70), induced allergic response in mice. PV increased the levels of PV-specific IgE, total IgE, IgG1, monocyte chemotactic protein 1(MCP-1), histamine, tryptase significantly. PV obviously mutagenic effect on spleen, intestinal tissue. Sequencing of microbial diversity showed that microorganism Ruminiclostridium and Alistipes in PV group changed significantly, which proved that the structure of intestinal microorganism has changed. In summary, Turbot parvalbumin triggered fish allergic responses by induced imbalance of inflammatory factors and microbial composition of IL-6/10/12p70, IgE/IgG and Ruminiclostridium, Alistipes. These results indicated that PV had high-risk allergy inducing ability, and the changes of the above indicators provided biological reference markers for risk assessment of the safety of aquatic products intake.Graphic abstract

In the present study, the effect of niacin supplementation on the growth performance and nutrient utilisation in Chinese Jinjiang cattle was investigated. A total of 48 finishing male Jinjiang cattle aged 24-30 months, with body weights of 200 ± 15 kg, were randomly divided into four groups. The cattle were fed a finishing diet (concentrate to forage ratio of 80:20). The diets for the control, NA 320 , NA 480 and NA 640 groups were supplemented with 0, 320, 480 or 640 mg/kg of niacin, respectively. The body weight and feed consumption of the 48 cattle were recorded on days 1, 28, and 56 of the experiment. Assessment of feed digestibility was conducted from days 52 to 56 of the study. Blood samples were collected from each animal on day 56. From days 1 to 56 of the study, the results indicated a significant increase in the average daily weight gains (p < .05) and lower feed to gain ratios (p < .05) for the NA 480 and NA 640 groups than for the control group. Furthermore, supplementation with 640 mg/kg niacin increased the apparent digestibility of all nutrients (p < .05), whereas supplementation with 480 mg/kg niacin enhanced the apparent digestibility of crude protein (p < .05). Moreover, supplementation with 480 and 640 mg/kg niacin increased the content of serum nonesterified fatty acids (p < .05). Therefore, it was concluded that supplementation with 640 mg/kg niacin in a high-concentrate diet may be beneficial to growth and nutrient utilisation in Chinese Jinjiang cattle.

Emergence of new hardware, including persistent memory and smart network interface card (SmartNIC), has brought new opportunities to file system design. In this paper, we design and implement a new file system named NICFS based on persistent memory and SmartNIC. We divide the file system into two parts: the front end and the back end. In the front end, data writes are appended to the persistent memory in a log-structured way, leveraging the fast persistence advantage of persistent memory. In the back end, the data in logs are fetched, processed, and patched to files in the background, leveraging the processing capacity of SmartNIC. Evaluation results show that NICFS outperforms Ext4 by about 21%/10% and about 19%/50% on large and small reads/writes, respectively.

Carbon emissions from energy consumption of Shandong province from 1995 to 2012 are calculated. Three zero-residual decomposition models (LMDI, MRCI and Shapley value models) are introduced for decomposing carbon emissions. Based on the results, Kendall coordination coefficient method is employed for testing their compatibility, and an optimal weighted combination decomposition model is constructed for improving the objectivity of decomposition. STIRPAT model is applied to evaluate the impact of each factor on carbon emissions. The results show that, using 1995 as the base year, the cumulative effects of population, per capita GDP, energy consumption intensity, and energy consumption structure of Shandong province in 2012 are positive, while the cumulative effect of industrial structure is negative. Per capita GDP is the largest driver of the increasing carbon emissions and has a great impact on carbon emissions; energy consumption intensity is a weak driver and has certain impact on carbon emissions; population plays a weak driving role, but it has the most significant impact on carbon emissions; energy consumption structure is a weak driver of the increasing carbon emissions and has a weak impact on carbon emissions; industrial structure has played a weak inhibitory role, and its impact on carbon emissions is great.

Background: Salmonella, is one of the most important pathogens causing foodborne illnesses worldwide. The early detection of Salmonella is essential to minimize the risk. Herein, the nanoprobe (CS-AuNPs@phage-T156) for Salmonella was obtained by functionalizing cysteamine (CS) stabilized gold nanoparticles (CS-AuNPs) with phage T156. Results: In the presence of target Salmonella, the CS-AuNPs@phage-T156 specifically recognized and adsorbed on the surface of Salmonella, then induced the aggregation of gold nanoparticles and the color changes from red to purple, which enabled visual detection. The concentration of Salmonella was quantified by the absorption ratio (A680/A526), with a wide linear range from 1.2 × 101 CFU/mL to 1.2 × 106 CFU/mL. Under the optimal experimental conditions, this assay possessed a potent selectivity characteristic quickly toward Salmonella, with a detection limit of 12 CFU/mL. Conclusion: This simple and rapid detection method is expected to provides a novel identification element for the detection of Salmonella by intuitive visualization judgment and quantitative analysis.

Various probiotics and natural products can help to relieve constipation. This study aimed to explore the constipation-relieving effects and potential mechanism of a combination laxative of konjac glucomannan and probiotics. This study evaluated the gastrointestinal-tract viability of probiotics in vitro. A constipation model was constructed in BALB/c mice, and the efficacies of the combinations verified in terms of their bowel movement–promoting effects, including the first black-stool defecation time and gastrointestinal transit rates of mice. Colonization by the probiotics was determined by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. Hematoxylin-eosin staining, gas chromatography, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, and Western blot were also used for analysis. Lactobacillus paracasei X11 (X11) and L. casei YRL577 (YRL577) had outstanding gastrointestinal-tract viability. Konjac glucomannan (KGM) + X11, Prunus persica + X11, and Prunus persica + YRL577 significantly relieved constipation. In addition, KGM promoted the colonization of X11. Meanwhile, KGM + X11 effectively promoted the metabolism of short-chain fatty acids in mice better than other combinations, and the 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) content in the KGM + X11 group was the highest among all the groups. Therefore, KGM + X11 was selected for further research. The combination laxative promoted the secretion of 5-HT, up-regulated mRNA and protein levels of 5-HT receptor 4 and serotonin transporter via the 5-HT pathway, and effectively relieved constipation. The combination laxative konjac glucomannan–probiotic (KGM + X11) promoted defecation in constipated mice, possibly by increasing short-chain fatty acid metabolism and 5-HT hormone release. [Display omitted] •Probiotic Lactobacillus paracasei X11 (X11) showed excellent gastrointestinal tract viability.•A combination laxative of konjac glucomannan (KGM) and X11 promoted intestinal peristalsis effectively.•KGM promoted the colonization of X11.•KGM+X11 promoted the metabolism of short-chain fatty acid.•KGM+X11 promoted 5-hydroxytryptamine pathway hormone release.

Host-side flash caching emerges as an effective solution for improving the performance of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud computing environment. However, for VMs with the commonly used Copy-on-Write (COW) virtual disks, flash caching in fact has negative impacts since it brings lots of unnecessary cache writes, hurting both the VM performance and the flash endurance. This paper presents COWCache, a COW-aware caching solution that addresses this problem by co-designing flash caching with COW-based virtual disks. First, COWCache designs a new architecture that bridges the semantic gap between flash caching and virtual disk management for realizing the VMs’ real data locality. Second, it separately manages COW metadata with fine-grained caching and journaling to improve the metadata caching efficiency. Third, it provides a novel decoupled Copy-on-Write mechanism, which decouples the amplified data requests from the critical I/O path and only admits the data with real VM locality into flash cache. COWCache also introduces a new data structure, the virtual cache map , to mitigate the memory footprint overhead for indexing the cached data in flash. Evaluations show that COWCache improves the application performance by up to 122.7% and reduces the flash cache writes by up to 78.5% compared to traditional flash caching solutions.

Intestinal microecology was closely related to immune regulation, but the related mechanism was still unclear. This study aimed to reveal how microorganisms improved immune response via casepase-3 and Bak of FAS/CD95 pathway. Bifidobacterium animalis F1-7 inhibited the melanoma B16-F10 cells in vitro effectively; had a potent anticancer effect of lung cancer mice; effectively improved the spleen immune index and CD3 + (75.8%) and CD8 + (19.8%) expression level; strengthened the phagocytosis of macrophages; inhibited the overexpression of inflammatory factors IL-6 (319.10 ± 2.46 pg/mL), IL-8 (383.05 ± 9.87 pg/mL), and TNF-α (2003.40 ± 11.42 pg/mL); and promoted the expression of anti-inflammatory factor IL-10 (406.00 ± 3.59 pg/mL). This process was achieved by promoting caspase-8/3 and BH3-interacting domain death agonist (Bid), Bak genes, and protein expression. This study confirmed the B. animalis F1-7 could act as an effective activator to regulate immune response by promoting the expression of caspase-8/3, Bid and Bak genes, and proteins and by activating the FAS/CD95 pathway. Our study provided a data support for the application of potentially beneficial microorganisms of B. animalis F1-7 as an effective activator to improve immunity. Graphical abstract