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Background Microorganisms serve important functions within numerous eukaryotic host organisms. An understanding of the variation in the plant niche-level microbiome, from rhizosphere soils to plant canopies, is imperative to gain a better understanding of how both the structural and functional processes of microbiomes impact the health of the overall plant holobiome. Using Populus trees as a model ecosystem, we characterized the archaeal/bacterial and fungal microbiome across 30 different tissue-level niches within replicated Populus deltoides and hybrid Populus trichocarpa × deltoides individuals using 16S and ITS2 rRNA gene analyses. Results Our analyses indicate that archaeal/bacterial and fungal microbiomes varied primarily across broader plant habitat classes (leaves, stems, roots, soils) regardless of plant genotype, except for fungal communities within leaf niches, which were greatly impacted by the host genotype. Differences between tree genotypes are evident in the elevated presence of two potential fungal pathogens, Marssonina brunnea and Septoria sp., on hybrid P. trichocarpa × deltoides trees which may in turn be contributing to divergence in overall microbiome composition. Archaeal/bacterial diversity increased from leaves, to stem, to root, and to soil habitats, whereas fungal diversity was the greatest in stems and soils. Conclusions This study provides a holistic understanding of microbiome structure within a bioenergy relevant plant host, one of the most complete niche-level analyses of any plant. As such, it constitutes a detailed atlas or map for further hypothesis testing on the significance of individual microbial taxa within specific niches and habitats of Populus and a baseline for comparisons to other plant species.

The aim of the paper is to estimate and assess residents' willingness to pay to improve air quality in the urban area of Beijing using the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM). The mean willingness to pay (WTP) for a 50% reduction of harmful substances in the air was 143 CNY per household per year, and the total WTP of the residents in the study area was 336 million CNY per year. As a proportion of household annual income, the mean WTP amounted to 0.7%. Four socio-economic variables were found to have significant impacts on residents' willingness to pay. The analysis results illustrated that WTP increases with income and education level, and decreases with household population and age. The willingness was larger for residents in the urban districts than those in the suburban districts. It was found that most of the protest bids lay on interviewees' incomplete perception of the values of environmental amenity. The influence of household income on people's willingness to pay illustrated in this study reflects a causal force of Beijing's transition to market economy that households created to have disposable income are more likely to care about environmental quality. The results of this study strike an optimistic note on the possibility of measuring the total economic value of environmental quality improvement by using the CVM in China. Suggestions on implication of the CVM for both academics and policy makers are provided in the paper.

Background: Triptolide, a major active ingredient isolated from Tripterygium wilfordii Hook f., is effective in the treatment of membranous nephropathy (MN); however, its pharmacological mechanism of action has not yet been clarified. We applied an approach that integrated network pharmacology and experimental validation to systemically reveal the molecular mechanism of triptolide in the treatment of MN. Methods: First, potential targets of triptolide and the MN-related targets were collected from publicly available database. Then, based on a protein--protein interaction network as well as GO and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses, we constructed target-pathway networks to unravel therapeutic targets and pathways. Moreover, molecular docking was applied to validate the interactions between the triptolide and hub targets. Finally, we induced passive Heymann nephritis (PHN) rat models and validated the possible molecular mechanisms of triptolide against MN. Results: The network pharmacology results showed that 118 intersected targets were identified for triptolide against MN, including mTOR, STAT3, CASP3, EGFR and AKT1. Based on enrichment analysis, signaling pathways such as PI3K/AKT, MAKP, Ras and Rap1 were involved in triptolide treatment of MN. Furthermore, molecular docking confirmed that triptolide could bind with high affinity to the PIK3R1, AKT1 and mTOR, respectively. Then, in vivo experiments indicated that triptolide can reduce 24 h urine protein (P < 0.01) and protect against renal damage in PHN. Serum albumin level was significantly increased and total cholesterol, triglycerides, and low-density lipoprotein levels were decreased by triptolide (P < 0.05). Compared with PHN group, triptolide treatment regulated the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway according to Western blot analyses. Conclusion: Triptolide could exert antiproteinuric and renoprotective effects in PHN. The therapeutic mechanism of triptolide may be associated with the regulation of PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway. This study demonstrates the pharmacological mechanism of triptolide in the treatment of MN and provides scientific evidence for basic and clinical research. Keywords: membranous nephropathy, network pharmacology, triptolide, molecular docking, experiment verification

Ti(C,N)-based cermets were prepared by vacuum sintering. The effect of Ni and Mo contents on microstructure, magnetic and mechanical properties of cermets were investigated using XRD, SEM, EDS, and VSM. The results showed that the proportion of ceramic hard phase decreased gradually, and the core-rim structure became incomplete with Ni content. However, with an increase in Mo content from 6 to 18 wt. %, the thickness of rim phase slightly increased. The complete core-rim structure refined the grain size of cermets, and the particles became the finest when Mo content was about 14 wt. %. The magnetization of cermets increased with Ni content, while their magnetization gradually weakened with Mo content. The deterioration of magnetic properties was caused by the high total content of Mo and Ti alloying elements in the binder phase. Meanwhile, the hardness of cermets decreased, while the TRS initially increased, followed by a gradual decrease with content of Ni. With an increase in Mo content, the hardness and TRS of Ti(C,N)-based cermets increased firstly and then decreased. The fracture toughness of cermets increased with Ni content, while the increasing Mo content reduced the fracture toughness. Due to grain refinement and solid-solution strengthening of the binder phase, the optimal composition of cermet was Ti(C,N)-14Mo-25Ni, whose hardness, TRS, and Kic values were ~90.3 HRA, 2340 MPa and 11.7 MPa·m1/2, respectively.

It is necessary to inhibit microbial growth in an industrial cooling water system. This paper has developed a Monopolar Bipolar polarity high voltage pulser with load adaptability for an algal experimental study. The load characteristics of the Chlorella pyrenoidosa solution were examined, and it was found that the solution load is resistive. The resistance is related to the plate area, concentration, and temperature of the solution. Furthermore, the pulser's treatment actually inhibits the algae cell growth. This article also explores the influence of various parameters of electric pulses on the algal effect. After the experiment, the optimum pulse parameters were determined to be an electric field intensity of 750 V cm, a pulse width per second of 120μs, and monopolar polarity.

The emergence and popularization of medical robots bring great convenience to doctors in treating patients. The core of medical robots is the interaction and cooperation between doctors and robots, so it is crucial to design a simple and stable human-robots interaction system for medical robots. Language is the most convenient way for people to communicate with each other, so in this paper, a DQN agent based on long-short term memory (LSTM) and attention mechanism is proposed to enable the robots to extract executable action sequences from doctors’ natural language instructions. For this, our agent should be able to complete two related tasks: 1) extracting action names from instructions. 2) extracting action arguments according to the extracted action names. We evaluate our agent on three datasets composed of texts with an average length of 49.95, 209.34, 417.17 words respectively. The results show that our agent can perform better than similar agents. And our agent has a better ability to handle long texts than previous works.

Archaeal communities from mercury and uranium-contaminated freshwater stream sediments were characterized and compared to archaeal communities present in an uncontaminated stream located in the vicinity of Oak Ridge, TN, USA. The distribution of the Archaea was determined by pyrosequencing analysis of the V4 region of 16S rRNA amplified from 12 streambed surface sediments. Crenarchaeota comprised 76% of the 1,670 archaeal sequences and the remaining 24% were from Euryarchaeota. Phylogenetic analysis further classified the Crenarchaeota as a Freshwater Group, Miscellaneous Crenarchaeota group, Group 13, Rice Cluster VI and IV, Marine Group I and Marine Benthic Group B; and the Euryarchaeota into Methanomicrobiales, Methanosarcinales, Methanobacteriales, Rice Cluster III, Marine Benthic Group D, Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vent Euryarchaeota 1 and Eury 5. All groups were previously described. Both hydrogen-and acetate-dependent methanogens were found in all samples. Most of the groups (with 60% of the sequences) described in this study were not similar to any cultivated isolates, making it difficult to discern their function in the freshwater microbial community. A significant decrease in the number of sequences, as well as in the diversity of archaeal communities was found in the contaminated sites. The Marine Group I, including the ammonia oxidizer Nitrosopumilus maritimus, was the dominant group in both mercury and uranium/ nitrate-contaminated sites. The uranium-contaminated site also contained a high concentration of nitrate, thus Marine Group I may play a role in nitrogen cycle.

The aim of this study was to explore the “intensity-response” relationship in local moxibustion-like stimuli- (LMS-) modulated gastric motility and its underlying receptor mechanism. Based on the thermal pain threshold (43°C), 41°C, 43°C, and 45°C LMS were separately applied to ST36 or CV12 for 180 s among ASIC3 knockout (ASIC3−/−) mice, TRPV1 knockout (TRPV1−/−) mice, and their homologous wild-type C57BL/6 mice ( n = 8 in each group). Gastric motility was continuously measured by an intrapyloric balloon, and the amplitude, integral, and frequency of gastric motility during LMS were compared with those of initial activities. We found that both 43°C and 45°C LMS at ST36 induced significantly facilitated effect of gastric motility P < 0.05 , while LMS at CV12 induced inhibited effects P < 0.05 . 41°C LMS had no significant impact on gastric motility. Compared with C57BL/6 mice, the facilitatory effect at ST36 and inhibitive effect of LMS at CV12 were decreased significantly in TRPV1−/− mice ( P < 0.05 ; P < 0.01 ) but not changed markedly in ASIC3−/− mice P > 0.05 . These results suggest that there existed an “intensity-response” relationship between temperature in LMS and its effects on gastric motility. TRPV1 receptor played a crucial role in the LMS-modulated gastric motility.

More than 300 kb of DNA sequence from five Populus bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones was compared with the complete sequence of the Arabidopsis genome to search for collinearity between the genomes of these two plant genera. Approximately 27% of the DNA sequences from the Populus genome were homologous to protein-coding regions in the Arabidopsis genome. BLAST scores and synteny were used to infer orthologous relationships between the Populus and Arabidopsis homologs. The probability that any pair of genes on a single Populus BAC will have orthologs on the same Arabidopsis chromosome is 46%-58%, substantially greater than the 20% expectation if there is no conservation of synteny between the Populus and Arabidopsis genomes. Likewise, the probability that any pair of genes on a single Populus BAC will have orthologs on a single Arabidopsis BAC is 19%-25%, much higher than the 0.1% expected if the orthologs are randomly distributed. These results provide evidence for substantial \"pockets\" of conserved microcollinearity between regions of the Populus and Arabidopsis genomes as well as for conservation of synteny even when local gene collinearity is not preserved during genome evolution.

Microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are highly polymorphic, codominant markers that have great value for the construction of genetic maps, comparative mapping, population genetic surveys, and paternity analyses. Here, we report the development and testing of a set of SSR markers derived from shotgun sequencing from Populus trichocarpa Torr. & A. Gray, a nonenriched genomic DNA library, and bacterial artificial chromosomes. Approximately 23% of the 1536 genomic clones and 48% of the 768 bacterial artificial chromosome subclones contained an SSR. Of the sequences containing an SSR, 72.4% contained a dinucleotide, 19.5% a trinucleotide, and 8.1% a tetranucleotide repeat unit; 26.6% of the sequences contained multiple SSR motifs in a complex or compound repeat structures. A survey of the genome sequence database revealed very similar proportional distribution, indicating that our limited rapid, shallow sequencing effort is representative of genome-wide patterns. In total, 492 primer pairs were designed and these yielded 77 markers that were mapped in an F2 pedigree, including 26 that were sufficiently informative to be included in a Populus framework map. SSRs with GC-rich motifs mapped at a significantly higher frequency than expected, although AT-rich SSRs accounted for the majority of mapped markers due to their higher representation in the genome. SSR markers developed from P. trichocarpa showed high utility throughout the genus, with amplification rates in excess of 70% for all Populus species tested. Finally, at least 30% of the markers amplified in several willow species, suggesting that some of these SSRs will be transferable across genera.