Kazal-type serine protease inhibitors (KaSPI) play important roles in insect growth, development, digestion, metabolism and immune defence. In this study, based on the transcriptome of Mythimna separata, the cDNA sequence of MsKaSPI with Kazal domain was uploaded to GenBank (MN931651). Spatial and temporal expression analysis showed that MsKaSPI was expressed at different developmental stages and different tissues, and it was induced by 20-hydroxyecdysone in third-instar larvae of M. separata. After 24 h infection by Beauveria bassiana, the expression level of MsKaSPI and the corresponding MsKaSPI content were significantly up-regulated, being 6.42-fold and 1.91-fold to the control group, respectively, while the activities of serine protease, trypsin and chymotrypsin were inhibited. After RNA interference interfered with MsKaSPI for 6 h, the expression decreased by 73.44%, the corresponding content of MsKaSPI protein decreased by 55.66% after 12 h, and the activities of serine protease and trypsin were significantly enhanced. Meanwhile, both the larval and pupal stages of M. separata were prolonged, the weights were reduced and the number of eggs per female decreased by 181. Beauveria bassiana infection also increased the mortality of MsKaSPI-silenced M. separata by 18.96%. These prove MsKaSPI can not only result in slow growth and low fecundity of M. separata by regulating the activity of related protease, but also participate in the resistance to pathogenic fungi by regulating the serine protease inhibitor content and the activities of related serine protease.

The relationship between magmatism and gold mineralization has been a topic of interest in understanding the formation of ore deposits. The Baizhangzi gold deposit, located in the northern margin of the North China Craton, is hosted by the Baizhangzi granite (BZG) and provides a case to evaluate the relation between granite and gold mineralization in Late Triassic. In this study, we present petrography, bulk geochemistry, zircon U-Pb isotope and trace elements data, as well as major elements of biotite and plagioclase for the BZG to evaluate the petrogenesis and link with gold mineralization. The BZG comprises biotite monzogranite, biotite-bearing monzogranite and monzogranite (BZGs). Zircon U-Pb geochronology shows that all the granitoids of BZGs were coeval with a formation age of 232 Ma. The granitoids, with high SiO2, Al2O3 and Sr, while low Y and Yb, show adakitic affinity. They are enriched in LILFs (e.g., Rb, Ba, Th, U and Sr) and LREEs, while depletion in HFSEs (e.g., Nb, Ta, P and Ti). The geochemical and mineral chemical data suggest that the granitoids have experienced the fractional crystallization of biotite + plagioclase + K- feldspar + apatite. Crystallization temperature is estimated as ca. 700°C, and pressure is between 0.71 kbar and 1.60 kbar. The monzogranite shows higher values of logfO2, △FMQ and △NNO than the biotite-bearing monzogranite, ranging from −19.76 to −11.71, −4.93 to +3.67 and −5.48 to +3.11, respectively. The fractional crystallization, together with high fO2, K-metasomatism and low evolution degree, provided favourable conditions for gold mineralization.

Childhood is a critical period for muscle accumulation. Studies in elders have reported that antioxidant vitamins could improve muscle health. However, limited studies have assessed such associations in children. This study included 243 boys and 183 girls. A seventy-nine-item FFQ was used to investigate dietary nutrients intake. Plasma levels of retinol and α-tocopherol were measured using high-performance liquid chromatography with MS. Dual X-ray absorptiometry was used to assess appendicular skeletal muscle mass (ASM) and total body fat. The ASM index (ASMI) and ASMI Z-score were then calculated. Hand grip strength was measured using a Jamar® Plus+ Hand Dynamometer. Fully adjusted multiple linear regression models showed that for each unit increase in plasma retinol content, ASM, ASMI, left HGS and ASMI Z-score increased by 2·43 × 10−3 kg, 1·33 × 10−3 kg/m2, 3·72 × 10−3 kg and 2·45 × 10−3 in girls, respectively (P < 0·001–0·050). ANCOVA revealed a dose–response relationship between tertiles of plasma retinol level and muscle indicators (Ptrend: 0·001–0·007). The percentage differences between the top and bottom tertiles were 8·38 %, 6·26 %, 13·2 %, 12·1 % and 116 % for ASM, ASMI, left HGS, right HGS and ASMI Z-score in girls, respectively (Pdiff: 0·005–0·020). No such associations were observed in boys. Plasma α-tocopherol levels were not correlated with muscle indicators in either sex. In conclusion, high circulating retinol levels are positively associated with muscle mass and strength in school-age girls.

Breast cancer is a high-risk disease with a high mortality rate among women. Chemotherapy plays an important role in the treatment of breast cancer. However, chemotherapy eventually results in tumours that are resistant to drugs. In recent years, many studies have revealed that the activation of Wnt/β-catenin signalling is crucial for the emergence and growth of breast tumours as well as the development of drug resistance. Additionally, drugs that target this pathway can reverse drug resistance in breast cancer therapy. Traditional Chinese medicine has the properties of multi-target and tenderness. Therefore, integrating traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine into chemotherapy provides a new strategy for reversing the drug resistance of breast tumours. This paper mainly reviews the possible mechanism of Wnt/β-catenin in promoting the process of breast tumour drug resistance, and the progress of alkaloids extracted from traditional Chinese medicine in the targeting of this pathway in order to reverse the drug resistance of breast cancer.

With the development of intelligent manufacturing, more and more nonstandard parts are used in high-precision assembly. The robotic assembly method based on attractive region in environment (ARIE) has been proven to have good performance in the high-precision assembly under the limitation of robot system accuracy or sensing accuracy. However, for the assembly of nonstandard parts, especially nonconvex parts, the existing ARIE-based strategy lacks a targeted design. In the assembly process, the nonconvex structure may cause blocking problems, which will lead to assembly failure when using the strategy. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a new assembly method by using the geometric features of constraint region based on the concept of ARIE. Specifically, first, when using the ARIE-based classic strategy, the reasons for the possible blocking problem in the assembly of a class of nonconvex axisymmetric parts are analyzed in detail. Second, a multi-step sliding strategy is proposed based on the theory of ARIE to solve the possible blocking problem in the assembly process. Third, impedance control is used to enable the peg to achieve the desired compliant motion in the proposed strategy. The improvement in the success rate of the proposed method is verified by the comparison experiment of small clearance peg-in-hole assembly, where the structure of the peg is nonconvex and axisymmetric.

According to the public data collected from the Health Commission of Gansu Province, China, regarding the COVID-19 pandemic during the summer epidemic cycle in 2022, the epidemiological analysis showed that the pandemic spread stability and the symptom rate (the number of confirmed cases divided by the sum of the number of asymptomatic cases and the number of confirmed cases) of COVID-19 were different among 3 main epidemic regions, Lanzhou, Linxia, and Gannan; both the symptom rate and the daily instantaneous symptom rate (daily number of confirmed cases divided by the sum of daily number of asymptomatic cases and daily number of confirmed cases) in Lanzhou were substantially higher than those in Linxia and Gannan. The difference in the food sources due to the high difference of the population ethnic composition in the 3 regions was probably the main driver for the difference of the symptom rates among the 3 regions. This work provides potential values for prevention and control of COVID-19 in different regions.

Visual place recognition (VPR) in condition-varying environments is still an open problem. Popular solutions are convolutional neural network (CNN)-based image descriptors, which have been shown to outperform traditional image descriptors based on hand-crafted visual features. However, there are two drawbacks of current CNN-based descriptors: (a) their high dimension and (b) lack of generalization, leading to low efficiency and poor performance in real robotic applications. In this paper, we propose to use a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) to tackle this problem. We employ a high-level layer of a pre-trained CNN to generate features and train a CAE to map the features to a low-dimensional space to improve the condition invariance property of the descriptor and reduce its dimension at the same time. We verify our method in four challenging real-world datasets involving significant illumination changes, and our method is shown to be superior to the state-of-the-art. The code of our work is publicly available at https://github.com/MedlarTea/CAE-VPR.

In vitro rearing of honey bee larvae is ideal for bioassay studies; no honey bee stable cell lines are available. Inconsistency of internal development staging of reared larvae and a susceptibility to contamination are common problems encountered. Standardized protocols on rearing larvae in vitro to make the larvae growth and development more similar to that of natural colonies are necessary to ensure the accuracy of experimental results and promote honey bee research as a model organism. Here, we concluded that when larval fasting weight was >160 mg, the time point of gut emptying can be defined as the critical point separating the larval and prepupal stages. In this way, we can conduct precise studies on the prepupal stage, such as organ remodeling during metamorphosis. Simultaneously, we further verified that recombinant AccApidaecin in genetic engineered bacteria added to the larval diet upregulated antibacterial peptide gene expression, and did not stimulate the stress response in larvae, nor did it affect the pupation rate or eclosion rate. This demonstrated that feeding recombinant AccApidaecin can enhance the individual antibacterial ability at the molecular level.

Coastal eutrophication and hypoxia remain a persistent environmental crisis despite the great efforts to reduce nutrient loading and mitigate associated environmental damages. Symptoms of this crisis have appeared to spread rapidly, reaching developing countries in Asia with emergences in Southern America and Africa. The pace of changes and the underlying drivers remain not so clear. To address the gap, we review the up-to-date status and mechanisms of eutrophication and hypoxia in global coastal oceans, upon which we examine the trajectories of changes over the 40 years or longer in six model coastal systems with varying socio-economic development statuses and different levels and histories of eutrophication. Although these coastal systems share common features of eutrophication, site-specific characteristics are also substantial, depending on the regional environmental setting and level of social-economic development along with policy implementation and management. Nevertheless, ecosystem recovery generally needs greater reduction in pressures compared to that initiated degradation and becomes less feasible to achieve past norms with a longer time anthropogenic pressures on the ecosystems. While the qualitative causality between drivers and consequences is well established, quantitative attribution of these drivers to eutrophication and hypoxia remains difficult especially when we consider the social economic drivers because the changes in coastal ecosystems are subject to multiple influences and the cause–effect relationship is often non-linear. Such relationships are further complicated by climate changes that have been accelerating over the past few decades. The knowledge gaps that limit our quantitative and mechanistic understanding of the human-coastal ocean nexus are identified, which is essential for science-based policy making. Recognizing lessons from past management practices, we advocate for a better, more efficient indexing system of coastal eutrophication and an advanced regional earth system modeling framework with optimal modules of human dimensions to facilitate the development and evaluation of effective policy and restoration actions.

Intertemporal choices involve tradeoffs between outcomes that occur at different times. Most of the research has used pure gains tasks and the discount rates yielding from those tasks to explain and predict real-world behaviors and consequences. However, real decisions are often more complex and involve mixed outcomes (e.g., sooner-gain and later-loss or sooner-loss and later-gain). No study has used mixed gain-loss intertemporal tradeoff tasks to explain and predict real-world behaviors and consequences, and studies involving such tasks are also scarce. Considering that tasks involving a combination of gains and losses may yield different discount rates and that existing pure gains tasks do not explain or predict real-world outcomes well, this study conducted two experiments to compare the discount rates of mixed gain-loss intertemporal tradeoffs with those of pure gains or pure losses (Experiment 1) and to examine whether these tasks predicted different real-world behaviors and consequences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 suggests that the discount rate ordering of the four tasks was, from highest to lowest, pure gains, sooner-loss and later-gain, pure losses, and sooner-gain and later-loss. Experiment 2 indicates that the evidence supporting the claim that the discount rates of the four tasks were related to different real-world behaviors and consequences was insufficient.

The endowment effect is a well-documented decision phenomenon, referring to a tendency that people price a commodity higher when selling it than when buying it. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a sort of inertia, an unwillingness to make a change, or in other words an attachment to the status-quo. People with autism dislike social interaction, and are thus probably less willing to buy and sell items and more attached to the status quo. Previous research revealed that T-carriers of a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of the dopamine beta-hydroxylase (DBH) gene, rs1611115 (C-1021T), are associated with autism and difficulty in social interaction. Therefore, rs1611115 may modulate the endowment effect. In the current study, the subjects sold and bought lotteries with various probabilities of winning money and provided saliva for genotyping. We found that T-carriers (people of CT genotype in this study) exhibited greater endowment effects compared to people of CC genotype. We discuss another two possible explanations of our results: empathy and loss aversion. This is the first attempt to research the endowment effect from the perspective of genes. The result indicates that an SNP of genes (an innate factor) can exert an observable effect on human market activities.