ALBERT

Description: Background: Major secondary metabolites, including flavonoids, caffeine, and theanine, are important components of tea products and are closely related to the taste, flavor, and health benefits of tea. Secondary metabolite biosynthesis in Camellia sinensis is differentially regulated in different tissues during growth and development. Until now, little was known about the expression patterns of genes involved in secondary metabolic pathways or their regulatory mechanisms. This study aimed to generate expression profiles for C. sinensis tissues and to build a gene regulation model of the secondary metabolic pathways. Results: RNA sequencing was performed on 13 different tissue samples from various organs and developmental stages of tea plants, including buds and leaves of different ages, stems, flowers, seeds, and roots. A total of 43.7 Gbp of raw sequencing data were generated, from which 347,827 unigenes were assembled and annotated. There were 46,693, 8446, 3814, 10,206, and 4948 unigenes specifically expressed in the buds and leaves, stems, flowers, seeds, and roots, respectively. In total, 1719 unigenes were identified as being involved in the secondary metabolic pathways in C. sinensis, and the expression patterns of the genes involved in flavonoid, caffeine, and theanine biosynthesis were characterized, revealing the dynamic nature of their regulation during plant growth and development. The possible transcription factor regulation network for the biosynthesis of flavonoid, caffeine, and theanine was built, encompassing 339 transcription factors from 35 families, namely bHLH, MYB, and NAC, among others. Remarkably, not only did the data reveal the possible critical check points in the flavonoid, caffeine, and theanine biosynthesis pathways, but also implicated the key transcription factors and related mechanisms in the regulation of secondary metabolite biosynthesis. Conclusions: Our study generated gene expression profiles for different tissues at different developmental stages in tea plants. The gene network responsible for the regulation of the secondary metabolic pathways was analyzed. Our work elucidated the possible cross talk in gene regulation between the secondary metabolite biosynthetic pathways in C. sinensis. The results increase our understanding of how secondary metabolic pathways are regulated during plant development and growth cycles, and help pave the way for genetic selection and engineering for germplasm improvement.

Description: Background: Although dyslipidemia is related to the pathogenesis of renal insufficiency, which routinely available lipid measure is more applicable in estimation of kidney function is still uncertain. Our objective was to evaluate inconsistent associations of lipid profiles with both albuminuria and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Methods: We performed a population-based study in 9730 subjects aged 40 years or older. Definitions of abnormalities in albumin excretion were according to the latest guidelines of American Diabetes Association’s Standards of Medical Care. CKD was defined as estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) 

Description: Iron homeostasis is an essential process over the entire lives of both hosts and bacterial pathogens, and also plays roles in many other metabolic functions. Currently, knowledge is limited on the iron scaveng...

Description: Based on an analysis of the cold regeneration mechanism of emulsified asphalt, the emulsified asphalt binders and cement were applied to prepare the cold recycled mixtures, and the main technical performances of the designed mixtures were evaluated, including high-temperature stability, water stability, and fatigue characteristics. A high content of 65% recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) material was used with some new aggregates and mineral powders, and the optimal emulsified asphalt binder and cement dosages were determined as 2.9% and 1.5% respectively. The technical performance test results show that: (1) The well-designed emulsified asphalt cold recycled mixtures have good high-temperature stability and water stability, and can meet the requirements of the road base layer and the lower layer. (2) When the stress level is lower, the fatigue performance of mixtures with lower emulsified asphalt binder dosage and lower cement content is better, but when the stress level is higher, the high dosage of emulsified asphalt binder is more favorable, while the cement content has little effect on the fatigue property. (3) The emulsified asphalt cold recycled mixtures have relatively poor fatigue resistance, and their fatigue life is significantly lower than that of the hot mixed asphalt mixtures.

Description: Throughout the several-hundred-year-long history of the concept of strength, inaccurate material strength as a result of the size effect and the inconsistency of strength theories have been two continuous and challenging issues, and have even been taken to be inherent attributes of material strength. Applying the structural stressing state theory and method, this study experimentally investigates the uniaxial load-bearing process of concrete specimens and reveals their stressing state mutation features at specific load levels. Exploration of this general feature resulted in the discovery of essential strength, which is basically without size effect. Then, biaxial and triaxial experiments with concrete specimens were conducted in order to obtain the results for various combinations of principal stresses on essential strength. Consequently, according to Yu’s unified strength theory, the formula for strength of concrete was determined by fitting the relation between the combined principal stresses and the essential strength, which was verified by experiments carried out using natural marble specimens. Essential strength could promote the accuracy of strength indices, and the formula for strength might replace the existing strength theories for brittle materials. The initial solution of these two classic issues could make a new contribution to Yu’s unified strength theory and its final goal, promoting related research on material strength and leading to a more rational use of material strength in practical engineering.

Description: Dam projects are inevitably accompanied by massive displacement and resettlement, which imposes intricate social impacts on the host community. This study aims to investigate the social impacts of dam-induced displacement and resettlement in China through a comparative case study where both the control and experimental groups were investigated. Data were collected through a mix of questionnaire-survey, archival files, and face-to-face interviews. The results show that dam-induced displacement and resettlement was conducive to improving residence conditions and facilitating the acceptance of rural cooperative medical insurance. But it had negative impacts on employment, income level and income resource, and overall well-being. Implications for theory and for practice are provided in the end.

Description: The effects of fly ash, sodium carbonate content, foaming temperature and foaming time on foam glass aperture sizes and their distribution were analyzed by the orthogonal experimental design. Results from the steady-state method showed a normal distribution of the number of apertures with change in average aperture, which ranges from 0.1 to 2.0 mm for more than 93% of apertures. For a given porosity, the thermal conductivity decreases with the increase of the aperture size. The apertures in the sample have obvious effects in blocking the heat flow transmission: heat flow is quickly diverted to both sides when encountered with the aperture. When the thickness of the sample is constant, the thermal resistance of the foam glass sample increases with increasing porosity, leading to better thermal insulation. Furthermore, our results suggest that the more evenly distributed and orderly arranged the apertures are in the foam glass material, the larger the thermal resistance of the material and hence, the better the thermal insulation.

Description: Excessive nitrogen fertilizer application in greenhouse vegetable production (GVP) is of scientific and public concern because of its significance to international environmental sustainability. We conducted a meta-analysis using 1174 paired observations from 69 publications on the effects of nitrogen fertilizer application and reducing nitrogen fertilizer application on the nitrogen losses on a broad scale. We found that the increase in nitrogen loss is much higher than that in production gain caused by excessive application of nitrogen fertilizer: nitrate leaching (+187.5%), ammonium leaching (+28.1%), total nitrogen leaching (+217.0%), nitrous oxide emission (+202.0%), ammonia emission (+176.4%), nitric oxide emission (+543.3%), yield (+35.7%) and nitrogen uptake (+24.5%). Environmental variables respond nonlinearly to nitrogen fertilizer application, with severe nitrate leaching and nitrous oxide emission when the application rate exceeds 570 kg N/ha and 733 kg/N, respectively. The effect of nitrogen fertilizer on yield growth decreases when the application rate exceeds 302 kg N/ha. Appropriate reduction in nitrogen fertilizer application rate substantially mitigates the environmental cost, for example, decreasing nitrate leaching (−32.4%), ammonium leaching (−6.5%), total nitrogen leaching (−37.3%), ammonia emission (−28.4%), nitrous oxide emission (−38.6%) and nitric oxide emission (−8.0%), while it has no significant effect on the nitrogen uptake and yield.

Description: 3D urban building models, which provide 3D information services for urban planning, management and operational decision-making, are essential for constructing digital cities. Unfortunately, the existing reconstruction approaches for LoD3 building models are insufficient in model details and are associated with a heavy workload, and accordingly they could not satisfy urgent requirements of realistic applications. In this paper, we propose an accurate LoD3 building reconstruction method by integrating multi-source laser point clouds and oblique remote sensing imagery. By combing high-precision plane features extracted from point clouds and accurate boundary constraint features from oblique images, the building mainframe model, which provides an accurate reference for further editing, is quickly and automatically constructed. Experimental results show that the proposed reconstruction method outperforms existing manual and automatic reconstruction methods using both point clouds and oblique images in terms of reconstruction efficiency and spatial accuracy.

Description: It is very significant to explore the intrinsic differences in breast cancer subtypes. These intrinsic differences are closely related to clinical diagnosis and designation of treatment plans. With the accumulation of biological and medicine datasets, there are many different omics data that can be viewed in different aspects. Combining these multiple omics data can improve the accuracy of prediction. Meanwhile; there are also many different databases available for us to download different types of omics data. In this article, we use estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) to define breast cancer subtypes and classify any two breast cancer subtypes using SMO-MKL algorithm. We collected mRNA data, methylation data and copy number variation (CNV) data from TCGA to classify breast cancer subtypes. Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) is employed to use these omics data distinctly. The result of using three omics data with multiple kernels is better than that of using single omics data with multiple kernels. Furthermore; these significant genes and pathways discovered in the feature selection process are also analyzed. In experiments; the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and has abundant biological interpretations.