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To efficiently use lignocellulosic materials in ruminants, it is crucial to explore effective enzymes, especially bifunctional enzymes. In this study, a novel stable bifunctional cellulase-xylanase protein from buffalo rumen metagenome was expressed and characterized, CelXyn2. The enzyme displayed optimal activity at pH 6.0 and 45 °C. The residual endoglucanase and xylanase activities were 90.6% and 86.4% after a 60-min pre-incubation at 55 °C. Hydrolysis of rice straw, wheat straw, sheepgrass and sugar beet pulp by CelXyn2 showed its ability to degrade both cellulose and hemicellulose polymers. Treatment with CelXyn2 improved the hydrolysis of agricultural residues with an evident increase in production of total gas, lactate and volatile fatty acids. The results of 16S rRNA and real-time PCR showed that the effect on in vitro ruminal microbial community depended on fermentation substrates. This study demonstrated that CelXyn2 could strengthen lignocellulose hydrolysis and in vitro ruminal fermentation. These characteristics of CelXyn2 distinguish it as a promising candidate for agricultural application.

Yaks living on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau for a long time have evolved a series of mechanisms to adapt to the unique geographical environment and climate characteristics of the plateau. Compared with other ruminants, yaks have higher energy utilization and metabolic efficiency. This paper presents possible mechanisms responsible for the efficient energy utilization, absorption and metabolism resulting from the unique evolutionary process of yaks. It is hoped that the information discussed in this review will give a better insight into the uniqueness and superiority of yaks in regards to energy metabolism and utilization compared with cattle and open new avenues for the targeted regulation of energy utilization pathways of other ruminants.

This study examined the potential effects of adding red pepper oil (RPO) and radish oil (RO) to broiler diets on the animals' development, immune system performance, and activity of digestive enzymes. A total of 300 1-day of age unsexed Arbor Acre chicks were allotted to five treatment groups in a complete randomized design experiment. Each group had sixty chicks divided into five replicate groups, each of 12 chicks. The 1stgroup (control group) was given a basal diet without supplements. A combination of RPO and RO was added to the basal diet of the remaining four groups at escalating levels: 0.3, 0.6, 0.9, and 1.2g/kg of feed, respectively. Compared to the control, body weight, weight gain, feed intake, and feed conversion ratio significantly improved by adding RPO and RO at 0.6 or 0.9 g/kg of feed. Additionally, with varying RPO and RO levels, there was a considerable reduction in uric acid, creatinine, and aspartate aminotransferase (AST). Birds fed 0.6 g/kg of RPO and RO had lower triglycerides and low-density lipoprotein (LDL). Furthermore, including RPO and RO in the diet mainly impacted the activity of digestive enzymes and antioxidant levels. In addition, thymus and spleen relative weights had been influenced considerably. Additionally, the group that was fed the RPO and RO diet at a 0.9 g/kg level had the highest levels of these immune system markers. Interestingly, chicks fed diets with 0.9 g/kg of RPO and RO showed the lowest levels of E. coli, Salmonella, and coliforms. Additionally, there was a trend of increasing lactic acid bacteria levels with higher concentrations of RPO and RO compared to the control group. We might conclude that the RPO and RO addition in broilers' diets maximizes their production and immunity.

Combining cytotoxic drugs with tumor microenvironment (TME) modulator agents is an effective strategy to enhance anti-tumor effects. In this study, two natural anti-tumor active ingredients celastrol (CEL) and glycyrrhetinic acid (GA) were combined for tumor treatment. In order to ensure the precise co-delivery and controllable synchronous release of combined drugs to tumors, it is necessary to construct a suitable nano-drug delivery platform. Based on this, we coupled hyaluronic acid (HA) with CEL by amide reaction to obtain an amphiphilic polymer prodrug HA-SS-CEL, and GA was spontaneously loaded into polymer micelles by self-assembly to obtain G/HSSC-M. G/HSSC-M has ideal size distribution, redox-responsive synchronous drug release, enhanced tumor cell internalization and in vivotumor targeting. Compared with free drugs, the construction of multifunctional polymer micelles makes G/HSSC-M show better anticancer effect at the same concentration, and can significantly inhibit the proliferation and migration of HepG2 and 4T1 cells. In the in vivoexperiments, G/HSSC-M inhibited tumor as high as 75.12% in H22 tumor-bearing mice. The mechanism included regulation of M1/M2 macrophage polarization, inhibition of Janus kinase 1/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (JAK1/STAT3) signaling pathway, and remodeling of tumor blood vessels. Therefore, the development of prodrug micelles co-loaded with CEL and GA provides a promising drug co-delivery strategy for combined cancer therapy.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of ensiled agricultural byproducts from Qinghai-Tibet plateau on growth performance, rumen microbiota, ruminal epithelium morphology, and nutrient transport-related gene expression in Tibetan sheep. Fourteen male Tibetan sheep were randomly assigned to one of two diets: an untreated diet (without silage inoculum, CON, n= 7) or an ensiled diet (with silage inoculum, ESD, n= 7). The total experimental period lasted for 84 d, including early 14 d as adaption period and remaining 70 d for data collection. The ESD increased average daily gain (P= 0.046), dry matter intake (P< 0.001), ammonia nitrogen (P= 0.045), microbial crude protein (P= 0.034), and total volatile fatty acids concentration (P< 0.001), and decreased ruminal pH value (P= 0.014). The proportion of propionate (P= 0.006) and the copy numbers of bacteria (P= 0.01) and protozoa (P= 0.002) were higher, while the proportion of acetate (P= 0.028) was lower in the sheep fed ESD compared to CON. Pyrosequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene revealed that ESD increased the relative abundance of Firmicutes, Ruminococcus, Lachnospiraceae_AC2044_group, Lachnospiraceae_XPB1014_group, and Christensenellaceae_R-7_groupin the rumen (P< 0.05), while decreased the relative abundance of Bacteroidota, Prevotellaceae_UCG-003, and Veillonellaceae_UCG-001(P< 0.05). Analyses with PICRUSt2 and STAMP indicated that the propionate metabolism pathway was enriched in the sheep fed ESD (P= 0.026). The ESD increased the rumen papillae height (P= 0.012), density (P= 0.036), and surface area (P= 0.001), and improved the thickness of the total epithelia (P= 0.018), stratum corneum (P= 0.040), stratum granulosum (P= 0.042), and stratum spinosum and basale (P= 0.004). The relative mRNA expression of cyclin-dependent Kinase 2, CyclinA2, CyclinD2, zonula occludens-1, Occludin, monocarboxylate transporter isoform 1 (MCT1), MCT4, sodium/potassium pump, and sodium/hydrogen antiporter 3 were higher in the rumen epithelial of sheep fed ESD than CON (P< 0.05). Conversely, the relative mRNA expressions of Caspase 3and B-cell lymphoma-2 were lower in the sheep fed ESD than CON (P< 0.05). In conclusion, compared with an untreated diet, feeding an ensiled diet altered the rumen microbial community, enhanced nutrient transport through rumen epithelium, and improved the growth performance of Tibetan sheep.This research demonstrated that ensiled diet improved the growth performance of Tibetan sheep by changing the rumen microbial structure and by promoting nutrient transport through rumen epithelium.Tibetan sheep on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau experience significant nutrient stress while a substantial amount of agricultural byproducts in the region go discarded and wasted. In this study, agricultural byproducts were ensiled and fed to the Tibetan sheep to investigate their effects on growth performance, rumen microorganisms, and nutrient transport through rumen epithelial tissues. Fourteen male Tibetan sheep were randomly assigned to one of two diets: untreated diet (without silage inoculum, CON, n= 7) or ensiled diet (with silage inoculum, ESD, n= 7). After 70 d of feeding, the ESD-fed sheep had a higher body weight than CON. The ensiled diet changed the rumen microbial community and increased the relative abundance of cellulolytic bacteria in the rumen. In addition, the ensiled diet also promoted the development of rumen epithelia and improved the relative expression of gene related to nutrient transport. Overall, the ensiled diet optimized the use of agricultural byproducts and significantly contributed to the production of Tibetan sheep.

For the problems of resources and environment faced in sustainable development, the use of remote sensing image object detection technology is an effective means to detect and analyze this major problem. Aiming at the problems of low accuracy and slow detection speed of existing remote sensing image rotation object detection algorithms implemented based on Transformer, a remote sensing image rotation object detection method based on dynamic position information Transformer is proposed. Firstly, to improve the detection accuracy, the cross-attention operation of the decoder is improved, and the obtained results are iteratively updated with the position information of the object queries and used as the initial object queries for the next decoder; secondly, to improve the robustness of the network for remote sensing image object detection, the data processing method of image pyramid is designed; Finally, a rotating IoU matching loss function more suitable for oriented object detection is introduced to improve the accuracy of matching the predicted boxed to the true boxed. The detection algorithm proposed in this paper is experimentally verified on DOTA and SSDD datasets, and the average detection accuracy is 73.70% and 90.3%, respectively, which effectively improves the average detection accuracy of Transformer-based rotating object detection algorithm in aerial remote sensing images and has better real-time detection performance.

Swainsonine induced liver inflammation in livestock; however, the underlying mechanisms, especially the role of bile acids (BAs), in the pathogenesis remained elusive. Here, our results showed that swainsonine induced hepatic inflammation via changing BA metabolism and gut microbiota in mice. Swainsonine significantly upregulated the levels of deoxycholic acid (DCA) and taurine-β-muricholic acid (T-β-MCA) in the serum and liver of mice due to the markedly increased genus Clostridiumand the decreased genus Lactobacillusin the gut. As antagonists of the farnesoid X receptor (FXR), elevated DCA and T-β-MCA inhibited hepatic Fxrgene expression and thus suppressed FXR-SHP signaling and activated hepatic Cyp7a1gene expression, which induced a significant upregulation of the total BA level in serum, contributing to liver inflammation. These findings offer new insights into the underlying mechanisms in which swainsonine induced liver inflammation in mice via the gut–liver axis and suggest that gut microbiota and its metabolite BAs may be underlying triggering factors.

The combination of Ce6, an acknowledged photosensitizer, and TPL, a natural anticancer agent, has been demonstrated as a useful strategy to reinforce the tumor growth suppression, as well as decrease the systemic side effects compared with their monotherapy. However, in view of the optimal chemo-photodynamic combination efficiency, there is still short of the feasible nanovehicle to steadily co-deliver Ce6 and TPL, and stimuli-responsively burst release drugs in tumor site. Herein, we described the synergistic antitumor performance of a pH-sensitive supramolecular nanosystem, mediated by the host–guest complexing between β-CD and acid pH-responsive amphiphilic co-polymer mPEG-PBAE-mPEG, showing the shell–core structural micelles with the tight β-CD layer coating. Both Ce6 and TPL were facilely co-loaded into the spherical supramolecular NPs (TPL+Ce6/NPs) by one-step nanoprecipitation method, with an ideal particle size (156.0 nm), acid pH-responsive drug release profile, and enhanced cellular internalization capacity. In view of the combination benefit of photodynamic therapy and chemotherapy, as well as co-encapsulation in the fabricated pH-sensitive supramolecular NPs, TPL+Ce6/NPs exhibited significant efficacy to suppress cellular proliferation, boost ROS level, lower MMP, and promote cellular apoptosis in vitro. Particularly, fluorescence imaging revealed that TPL+Ce6/NPs preferentially accumulated in the tumor tissue area, with higher intensity than that of free Ce6. As expected, upon 650-nm laser irradiation, TPL+Ce6/NPs exhibited a cascade of amplified synergistic chemo-photodynamic therapeutic benefits to suppress tumor progression in both hepatoma H22 tumor-bearing mice and B16 tumor-bearing mice. More importantly, lower systemic toxicity was found in the tumor-bearing mice treated with TPL+Ce6/NPs. Overall, the designed supramolecular TPL+Ce6/NPs provided a promising alternative approach for chemo-photodynamic therapy in tumor treatment.

Colonization and development of the gut microbiome is a crucial consideration for optimizing the health and performance of livestock animals. This is mainly attributed to the fact that dietary and management practices greatly influence the gut microbiota, subsequently leading to changes in nutrient utilization and immune response. A favorable microbiome can be implanted through dietary or management interventions of livestock animals, especially during early life. In this review, we explore all the possible factors (for example gestation, colostrum, and milk feeding, drinking water, starter feed, inoculation from healthy animals, prebiotics/probiotics, weaning time, essential oil and transgenesis), which can influence rumen microbiome colonization and development. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of potential strategies used to manipulate gut development and microbial colonization to improve the production and health of newborn calves at an early age when they are most susceptible to enteric disease. Moreover, we provide insights into possible interventions and their potential effects on rumen development and microbiota establishment. Prospects of latest techniques like transgenesis and host genetics have also been discussed regarding their potential role in modulation of rumen microbiome and subsequent effects on gut development and performance in neonatal ruminants.