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Gastrodin, a phenolic glycoside, is a prominent component of Gastrodia elata , which is renowned for its sedative, hypnotic, anticonvulsant, and neuroprotective activities. Engineering heterologous production of plant natural products in microbial host represents a safe, cost-effective, and scalable alternative to plant extraction. Here, we present the construction of an engineered Yarrowia lipolytica yeast that achieves a high-titer production of gastrodin. We systematically refactored the yeast genome by enhancing the flux of the shikimate pathway and optimizing the glucosyl transfer system. We introduced more than five dozen of genetic modifications onto the yeast genome, including enzyme screening, alleviation of rate-limiting steps, promoter selection, genomic integration site optimization, downregulation of competing pathways, and elimination of gastrodin degradation. Meanwhile, we developed a Copper-induced Antisense-Transcriptional Regulation (CATR) tool. The developed CATR toolkit achieved dynamic repression and activation of violacein synthesis through the addition of copper in Y. lipolytica. This strategy was further used to dynamically regulate the pyruvate kinase node to effectively redirect glycolytic flux towards the shikimate pathway while maintaining cell growth at proper rate. Taken together, these efforts resulted in 9477.1 mg/L of gastrodin in shaking flaks and 13.4 g/L of gastrodin with a yield of 0.149 g/g glucose in a 5-L bioreactor, highlighting the potential for large-scale and sustainable production of gastrodin from microbial fermentation. • Heterologous enzymes of the gastrodin pathway have been re-screened. • Various endogenous promoters and genomic locus have been characterized. • A novel CATR tool was designed for regulating the pyruvate kinase node. • The engineering yeast gave a titer of 13.4 g/L gastrodin in a 5-L bioreactor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] People can acquire unconscious structural knowledge of Chinese tonal retrogrades and inversions. [•] Inversions were implicitly learnt more easily than retrogrades. [•] Both n-gram structure and repetition patterns are controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Unfairness plays an important role in economic decision making. This fMRI study sought to investigate how the loss and the gain contexts could modulate behavioral and brain responses to unfairness by focusing on participants' rejection behaviors during an Ultimatum Game paradigm. Participants were scanned while they were playing the Ultimatum Game as responders in both loss and gain contexts, i.e. receiving ¥50 as gains and paying for ¥50 as losses. At the behavioral level, lower fairness ratings and higher rejection rates were revealed for unfair losses than unfair gains. At the neural level, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex/anterior middle cingulate cortex and bilateral dorsal striatum were associated with rejection (vs. acceptance) in the loss context, but not in the gain context. Together, our data indicated that participants may experience more unfairness in UG and stronger desire to sanction social norm violations in the loss context than in the gain context, inducing more fairness-related neutral activities when rejecting (vs. accepting) unfair losses than unfair gains. These findings shed light on the significance of context (i.e. loss or gain) in fairness-related social decision-making processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Past researches showed that empathy for pain not only triggers a resonance mechanism between other and self, but also is modulated by contextual factors. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study demonstrated that short-term media violence exposure reduced both pain ratings and also the activation of anterior insula and anterior mid-cingulate cortex to other's pain. Thus, violence exposure modulated empathic responses to other's pain based on a physiological desensitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Short-term media violence exposure reduced pain ratings to other’s pain. [•] Short-term media violence exposure reduced the activation of AI and aMCC to pain. [•] Violence exposure modulated empathic responses to pain through desensitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previous research has shown that people can implicitly acquire mappings between word forms and literal meanings (Williams, 2004, 2005). We argue, from the metaphor-representation and embodiment perspectives, that people can unconsciously establish mappings between word forms and not only literal but also metaphorical meanings. Using Williams’ (2005) paradigm, we found that transfer of form-meaning connections from a concrete domain (space) to an abstract domain (power) was achieved in a metaphor-consistent way without awareness. Our results support the view that unconscious knowledge can be flexibly deployed in an abstract way not previously explored in the implicit learning literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We demonstrated unconscious learning of task-irrelevant perceptual regularities in a Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task in both visual and auditory domains. Participants were required to respond to different letters (‘F’ or ‘J’, experiment 1) or syllables (‘can’ or ‘you’, experiment 2) which occurred in random order. Unbeknownst to participants, the color (red, green, blue or yellow) of the two letters or the tone (1–4) of the syllables varied according to certain rules. Reaction times indicated that people indeed learnt both the color and tonal regularities indicating that task-irrelevant sequence structure can be learned perceptually. In a subsequent prediction test of knowledge of the color or tonal cues using subjective measures, we showed that people could acquire task irrelevant knowledge unconsciously. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The study aims to help characterize the sort of structures about which people can acquire unconscious knowledge. It is already well established that people can implicitly learn n-grams (chunks) and also repetition patterns. We explore the acquisition of unconscious structural knowledge of symmetry. Chinese Tang poetry uses a specific sort of mirror symmetry, an inversion rule with respect to the tones of characters in successive lines of verse. We show, using artificial poetry to control both n-gram structure and repetition patterns, that people can implicitly learn to discriminate inversions from non-inversions, presenting a challenge to existing models of implicit learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We investigated the implicit learning of a linguistically relevant variable (animacy) in a natural language context (namely, the relation of forms of determiners to semantics). Trial by trial subjective measures indicated that exposure to a form–animacy regularity led to unconscious knowledge of that regularity. Under the same conditions, people did not learn about another form–meaning regularity when a linguistically arbitrary variable was used instead of animacy (size relative to a dog). Implicit learning is constrained to acquire unconscious knowledge about features with high prior probabilities of being relevant in that domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An experiment explored the acquisition of conscious and unconscious knowledge of semantic prosody in a second language under incidental and intentional learning conditions. Semantic prosody is the conotational coloring of the semantics of a word, largely uncaptured by dictionary definitions. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we revealed that both conscious and unconscious knowledge were involved in the acquisition of semantic prosody. Intentional learning resulted in similar unconscious but more conscious knowledge than incidental learning. The results are discussed in terms of second language learning and the nature of unconscious knowledge. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Children’s recognition of familiar own-age peers was investigated. Chinese children (4-, 8-, and 14-year-olds) were asked to identify their classmates from photographs showing the entire face, the internal facial features only, the external facial features only, or the eyes, nose, or mouth only. Participants from all age groups were familiar with the faces used as stimuli for 1 academic year. The results showed that children from all age groups demonstrated an advantage for recognition of the internal facial features relative to their recognition of the external facial features. Thus, previous observations of a shift in reliance from external to internal facial features can be attributed to experience with faces rather than to age-related changes in face processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]