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Gut bacteria might play an important role in male reproductive disorders, such as male infertility and sperm abnormalities; however, their causal role is unclear. Herein, Mendelian randomization (MR)-Egger, weighted median, inverse variance weighting, Simple mode, and Weighted mode were used to test the causal relationship between gut microbes and male reproductive diseases. The MR results were validated using various metrics. The MR results were also consolidated using reverse causality speculation, conducted using two-way MR analysis and Steiger filtering. Biological function was analysed using enrichment analyses. The results suggested that eight intestinal microflorae were causally associated with male infertility. The Eubacterium oxidoreducens group was associated with an increased risk of male infertility, while the family Bacteroidaceae was negatively associated with male reproductive diseases. Eight intestinal microflorae were causally associated with abnormal spermatozoa. The family Streptococcaceae was associated with a high risk of abnormal spermatozoa, whereas the family Porphyromonadaceae was associated with a low risk of abnormal spermatozoa. No pleiotropy was observed, this study identified a high correlation between the gut flora and the likelihood of male reproductive diseases. Future research will attempt to advance microbial-focused treatments for such diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common subtype of invasive non-Hodgkin lymphoma. 60–70% of patients are curable with current chemoimmunotherapy, whereas the rest are refractory or relapsed. Understanding of the interaction between DLBCL cells and tumor microenvironment raises the hope of improving overall survival of DLBCL patients. P2X7, a member of purinergic receptors P2X family, is activated by extracellular ATP and subsequently promotes the progression of various malignancies. However, its role in DLBCL has not been elucidated. In this study, the expression level of P2RX7 in DLBCL patients and cell lines was analyzed. MTS assay and EdU incorporation assay were carried out to study the effect of activated/inhibited P2X7 signaling on the proliferation of DLBCL cells. Bulk RNAseq was performed to explore potential mechanism. The results demonstrated high level expression of P2RX7 in DLBCL patients, typically in patients with relapse DLBCL. 2′(3′)-O-(4-benzoylbenzoyl) adenosine 5-triphosphate (Bz-ATP), an agonist of P2X7, significantly accelerated the proliferation of DLBCL cells, whereas delayed proliferation was detected when administrated with antagonist A740003. Furthermore, a urea cycle enzyme named CPS1 (carbamoyl phosphate synthase 1), which up-regulated in P2X7-activated DLBCL cells while down-regulated in P2X7-inhibited group, was demonstrated to involve in such process. Our study reveals the role of P2X7 in the proliferation of DLBCL cells and implies that P2X7 may serve as a potential molecular target for the treatment of DLBCL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strict control measures on atmospheric volatile halogenated hydrocarbons (VHCs) have been taken in China over the past decades to protect the ozone layer, combat climate change, and protect human health and natural ecosystem. It is necessary to obtain overall understanding of the atmospheric dispersion characteristics and human health risks of VHCs in order to provide scientific support for further effective control in China. This paper investigated the reasons for the variations of VHCs in the urban areas in China from 2001 to 2020 based on literature review and collation, and also evaluated the human health risk of harmful VHCs to the exposed populations in the urban areas in China. The study results showed that the variation trends for six groups of VHCs corresponded well to the temporal starting point and persistence of the measures taken, and concentrations of some controlled VHCs species showed a significant decreasing trend since they were banned. While progress continues to be made in the control of VHCs, it is worth noting that some harmful VHCs imposed obvious carcinogenic risks to the exposed human in China, which means that special attention should still be paid to control the emissions of harmful VHCs in the future with China's continuous compliance with the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol. The shortcomings in long-term continuity, spatial representativeness, completeness of key species, and analytical comparability of the current atmospheric VHCs measurements in China limit the acquisition of a more comprehensive and scientific understanding of VHCs pollution in China in this review. Nevertheless, the review could still provide some useful information on VHCs in China, which would improve the understanding of the overall situation and control of VHCs in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhizoma Alismatis, a commonly used traditional Chinese medicine, is the dried tuber of Alisma orientale and Alisma A. plantago-aquatica, mainly cultivated in Fujian and Sichuan provinces (China), respectively. Studies have shown that the rhizosphere microbiome is a key factor determining quality of Chinese medicinal plants. Here we applied metagenomics to investigate the rhizosphere microbiome of Alisma in Fujian and Sichuan, focusing on its structure and function and those genes involved in protostane triterpenes biosynthesis. The dominant phyla were Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, Acidobacteria, and Gemmatimonadetes. Compared with Fujian, the rhizosphere of Sichuan has a greater α diversity and stronger microbial interactions but significantly lower relative abundance of archaea. Microbes with disease-suppressing functions were more abundant in Sichuan than Fujian, but vice versa for those with IAA-producing functions. Gemmatimonas, Anaeromyxobacter, and Pseudolabrys were the main contributors to the potential functional difference in two regions. Genes related to protostane triterpenes biosynthesis were enriched in Fujian. Steroidobacter, Pseudolabrys, Nevskia, and Nitrospira may contribute to the accumulation of protostane triterpenes in Alisma. This work fills a knowledge gap of Alisma’s rhizosphere microbiome, providing a valuable reference for studying its beneficial microorganisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deteriorating groundwater quality due to natural genesis and anthropogenic activities has prevented the sustainable use of groundwater. The characteristics and factors affecting groundwater quality for drinking in shallow aquifers (depth ≤ 100 m) in the plain area of Yarkant River Basin in Xinjiang were analyzed using water quality index (WQI), geostatistics, and geochemical methods. Results showed that the groundwater was weak-alkaline with neutral pH, with dominant water types being SO4•HCO3-Ca•Mg, SO4•Cl•HCO3-Na•Ca, SO4•HCO3•Cl-Ca•Na, Cl•SO4-Na•Ca, and HCO3•SO4-Mg•Ca. WQI ranged between 31.79 and 549.37, and about 14.43%, 31.96%, 18.56%, 22.68%, and 12.37% of the all samples were excellent, good, medium, poor, and extremely poor quality, respectively. The proportion of excellent quality was the highest in single structure phreatic aquifer (SSPA, 50.00%) and good quality were the highest in multilayered structure phreatic aquifer (MSPA, 34.21%) and multilayered structure confined aquifer (MSCA, 28.89%). With the extension of the river, the groundwater quality gradually degenerated from south to north in phreatic aquifer (PA, including SSPA and MSPA). The further away from the Yarkant river, the worse the groundwater quality of PA. Furthermore, the WQI showed excellent, good, and an alternation of medium and poor quality (including extremely poor quality) from south to north in the MSCA. The groundwater quality deterioration might have been affected by the dissolution of evaporite minerals, such as halite, gypsum, and anhydrite and ion exchange process. In addition, local effects of anthropogenic activities and land usage patterns on the groundwater quality should be reckoned as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Amino acids, which are transported by amino acid transporters, are the major forms of organic nitrogen utilized by higher plants. Among the 19 Amino Acid Permease transporters (AAPs) in rice, only a small number of these genes have been reported to influence rice growth and development. However, whether other OsAAPs are responsible for rice growth and development is unclear. Results: In this study, we demonstrate that OsAAP4 promoter sequences are divergent between Indica and Japonica, with higher expression in the former, which produces more tillers and higher grain yield than does Japonica. Overexpression of two different splicing variants of OsAAP4 in Japonica ZH11 significantly increased rice tillering and grain yield as result of enhancing the neutral amino acid concentrations of Val, Pro, Thr and Leu. OsAAP4 RNA interference (RNAi) and mutant lines displayed opposite trends compared with overexpresing (OE) lines. In addition, exogenous Val or Pro at 0.5 mM significantly promoted the bud outgrowth of lines overexpressing an OsAAP4a splicing variant compared with ZH11, and exogenous Val or Pro at 2.0 mM significantly enhanced the bud outgrowth of lines overexpressing splicing variant OsAAP4b compared with ZH11. Of note, the results of a protoplast amino acid-uptake assay showed that Val or Pro at different concentrations was specifically transported and accumulated in these overexpressing lines. Transcriptome analysis further demonstrated that OsAAP4 may affect nitrogen transport and metabolism, and auxin, cytokinin signaling in regulating rice tillering. Conclusion: Our results suggested that OsAAP4 contributes to rice tiller and grain yield by regulating neutral amino acid allocation through two different splicing variants and that OsAAP4 might have potential applications in rice breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid assessment of metabolic engineering strategies in plants is aided by crops that provide simple, high throughput transformation systems, a sequenced genome, and the ability to evaluate the resulting plants in field trials. Camelina sativa provides all of these attributes in a robust oilseed platform. The ability to perform field evaluation of Camelina is a useful, and in some studies essential benefit that allows researchers to evaluate how traits perform outside the strictly controlled conditions of a greenhouse. In the field the plants are subjected to higher light intensities, seasonal diurnal variations in temperature and light, competition for nutrients, and watering regimes dictated by natural weather patterns, all which may affect trait performance. There are difficulties associated with the use of Camelina. The current genetic resources available for Camelina pale in comparison to those developed for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana; however, the sequence similarity of the Arabidopsis and Camelina genomes often allows the use of Arabidopsis as a reference when additional information is needed. Camelina’s genome, an allohexaploid, is more complex than other model crops, but the diploid inheritance of its three subgenomes is straightforward. The need to navigate three copies of each gene in genome editing or mutagenesis experiments adds some complexity but also provides advantages for gene dosage experiments. The ability to quickly engineer Camelina with novel traits, advance generations, and bulk up homozygous lines for small-scale field tests in less than a year, in our opinion, far outweighs the complexities associated with the crop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the estimation of a Box-Cox transformation model with varying coefficient. A two-step approach is proposed in which the first step estimates the varying cofficients nonparametrically for any given parameter α in the transformation function. Then a one-dimensional search of α has been employed based on some least absolute deviation criterion function. The validity of our estimator does not require independence assumption thus is robust to the conditional heteroscedasticity. A simulation study shows a reasonably well finite sample performance. Additionally, a comprehensive empirical study has been carefully examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that is likely to be strongly determined by genetic factors. To identify markers of disks, large homolog 2 ( DLG2), FAT atypical cadherin 3 ( FAT3), kinectin1 ( KTN1), deleted in colorectal carcinoma ( DCC), and glycogen synthase kinase-3β ( GSK3β) that contribute to the genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia, we systematically screened for polymorphisms in the functional regions of these genes. A total of 22 functional single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 940 Chinese subjects were genotyped using SNaPshot. The results first suggested that the allelic and genotypic frequencies of the DCC polymorphism rs2229080 were nominally associated with schizophrenia. The patients were significantly less likely to be CC homozygous ( P = 0.005, odds ratio [OR] = 0.635, 95 % confidence interval [95 % CI] = 0.462-0.873), and the schizophrenia subjects exhibited lower frequency of the C allele ( P = 0.024, OR = 0.811, 95 % CI = 0.676-0.972). Regarding GSK3β, there was a significant difference in genotype distribution of rs3755557 between schizophrenia and healthy control subjects ( P = 0.009). The patients exhibited a significantly lower frequency of the T allele of rs3755557 ( P = 0.002, OR = 0.654, 95 % CI = 0.498-0.860). Our results point to the polymorphisms of DCC and GSK3β as contributors to the genetic basis of individual differences in the susceptibility to schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intestinal ischemia reperfusion (IR) causes injury of distant critical organs. Remote intestinal ischemic preconditioning (IP) may confer the cytoprotection in critical organs including lung. The authors hypothesized that intestinal IP would be a prophylactic factor in the prevention of distant lung injury induced by IR. Rats were randomly divided into IR, IP, and Sham (S) group. Compared with IR group in the serum and lung tissue, MPO, MDA, TNF-α, and IL-1 levels were significantly decreased in the IP group. Following the same pattern, NO level in the serum and lung tissue was significantly increased in the IP group. And intestinal IP markedly abolished lung injury scores in contrast to IR group. Moreover, intestinal IP significantly attenuated caspase-3 expression, leading to the low expression of Bax and the high expression of Bcl-2. The present study showed that intestinal IP ameliorates the capacity of anti-oxygen free radical, inhibits the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines and alleviates apoptosis in IR-induced lung injury in rats. Intestinal IP may provide a novel prophylactic strategy for treatment of IR-induced lung injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater hydrochemistry could reveal the interaction mechanism between groundwater and the environment, which provides a scientific basis for environmental resources management. In this study, Shukaliefu's classification method and Piper diagram were adopted to determine the hydrochemical types of groundwater in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang, China. The method of 'onevote veto' was applied to evaluate the quality of groundwater. Phreeqc software was used to calculate the saturation indices of calcite and fluorite in groundwater. By comparing groundwater quality data of 2003 and 2011, we characterized the variations in hydrochemical types and water quality types, salinization of groundwater and fluoride geochemistry of the plain area of the Tarim Basin. Results show that the primary anion in phreatic water in the plain area of the Tarim Basin changed from HCO to SO or Cl. On the contrary, the primary anion in confined water changed from SO or Cl to HCO. In 2003, 63.1 % of the sampling points in the study area exceeded the Class III water quality standard of China. In 2011, the proportion increased to 82.5 %. In addition, severe groundwater salinization was found at 19.7 % of the sampling points. Some of the deep groundwater samples were salinized as well. In the Aksu area at the north-west part of the Tarim Basin, F concentration exceeding the standard limit (1 mg/L) was found to be 55.0 % of the groundwater samples tested. Based on these findings, it is concluded that the phreatic water in the study area was severely influenced by the industrial wastewater and domestic sewage related to human activities, while the confined water was less affected. The general quality of groundwater was in an aggravation trend, and the groundwater salinization was in a severe condition in this area. The Ca-Na ionic exchange, the unsaturated fluorite and oversaturated calcite in the aquifer of the Aksu area are proposed to cause F enrichment in groundwater of this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

herosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease. C-reactive protein (CRP) not only is an inflammatory marker but also regulates the expressions of other inflammatory cytokines associated with the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) also contributes to atherogenesis via transducting inflammatory signals. Herein, our studies focused on characterizing the effect of CRP on tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) production and TLR4-related molecular mechanisms in rat vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs). The results showed that CRP stimulated VSMCs to secrete TNF-α and enhanced TLR4 expression in a time-concentration-dependent manner. TLR4 knockdown significantly inhibited CRP-induced TNF-α generation, and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) blocker SB203580 depressed TLR4 expression and TNF-α production initiated by CRP in VSMCs. The data demonstrate that CRP triggers an inflammatory response in rat VSMCs by inducing TNF-α secretion, which is mediated by p38 MAPK-TLR4 signaling pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracellular factors may act on cells in two distinct modes: an acute increase in concentration as a result of regulated secretion, or a gradual increase in concentration when secreted constitutively or from a distant source. We found that cellular responses to brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) differed markedly depending on how BDNF was delivered. In cultured rat hippocampal neurons, acute and gradual increases in BDNF elicited transient and sustained activation of TrkB receptor and its downstream signaling, respectively, leading to differential expression of Homer1 and Arc. Transient TrkB activation promoted neurite elongation and spine head enlargement, whereas sustained TrkB activation facilitated neurite branch and spine neck elongation. In hippocampal slices, fast and slow increases in BDNF enhanced basal synaptic transmission and LTP, respectively. Thus, the kinetics of TrkB activation is critical for cell signaling and functions. This temporal dimension in cellular signaling may also have implications for the therapeutic drug design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synaptic actions of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) are 'gated' by cyclic AMP (cAMP), but the underlying molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Here we report that cAMP regulates BDNF function in mature hippocampal neurons by modulating the signaling and trafficking of its receptor TrkB. cAMP gated the TrkB tyrosine kinase with three characteristic features: BDNF-induced TrkB phosphorylation was attenuated by inhibitors of cAMP signaling, it was potentiated by cAMP analogs, and activation of the cAMP pathway alone had no effect. In addition, cAMP facilitated trafficking of TrkB to dendritic spines, possibly by promoting its interaction with synaptic scaffolding protein PSD-95. Norepinephrinergic and dopaminergic agonists, which elevate intracellular cAMP concentration, also enhanced TrkB phosphorylation and its translocation to spines. cAMP gated long-term modulation by BDNF of spine density, but not the number of primary dendrites. These results reveal a specific role of cAMP in controlling BDNF actions in the brain, and provide new insights into the molecular mechanism underlying cAMP gating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gut microbiota is closely related to the development of sepsis. The aim of this study was to explore changes in the gut microbiota and gut metabolism, as well as potential relationships between the gut microbiota and environmental factors in the early stages of sepsis. Fecal samples were collected from 10 septic patients on the first and third days following diagnosis in this study. The results showed that in the early stages of sepsis, the gut microbiota is dominated by microorganisms that are tightly associated with inflammation, such as Escherichia-Shigella, Enterococcus, Enterobacteriaceae, and Streptococcus. On sepsis day 3 compared to day 1, there was a significant decrease in Lactobacillus and Bacteroides and a significant increase in Enterobacteriaceae, Streptococcus, and Parabacteroides. Culturomica_massiliensis, Prevotella_7 spp., Prevotellaceae, and Pediococcus showed significant differences in abundance on sepsis day 1, but not on sepsis day 3. Additionally, 2-keto-isovaleric acid 1 and 4-hydroxy-6-methyl-2-pyrone metabolites significantly increased on sepsis day 3 compared to day 1. Prevotella_7 spp. was positively correlated with phosphate and negatively correlated with 2-keto-isovaleric acid 1 and 3-hydroxypropionic acid 1, while Prevotella_9 spp. was positively correlated with sequential organ failure assessment score, procalcitonin and intensive care unit stay time. In conclusion, the gut microbiota and metabolites are altered during sepsis, with some beneficial microorganisms decreasing and some pathogenic microorganisms increasing. Furthermore, Prevotellaceae members may play different roles in the intestinal tract, with Prevotella_7 spp. potentially possessing beneficial health properties and Prevotella_9 spp. potentially playing a promoting role in sepsis., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)