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Abstract Asparagus cochinchinensis is a member of the Asparagaceae family whose medicinal part is the dried root tuber. The distribution of A. cochinchinensis and its secondary metabolites are closely associated with environmental factors, such as climate and soil properties. By establishing and optimizing a maximum entropy model, we analyzed and predicted the distribution pattern and migration direction of suitable habitats for A. cochinchinensis and determined the main environmental factors affecting the accumulation of secondary metabolites. Under current climatic conditions, the area of suitable habitats for A. cochinchinensis (208.38 × 104 km2) accounts for 21.71% of the land area of China, and the areas of lowly, moderately, and highly suitable areas were 64.15 × 104 km2, 113.66 × 104 km2, and 30.57 × 104 km2, respectively. Under future climate scenarios, the total area of suitable habitats hardly changes. The area of highly suitable habitats significantly decreases under the SSP1‐RCP2.6 scenario (to 83.22% of the current value) and the SSP3‐RCP7 scenario (to 48.94% of the current value), but eventually increases to 112.86% of the current value under the SSP5‐RCP8.5 scenario, which indicates that A. cochinchinensis might adapt better to a high‐carbon‐emissions scenario. Under different climate scenarios, low‐impact areas mainly occur in southern China and will correspond 92.07% of the current suitable area. Highly suitable habitats primarily occur in the southeastern Sichuan Basin, northern Guangxi, eastern Guizhou, and western Hunan. HPLC analysis showed that the content of protodioscin (0.373%) and protogracillin (0.044%) in S2 was the highest. The total saponins contents of S1 and S2 were the highest, which were 35.6586 and 33.1262 mg/g, respectively. The total polysaccharide content of S9 was the highest (16.9467%). The total contents of saponins and polysaccharides in A. cochinchinensis were significantly, but oppositely, correlated with temperature, precipitation, and other factors. This study has identified environmental factors affecting the growth and quality of A. cochinchinensis, which has guiding significance for resource conservation and site selection for large‐scale cultivation.

The most common subtype of lung cancer is non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) , accounting for 80% to 85% of lung cancer. During the development process, the tumor is easily metastasized to the brain, seriously affecting the treatment prognosis and quality of life of patients. At present, the main treatment options for brain metastasis of lung cancer are surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy. In recent years, breakthroughs have been made in the application of immune checkpoint inhibitors, and some combination immunotherapies have been clinically approved. According to the Chinese Experts Consensus on Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors for Non-small Cell Lung Cancer, there have been certain studies showing that immunotherapy can be applied to the treatment of advanced NSCLC. Immunotherapy is like a double-edged sword, and its practical clinical significance still needs further exploration. This article reviews the progress of immunotherapy for brain metastasis of NSCLC and explores more reasonable clinical treatment plans for patients with brain metastasis of lung cancer.

This study aims to determine the ultrastructural changes in collagen fibrils in rabbit conjunctiva after conjunctival crosslinking using riboflavin and ultraviolet A (UVA) light at an irradiation intensity of 45 mW/cm2. Conjunctival crosslinking may increase conjunctival stiffness. The supertemporal quadrants of the right eyes of 24 adult rabbits were treated with a topical riboflavin solution (0.25%) before irradiation with UVA light at 45 mW/cm2 for 4 min. After 3 weeks, the collagen fibrils in fibril bundles were examined by electron microscopy. Immunohistochemical staining was used to detect the expression levels of collagen I and collagen III in the rabbits’ conjunctiva. The diameter of the collagen fibrils in the fibril bundles varied slightly, ranging from 30 to 60 nm in the conjunctival stroma of the control group. In the treatment group, the diameter of collagen fibrils ranged from 60 to 90 nm. The thickest collagen fibrils were observed in the treatment group (up to 90 nm in diameter). In contrast, those in the conjunctival stroma of the control group were considerably smaller (up to 60 nm in diameter). However, thicknesses of collagen fibrils displayed a unimodal distribution. Both collagen I and collagen III increased after treatment with riboflavin and UVA light irradiation at 45 mW/cm2. The data indicate that in rabbits, conjunctival crosslinking with riboflavin and UVA light at 45 mW/cm2 for 4 min is safe and does not induce ultrastructural alterations of the conjunctival cells. The conjunctival crosslinking with riboflavin and UVA light at 45 mW/cm2 can increase the diameter of collagen fibrils, but the average densities of collagen I and collagen III have no statistical significance.

Primary malignant melanoma of the parotid gland (PGMM) is extremely rare, with a poor prognosis. Surgery is the main treatment option followed by adjuvant treatments such as radiotherapy, but which adjuvant treatment to be optimal is still controversial. In this case, a 63-year-old male PGMM patient was first misdiagnosed as a “myoepithelial tumor” and then treated with surgery, postoperative immunotherapy (sintilimab), chemotherapy, and radiotherapy successfully. The progression free survival was more than 19 months without signs of metastasis or recurrence to date. To our best knowledge, this is the first report of postoperative immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy and radiotherapy for PGMM. Our case indicated that combination therapy including surgery, adjuvant immunotherapy (sintilimab) combined with chemotherapy and radiotherapy may be a potential treatment option for PGMM, which needs further research.

Sesame production is severely affected by unexpected drought stress during flowering stage. However, little is known about dynamic drought-responsive mechanisms during anthesis in sesame, and no particular attention was given to black sesame, the most common ingredient in East Asia traditional medicine. Herein, we investigated drought-responsive mechanisms of two contrasting black sesame cultivars (Jinhuangma, JHM, and Poyanghei, PYH) during anthesis. Compared to PYH, JHM plants showed higher tolerance to drought stress through the maintenance of biological membrane properties, high induction of osmoprotectants’ biosynthesis and accumulation, and significant enhancement of the activities of antioxidant enzymes. For instance, the drought stress induced a significant increase in the content of soluble protein (SP), soluble sugar (SS), proline (PRO), glutathione (GSH), as well as the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and peroxidase (POD) in leaves and roots of JHM plants compared to PYH plants. RNA sequencing followed by differentially expressed genes (DEGs) analysis revealed that more genes were significantly induced under drought in JHM than in PYH plants. Functional enrichment analyses disclosed that several pathways related to drought stress tolerance, such as photosynthesis, amino acids and fatty acid metabolisms, peroxisome, ascorbate and aldarate metabolism, plant hormone signal transduction, biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, and glutathione metabolism, were highly stimulated in JHM than in PYH plants. Thirty-one (31) key highly induced DEGs, including transcription factors and glutathione reductase and ethylene biosynthetic genes, were identified as potential candidate genes for improving black sesame drought stress tolerance. Our findings show that a strong antioxidant system, biosynthesis and accumulation of osmoprotectants, TFs (mainly ERFs and NACs), and phytohormones are essential for black sesame drought tolerance. Moreover, they provide resources for functional genomic studies toward molecular breeding of drought-tolerant black sesame varieties.

Red Culture is one of the symbols of Chinese national spirit in China. With the enhancement of China's international status, the world gets to know the Red Culture stage by stage. And yet, in the process of Red Culture's foreign publicity, the depth and breadth of cultural diffusion have been affected by different factors. This paper objectively analyzes the current situation of foreign publicity translation about Red Culture and then focuses on the Red tourism industry to explore the characteristics and advantages of foreign-oriented publicity translation under the intercultural communicative perspective. In the end, we are trying to come up with some methods to increase the accuracy of Red Culture publicity translation.

Background: Traffic-related air pollution especially in highly socioeconomically developed megacity is usually considered as a severe problem leading to inevitable adverse health outcomes. This study aimed to investigate the associations between traffic-related air pollutants with risk of dry eye disease (DED) outpatient visits in a megacity (Guangzhou) along the subtropical coast in South China. Methods: Daily data on DED outpatient visits and environmental variables from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2020 in Guangzhou were obtained. A time-series study using a quasi-Poisson generalized linear model (GLM) combined with distributed lag non-linear model (DLNM) was adopted. Subgroup analyses stratified by age, gender, and season were conducted. Results: Totally, 27, 828 DED cases were identified during the study period including 2557 days. Daily number of outpatient visits for DED ranged from 0 to 41. An increase of 10 μg/m3 in PM2.5, NO2 and SO2 concentration was associated with 3.1%, 5.9% and 17.4% increase in the risk of DED outpatient visits, respectively (RRPM2.5 = 1.031, 95%CI: 1.004–1.059, lag 0–11 day; RRNO2 = 1.059, 95% CI: 1.027–1.092, lag0-14 day; RRSO2 = 1.174, 95% CI: 1.036–1.330, lag0-13 day). Subgroup analyses indicated that the effects of PM2.5 exposure on the risk of DED outpatient visits remained significant in aged < 60 years (RR max = 1.008, 95% CI: 1.003–1.013, lag0 day) and the effects of SO2 exposure on the DED outpatient visits risk remained significant in the females (RR max = 1.025, 95% CI: 1.006–1.044, lag0 day). The associations of PM2.5 (RR = 1.010, 95% CI: 1.003–1.016, lag0 day) and SO2 (RR = 1.030, 95% CI: 1.003–1.058, lag14 day) exposure with DED outpatient visits risk remained significant in warm seasons, whereas NO2 (RR = 1.006, 95% CI: 1.002–1.009, lag14 day) exposure was significantly associated with DED outpatient visits in cold seasons. The associations of PM2.5 (first visit, RR = 1.006, 95% CI: 1.001–1.011, lag0 day; re-visit, RR = 1.002, 95% CI: 1.000–1.005, lag6 day), NO2 (first visit, RR = 1.006, 95% CI: 1.001–1.012, lag0 day; re-visit, RR = 1.007, 95% CI: 1.002–1.012, lag0 day), and SO2 (first visit, RR = 1.023, 95% CI: 1.002–1.044, lag0 day; re-visit, RR = 1.023, 95% CI: 1.000–1.045, lag0 day) exposure with risk of DED outpatient visits were significant for both first- and re-visits. Conclusions: Our study revealed that short-term exposure to PM2.5, NO2 and SO2 were positively associated with risk of DED outpatient visits, especially for the youngers, females and during warm seasons, providing evidence for making public health policy to improve life quality in developed megacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to solve the problem of weak single domain generalization ability in existing crowd counting methods, this study proposes a new crowd counting framework called Multi-scale Attention and Hierarchy level Enhancement (MAHE). Firstly, the model can focus on both the detailed features and the macro information of structural position changes through the fusion of channel attention and spatial attention. Secondly, the addition of multi-head attention feature module facilitates the model's capacity to effectively capture complex dependency relationships between sequence elements. In addition, the three-stage encoding and decoding processing mode enables the model to effectively represent crowd density information. Finally, the fusion of multi-scale features derived from different receptive fields is further enhanced through multi-scale hierarchy level feature fusion, thereby enabling the model to learn high-level semantic information and low-level multi-scale visual field feature information. This method enhances the model's capacity to capture key feature information, even in highly differentiated datasets, thereby improving the model's generalization ability on a single domain. The model has demonstrated strong generalization capabilities through extensive experiments on different datasets. This study not only improves the accuracy of crowd counting, but also introduces a new research approach for single domain generalization of crowd counting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]