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Creating visualizations is an integral part of data analysts' work. Often based on the Grammar of Graphics, visualization grammars, such as ggplot2 and Vega-Lite, provide elegant abstractions for visualization specification. Even though visualization grammars have consistent syntax and promote the exploration of visualization design space, we have a limited understanding of how data analysts interact with visualization grammars. There is a semantic distance between analysts' task language and visualization grammars. Data analysts may have friction in executing their task language, e.g., probability distributions, and data operations, using visualization grammars. Alternatively, analysts may have trouble evaluating whether visualization outputs achieved their analytic goals. In this thesis, I explore integrating visualization grammars with analysts' task language to understand and reduce the semantic distance between them. As an example of executing visualizations, data analysts need to inspect and communicate uncertainty. However, visualizing probability distribution, such as P(A|B), remains convoluted and error-prone in visualization grammars. I designed a Probabilistic Grammar of Graphics (PGoG), an extension to ggplot2. By making expressions such as P(A|B) data objects in the grammar, PGoG enables analysts to systematically create and iterate on a variety of probabilistic visualizations, including icon arrays, product plots, and stacked density plots. PGoG reduced the edit distance between plot designs and avoids creating plots with misleading proportions. Overall, PGoG helps analysts execute visualizations by introducing probability distributions into a visualization grammar. In the direction of evaluation, I designed Datamations, a framework that helps people understand data analysis pipelines. A pipeline consists of a sequence of data operation functions (verbs) such as group_by() and summarize(), with the results of one verb piped to the next. Pipeline outputs (i.e. plots and tables) are not straightforward to interpret because the semantic concepts of data and analysis verbs are not directly visible. Datamations turn these semantic concepts into an animated explanation by leveraging the state-transition abstraction in analysis pipelines. It translates data operation verbs into animated transitions, and intermediate data states into static keyframes. I showed that Datamations helped laypeople understand Simpson's paradox better in a crowd-sourced experiment, which suggested the potential for analysts to use Datamation. PGoG and Datamations are solutions that reduce the semantic distance. As retrospection, I investigated the semantic distance itself---how do real-life analysts adapt to a visualization grammar during analysis? I conducted a qualitative study where I recruited participants (N=6) from TidyTuesday, a data science community. Through reflexive thematic analysis, I described how participants executed plots centered on analysis tasks and how plots looked, in addition to concepts in the visualization grammar. Participants had trouble evaluating their analyses due to the tight coupling between visualization and analysis specifications. By understanding how analysts have adapted to visualization grammars, we can identify more ways to reduce the semantic distance between them. Based on my three projects, I discuss ways visualization grammars can be more practical for data analysts. We can center analysts' language, the need for customization, and visual templates. Analysts can evaluate their analysis better by having visualization-analysis integration that maintains consistency and increases transparency. Computational notebooks can be a productive environment to promote this integration. Integrating visualization grammars and analysts' task language has more potential to shape and support analysts' work.

Genetic analysis of 4 major flavonoids in barley interspecific hybrids which were used as parents for half diallel crossingwas carried out. Compared with seven parents, the highest general combining ability of catechin content was Clipper barley, the higest general combining ability (GCA) of myricetin content were Schooner barley and Huangchangguang barley, the highest general combining ability of quercetin content were Ziguangmang barley and Kuanying barley, the highest general combining ability of kaempferol content were Ziguangmang barley and Schooner barley, the highest general combining ability of flavonoids are Schooner barley and Huangchangguang barley. The hybrid combination of a good matching were Clipper barley, Schooner barley, Ziguangmang barley and Kuanying barley, as a comprehensive general combining ability, specific combining ability, and combinations of which can be used as flavonoids in barley breeding.

Barley plays an important role in health and civilization of human migration from Africa to Asia, later to Eurasia. We demonstrated the systematic mechanism of functional ingredients in barley to combat chronic diseases, based on PubMed, CNKI, and ISI Web of Science databases from 2004 to 2020. Barley and its extracts are rich in 30 ingredients to combat more than 20 chronic diseases, which include the 14 similar and 9 different chronic diseases between grains and grass, due to the major molecular mechanism of six functional ingredients of barley grass (GABA, flavonoids, SOD, K-Ca, vitamins, and tryptophan) and grains (β-glucans, polyphenols, arabinoxylan, phytosterols, tocols, and resistant starch). The antioxidant activity of barley grass and grain has the same and different functional components. These results support findings that barley grain and its grass are the best functional food, promoting ancient Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, and further show the depending functional ingredients for diet from Pliocene hominids in Africa and Neanderthals in Europe to modern humans in the world. This review paper not only reveals the formation and action mechanism of barley diet overcoming human chronic diseases, but also provides scientific basis for the development of health products and drugs for the prevention and treatment of human chronic diseases.

Barley grass powder is the best functional food that provides nutrition and eliminates toxins from cells in human beings; however, its functional ingredients have played an important role as health benefit. In order to better cognize the preventive and therapeutic role of barley grass for chronic diseases, we carried out the systematic strategies for functional ingredients of barley grass, based on the comprehensive databases, especially the PubMed, Baidu, ISI Web of Science, and CNKI, between 2008 and 2017. Barley grass is rich in functional ingredients, such as gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), flavonoids, saponarin, lutonarin, superoxide dismutase (SOD), K, Ca, Se, tryptophan, chlorophyll, vitamins (A, B1, C, and E), dietary fiber, polysaccharide, alkaloid, metallothioneins, and polyphenols. Barley grass promotes sleep; has antidiabetic effect; regulates blood pressure; enhances immunity; protects liver; has anti-acne/detoxifying and antidepressant effects; improves gastrointestinal function; has anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, hypolipidemic, and antigout effects; reduces hyperuricemia; prevents hypoxia, cardiovascular diseases, fatigue, and constipation; alleviates atopic dermatitis; is a calcium supplement; improves cognition; and so on. These results support that barley grass may be one of the best functional foods for preventive chronic diseases and the best raw material of modern diet structure in promoting the development of large health industry and further reveal that GABA, flavonoids, SOD, K-Ca, vitamins, and tryptophan mechanism of barley grass have preventive and therapeutic role for chronic diseases. This paper can be used as a scientific evidence for developing functional foods and novel drugs for barley grass for preventive chronic diseases.

Objectives. Functional components in alliums have long been maintained to play a key role in modifying the major risk factors for chronic disease. To obtain a better understanding of alliums for chronic disease prevention, we conducted a systematic review for risk factors and prevention strategies for chronic disease of functional components in alliums, based on a comprehensive English literature search that was conducted using various electronic search databases, especially the PubMed, ISI Web of Science, and CNKI for the period 2007–2016. Allium genus especially garlic, onion, and Chinese chive is rich in organosulfur compounds, quercetin, flavonoids, saponins, and others, which have anticancer, preventive cardiovascular and heart diseases, anti-inflammation, antiobesity, antidiabetes, antioxidants, antimicrobial activity, neuroprotective and immunological effects, and so on. These results support Allium genus; garlic and onion especially may be the promising dietotherapeutic vegetables and organopolysulfides as well as quercetin mechanism in the treatment of chronic diseases. This review may be used as scientific basis for the development of functional food, nutraceuticals, and alternative drugs to improve the chronic diseases.

Through orthogonal experiment designs L4(23),the content changes of resistant starch on mixture and cooking among three different kinds of genotypes rice,indica rice,japonica rice and glutinous rice were studied with cultivar Gongmi3 in high resistant starch content as the material.It provids a theoretical and practical basis for producting main food of diabetes.The results showed:1) The contents of resistant starch of different genotypes rice were significantly different,which was effected by processing and cooking condition.It was higher than polished ricein brown rice and the contents of resistant starch of cooked rice were higher than those of raw rice.2) The effects of resistant starch content of the all factors were also obvious among the mixture ratio of different genotypes rice as well as the ratio of water between the rice of cook and the cook times.The influence of resistant starch was significantly varied from genotypes to process.There existed highly significant differences in producing the resistant starch with cooking optimum parameters.The contents of resistant starch in polished rice were higher than that in brown rice while the contents of resistant starch of indica and japonica rice were higher than that in glutinous rice.