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Hydrogel-based burn wound dressings with excellent antibacterial, antifungal, and mechanical properties are ideal biomaterials to promote infected large burn wound healing. In this study, the hydrogel synthesized by repetitive freezing-thawing consists of poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA), silk sericin (SS), and azithromycin (AZM), with genipin (GNP) as crosslinker. The FTIR showed that all hydrogel components were successfully blended. The swelling ratio, porosity, cell attachment, and proliferation improved with SS incorporation, while increased PVA content enhanced the mechanical performance of the hydrogel. The inclusion of AZM improved the antimicrobial property of the hydrogel towards Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, and Candida albicans. The hydrogel showed sustained SS and AZM releases as well as cytocompatibility on keratinocytes and fibroblasts. Furthermore, the hydrogel displays skin adhesion ability when freeze-dried. In the in vivo study using an infected mouse full-thickness burn model with a 10% total body surface area, it was shown that burn injury led to increased inflammatory cytokine responses and macroscopic and microscopic alterations in the spleen and liver. The kidneys, on the other hand, revealed neither change. Interestingly, the prepared hydrogel had a better burn wound healing effect than the commercial Tegaderm™ film dressing, minimizing systemic burn effects. Hence, this novel hydrogel is projected to be a promising candidate for accelerated healing of infected burn wounds.

Allium victorialis L. (Family: Liliaceae) is an herb with nutritional and medicinal properties. In Jilin Province, China, A. victorialis is mainly distributed in the Changbai Mountains and grows in various habitat conditions. However, the relationship between habitat factors and the nutritional quality of A. victorialis in the Changbai Mountains has not yet been examined. We assessed the nutritional quality of five A. victorialis populations growing in five different habitats in the Changbai Mountains and analyzed the relationship between nutritional quality and habitat factors. Allium victorialis populations in this region were primarily found in the undergrowth at elevations above 500 m and within specific ranges of air temperature, air relative humidity, soil temperature, and soil water content. Among the habitat factors investigated, canopy density significantly affected several nutritional components of A. victorialis; however, elevation had a significant effect only on the total flavonoid content, and the vitamin C content was not strongly associated with the main habitat factors in this study. During germplasm selection and artificial cultivation, it is important to simulate the growth conditions of the original habitat. Our results provide useful information for site selection and environmental condition optimization for the artificial cultivation of A. victorialis.

The Changbai Mountains comprise one of the main distribution areas of A. victorialis in China, and this species is endangered owing to habitat changes and overexploitation. However, A. victorialis germplasms have not been systematically collected and studied. The aims of this study were to obtain some detailed genetic information, analyze the genetic diversity, and further promote the protection of A. victorialis germplasms from the Changbai Mountains. Transcriptomic analysis was performed with six A. victorialis samples collected from the Changbai Mountains. At least 146,759 genes for each sample were obtained after performing de novo assembly of the RNA-seq data, and at least 92% of these genes were found to have only one mRNA isoform. These sequences and their functional annotations provided a large-scale genetic resource of this species. Phylogenetic analysis showed that A. victorialis was genetically distant from some related species, e.g. Allium sativum, Allium fistulosum, and Allium cepa, but genetically close to Allium tuberosum. The two A. victorialis var. listera samples were phylogenetically separated from the other four samples, and these two samples should be regarded as Allium listera. In addition, two KASP markers for discriminating the Dongfeng samples from the other four A. victorialis samples were successfully developed. This study lays the foundation for future studies on the genetic diversity and evolution of Allium species, as well as for the conservation of A. victorialis germplasms from the Changbai Mountains and other populations of this species.

Background Potato, a vegetable crop grown worldwide, has many uses, a short growth period, a large market demand and high economic benefits. The loss of potato seediness due to traditional potato growing methods is becoming increasingly evident, and research on new ways of growing potatoes is particularly important. Bud planting technology has the advantages of more reproduction, faster growth, and simplified maintenance of crop plants under cultivation. Methods In this study, a bud planting method was adopted for the cultivation of potato seedlings. Specifically, we assessed different types of treatments for the production of high-quality buds and seedlings of potato. A total of four disease-free potato varieties (Fujin, Youjin, Zhongshu 4, and Feiwuruita) were selected, potato buds with three different lengths (3 cm, 5 cm, and 7 cm) were considered the T1, T2, and T3 treatments, and terminal buds, middle buds, and tail buds were used as the T4, T5, and T6 treatments. A nutrient pot experiment was performed following a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replicates and a natural control (CK) treatment. Cultivation was performed with the common horticultural practices of weeding and hoeing applied as needed. The photosynthetic indices, physiological indices, growth indices and quality of potato seedlings and quality of potato buds were measured at two-week intervals, and yield indices were measured when the final crop was harvested 14 weeks after planting. Results and Conclusions Cultivation of seedlings from potato buds of different lengths increased the reproduction coefficient and reduced the number of seed potatoes needed for cultivation. All morphological, physiological, and yield indices showed positive trends. A potato bud length of 7 cm was optimal for raising seedlings. Moreover, buds located at the terminal of the potato yielded seedlings with the best quality. In conclusion, we recommend that our proven bud planting technique be adopted at the commercial level, which could support good crop production with maximum yield.

Objective: To investigate the factors affecting the duration of continuous breastfeeding of infants within 2 years of age, and to explore intervention strategies that may promote breastfeeding duration in China. Method: A self-made electronic questionnaire was used to investigate the breastfeeding duration of infants, and the influencing factors were collected from three levels of individual, family, and social support. The Kruskal–Wallis rank sum test and the multivariable ordinal logistic regression model were used for data analysis. Subgroup analysis was carried out according to region and parity. Results: A total of 1001 valid samples from 26 provinces across the country were obtained. Among them, 9.9% breastfed for less than 6 months, 38.6% for 6 to 12 months, 31.8% for 12 to 18 months, 6.7% for 18 to 24 months, and 13.1% for more than 24 months. Barriers to sustained breastfeeding included the mother’s age at birth being over 31, education level below junior high, cesarean delivery, and the baby’s first nipple sucking at 2 to 24 h after birth. Factors that promote continued breastfeeding included freelancer or full-time mother, high breastfeeding knowledge score, supporting breastfeeding, baby with low birth weight, first bottle feeding at 4 months and later, first supplementary food at over 6 months old, high family income, the mother’s family and friends supporting breastfeeding, breastfeeding support conditions after returning to work, etc. Conclusion: The breastfeeding duration in China is generally short, and the proportion of mothers breastfeeding until the age of 2 years and above, recommended by WHO, is very low. Multiple factors at the individual, family, and social support levels influence the duration of breastfeeding. It is suggested to improve the current situation by strengthening health education, improving system security, and enhancing social support.

With the development of industrialization and urbanization, the consumption and pollution of water resources are becoming more and more serious. Water quality monitoring is an extremely important technical means to protect water resources. However, the current popular water quality monitoring methods have their shortcomings, such as a low signal-to-noise ratio of satellites, poor time continuity of unmanned aerial vehicles, and frequent maintenance of in situ underwater probes. A non-contact near-surface system that can continuously monitor water quality fluctuation is urgently needed. This study proposes an automatic near-surface water quality monitoring system, which can complete the physical equipment construction, data collection, and processing of the application scenario, prove the feasibility of the self-developed equipment and methods and obtain high-performance retrieval results of four water quality parameters, namely chemical oxygen demand (COD), turbidity, ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3-N), and dissolved oxygen (DO). For each water quality parameter, fourteen machine learning algorithms were compared and evaluated with five assessment indexes. Because the ensemble learning models combine the prediction results of multiple basic learners, they have higher robustness in the prediction of water quality parameters. The optimal determination coefficients (R2) of COD, turbidity, NH3-N, and DO in the test dataset are 0.92, 0.98, 0.95, and 0.91, respectively. The results show the superiority of near-surface remote sensing, which has potential application value in inland, coastal, and various water bodies in the future.

As an important part of the "air–ground" integrated water quality monitoring system, the inversion of water quality from unmanned airborne hyperspectral image has attracted more and more attention. Meanwhile, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the characteristics of small size, flexibility and quick response, and can complete the task of water environment detection in a large area, thus avoiding the difficulty in obtaining satellite data and the limitation of single-point monitoring by ground stations. Most researchers use UAV for water quality monitoring, they take water samples back to library or directly use portable sensors for measurement while flying drones at the same time. Due to the UAV speed and route planning, the actual sampling time and the UAV passing time cannot be guaranteed to be completely synchronized, and there will be a difference of a few minutes. For water quality parameters such as chromaticity (chroma), chlorophyll-a (chl-a), chemical oxygen demand (COD), etc., the changes in a few minutes are small and negligible. However, for the turbidity, especially in flowing water body, this value of it will change within a certain range. This phenomenon will lead to noise error in the measured suspended matter or turbidity, which will affect the performance of regression model and retrieval accuracy. In this study, to solve the quality problem of label data in a flowing water body, an unmanned airborne hyperspectral water quality retrieval experiment was carried out in the Xiao River in Xi’an, China, which verified the rationality and effectiveness of label denoising analysis of different water quality parameters. To identify noisy label instances efficiently, we proposed an instance selection scheme. Furthermore, considering the limitation of the dataset samples and the characteristic of regression task, we build a 1DCNN model combining a self attention mechanism (SAM) and the network achieves the best retrieving performance on turbidity and chroma data. The experiment results show that, for flowing water body, the noisy-label instance selection method can improve retrieval performance slightly on the COD parameter, but improve greatly on turbidity and chroma data.

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is native to Peru and Mexico. It is an important vegetable crop of the world, which ranks next to potato in importance. In addition, tomato is one of the most widely cultivated fruit and vegetables in the world. In this study, we obtained the complete chloroplast genome sequence of Tomato using BGISEQ-500 sequencing. Its chloroplast genome size has 155,474 bp, containing a large single copy region (85,856 bp), a small single copy region (18,374 bp), and a pair of IR regions (25,622 bp). The overall GC contents of the chloroplast genome were 38.0%. This circular genome contains 142 annotated genes, including 89 protein-coding genes, 45 tRNAs and 8 rRNAs. The phylogenetic relationship analysis using Maximum Likelihood method showed that tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) much closely related to two kinds of wild tomatoes Solanum pimpinellifolium and Solanum cheesmaniae. This complete chloroplast genomes can be subsequently used for the genetic breeding and useful to study the evolutionary processes in Lycopersicon.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the top five staple foods in China. It has high nutritional value, adaptability, and large yield. It is the third most important food crop in the world, second only to wheat and rice. In this study, we obtained the complete chloroplast genome sequence of Potato using BGISEQ-500 sequencing. Its chloroplast genome size has 155,732 bp, containing a large single copy region (85,736 bp), a small single copy region (18,384 bp), and a pair of IR regions (25,596 bp). The overall GC contents of the chloroplast genome were 37.8%. This circular genome contains 130 annotated genes, including 85 protein-coding genes, 37 tRNAs, and eight rRNAs. Maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis the phylogenetic relationship analysis using Neighbour-Joining (NJ) method showed that Potato (S. tuberosum L.) is much closely related to Solanum bulbocastanum. This complete chloroplast genomes can be subsequently used for the genetic breeding and useful to study the evolutionary processes in Solanaceae.

Hydrogel-based burn wound dressings with excellent antibacterial, antifungal, and mechanical properties are ideal biomaterials to promote infected large burn wound healing. In this study, the hydrogel synthesized by repetitive freezing-thawing consists of poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA), silk sericin (SS), and azithromycin (AZM), with genipin (GNP) as crosslinker. The FTIR showed that all hydrogel components were successfully blended. The swelling ratio, porosity, cell attachment, and proliferation improved with SS incorporation, while increased PVA content enhanced the mechanical performance of the hydrogel. The inclusion of AZM improved the antimicrobial property of the hydrogel towards Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, and Candida albicans. The hydrogel showed sustained SS and AZM releases as well as cytocompatibility on keratinocytes and fibroblasts. Furthermore, the hydrogel displays skin adhesion ability when freeze-dried. In the in vivo study using an infected mouse full-thickness burn model with a 10% total body surface area, it was shown that burn injury led to increased inflammatory cytokine responses and macroscopic and microscopic alterations in the spleen and liver. The kidneys, on the other hand, revealed neither change. Interestingly, the prepared hydrogel had a better burn wound healing effect than the commercial Tegaderm™ film dressing, minimizing systemic burn effects. Hence, this novel hydrogel is projected to be a promising candidate for accelerated healing of infected burn wounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]