Integrating the impacts of vegetation coverage on ecosystem services to determine ecological restoration targets for adaptive management on the Loess Plateau, China

Achieving sustainable resource management is essential to address the rising demand for ecosystem services. The absence of targeted vegetation restoration based on ecological function positioning has, nevertheless, made it challenging to effectively combat the ecological decline. This study attempted to classify four dominant ecological function areas based on the assessment of water conservation, soil retention, habitat quality, and food supply and determined the vegetation coverage threshold by exploring the trade-offs among ecosystem services and constraint effects between ecosystem services and vegetation coverage. The results highlighted the impacts of ecosystem services on vegetation coverage across the years 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 and established differentiated ecological restoration targets. The optimal vegetation coverage in the water conservation area was found to be 58%–63%, in the soil retention area was 52%–56%, in the food supply area was 34%–40%, and in the habitat quality area was 65%–70%. Finally, the study identified the subwatersheds with reasonable vegetation coverage, excessive restoration, and those that failed to reach the optimal vegetation coverage to develop targeted restoration strategies for each subwatershed according to its unique vegetation conditions. This study provides valuable insights into the specification of differentiated vegetation coverage targets and serves as a useful tool for more effective ecosystem planning and management.</p

Aspect-oriented Opinion Alignment Network for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification

Aspect-based sentiment classification is a crucial problem in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims to predict the sentiment polarity of the given aspect according to its context. Previous works have made remarkable progress in leveraging attention mechanism to extract opinion words for different aspects. However, a persistent challenge is the effective management of semantic mismatches, which stem from attention mechanisms that fall short in adequately aligning opinions words with their corresponding aspect in multi-aspect sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel Aspect-oriented Opinion Alignment Network (AOAN) to capture the contextual association between opinion words and the corresponding aspect. Specifically, we first introduce a neighboring span enhanced module which highlights various compositions of neighboring words and given aspects. In addition, we design a multi-perspective attention mechanism that align relevant opinion information with respect to the given aspect. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results. The source code is available at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/ABSA-AOAN.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure, ECAI 202

3-D engraving of volcanic mechanism in the Tiantai slope of Xihu Depression and its formation mechanism

The development and distribution of igneous rocks in the Tiantai slope of Xihu Depression have an important influence on reservoir reconstruction and tectonic evolution.According to the seismic characteristics and tectonic environment in the area, two types of eruptions are divided into center type and fissure type.Based on drilling data and 3-D seismic data, the seismic amplitude and variance cube thresholding dispaly, systematically depicting 3-D spatial and temporal distribution of Tiantai of volcanics and eruption phases, revealing the igneous rocks of Mesozoic to the Miocene period in Tiantai have intermittent development more features, and enrichment of volcanism in the Tiantai slope in the southwest.Two types of eruptive modes, the central type and the fissure type, are established in the area.The establishment of these modes is of great significance for correctly predicting the distribution of igneous rocks.Finally, the genesis of igneous rock mechanism is analyzed and discussed. It is found volcanic activities and tectonic movement influence each other, volcanic distribution of space and time and the fracture also has certain configuration relations.It is believed that fissure eruption may form oil and gas migration channel, is characterized by terrigenous central type eruption is helpful to form good reservoir space.Based on this study, it will be easier to find effective volcanic reservoirs in Tiantai area, which plays an important role in indicating petroleum exploration

<i>S100A4</i> Promotes BCG-Induced Pyroptosis of Macrophages by Activating the NF-κB/NLRP3 Inflammasome Signaling Pathway

Pyroptosis is a host immune strategy to defend against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection. S100A4, a calcium-binding protein that plays an important role in promoting cancer progression as well as the pathophysiological development of various non-tumor diseases, has not been explored in Mtb-infected hosts. In this study, transcriptome analysis of the peripheral blood of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) revealed that S100A4 and GSDMD were significantly up-regulated in PTB patients’ peripheral blood. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between the expression of GSDMD and S100A4. KEGG pathway enrichment analysis showed that differentially expressed genes between PTB patients and healthy controls were significantly related to inflammation, such as the NOD-like receptor signaling pathway and NF-κB signaling pathway. To investigate the regulatory effects of S100A4 on macrophage pyroptosis, THP-1 macrophages infected with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) were pre-treated with exogenous S100A4, S100A4 inhibitor or si-S100A4. This research study has shown that S100A4 promotes the pyroptosis of THP-1 macrophages caused by BCG infection and activates NLRP3 inflammasome and NF-κB signaling pathways, which can be inhibited by knockdown or inhibition of S100A4. In addition, inhibition of NF-κB or NLRP3 blocks the promotion effect of S100A4 on BCG-induced pyroptosis of THP-1 macrophages. In conclusion, S100A4 activates the NF-κB/NLRP3 inflammasome signaling pathway to promote macrophage pyroptosis induced by Mtb infection. These data provide new insights into how S100A4 affects Mtb-induced macrophage pyroptosis

A novel UBE2A splice site variant causing intellectual disability type Nascimento

Abstract X‐linked intellectual disability type Nascimento (XLID) is a rare disease caused by variants in the ubiquitin‐conjugating enzyme E2A gene (UBE2A). Patients with XLID have similar phenotypes, including speech impairments, severe intellectual disability, hearing loss, wide facies, synophrys, generalized hirsutism, and urogenital abnormalities. Till date, only two splice‐site variants of the UBE2A gene have been observed in patients with X‐linked ID type Nascimento. Here, we report the case of a Chinese boy with a syndrome clinically similar to XLID with speech impairment, severe intellectual disability, and moderate hearing loss. However, different characteristics were also present in the patient, including an inability to maintain his head in an upright posture. Both of the patient's palms have a single transverse palmar crease. Subsequent whole‐exome sequencing revealed a novel splice site variant in UBE2A (c.241 + 1 G > A). Our study not only expands the variant spectrum and clinical characteristics of UBE2A deficiency syndrome but also provides clinical evidence for genetic diagnoses

Partial desensitization of MYC2 transcription factor alters the interaction with jasmonate signaling components and affects specialized metabolism

The activity of bHLH transcription factor MYC2, a key regulator in jasmonate signaling and plant specialized metabolism, is sensitive to repression by JASMONATE-ZIM-domain (JAZ) proteins and co-activation by the mediator subunit MED25. The substitution of a conserved aspartic acid (D) to asparagine (N) in the JAZ-interacting domain (JID) of Arabidopsis MYC2 affects interaction with JAZ, although the mechanism remained unclear. The effects of the conserved residue MYC2D128 on interaction with MED25 have not been investigated. Using tobacco as a model, we generated all possible substitutions of aspartic acid 128 (D128) in NtMYC2a. NtMYC2aD128N partially desensitized the repression by JAZ proteins, while strongly interacting with MED25, resulting in increased expression of nicotine pathway genes and nicotine accumulation in tobacco hairy roots overexpressing NtMYC2aD128N compared to those overexpressing NtMYC2a. The proline substitution, NtMYC2aD128P, negatively affected transactivation and abolished the interaction with JAZ proteins and MED25. Structural modeling and simulation suggest that the overall stability of the JID binding pocket is a predominant cause for the observed effects of substitutions at D128. The D128N substitution has an overall stabilizing effect on the binding pocket, which is destabilized by D128P. Our study offers an innovative tool to increase the production of plant natural products.Published versionThis work is supported partially by the Harold R. Burton Endowed Professorship to L.Y., and by the grants 2018530000241001 and 2022530000241012 from the Yunnan Tobacco Company, the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFC1711100), the Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development Center (KTRDC), The Shandong Province Modern Agricultural Technology System (SDAIT-25- 02), The China Tobacco Shandong Industrial Corporation Major Project (202102004), The Shandong Tobacco Company Science and Technology Project (KN294, KN291, KN293, KN287), The Shandong Weifang Tobacco Company Science and Technology Project (2021-57), and The Shandong Rizhao Tobacco Company Science and Technology Project (2022-003)