Effect of cadmium on the defense response of Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas to Listonella anguillarum challenge

Heavy metal pollution can affect the immune capability of organisms. We evaluated the effect of cadmium (Cd) on the defense responses of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas to Listonella anguillarum challenge. The activities of several important defensive enzymes, including superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), acid phosphatase (ACP), Na+, K+ -ATPase in gills and hepatopancreas, and phenoloxidase-like (POL) enzyme in hemolymph were assayed. In addition, the expression levels of several genes, including heat shock protein 90 (HSP90), metallothionein (MT), and bactericidal/permeability increasing (BPI) protein were quantified by fluorescent quantitative PCR. The enzyme activities of SOD, ACP, POL, and GPx in hepatopancreas, and the expression of HSP90 were down-regulated, whereas GPx activity in the gill, Na+, K+-ATPase activities in both tissues, and MT expression was increased in Cdexposed oysters post L. anguillarum challenge. However, BPI expression was not significantly altered by co-stress of L. anguillarum infection and cadmium exposure. Our results suggest that cadmium exposure alters the oysters' immune responses and energy metabolism following vibrio infection.Heavy metal pollution can affect the immune capability of organisms. We evaluated the effect of cadmium (Cd) on the defense responses of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas to Listonella anguillarum challenge. The activities of several important defensive enzymes, including superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), acid phosphatase (ACP), Na+, K+ -ATPase in gills and hepatopancreas, and phenoloxidase-like (POL) enzyme in hemolymph were assayed. In addition, the expression levels of several genes, including heat shock protein 90 (HSP90), metallothionein (MT), and bactericidal/permeability increasing (BPI) protein were quantified by fluorescent quantitative PCR. The enzyme activities of SOD, ACP, POL, and GPx in hepatopancreas, and the expression of HSP90 were down-regulated, whereas GPx activity in the gill, Na+, K+-ATPase activities in both tissues, and MT expression was increased in Cdexposed oysters post L. anguillarum challenge. However, BPI expression was not significantly altered by co-stress of L. anguillarum infection and cadmium exposure. Our results suggest that cadmium exposure alters the oysters' immune responses and energy metabolism following vibrio infection

Metabolic responses of HeLa cells to silica nanoparticles by NMR-based metabolomic analyses

Silica nanoparticles are increasingly used in the biomedical fields due to their excellent solubility, high stability and favorable biocompatibility. However, despite being considered of low genotoxicity, their bio-related adverse effects have attracted particular concern from both the scientific field and the public. In this study, human cervical adenocarcinoma cells (HeLa line) were exposed to 0.01 or 1.0 mg/mL of hydrophilic silica nanoparticles. The H-1 NMR spectroscopy coupled with multivariate statistical analysis were used to characterize the metabolic variations of intracellular metabolites and the compositional changes of the corresponding culture media. At the early stage of silica nanoparticles-exposure, no obvious dose-effect of HeLa cell metabolome was observed, which implied that cellular stress-response regulated the metabolic variations of HeLa cell. Silica nanoparticles induced the increases of lipids including triglyceride, LDL, VLDL and lactate/alanine ratio and the decreases of alanine, ATP, choline, creatine, glycine, glycerol, isoleucine, leucine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and valine, which involved in membrane modification, catabolism of carbohydrate and protein, and stress-response. Subsequently, a complicated synergistic effect of stress-response and toxicological-effect dominated the biochemical process and metabolic response, which was demonstrated in the reverse changes of some metabolites including acetate, ADP, ATP, choline, creatine, glutamine, glycine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine and valine between 6 and 48 h post-treatment of silica nanoparticles. The toxicological-effects induced by high-dosage silica nanoparticles could be derived from the elevated levels of ATP and ADP, the utilization of glucose and amino acids and the production of metabolic end-products such as glutamate, glycine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, and valine. The results indicated that it is important and necessary to pursue further the physiological responses of silica nanoparticles in animal models and human before their practical use. NMR-based metabolomic analysis helps to understand the biological mechanisms of silica nanoparticles and their metabolic fate, and further, it offers an ideal platform for establishing the bio-safety of existing and new nanomaterials.Silica nanoparticles are increasingly used in the biomedical fields due to their excellent solubility, high stability and favorable biocompatibility. However, despite being considered of low genotoxicity, their bio-related adverse effects have attracted particular concern from both the scientific field and the public. In this study, human cervical adenocarcinoma cells (HeLa line) were exposed to 0.01 or 1.0 mg/mL of hydrophilic silica nanoparticles. The H-1 NMR spectroscopy coupled with multivariate statistical analysis were used to characterize the metabolic variations of intracellular metabolites and the compositional changes of the corresponding culture media. At the early stage of silica nanoparticles-exposure, no obvious dose-effect of HeLa cell metabolome was observed, which implied that cellular stress-response regulated the metabolic variations of HeLa cell. Silica nanoparticles induced the increases of lipids including triglyceride, LDL, VLDL and lactate/alanine ratio and the decreases of alanine, ATP, choline, creatine, glycine, glycerol, isoleucine, leucine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and valine, which involved in membrane modification, catabolism of carbohydrate and protein, and stress-response. Subsequently, a complicated synergistic effect of stress-response and toxicological-effect dominated the biochemical process and metabolic response, which was demonstrated in the reverse changes of some metabolites including acetate, ADP, ATP, choline, creatine, glutamine, glycine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine and valine between 6 and 48 h post-treatment of silica nanoparticles. The toxicological-effects induced by high-dosage silica nanoparticles could be derived from the elevated levels of ATP and ADP, the utilization of glucose and amino acids and the production of metabolic end-products such as glutamate, glycine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, and valine. The results indicated that it is important and necessary to pursue further the physiological responses of silica nanoparticles in animal models and human before their practical use. NMR-based metabolomic analysis helps to understand the biological mechanisms of silica nanoparticles and their metabolic fate, and further, it offers an ideal platform for establishing the bio-safety of existing and new nanomaterials

Differential metabolic responses of clam Ruditapes philippinarum to Vibrio anguillarum and Vibrio splendidus challenges

Clam Ruditapes philippinarum is one of the important marine aquaculture species in North China. However, pathogens can often cause diseases and lead to massive mortalities and economic losses of clam. In this work, we compared the metabolic responses induced by Vibrio anguillarum and Vibrio splendidus challenges towards hepatopancreas of clam using NMR-based metabolomics. Metabolic responses suggested that both V anguillarum and V splendidus induced disturbances in energy metabolism and osmotic regulation, oxidative and immune stresses with different mechanisms, as indicated by correspondingly differential metabolic biomarkers (e.g., amino acids, ATP, glucose, glycogen, taurine, betaine, choline and hypotaurine) and altered mRNA expression levels of related genes including ATP synthase, ATPase, glutathione peroxidase, heat shock protein 90, defensin and lysozyme. However, V. anguillarum caused more severe oxidative and immune stresses in clam hepatopancreas than V splendidus. Our results indicated that metabolomics could be used to elucidate the biological effects of pathogens to the marine clam R. philippinarum. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Clam Ruditapes philippinarum is one of the important marine aquaculture species in North China. However, pathogens can often cause diseases and lead to massive mortalities and economic losses of clam. In this work, we compared the metabolic responses induced by Vibrio anguillarum and Vibrio splendidus challenges towards hepatopancreas of clam using NMR-based metabolomics. Metabolic responses suggested that both V anguillarum and V splendidus induced disturbances in energy metabolism and osmotic regulation, oxidative and immune stresses with different mechanisms, as indicated by correspondingly differential metabolic biomarkers (e.g., amino acids, ATP, glucose, glycogen, taurine, betaine, choline and hypotaurine) and altered mRNA expression levels of related genes including ATP synthase, ATPase, glutathione peroxidase, heat shock protein 90, defensin and lysozyme. However, V. anguillarum caused more severe oxidative and immune stresses in clam hepatopancreas than V splendidus. Our results indicated that metabolomics could be used to elucidate the biological effects of pathogens to the marine clam R. philippinarum. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

DEVELOPMENT OF LABEL-FREE BIOSENSOR FOR DETECTING STEROID HORMONE CONCENTRATION IN FISH

A novel label-free immunosensor for detecting steroid hormone was developed. The principle of the sensor system is based on differences in the electrochemical activity induced by an immunoreaction that depends on the levels of steroid hormone in the sample. A gold electrode functionalized with 3-mercaptopropionic acid (MPA) self- assembled monolayer was used to fabricate electrochemical immunosensor. In addition, single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) was selected to expandthe dynamic range of the sensor. The sensor was immersed into a sample solution and measurements were determined by cyclic voltammetry. Each electrochemical measurement including sample immerse only took about 15min. In this study, we introduced an application of our sensor in detecting 17, 20β- dihydroxy-4-pregnen- 3-one (DHP). The immunosensor showed a specific response to DHP, and the oxidation peak current linearly decreased in the range of 7.8-500.0pg ml-1 (without SWCNT) and 15.6-50000.0pg ml-1 (with SWCNT). The sensor system was then applied to monitor DHP of goldfish (Carassiusauratus) and was compared with the levels of the same samples determined using ELISA as the convention method. Blood plasma of fish was collected every 3h after administering a DHP inducer. A good relationship (coefficient: 0.934) was observed between DHP levels determined by both methods. Keyword: Biosensor, Steroid hormone, Immunoassay, Fish, Single-walled carbon nanotube

Common and different features of Chinese and Italian hydrogeological mapping guidelines

The definition of common international guidelines for the compilation of high quality hydrogeological maps has been attempted from the second half of the last century for hydrogeologists, to solve the lack of uniformity among national guidelines due to the various geological-hydrogeological and climatic situations of different countries worldwide. With this aim, the China Geological Survey and the Geological Survey of Italy-ISPRA are undertaking cooperative research in implementing 1:50,000 scale hydrogeological survey and mapping at selected sites in both countries. The project intends to develop a new generation of hydrogeological and groundwater resource maps with descriptive effectiveness and consistency with field survey data. The project will promote improvements of technologies in hydrogeological survey and mapping of the two countries and might even be agreed at a wider international level. Chinese and Italian hydrogeological guidelines have similar aspects as well as concerns: 1) the undertaking of field surveys at the 1:50,000 scale and more detailed (1:25000) scale; 2) building of a hydrogeological database; 3) publication of the official map in both paper and electronic form; 4) inclusion of several small scale maps inlayed at the margin of a main map in the hydrogeological map layout; 5) comparable level in required survey quota. Furthermore, more attention will be paid to a 3D map, conceptual model, aquifer structure, groundwater cycle and hydrogeological parameter description.In contrast, the most important difference regards the following. The hydrogeological mapping guidelines of Italy have integrated specifications for both survey and mapping, i.e. they deal with a structural layout characterized by survey contents followed by mapping contents and reflect a technical route of surveying for mapping. In contrast, there are no mapping contents in the current hydrogeological guidelines of China and these then needed to be formulated. The Italian guidelines could provide important references for China in legend organization, mapping rules, survey quota and so on.Finally, the collaboration between China and Italy is of great significance for the two ancient civilized countries sharing the “One Belt and One Road” international initiative. </p

Impact of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy on maternal and neonatal outcomes of twin gestation: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundThe impact of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) on outcomes of twin gestations is not clear. We aimed to collate data via this meta-analysis to examine how HDP alters maternal and neonatal outcomes of twin gestations.MethodsStudies comparing pregnancy outcomes of twin gestations based on HDP and published on the databases of PubMed, CENTRAL, Scopus, Web of Science, and Embase between 1 January 2000 to 20 March 2023 were eligible for inclusion.ResultsTwelve studies were included. A cumulative of 355,129 twin gestations were analyzed in the current meta-analysis. The pooled analysis found that the presence of HDP increases the risk of preterm birth (OR: 1.86 95% CI: 1.36, 2.55 I2 = 99%) and cesarean section in twin gestations (OR: 1.36 95% CI: 1.20, 1.54 I2 = 89%). Meta-analysis showed a significantly increased risk of low birth weight (OR: 1.30 95% CI: 1.10, 1.55 I2 = 97%), small for gestational age (OR: 1.30 95% CI: 1.09, 1.55 I2 = 96%) and neonatal intensive care unit admissions (OR: 1.77 95% CI: 1.43, 2.20 I2 = 76%) with HDP in twin gestations. There was no difference in the incidence of 5-min Apgar scores &lt;7 (OR: 1.07 95% CI: 0.87, 1.38 I2 = 79%) but a lower risk of neonatal death (OR: 0.39 95% CI: 0.25, 0.61 I2 = 62%) with HDP.ConclusionHDP increases the risk of preterm birth, cesarean sections, low birth weight, SGA, and NICU admission in twin gestations. Contrastingly, the risk of neonatal death is reduced with HDP. Further studies are needed to corroborate the current results.Systematic Review RegistrationPROSPERO (CRD42023407725)

Compound Attention and Neighbor Matching Network for Multi-contrast MRI Super-resolution

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reflects information about human tissue from different perspectives and has many clinical applications. By utilizing the complementary information among different modalities, multi-contrast super-resolution (SR) of MRI can achieve better results than single-image super-resolution. However, existing methods of multi-contrast MRI SR have the following shortcomings that may limit their performance: First, existing methods either simply concatenate the reference and degraded features or exploit global feature-matching between them, which are unsuitable for multi-contrast MRI SR. Second, although many recent methods employ transformers to capture long-range dependencies in the spatial dimension, they neglect that self-attention in the channel dimension is also important for low-level vision tasks. To address these shortcomings, we proposed a novel network architecture with compound-attention and neighbor matching (CANM-Net) for multi-contrast MRI SR: The compound self-attention mechanism effectively captures the dependencies in both spatial and channel dimension; the neighborhood-based feature-matching modules are exploited to match degraded features and adjacent reference features and then fuse them to obtain the high-quality images. We conduct experiments of SR tasks on the IXI, fastMRI, and real-world scanning datasets. The CANM-Net outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both retrospective and prospective experiments. Moreover, the robustness study in our work shows that the CANM-Net still achieves good performance when the reference and degraded images are imperfectly registered, proving good potential in clinical applications.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

NMR-Based Metabolomic Investigations on the Differential Responses in Adductor Muscles from Two Pedigrees of Manila Clam Ruditapes philippinarum to Cadmium and Zinc

Manila clam Ruditapes philippinarum is one of the most important economic species in shellfishery in China due to its wide geographic distribution and high tolerance to environmental changes (e.g., salinity, temperature). In addition, Manila clam is a good biomonitor/bioindicator in “Mussel Watch Programs” and marine environmental toxicology. However, there are several pedigrees of R. philippinarum distributed in the marine environment in China. No attention has been paid to the biological differences between various pedigrees of Manila clams, which may introduce undesirable biological variation in toxicology studies. In this study, we applied NMR-based metabolomics to detect the biological differences in two main pedigrees (White and Zebra) of R. philippinarum and their differential responses to heavy metal exposures (Cadmium and Zinc) using adductor muscle as a target tissue to define one sensitive pedigree of R. philippinarum as biomonitor for heavy metals. Our results indicated that there were significant metabolic differences in adductor muscle tissues between White and Zebra clams, including higher levels of alanine, glutamine, hypotaurine, phosphocholine and homarine in White clam muscles and higher levels of branched chain amino acids (valine, leucine and isoleucine), succinate and 4-aminobutyrate in Zebra clam muscles, respectively. Differential metabolic responses to heavy metals between White and Zebra clams were also found. Overall, we concluded that White pedigree of clam could be a preferable bioindicator/biomonitor in marine toxicology studies and for marine heavy metals based on the relatively high sensitivity to heavy metals

The asymmetric photosynthetic characteristics of the isobilateral sorghum leaves under the illumination of the diffuse light

The difference between photosynthesis on the two leaf sides (dorsoventral asymmetry) of photosynthesis is important for light-use patterns, but the asymmetry is environment dependent. Its role in photosynthetic regulation has been intensively studied, but little is known about the impacts of direct and diffuse light on the asymmetry. Because of the current changing fraction of diffuse light in sky radiation, this study investigated the dorsoventral asymmetry of photosynthetic traits under direct and diffuse light conditions in an important food and energy crop, Sorghum bicolor L. A unique method was used to investigate the specific gas exchange of each leaf surface. Anatomical and morphological traits were different between the two surfaces of sorghum leaves, which might result in photosynthetic asymmetry. The variations in photosynthetic rates and stomatal conductance were significant between the two surfaces in direct and diffuse light, but the degree of dorsoventral asymmetry decreased in diffuse light. The integrated PN and Gs of the adaxial illumination were significantly higher than that of abaxial illumination both in direct and diffuse light in sorghum leaves, but the ASI of the integrated PNwas 2.83 in direct light, while significantly dropped to 1.69 in diffuse light. Significant morphological differences between the two surfaces might cause photosynthetic asymmetry in the sorghum leaves. The variations of specific gas exchange were significant between direct and diffuse light, including in the incident and self-transmitted light. Compared with direct light, diffuse light reduced the stomatal sensitivity, with the degree of decline being greater in the adaxial surface, which caused weak dorsoventral asymmetry in photosynthesis. The specific photosynthetic characteristics in sorghum leaves varied obviously in direct and diffuse light, including in the incident and self-transmitted light, which contributed to the different overall gas exchange. Compared with direct light, the decline of stomatal sensitivity, which showed positive correlation with stomatal density, caused weakened dorsoventral asymmetry in photosynthesis in diffuse light. The findings provide new insights into dorsoventral asymmetry and the impact of diffuse light on photosynthesis in isobilateral leaves