The effect of basic public service on urban-rural income inequality: a sys-GMM approach

Based on provincial panel data of China ranging from 2004 to 2015, this paper has empirically examined the effect of basic public service on the urban–rural income inequality with a system generalised method of moments (sys-GMM). We arrive at the following conclusions: 1) the improvement of public service provision is conducive to narrowing the urban–rural income gap; 2) compared with the ‘hard’ public services (including infrastructure, environmental protection and cultural facilities), the‘soft’ public services (including education, medical care and social security) play a more significant role in reducing the disparity; 3) the household registration system impairs the welfare brought by the ‘soft’ public services and exacerbates the passive effect of ‘hard’ public services on the income gap; 4) the interactive impact of household registration regulation and public service provision on the income gap is more significant in developed areas. These findings suggest the government should give priority to the improvement of‘soft’ public services, reevaluate the way of spending on ‘hard’ public services in rural areas and deepen the household registration system reform

Utility-based Weighted Multicategory Robust Support Vector Machines

The Support Vector Machines (SVM) has been an important classification technique in both machine learning and statistics communities. The robust SVM is an improved version of the SVM so that the resulting classifier can be less sensitive to outliers. In many practical problems, it may be advantageous to use different weights for different types of misclassification. However, the existing RSVM treats different kinds of misclassification equally. In this paper, we propose the weighted RSVM, as an extension of the standard SVM. We show that surprisingly, the cost-based weights do not work well for weighted extensions of the RSVM. To solve this problem, we propose a novel utility-based weights for the weighted RSVM. Both theoretical and numerical studies are presented to investigate the performance of the proposed weighted multicategory RSVM

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Measurements in High Flat-top Pulsed Magnetic Field up to 40 T at WHMFC

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique benefits from high magnetic field not only due to the field-enhanced measurement sensitivity and resolution, but also because it is a powerful tool to investigate field-induced physics in modern material science. In this study, we successfully performed NMR measurements in high flat-top pulsed magnetic field (FTPMF) up to 40 T. A two-stage corrected FTPMF with fluctuation less than 10 mT and duration longer than 9 ms was established. Besides, a Giga-Hz NMR spectrometer and a sample probe suitable for pulsed-field condition were developed. Both free-induction-decay and spin-echo sequences were exploited for the measurements. The derived $^{93}$Nb NMR results show that the stability and homogeneity of the FTPMF reach an order of 10$^2$ ppm / 10 ms and 10$^2$ ppm / 10 mm$^3$ respectively, which is approaching a degree of maturity for some researches on condensed matter physics.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Seed Dormancy-Life Form Profile for 358 Species from the Xishuangbanna Seasonal Tropical Rainforest, Yunnan Province, China Compared to World Database

Seed dormancy profiles are available for the major vegetation regions/types on earth. These were constructed using a composite of data from locations within each region. Furthermore, the proportion of species with nondormant (ND) seeds and the five classes of dormancy is available for each life form in each region. Using these data, we asked: will the results be the same if many species from a specific area as opposed to data compiled from many locations are considered? Germination was tested for fresh seeds of 358 species in 95 families from the Xishuangbanna seasonal tropical rainforest (XSTRF): 177 trees, 66 shrubs, 57 vines and 58 herbs. Seeds of 12.3% of the species were ND, and 0.3, 14.8, 60.6, 12.0 and 0% of the species had morphological (MD), morphophysiological (MPD), physiological (PD), physical (PY), and combinational (PY + PD) dormancy, respectively. PD was more important than ND in all life forms, PY was highest in shrubs, MD was not important in any life form and MPD was most common for herb and vines. The seed dormancy profile for XSTRF differs considerably from the composite profile for this vegetation type worldwide, most obviously in ND being much lower and PD much higher in XSTRF

Design, synthesis, biological evaluation and docking study of 4-isochromanone hybrids bearing N-benzyl pyridinium moiety as dual binding site acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (part II)

A series of novel 4-isochromanone compounds bearing N-benzyl pyridinium moiety were designed and synthesized as acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors. The biological evaluation showed that most of the target compounds exhibited potent inhibitory activities against AChE. Among them, compound 1q possessed the strongest anti-AChE activity with an IC50 value of 0.15 nM and high AChE/BuChE selectivity (SI >5000). Moreover, compound 1q had low toxicity in normal nerve cells and was relatively stable in rat plasma. Together, the current finding may provide a new approach for the discovery of novel anti-Alzheimer’s disease agents

Design, synthesis, biological evaluation and docking study of 4-isochromanone hybrids bearing N-benzyl pyridinium moiety as dual binding site acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (part II)

A series of novel 4-isochromanone compounds bearing N-benzyl pyridinium moiety were designed and synthesized as acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors. The biological evaluation showed that most of the target compounds exhibited potent inhibitory activities against AChE. Among them, compound 1q possessed the strongest anti-AChE activity with an IC50 value of 0.15 nM and high AChE/BuChE selectivity (SI >5000). Moreover, compound 1q had low toxicity in normal nerve cells and was relatively stable in rat plasma. Together, the current finding may provide a new approach for the discovery of novel anti-Alzheimer’s disease agents

A 13-Gene Metabolic Prognostic Signature Is Associated With Clinical and Immune Features in Stomach Adenocarcinoma

Patients with advanced stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) commonly show high mortality and poor prognosis. Increasing evidence has suggested that basic metabolic changes may promote the growth and aggressiveness of STAD; therefore, identification of metabolic prognostic signatures in STAD would be meaningful. An integrative analysis was performed with 407 samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and 433 samples from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) to develop a metabolic prognostic signature associated with clinical and immune features in STAD using Cox regression analysis and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). The different proportions of immune cells and differentially expressed immune-related genes (DEIRGs) between high- and low-risk score groups based on the metabolic prognostic signature were evaluated to describe the association of cancer metabolism and immune response in STAD. A total of 883 metabolism-related genes in both TCGA and GEO databases were analyzed to obtain 184 differentially expressed metabolism-related genes (DEMRGs) between tumor and normal tissues. A 13-gene metabolic signature (GSTA2, POLD3, GLA, GGT5, DCK, CKMT2, ASAH1, OPLAH, ME1, ACYP1, NNMT, POLR1A, and RDH12) was constructed for prognostic prediction of STAD. Sixteen survival-related DEMRGs were significantly related to the overall survival of STAD and the immune landscape in the tumor microenvironment. Univariate and multiple Cox regression analyses and the nomogram proved that a metabolism-based prognostic risk score (MPRS) could be an independent risk factor. More importantly, the results were mutually verified using TCGA and GEO data. This study provided a metabolism-related gene signature for prognostic prediction of STAD and explored the association between metabolism and the immune microenvironment for future research, thereby furthering the understanding of the crosstalk between different molecular mechanisms in human STAD. Some prognosis-related metabolic pathways have been revealed, and the survival of STAD patients could be predicted by a risk model based on these pathways, which could serve as prognostic markers in clinical practice

Engineered Streptomyces lividans Strains for Optimal Identification and Expression of Cryptic Biosynthetic Gene Clusters

Streptomyces lividans is a suitable host for the heterologous expression of biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) from actinomycetes to discover “cryptic” secondary metabolites. To improve the heterologous expression of BGCs, herein we optimized S. lividans strain SBT5 via the stepwise integration of three global regulatory genes and two codon-optimized multi-drug efflux pump genes and deletion of a negative regulatory gene, yielding four engineered strains. All optimization steps were observed to promote the heterologous production of polyketides, non-ribosomal peptides, and hybrid antibiotics. The production increments of these optimization steps were additional, so that the antibiotic yields were several times or even dozens of times higher than the parent strain SBT5 when the final optimized strain, S. lividans LJ1018, was used as the heterologous expression host. The heterologous production of these antibiotics in S. lividans LJ1018 and GX28 was also much higher than in the strains from which the BGCs were isolated. S. lividans LJ1018 and GX28 markedly promoted the heterologous production of secondary metabolites, without requiring manipulation of gene expression components such as promoters on individual gene clusters. Therefore, these strains are well-suited as heterologous expression hosts for secondary metabolic BGCs. In addition, we successfully conducted high-throughput library expression and functional screening (LEXAS) of one bacterial artificial chromosome library and two cosmid libraries of three Streptomyces genomes using S. lividans GX28 as the library-expression host. The LEXAS experiments identified clones carrying intact BGCs sufficient for the heterologous production of piericidin A1, murayaquinone, actinomycin D, and dehydrorabelomycin. Notably, due to lower antibiotic production, the piericidin A1 BGC had been overlooked in a previous LEXAS screening using S. lividans SBT5 as the expression host. These results demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of S. lividans GX28 as a host for high-throughput screening of genomic libraries to mine cryptic BGCs and bioactive compounds