Investigations on the Antifungal Effect of Nerol against Aspergillus flavus

The antifungal efficacy of nerol (NEL) has been proved against Aspergillus flavus by using in vitro and in vivo tests. The mycelial growth of A. flavus was completely inhibited at concentrations of 0.8 μL/mL and 0.1 μL/mL NEL in the air at contact and vapor conditions, respectively. The NEL also had an evident inhibitory effect on spore germination in A. flavus along with NEL concentration as well as time-dependent kinetic inhibition. The NEL presented noticeable inhibition on dry mycelium weight and synthesis of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) by A. flavus, totally restraining AFB1 production at 0.6 μL/mL. In real food system, the efficacy of the NEL on resistance to decay development in cherry tomatoes was investigated in vivo by exposing inoculated and control fruit groups to NEL vapor at different concentration. NEL vapors at 0.1 μL/mL air concentration significantly reduced artificially contaminated A. flavus and a broad spectrum of fungal microbiota. Results obtained from presented study showed that the NEL had a great antifungal activity and could be considered as a benefit and safe tool to control food spoilage

A Co-Doped MnO2 catalyst for Li-CO2 batteries with low overpotential and ultrahigh cyclability.

Li-CO2 batteries can not only capture CO2 to solve the greenhouse effect but also serve as next-generation energy storage devices on the merits of economical, environmentally-friendly, and sustainable aspects. However, these batteries are suffering from two main drawbacks: high overpotential and poor cyclability, severely postponing the acceleration of their applications. Herein, a new Co-doped alpha-MnO2 nanowire catalyst is prepared for rechargeable Li-CO2 batteries, which exhibits a high capacity (8160 mA h g−1 at a current density of 100 mA g−1), a low overpotential (≈0.73 V), and an ultrahigh cyclability (over 500 cycles at a current density of 100 mA g−1), exceeding those of Li‐CO2 batteries reported so far. The reaction mechanisms are interpreted depending on in situ experimental observations in combination with density functional theory calculations. The outstanding electrochemical properties are mostly associated with a high conductivity, a large fraction of hierarchical channels, and a unique Co interstitial doping, which might be of benefit for the diffusion of CO2, the reversibility of Li2CO3 products, and the prohibition of side reactions between electrolyte and electrode. These results shed light on both CO2 fixation and new Li-CO2 batteries for energy storage

Magnetic phase transitions in the triangular-lattice spin-1 dimer compound K2Ni2(SeO3)3

In our study, we conduct magnetization and heat capacity measurements to investigate field-induced magnetic phase transitions within the newly synthesized compound K2Ni2(SeO3)3, a spin-1 dimer system arranged on a triangular lattice. The Ni-Ni dimers exhibit a ferromagnetic intra-dimer interaction, effectively behaving as an ensemble with a total spin of S=2. In contrast, antiferromagnetic interactions manifest between these dimers on the triangular lattice. The trigonal distortion of the NiO6 octahedra introduces easy-axis magnetic anisotropy, accounting for the distinct magnetic phase diagrams observed when applying c-axis directional and in-plnae magnetic fields. Notably, our investigation unveils a two-step phase transition with the magnetic field aligned with the c direction. We propose that the system at the first transition is from a paramagnetic state to an up-up-down state, characterized by the Z3 lattice-symmetry breaking. Subsequently, a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, involving the breaking of the c-axis spin-rotation symmetry, leads to the formation of the "Y state" at low temperatures. These findings yield valuable insights into the magnetic phase transitions inherent to geometrically frustrated magnetic systems featuring dimer structures.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

The Salicylic Acid-Mediated Release of Plant Volatiles Affects the Host Choice of \u3cem\u3eBemisia tabaci\u3c/em\u3e

The whitefly Bemisia tabaci (Gennadius) (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae) causes serious crop losses worldwide by transmitting viruses. We have previously shown that salicylic acid (SA)-related plant defenses directly affect whiteflies. In this study, we applied exogenous SA to tomato plants in order to investigate the interaction between SA-induced plant volatiles and nonviruliferous B. tabaci B and Q or B- and Q-carrying tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV). The results showed that exogenous SA caused plants to repel nonviruliferous whiteflies, but the effect was reduced when the SA concentration was low and when the whiteflies were viruliferous. Exogenous SA increased the number and quantity of plant volatiles—especially the quantity of methyl salicylate and δ-limonene. In Y-tube olfactometer assays, methyl salicylate and δ-limonene repelled the whiteflies, but the repellency was reduced for viruliferous Q. We suggest that the release of plant volatiles as mediated by SA affects the interaction between whiteflies, plants, and viruses. Further studies are needed to determine why viruliferous Q is less sensitive than nonviruliferous Q to repellent plant volatiles

COAD: Contrastive Pre-training with Adversarial Fine-tuning for Zero-shot Expert Linking

Expert finding, a popular service provided by many online websites such as Expertise Finder, LinkedIn, and AMiner, benefits seeking consultants, collaborators, and candidate qualifications. However, its quality is suffered from a single source of support information for experts. This paper employs AMiner, a free online academic search and mining system, having collected more than over 100 million researcher profiles together with 200 million papers from multiple publication databases, as the basis for investigating the problem of expert linking, which aims at linking any external information of persons to experts in AMiner. A critical challenge is how to perform zero shot expert linking without any labeled linkages from the external information to AMiner experts, as it is infeasible to acquire sufficient labels for arbitrary external sources. Inspired by the success of self supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing, we propose to train a self supervised expert linking model, which is first pretrained by contrastive learning on AMiner data to capture the common representation and matching patterns of experts across AMiner and external sources, and is then fine-tuned by adversarial learning on AMiner and the unlabeled external sources to improve the model transferability. Experimental results demonstrate that COAD significantly outperforms various baselines without contrastive learning of experts on two widely studied downstream tasks: author identification (improving up to 32.1% in HitRatio@1) and paper clustering (improving up to 14.8% in Pairwise-F1). Expert linking on two genres of external sources also indicates the superiority of the proposed adversarial fine-tuning method compared with other domain adaptation ways (improving up to 2.3% in HitRatio@1).Comment: TKDE under revie

Ultrasound-assisted extraction of polyphenols from Chinese propolis

IntroductionPropolis is a beneficial bioactive food with rich polyphenols content. Nowadays, an increasing interest is attracted to the extraction of polyphenols from raw propolis. This study utilized the novel ultrasound-assisted approach for polyphenol extraction from Chinese propolis, aiming to improve its extraction yield and reveal the relevant mechanisms via extraction kinetic study as well as the compositional and structural analysis.MethodsThe optimum ultrasound-assisted extraction conditions were optimized according to the total phenolic content and total flavonoids content. Compositional and structural analysis were conducted using high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole-time of flight tandem mass spectrometry, high-performance liquid chromatography, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and scanning electron microscope (SEM).Results and discussionThe optimum ultrasound-assisted extraction conditions were as follows: ratio of liquid to solid, 60:1; ultrasound power, 135 W; ultrasound duration, 20 min. Under the optimum conditions, the antioxidant activities of the extract were increased by 95.55% and 64.46% by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical scavenging ability assay and 2,2'-azino-bis (3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) radical scavenging ability assay, respectively, compared to those obtained by traditional maceration. The second-order kinetics model was employed to study the extraction process; it was found that ultrasound significantly accelerated the extraction of propolis and increased the maximum extraction volume of phenolic compounds. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of polyphenol compositions showed that ultrasound did not change the polyphenol types in the extract but it significantly improved the contents of various flavonoids and phenolic acids such as galangin, chrysin, pinocembrin, pinobanksin and isoferulic acid. Likewise, the FT-IR analysis indicated that the types of functional groups were similar in the two extracts. The SEM analysis revealed that the ultrasound-assisted extraction enhanced the contact areas between propolis and ethanol by breaking down the propolis particles and eroding the propolis surface

Odor, Not Performance, Dictates \u3cem\u3eBemisia tabaci\u3c/em\u3e\u27s Selection Between Healthy and Virus Infected Plants

Although, insect herbivores are generally thought to select hosts that favor the fitness of their progeny, this “mother-knows-best” hypothesis may be challenged by the presence of a plant virus. Our previous study showed that the whitefly, Bemisia tabaci, the obligate vector for transmitting Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV), preferred to settle and oviposit on TYLCV-infected rather than healthy host plant, Datura stramonium. The performances of B. tabaci larvae and adults were indeed improved on virus-infected D. stramonium, which is consistent with “mother-knows-best” hypothesis. In this study, B. tabaci Q displayed the same preference to settle and oviposit on Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV)-infected host plants, D. stramonium and Capsicum annuum, respectively. As a non-vector of TSWV, however, insect performance was impaired since adult body size, longevity, survival, and fecundity were reduced in TSWV infected D. stramonium. This appears to be an odor-mediated behavior, as plant volatile profiles are modified by viral infection. Infected plants have reduced quantities of o-xylene and α-pinene, and increased levels of phenol and 2-ethyl-1-hexanol in their headspace. Subsequent behavior experiments showed that o-xylene and α-pinene are repellant, while phenol and 2-ethyl-1-hexanol are attractive. This indicates that the preference of B. tabaci for virus-infected plants is modulated by the dynamic changes in the volatile profiles rather than the subsequent performances on virus-infected plants

Odor, Not Performance, Dictates \u3cem\u3eBemisia tabaci\u3c/em\u3e\u27s Selection Between Healthy and Virus Infected Plants

Although, insect herbivores are generally thought to select hosts that favor the fitness of their progeny, this “mother-knows-best” hypothesis may be challenged by the presence of a plant virus. Our previous study showed that the whitefly, Bemisia tabaci, the obligate vector for transmitting Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV), preferred to settle and oviposit on TYLCV-infected rather than healthy host plant, Datura stramonium. The performances of B. tabaci larvae and adults were indeed improved on virus-infected D. stramonium, which is consistent with “mother-knows-best” hypothesis. In this study, B. tabaci Q displayed the same preference to settle and oviposit on Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV)-infected host plants, D. stramonium and Capsicum annuum, respectively. As a non-vector of TSWV, however, insect performance was impaired since adult body size, longevity, survival, and fecundity were reduced in TSWV infected D. stramonium. This appears to be an odor-mediated behavior, as plant volatile profiles are modified by viral infection. Infected plants have reduced quantities of o-xylene and α-pinene, and increased levels of phenol and 2-ethyl-1-hexanol in their headspace. Subsequent behavior experiments showed that o-xylene and α-pinene are repellant, while phenol and 2-ethyl-1-hexanol are attractive. This indicates that the preference of B. tabaci for virus-infected plants is modulated by the dynamic changes in the volatile profiles rather than the subsequent performances on virus-infected plants