Massive nutrients offshore transport off the Changjiang Estuary in flooding summer of 2020

Flood events significantly increase water discharges and terrigenous material inputs to coastal waters. Riverine nutrients in the Changjiang Estuary are transported by the dispersion of Changjiang Diluted Water (CDW) plumes and detached low-salinity water patches. However, the effects of flooding on nutrient offshore transports have not been well explored. Here, we present the nutrient conditions in the Changjiang Estuary and adjacent East China Sea in the historical flooding year 2020. Comparisons of nutrient distributions between flooding years, drought year and non-flooding years were also made. Our results showed that nitrate flux from the Changjiang River in August 2020 was 1.5 times that of the multi-year averaged flux in non-flooding years. Enormous riverine nutrient input resulted in much higher nutrient concentrations in the outer estuary than those in non-flooding years. In addition, a detached low-salinity water patch was observed, which made the salinity of the northern estuary even lower than that in the historical flooding year 1998. Surface dissolved inorganic nitrate (DIN) level in the low-salinity water patch was even ~16 times of that at nearby station in the drought year 2006. While phosphate (PO43−) concentrations were less than 0.1 μmol L−1 east of 123°E, which was probably caused by intensive biological uptake, as indicated by a high Chlorophyll a (Chl a) concentration (29.08 μg L−1). The depleted PO43− and high N/P of the low-salinity water patch suggested PO43− limitation even under flood conditions. A three end-member mixing model was adopted to identify the contributions of the CDW end-member (CDWend-member) and biological process to nutrient distributions. Our model results showed that the nutrient contribution of the CDWend-member to the estuary (122–124°E, 31–32.5°N) in flooding year 2020 was over double that in drought year 2006. Model-derived biological DIN uptake was as high as 24.65 μmol L−1 at the low-salinity water patch. Accordingly, the estimated net community production was 566–1131 mg C m−2 d−1 within the euphotic zone. The offshore transport of a low-salinity, high-DIN water patch during flooding could probably have a significant influence on biogeochemical cycles in the broad shelf, and even the adjacent Japan Sea

The red blood cell as a mediator of endothelial dysfunction in patients with familial hypercholesterolemia and dyslipidemia

Peer reviewe

Evaluating the effectiveness of three national marine protected areas in the Yangtze River Delta, China

China’s coastal areas face serious environmental degradation as a consequence of large-scale economic development. To balance environmental sustainability with economic development, China is currently implementing a strategy of ‘eco-civilization’, with marine protected areas (MPAs) expected to be one approach to achieving sustainable marine ecosystems. Since the 1990s, China has established over 270 MPAs, but their effectiveness remains unknown, particularly in the Yangtze River Delta. This study modified pre-existing frameworks to evaluate the effectiveness of three national MPAs in the Yangtze River Delta. The modified framework includes conservation outcomes and their potential drivers. Drivers consist of – attributes species or ecosystems within the MPA, attributes of the MPA, institutional design principles, and participation. Five scenarios were proposed based on score combinations of the four drivers: proactive, well designed, well governed, interactive, and learning. All three MPAs achieved a satisfactory level of outcomes and most of the drivers for all three MPAs achieved a satisfactory level. Two of the MPAs were categorized into the learning scenario, and the third into the well-designed scenario, indicating that there is still room to improve institutional design principles and public participation. We suggest developing cost and benefit indicators to more deeply understand proportionality among stakeholders. In addition, the role of participation should be clarified and promoted. We recommend regular environmental performance monitoring and assessment to identify problems and optimize management

Erythrocytes from patients with type 2 diabetes induce endothelial dysfunction via arginase I.

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular complications are major clinical problems in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The authors previously demonstrated a crucial role of red blood cells (RBCs) in control of cardiac function through arginase-dependent regulation of nitric oxide export from RBCs. There is alteration of RBC function, as well as an increase in arginase activity, in T2DM. OBJECTIVES: The authors hypothesized that RBCs from patients with T2DM induce endothelial dysfunction by up-regulation of arginase. METHODS: RBCs were isolated from patients with T2DM and age-matched healthy subjects and were incubated with rat aortas or human internal mammary arteries from nondiabetic patients for vascular reactivity and biochemical studies. RESULTS: Arginase activity and arginase I protein expression were elevated in RBCs from patients with T2DM (T2DM RBCs) through an effect induced by reactive oxygen species (ROS). Co-incubation of arterial segments with T2DM RBCs, but not RBCs from age-matched healthy subjects, significantly impaired endothelial function but not smooth muscle cell function in both healthy rat aortas and human internal mammary arteries. Endothelial dysfunction induced by T2DM RBCs was prevented by inhibition of arginase and ROS both at the RBC and vascular levels. T2DM RBCs induced increased vascular arginase I expression and activity through an ROS-dependent mechanism. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates a novel mechanism behind endothelial dysfunction in T2DM that is induced by RBC arginase I and ROS. Targeting arginase I in RBCs may serve as a novel therapeutic tool for the treatment of endothelial dysfunction in T2DM

Prodepth: Predict Residue Depth by Support Vector Regression Approach from Protein Sequences Only

Residue depth (RD) is a solvent exposure measure that complements the information provided by conventional accessible surface area (ASA) and describes to what extent a residue is buried in the protein structure space. Previous studies have established that RD is correlated with several protein properties, such as protein stability, residue conservation and amino acid types. Accurate prediction of RD has many potentially important applications in the field of structural bioinformatics, for example, facilitating the identification of functionally important residues, or residues in the folding nucleus, or enzyme active sites from sequence information. In this work, we introduce an efficient approach that uses support vector regression to quantify the relationship between RD and protein sequence. We systematically investigated eight different sequence encoding schemes including both local and global sequence characteristics and examined their respective prediction performances. For the objective evaluation of our approach, we used 5-fold cross-validation to assess the prediction accuracies and showed that the overall best performance could be achieved with a correlation coefficient (CC) of 0.71 between the observed and predicted RD values and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.74, after incorporating the relevant multiple sequence features. The results suggest that residue depth could be reliably predicted solely from protein primary sequences: local sequence environments are the major determinants, while global sequence features could influence the prediction performance marginally. We highlight two examples as a comparison in order to illustrate the applicability of this approach. We also discuss the potential implications of this new structural parameter in the field of protein structure prediction and homology modeling. This method might prove to be a powerful tool for sequence analysis

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Revisiting industry 4.0 with a case study

Abstract The Industry 4.0 is becoming a hot topic. In this paper, we revisit Industry 4.0 from the perspectives of its purposes, features, and key performance indicators. We present a reference roadmap for advancing an Industry 4.0 project from plan to implementation. We present the case study of steel industry 4.0 and lessons. In addition, we give suggestions directing the advancement of Industry 4.0