Analysis of morphological differences in five large yellow croaker (<em>Larimichthys crocea</em>) populations

To explore the morphological and phenotypic characteristics and differences among different populations of Larimichthys crocea, traditional morphological measurements were carried out on three wild populations from Zhoushan, Xiamen and Zhanjiang and two farmed populations from Ningde and Wenzhou. Seven morphological parameters of five L. crocea populations were compared and analyzed. The results of one-way ANOVA showed significant differences in trunk and caudal stalk among the five populations. The contribution rates of the first five principal components to the total difference among different populations were 29.984%, 18.462%, 17.234%, 12.167%, and 9.904%, respectively, and the cumulative contribution rates were 87.751%. Trunk can be used to distinguish different geographic populations best. The cluster analysis results showed that the distance between wild populations was the closest, while the distance between farmed populations was far. The step discriminant method established the classification discriminant function of 5 populations. The discriminant accuracy P1 was 78.3%-92.7%, the discriminant accuracy P2 was 76.4%-96.5%, and the comprehensive recognition rate was 99.3%. The discriminant accuracy of this method was high, and it could provide a reference for the differentiation of different populations of L. crocea. This study provided basic morphological data for identifying a large yellow croaker population, protecting germplasm resources, and breeding improved varieties

Analysis of morphological differences among different populations of golden pompano (<em>Trachinotus ovatus</em>)

To explore the external morphological differences of golden pompano in different geographical populations, eight quantitative traits of 210 samples from seven golden pompano populations were measured. Multivariate statistical methods, such as principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, cluster analysis, and One-way ANOVA, were used to compare morphological differences among the populations. Principal component analysis extracted the top five principal components with a cumulative contribution rate of 85.79%, of which the first three principal components could explain seven morphological features. The principal component scatter plot showed that the NH, CH, and LL populations had similar morphology. Using the stepwise discriminant method to establish the classification and discrimination functions of the seven populations, the discrimination accuracy of the DL population was 93.3% for P1 and 87.5% for P2, which was the highest, and the comprehensive discrimination rate was 71.4%. The clustering relationship diagram showed that the populations were divided into three branches, and the CH and NH populations were closest. In contrast, the DL and HF populations were farthest from the other populations. One-way ANOVA showed significant differences (P<0.05) among all traits of the populations, and the morphological differences between the HX and DL populations were the largest. The results of this study showed specific differences in the external morphology of golden pompano among different populations

Transcriptome analysis of the allometric growth of golden pompano (<em>Trachinotus ovatus</em>) following soybean meal feed

Golden pompano (*Trachinotus ovatus*) is a marine fish of great commercial value. It was selected for a study on allometric growth using fermented soybean meal (SBM) as the primary protein source during an 8-week culture period. By comparing the gene expression levels of different individuals in the fermented soybean meal group, we discovered that 1026 genes exhibited significant changes in slow and fast-growth individuals. Among these genes, 358 showed high expression levels, while 668 showed low ones. Subsequently, we conducted go function annotation and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis on all the significantly differentially expressed genes. This analysis revealed that many of these genes were associated with oxidative phosphorylation, steroid biosynthesis, glyceride metabolism, alanine, aspartic acid, and glutamate metabolism. Identifying these differentially expressed genes is a foundation for unraveling the molecular mechanisms behind growth and development. Additionally, it provides valuable gene data for future studies on the cloning and expression of growth-related genes and offers insights for subsequent biological research

Adaptive Optimizers with Sparse Group Lasso for Neural Networks in CTR Prediction

We develop a novel framework that adds the regularizers of the sparse group lasso to a family of adaptive optimizers in deep learning, such as Momentum, Adagrad, Adam, AMSGrad, AdaHessian, and create a new class of optimizers, which are named Group Momentum, Group Adagrad, Group Adam, Group AMSGrad and Group AdaHessian, etc., accordingly. We establish theoretically proven convergence guarantees in the stochastic convex settings, based on primal-dual methods. We evaluate the regularized effect of our new optimizers on three large-scale real-world ad click datasets with state-of-the-art deep learning models. The experimental results reveal that compared with the original optimizers with the post-processing procedure which uses the magnitude pruning method, the performance of the models can be significantly improved on the same sparsity level. Furthermore, in comparison to the cases without magnitude pruning, our methods can achieve extremely high sparsity with significantly better or highly competitive performance. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/dlrover/blob/master/tfplus.Comment: 24 pages. Published as a conference paper at ECML PKDD 2021. This version includes Appendix which was not included in the published version because of page limi

Peste des Petits Ruminants Virus in Tibet, China

Serologic and molecular evidence indicates that peste des petits ruminants virus (PPRV) infection has emerged in goats and sheep in the Ngari region of southwestern Tibet, People’s Republic of China. Phylogenetic analysis confirms that the PPRV strain from Tibet is classified as lineage 4 and is closely related to viruses currently circulating in neighboring countries of southern Asia

Research progress in the removal of fluoride ions from mine water by adsorption method

Fluoride ions are widely distributed in surface rivers and groundwater bodies in China, especially in the mining areas along the Yellow River in the western Yellow River basin that there is a widespread problem of excessive fluoride in the mine water, which poses a potential threat to the local ecological environment and human health. The status quo of fluoride pollution in China is mostly at a low concentration pollution level, which leads to it difficult to remove efficiently through conventional water treatment technologies. The adsorption method is considered to be an effective way to remove low concentration fluoride ions because of its high adsorption efficiency and convenient operation. The research status of fluoride removal by commonly used adsorption materials such as carbon based, minerals, metals and metal organic frameworks (MOFs) was reviewed and summarized before summarizing the influence of different factors on the fluoride removal efficiency and adsorption mechanism of these adsorption materials. Then the application effect and operation cost of adsorption method in mine water treatment were emphatically analyzed, and the development direction of adsorption method in the treatment of low concentration (<10 mg/L) and high water content fluorine-containing mine water was prospected. In general, there are still some deficiencies in the study of fluoride removal by adsorption. In terms of adsorption mechanism, it should be further investigated from three aspects which includes the characteristics of adsorption materials, the occurrence form of fluoride ions and the interaction mechanism between adsorption materials and fluoride ions. For the engineering application of adsorption method, the demand of engineering application should be regarded as the guidance. Based on the above discussion, the research and development direction of removing fluoride ions from mine water by adsorption method is proposed, which is to focus on the development of low cost and high efficiency environment-friendly modified adsorbents based on natural/waste (ore) and carbon-based, aluminum-based or other new polymer adsorption materials under the principle of clarifying local policies and water quality and quantity. In addition, it is necessary not to improve the selective adsorption performance of the modified adsorbent for fluoride ions, but also to ensure the stability, economy and safety of the adsorbent in the whole life cycle of preparation, processing, production and recycling, thereby improving its competitiveness of the adsorption method in the actual application of fluoride containing wastewater and enhancing the application potential of the adsorption method

A High-Density Genetic Linkage Map and QTL Mapping for Sex in Black Tiger Shrimp (Penaeus monodon)

The black tiger shrimp, Penaeus monodon, is important in both fishery and aquaculture and is the second-most widely cultured shrimp species in the world. However, the current strains cannot meet the market needs in various cultural environments, and the genome resources for P. monodon are still lacking. Restriction-site associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) has been widely used in genetic linkage map construction and in quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping. We constructed a high-density genetic linkage map with RADseq in a full-sib family. This map contained 6524 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and 2208 unique loci. The total length was 3275.4 cM, and the genetic distance was estimated to be 1.1 Mb/cM. The sex trait is a dichotomous phenotype, and the same interval was detected as a QTL using QTL mapping and genome-wide association analysis. The most significant locus explained 77.4% of the phenotype variance. The sex locus was speculated to be the same in this species based on the sequence alignments in Mozambique, India, and Hawaii populations. The constructed genetic linkage map provided a valuable resource for QTL mapping, genome assembly, and genome comparison for shrimp. The demonstrated common sex locus is a step closer to locating the underlying gene

The Transcriptional Factor PPARαb Positively Regulates Elovl5 Elongase in Golden Pompano Trachinotus ovatus (Linnaeus 1758)

The nuclear peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) regulate the transcription of elongases of very long-chain fatty acids (Elovl), which are involved in polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) biosynthesis in mammals. In the present study, we first characterized the function of Elovl5 elongase in Trachinotus ovatus. The functional study showed that ToElovl5 displayed high elongation activity toward C18 and C20 PUFA. To investigate whether PPARαb was a regulator of Elovl5, we also reported the sequence of T. ovatus PPARαb (ToPPARαb). The open reading frame (ORF) sequence encoded 469 amino acids possessing four typical characteristic domains, including an N-terminal hypervariable region, a DNA-binding domain (DBD), a flexible hinge domain and a ligand-binding domain (LBD). Thirdly, promoter activity experiments showed that the region from PGL3-basic-Elovl5-5 (-146 bp to +459 bp) was defined as the core promoter by progressive deletion mutation of Elovl5. Moreover, PPARαb overexpression led to a clear time-dependent enhancement of ToElovl5 promoter expression in HEK 293T cells. Fourth, the agonist of PPARαb prominently increased PPARαb and Elovl5 expression, while PPARαb depletion by RNAi or an inhibitor was correlated with a significant reduction of Elovl5 transcription in T. ovatus caudal fin cells (TOCF). In conclusion, the present study provides the first evidence of the positive regulation of Elovl5 transcription by PPARαb and contributes to a better understanding of the transcriptional mechanism of PPARαb in fish

Complete mitochondrial genome of banana skipper Erionota torus Evans (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae) and phylogenetic analysis

Erionota torus (Evans, 1941) is a banana pest and is mainly distributed in Southeast Asia and the Pacific regions. The complete mitogenome of E. torus (GenBank accession number MW586888) is 15,987 bp in size, including 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNAs, 2 ribosomal RNAs genes, and a noncoding A þ T-rich region. The A þ T-rich region is located between 12S rRNA and tRNAMet. The base compos ition of the whole E. torus mitogenome is 39.68% for A, 7.30% for G, 41.55% for T, and 11.47% for C, with a high AT content of 81.23%. The phylogeny analysis indicated that E. torus had a close relation ship with Notocrypta curvifascia. The present data could contribute to the further detailed phylogeo graphic analysis and provide a comprehensive control strategy for this banana pest

Controlling the Bureaucracy of the Antipoverty Program

Rapid progress made in various areas of regenerative medicine in recent years occurred both at the cellular level, with the Nobel prize-winning discovery of reprogramming (generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells) and also at the biomaterial level. The use of four transcription factors, Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4 (called commonly "Yamanaka factors") for the conversion of differentiated cells, back to the pluripotent/embryonic stage, has opened virtually endless and ethically acceptable source of stem cells for medical use. Various types of stem cells are becoming increasingly popular as starting components for the development of replacement tissues, or artificial organs. Interestingly, many of the transcription factors, key to the maintenance of stemness phenotype in various cells, are also overexpressed in cancer (stem) cells, and some of them may find the use as prognostic factors. In this review, we describe various methods of iPS creation, followed by overview of factors known to interfere with the efficiency of reprogramming. Next, we discuss similarities between cancer stem cells and various stem cell types. Final paragraphs are dedicated to interaction of biomaterials with tissues, various adverse reactions generated as a result of such interactions, and measures available, that allow for mitigation of such negative effects