Lipidomic changes during different growth stages of Nitzschia closterium f. minutissima

Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography-Electrospray ionization-Quadrupole-Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry (UPLC-ESI-Q-TOF–MS) is a powerful lipidomic tool. In this study, we developed a UPLC/Q-TOF–MS based method to investigate the lipid metabolomic changes in different growth phases of Nitzschia closterium f. minutissima. The data classification and biomarker selection were carried out by using multivariate statistical analysis, including principal components analysis (PCA), projection to latent structures with discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and orthogonal projection to latent structures with discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA). We discovered that the intercellular lipid metabolites were significantly different among exponential, early stationary and late stationary phases. Thirty-one lipid molecules were selected and identified as putative biomarkers, including free fatty acid, Harderoporphyrin, phosphatidylglycerol, 1,2-diacyglycerl-3-O-4′-(N,N-trimethy)-homoserine, triacylglycerol, cholesterol, sulfoquinovosyldiacylglycerol, lyso-sulfoquinovosyldiacylglycerol, monogalactosyldiacylglycerol, digalactosyldiacylglycerol and lyso-digalactosyldiacylglycerol. These lipids have been shown previously to function in energy storage, membrane stability and photosynthesis efficiency during the growth of diatoms. Further analysis on the putative biomarkers demonstrated that nitrate starvation played critical role in the transition from exponential phase to stationary phase in N. closterium. This study is the first one to explore the lipidomic changes of microalgae in different growth phases, which promotes better understanding of their physiology and ecology.     

海藻多糖抑制白细胞呼吸爆发作用研究

采用ESR、自旋捕集及自旋氧探针技术,研究了海藻硫酸多糖(SPS)对豆蔻酰佛波醇乙酯(PMA)刺激的多形核白细胞(PMN)呼吸爆发的影响.结果表明,SPS能显著抑制PMN呼吸爆发,10 g/L和5 g/L SPS几乎完全清除PMN呼吸爆发产生的自由基,1 g/L SPS可清除53.2%;10 g/L SPS对PMN的耗氧量也有较明显的抑制作用.     

PSMD: An extensive database for pan‐species microsatellite investigation and marker development

Microsatellites are widely distributed throughout nearly all genomes which have been extensively exploited as powerful genetic markers for diverse applications due to their high polymorphisms. Their length variations are involved in gene regulation and implicated in numerous genetic diseases even in cancers. Although much effort has been devoted in microsatellite database construction, the existing microsatellite databases still had some drawbacks, such as limited number of species, unfriendly export format, missing marker development, lack of compound microsatellites and absence of gene annotation, which seriously restricted researchers to perform downstream analysis. In order to overcome the above limitations, we developed PSMD (Pan‐Species Microsatellite Database, http://big.cdu.edu.cn/psmd/ ) as a web‐based database to facilitate researchers to easily identify microsatellites, exploit reliable molecular markers and compare microsatellite distribution pattern on genome‐wide scale. In current release, PSMD comprises 678,106,741 perfect microsatellites and 43,848,943 compound microsatellites from 18,408 organisms, which covered almost all species with available genomic data. In addition to interactive browse interface, PSMD also offers a flexible filter function for users to quickly gain desired microsatellites from large data sets. PSMD allows users to export GFF3 formatted file and CSV formatted statistical file for downstream analysis. We also implemented an online tool for analysing occurrence of microsatellites with user‐defined parameters. Furthermore, Primer3 was embedded to help users to design high‐quality primers with customizable settings. To our knowledge, PSMD is the most extensive resource which is likely to be adopted by scientists engaged in biological, medical, environmental and agricultural research.     

Myokine IL-15 regulates the crosstalk of co-cultured porcine skeletal muscle satellite cells and preadipocytes

The present study was carried out to preliminarily reveal the underlying mechanisms of the co-culture system between porcine muscle satellite cells (SCs) and stromal-vascular cells (SVs). The two cell types were co-cultured to assess both proliferation and differentiation. Desmin and Pref-1 immunofluorescence staining technique were taken to identify the two types of isolated cells. The expression of specific marker genes Myogenin was up-regulated in SCs (P < 0.05) and the differentiation of SCs could be promoted when co-cultured with preadipocytes compared with the single-cultured control, while expression of c/EBPβ in SVs was down-regulated (P < 0.05) and the differentiation of preadipocytes could be inhibited. Furthermore, secretion of myokine IL-15 was markedly increased, as well as its gene and protein expression levels in co-culture supernatants. However, the secretion of adipokine leptin was significantly decreased. These findings demonstrate that myokines like IL-15 could facilitate the SCs’ differentiation while inhibit the SVs differentiation, and act as an important regulator of co-culture between muscle cells and adipocytes.     

小麦秆锈抗性遗传及抗性基因研究进展

目前国际上已发现近80个小麦抗秆锈基因,其中45个抗秆锈基因已被正式定名,58个抗秆锈基因已定位在小麦特定染色体上,其中12个基因被标记。本文对小麦抗秆锈病基因抗源、抗秆锈性遗传、分子标记研究现状及存在问题加以综述,并对抗秆锈分子遗传前景进行展望。     

Analysis of variable sites between two complete South China tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis) mitochondrial genomes

In order to investigate the mitochondrial genome of Panthera tigris amoyensis, two South China tigers (P25 and P27) were analyzed following 15 cymt-specific primer sets. The entire mtDNA sequence was found to be 16,957 bp and 17,001 bp long for P25 and P27 respectively, and this difference in length between P25 and P27 occurred in the number of tandem repeats in the RS-3 segment of the control region. The structural characteristics of complete P. t. amoyensis mitochondrial genomes were also highly similar to those of P. uncia. Additionally, the rate of point mutation was only 0.3% and a total of 59 variable sites between P25 and P27 were found. Out of the 59 variable sites, 6 were located in 6 different tRNA genes, 6 in the 2 rRNA genes, 7 in non-coding regions (one located between tRNA-Asn and tRNA-Tyr and six in the D-loop), and 40 in 10 protein-coding genes. COI held the largest amount of variable sites (9 sites) and Cytb contained the highest variable rate (0.7%) in the complete sequences. Moreover, out of the 40 variable sites located in 10 protein-coding genes, 12 sites were nonsynonymous.     

地上部植食者褐飞虱对不同水稻品种土壤线虫群落的影响

地上和地下部生物群落的交互作用对于调控陆地生态过程具有重要作用。在盆栽条件下利用2×2析因设计研究了褐飞虱(Nilaparvata lugens)取食不同水稻品种后对土壤线虫群落的影响。结果表明, 褐飞虱侵害水稻9 d后, 感虫品种(广四和汕优63)的土壤线虫总数、属数及自生线虫(食细菌线虫、食真菌线虫和捕食性线虫)数量增加, 并且一般达到显著水平(P<0.05); 而上述指标在抗虫品种(汕优559和IR36)土壤中则呈现相反的趋势。植食性线虫数量在强感虫品种广四上显著增加(P<0.05), 而在强抗虫品种IR36上显著减少(P<0.05)。褐飞虱和水稻品种对土壤线虫的生态指数(线虫通道指数、Shannon-Wiener指数、成熟度指数、富集指数和结构指数)没有明显影响, 可能与供试土壤线虫群落组成单一及褐飞虱作用时间较短有关。总之, 褐飞虱强烈影响土壤线虫数量、群落组成和营养结构, 并且作用的方向(促进或抑制)和程度依赖于水稻的品种特性, 揭示出地上部植食者的短期侵害将对稻田土壤生态系统的结构和功能产生深远影响。