The beetle Octodonta nipae (Maulik) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) is a serious invasive insect pest of palm plants in southern China, and the endoparasitoid Tetrastichus brontispae Ferrière (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) is a natural enemy of this pest that exhibits great ability in the biocontrol of O. nipae. For successful parasitism, endoparasitoids often introduce or secrete various virulence factors to suppress host immunity. To investigate the effects of parasitization by T. brontispae on the O. nipae immune system, the transcriptome of O. nipae pupae was analyzed with a focus on immune-related genes through Illumina sequencing. De novo assembly generated 49,919 unigenes with a mean length of 598 bp. Of these genes, 27,490 unigenes (55.1% of all unigenes) exhibited clear homology to known genes in the NCBI nr database. Parasitization had significant effects on the transcriptome profile of O. nipae pupae, and most of these differentially expressed genes were down-regulated. Importantly, the expression profiles of immune-related genes were significantly regulated after parasitization. Taken together, these transcriptome sequencing efforts shed valuable light on the host (O. nipae) manipulation mechanisms induced by T. brontispae, which will pave the way for the development of novel immune defense-based management strategies of O. nipae, and provide a springboard for further molecular analyses, particularly of O. nipae invasion.

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Objective— Myocardial injury during cardiac surgery is a major cause of perioperative morbidity and mortality. We determined whether perioperative statin therapy is cardioprotective in patients undergoing noncoronary artery cardiac surgery and the potential mechanisms. Methods and Results— One hundred fifty-one patients undergoing noncoronary artery cardiac surgery were randomly assigned to either a statin group (n=77) or a control group (n=74). Simvastatin (20 mg) was administered preoperatively and postoperatively. Plasma were analyzed for troponin T, isoenzyme of creatine kinase, C-reaction protein, interleukin-6, interleukin-8, creatinine, and blood urea nitrogen. Cardiac echocardiography was performed. Endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), Akt, p38, heat shock protein 90, caveolin-1, and nitric oxide (NO) in the heart were detected. Simvastatin significantly reduced plasma troponin T, isoenzyme of creatine kinase, C-reaction protein, blood urea nitrogen , creatinine, interleukin-6, interleukin-8, and the requirement of inotropic postoperatively. Simvastatin increased NO production, the expression of eNOS and phosphorylation at serine1177, phosphorylation of Akt, expression of heat shock protein 90, heat shock protein 90 association with eNOS and decreased eNOS phosphorylation at threonine 495, phosphorylation of p38, and expression of caveolin-1. Simvastatin also improved cardiac function postoperatively. Conclusion— Perioperative statin therapy can improve cardiac function and renal function by reducing myocardial injury and inflammatory response through activating Akt-eNOS and attenuating p38 signaling pathways in patients undergoing noncoronary artery cardiac surgery. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov . Unique identifier: NCT01178710.

The diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella, has developed extremely high levels of resistance to chlorantraniliprole and other classes of insecticides in the field. As microRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in various biological processes through gene regulation, we examined the miRNA profile of P. xylostella in response to chlorantraniliprole exposure. RNA sequencing analysis showed that insecticide treatment caused significant changes in the abundance of some miRNAs. Increasing exposure time and insecticide concentration induced more dysregulated miRNAs in P. xylostella larvae. We also screened potential target genes for some of the differentially expressed miRNAs (such as miR-2b-3p, miR-14b-5p and let-7-5p), which may play important roles in insecticide resistance development. Exposure of P. xylostella larvae to chlorantraniliprole caused considerable overexpression in the transcript levels of potential target genes cytochrome P450 9f2 (CYP9F2) and 307a1 (CYP307a1). Application of miR-2b-3p and miR-14b-5p mimics significantly suppressed the relative transcript levels of CYP9F2 and CYP307a1, respectively, in a P. xylostella cell line. Furthermore, enrichment of P. xylostella diet with miR-2b-3p mimics significantly increased mortality in deltamethrin-resistant larvae when exposed to deltamethrin. The results suggest that miR-2b-3p may suppress CYP9F2 transcript levels in P. xylostella and consequently inhibit larval detoxification pathways. The findings provide an insight into possible role of miRNAs in regulation of metabolic resistance of insects to insecticides.

The authors have withdrawn their manuscript whilst they perform additional experiments to test some of their conclusions further. Therefore, the authors do not wish this work to be cited as reference for the project. If you have any questions, please contact the corresponding author.

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The ability to recognize emotions in conversations is necessary and important for the online chatbot to do tasks such as empathetic response generation and emotional support. Present researches mainly focus on recognizing emotions through a speaker's utterance, while research on emotion inference predicts emotions of addressees through previous utterances. Because of the lack of the addressee's utterance, emotion inference is more challenging than emotion recognition. In this paper, we propose a global-local modeling method based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) and pre-trained language models (PLM) to do emotion inference, which utilizes the sequence modeling ability of RNNs and abundant knowledge from PLMs. Moreover, we take the whole dialogue history as input of PLM to generate knowledge by in-context learning. Experimental results show that our model with knowledge enhancement achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets. 1

There are at least two alternative splices of PxRyR expressed in all developmental stages and tissues in P. xylostella at various levels. The results provided the basis for further understanding of the mechanisms of resistance to diamide insecticides in P. xylostella.