Drought is a major constraint for rice production in the rainfed lowlands in China. Silicon (Si) has been verified to play an important role in enhancing plant resistance to environmental stress. Two near-isogenic lines of rice (Oryza sativa L.), w-14 (drought susceptible) and w-20 (drought resistant), were selected to study the effects of exogenous Si application on the physiological traits and nutritional status of rice under drought stress. In wet conditions, Si supply had no effects on growth and physiological parameters of rice plants. Drought stress was found to reduce dry weight, root traits, water potential, photosynthetic parameters, basal quantum yield (F(v)/F(0)), and maximum quantum efficiency of PSII photochemistry (F(v)/F(m)) in rice plants, while Si application significantly increased photosynthetic rate (Pr), transpiration rate (Tr), F(v)/F(0), and F(v)/F(m) of rice plants under drought stress. In addition, water stress increased K, Na, Ca, Mg, Fe content of rice plants, but Si treatment significantly reduced these nutrient level. These results suggested that silicon application was useful to increase drought resistance of rice through the enhancement of photochemical efficiency and adjustment of the mineral nutrient absorption in rice plants.

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Silicon is the second most abundant mineral element in soil, it has important role in alleviating various environmental stresses and enhancing plant resistance against pathogen, but the exact mechanism by which Si mediates pathogen resistance remains unclear. One of the resistance mechanisms is related to silicon deposition in leaf that acts as a physical barrier to hinder pathogen penetration. But more evidence show that silicon can induce defense responses that are functionally similar to systemic acquired resistance, Si-treated plants can significantly increase antioxidant enzyme activities and the production of antifungal compounds such as phenolic metabolism product, phytoalexins and pathogenesis-related proteins etc. Molecular and biochemical detections show that Si can activate the expression of defense-related genes and may play important role in the transduction of plant stress signal such as salicylic acid, jasmonic acid and ethylene.

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Polycyclic tetramate macrolactams (PoTeMs) are a growing class of natural products with distinct structure and diverse biological activities. By promoter engineering and heterologous expression of the cryptic cbm gene cluster, four new PoTeMs, combamides A-E (1-4), were identified. Additionally, two new derivatives, combamides E (5) and F (6), were generated via combinatorial biosynthesis. Together, our findings provide a sound base for expanding the structure diversities of PoTeMs through genome mining and combinatorial biosynthesis.

Forecasting and preventing urban noise pollution are major challenges in urban environmental management. Most existing efforts, including experiment-based models, statistical models, and noise mapping, however, have limited capacity to explain the association between urban growth and corresponding noise change. Therefore, these conventional methods can hardly forecast urban noise at a given outlook of development layout. This paper, for the first time, introduces a land use regression method, which has been applied for simulating urban air quality for a decade, to construct an urban noise model (LUNOS) in Dalian Municipality, Northwest China. The LUNOS model describes noise as a dependent variable of surrounding various land areas via a regressive function. The results suggest that a linear model performs better in fitting monitoring data, and there is no significant difference of the LUNOS's outputs when applied to different spatial scales. As the LUNOS facilitates a better understanding of the association between land use and urban environmental noise in comparison to conventional methods, it can be regarded as a promising tool for noise prediction for planning purposes and aid smart decision-making.