Shanxi aged vinegar (SAV), one of the famous Chinese vinegars, is produced by multispecies solid-state fermentation in which the acetic acid fermentation stage (AAF) is especially important. However, how bacterial succession and their metabolites change along with the different stages of AAF is still poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the dynamic bacterial succession and flavor formation in three batches of SAV using high-throughput sequencing and metabolomics approaches. It is interesting to find that AAF can be divided into three stages based on its bacterial community succession (early stage, days 0–4; medium stage, days 5–21; and later stage, days 22–26). Pantoea, Pediococcus, Lactococcus and Rhizobium played an important role in the early stage; Lactobacillus was dominant in the medium stage (67.72%); and Acetobacter, Komagataeibacter and Kroppenstedtia were the key bacteria in the later stage. A total of seven organic acids and 42 volatile constituents (esters, alcohol, ketones and aldehydes) were detected during the AAF. Spearman correlation analysis showed a significant correlation between the bacterial community and these flavor metabolites during the AAF of the SAV. This is the first report to explore the relationships between volatile flavor metabolites and bacterial community succession by a three-staged method and provide theoretical support for a flavor formation mechanism in traditional SAV.

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Prior consumer research has studied the impact of anthropomorphism on product perception and evaluation. This research explores how anthropomorphic thinking influences people's experience of emotions and subsequent consumption behavior. Based on research on emotion regulation and the psychological process of detachment, we show that individuals instructed to anthropomorphize sadness (i.e., think of sadness as a person) report less experienced sadness afterward (Studies 1 and 2A). The same result is observed for its opposite, happiness, such that anthropomorphic thinking dilutes happiness (Study 2B). We argue that this reduction of emotion occurs because anthropomorphic thinking increases the perceived distance between the self and the anthropomorphized emotion, thereby creating a feeling of detachment. Evidence for a detachment process is found via measurement (Studies 3 and 4) and a theory-guided moderation, with the effect lessening when sadness is seen as a dependent (vs. independent) person (Study 3). These findings have implications for consumer behavior. When sadness is ameliorated by anthropomorphic thinking, people tend to display better self-control in subsequent consumption, as manifested by a greater likelihood of choosing a healthier or more practical product (Studies 4 and 5).

Full-waveform inversion and reverse time migration rely on an efficient forward-modeling approach. Current 3D large-scale frequency-domain implementations of these techniques mostly extract the desired frequency component from the time-domain wavefields through discrete Fourier transform. However, instead of conducting the time-marching steps for each seismic source, in which the time step is limited by the stability condition, performing the wave modeling directly in the frequency domain using an iterative linear solver may reduce the entire computational complexity. For 2D and 3D frequency-domain elastic wave modeling, a parallel iterative solver based on a conjugate gradient acceleration of the symmetric Kaczmarz row-projection method, named the conjugate-gradient-accelerated component-averaged row projections (CARP-CG) method, shows interesting convergence properties. The parallelization is realized through row-block division and component averaging operations. Convergence is achieved systematically even when different physical factors such as the space-dependent Poisson's ratio, free-surface condition, and seismic attenuation are incorporated in the wave modeling. We determined that the scalability of CARP-CG was satisfactory, especially for large-scale applications, using up to several hundred computational cores. We found a potential improvement in computational complexity compared to timedomain modeling through numerical experiments. Finally, we achieved a convergence at 5 Hz in a 3D heterogeneous model, involving fast-slow-fast layers resembling waveguide geometries, with up to several hundred million unknowns, in fewer than 10 h on fewer than 200 cores. All of these results make CARP-CG a potential candidate of the forward modeling engine for seismic imaging on challenging models.

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Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is a major crop worldwide that meets human economic and nutritional requirements. Potato has several advantages over other crops: easy to cultivate and store, cheap to consume, and rich in a variety of secondary metabolites. In this study, we generated three marker-free transgenic potato lines that expressed the Arabidopsis thaliana flavonol-specific transcriptional activator AtMYB12 driven by the tuber-specific promoter Patatin. Marker-free potato tubers displayed increased amounts of caffeoylquinic acids (CQAs) (3.35-fold increases on average) and flavonols (4.50-fold increase on average). Concentrations of these metabolites were associated with the enhanced expression of genes in the CQA and flavonol biosynthesis pathways. Accumulation of CQAs and flavonols resulted in 2-fold higher antioxidant capacity compared to wild-type potatoes. Tubers from these marker-free transgenic potatoes have therefore improved antioxidant properties.

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