Ginkgo biloba, a famous living fossil, is the sole survivor of the genus Ginkgo. To make inferences about the glacial refugia that harbored G. biloba, we examined the genetic structure of eight potential refugial populations and plantations using chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) with eight size variants in the trnK1-trnK2 fragment. The data consist of haplotypes from 158 trees collected from eight localities. The majority of the cpDNA haplotypes are restricted to minor portions of the geographical range. Our results suggest that refugia of G. biloba were located in southwestern China. This area is a current biodiversity hotspot of global importance, and may have been protected from the extremes of climatic fluctuations during the Pleistocene. The Ginkgos on West Tianmu Mountain, which were previously considered to be wild by many researchers, may, instead, have been introduced by Buddhist monks. Heredity (2005) 94, 396-401.

One Sentence Summary: Chronic stress breaks glucose intolerance cycle to resist diet-induced obesity, through myonectin-mediated inhibition of glycemic response to epinephrine (EPI) and activation of insulin signaling in adipose tissues. GraphicalAbstract Stress AAV+ Sympathetic output HFD 2wk Glucose intolerance 4wk Insulin sensitivity ↓ EPI sensitivity ↑ 3wk Glucose intolerance↑ Insulin sensitivity↑ Insulin sensitivity↑↑ P-Akt Ser473↑ EPI sensitivity↑ Thermogenesis↑ Insulin sensitivity↑ P-Akt Ser473↑ EPI sensitivity↑ Lipolysis↑ Myonectin↑ BAT WAT Improved Glycemic Control Stress diet Improved Metabolic Profile Glucose Intolerance Cycle ? ? Obesity Highlights  EPI sensitivity increases after glucose intolerance and with reduced insulin sensitivity in diet-induced obesity  Chronic stress blunts glycemic responses to EPI and increases myonectin levels in serum and skeletal muscle  Myonectin attenuates glycemic response to EPI and improves metabolic profile in HFD-fed mice  Reducing myonectin reverses beneficial effects of stress on glucose homeostasis AbstractInhibiting glycemic response to HPA axis contributes to glycemic control for diabetic patients.Here, mice were subjected to high-fat diet and intermittent chronic stress, and glucose homeostasis and lipolysis were determined during the intervention. Firstly, we found that glucose intolerance appears at the earliest, followed by reduced insulin sensitivity and increased epinephrine (EPI) sensitivity in the early stage of diet-induced obesity. Next we investigated whether chronic stress impairs glycemic control and which mediates its effects. Short-term stress training raises serum and skeletal muscle myonectin (Myn) levels and improves glucose intolerance. Stress attenuates blood glucose and glycerol responses to EPI, but enhances lipolytic response to EPI in adipose tissues. Myn overexpression in vivo improves glucose tolerance and enhances insulin sensitivity at the cost of blunting glycemic responses to EPI. Myn knockdown reduces beneficial effects of stress or exercise on glucose homeostasis. Together, myonectin is a stress-induced myokine that readjusts glycemic and metabolic responses to HPA axis, and thus prevent the progression of glucose intolerance and obesity. Clin Endocrinol Metab 92(7): JS, Samuel VT (2014) Targeting steroid receptor coactivator 1 with antisense oligonucleotides increases insulin-stimulated skeletal muscle glucose uptake in chow-fed and high-fat-fed male rats. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab 307(9): E773-E783 Chuang JC, Krishnan V, Yu HG, Mason B, Cui H, Wilkinson MB, Zigman JM, Elmquist JK, Nestler EJ, Lutter M (2010) A beta3-adrenergic-leptin-melanocortin circuit regulates behavioral and metabolic changes induced by chronic stress. Biol Psychiatry 67(11): 1075-1082 Covington JD, Tam CS, Bajpeyi S, Galgani JE, Noland RC, Smith SR, Redman LM, Ravussin E (2016) Myokine Expression in Muscle and Myotubes in Response to Exercise Stimulation. Med Sci Sports Exerc 48(3): 384-390 Crunkhorn S (2018) Metabolic disease: Safely mimicking c...

SiO2 mesoporous molecular sieve SBA-15 with the incorporation of erbium ions is studied as a novel type of nanoscopic composite photoluminescent material in this paper. To enhance the photoluminescence efficiency, two schemes have been used for the incorporation of Er3+ where (1) Er3+ is ligated with bis-(perfluoromethylsulfonyl)-aminate (PMS) forming Er(PMS)x-SBA-15 and (2) Yb3+ is codoped with Er3+ forming Yb-Er-SBA-15. As high as 11.17 × 10−21cm2 of fluorescent cross section at 1534 nm and 88 nm of “effective bandwidth” have been gained. It is a 29.3% boost in fluorescent cross section compared to what has been obtained in conventional silica. The upconversion coefficient in Yb-Er-SBA-15 is relatively small compared to that in other ordinary glass hosts. The increased fluorescent cross section and lowered upconversion coefficient could benefit for the high-gain optical amplifier. Finally, the Judd–Ofelt theory has also been used for the analyses of the optical spectra of Er(PMS)x-SBA-15.

Endowing dialogue agents with personas is the key to delivering more human-like conversations. However, existing persona-grounded dialogue systems still lack informative details of human conversations and tend to reply with inconsistent and generic responses. One of the main underlying causes is that pre-defined persona sentences are generally short and merely superficial descriptions of personal attributes, making appropriate persona selection and understanding non-trivial. Another challenge is that it is crucial to consider the context and the conversation flow to dynamically determine when to invoke different types of persona signals. To address these problems, we propose a disentangled-attention based pre-training architecture, which incorporates persona-aware prompt learning to bridge the connection between the selected persona and response generation. Our model first exploits the conversation flow to select context-relevant personas, and subsequently enriches the superficial persona descriptions with extra personality traits through persona-aware prompting. Finally, the decoder leverages a disentangled-attention mechanism to flexibly control the reliance on personas and dialogue contexts, and incorporates A*-like keyword-based heuristic estimates for controllable generation. Extensive experiments show that our approach can outperform strong baselines and deliver more consistent and engaging responses on the PERSONA-CHAT dataset.