Search Results (1,467)

Simulation of a human neurological disease on an animal model has the advantage of allowing control and manipulation of most of the regulating factors and producing real biological replicas while, beyond several common traits, every human is dynamic and unique. Moreover, one can explore novel therapeutic strategies on animals before asking permission to apply them to humans. Nevertheless, experimental outcomes depend on species, strain, sex, age, hormonal status, diet, exposure to hypoxia, toxins, radiation, external stimuli, stress, and housing conditions. Further complications stem from tissue hetero-cellularity, technological constraints, computational complexity and difficulties integrating the experimental results into a coherent biological picture. Moreover, most diseases are multi-factorial and associated with altered structure and/or expression of several genes. A major problem with genetically engineered animals is that together with the targeted gene(s), numerous other genes are mutated and/or regulated, owing to their interlinkage in functional pathways. This experience-based methodological commentary presents the challenges, relevance and limitations of the mouse, rat and rabbit models we used to decipher the transcriptomic alterations associated with several neurological disorders. Links to publicly accessible databases presenting experimental protocols and expression profiles are provided for readers interested in reanalyzing our data and comparing them with others’ results. Full article

Continuous, non-invasive fish monitoring supports aquatic animal management, biodiversity assessment, and sustainable aquaculture, but embedded deployment requires a careful balance among accuracy, speed, memory, and computation under visually degraded underwater conditions. We developed ULFD-YOLO, an ultra-lightweight detector derived from YOLOv11n through coordinated redesign of the backbone, neck, and detection head. The model combines a custom convolutional MobileNetV4-tiny backbone, a hypergraph-based multi-scale fusion neck, and a lightweight MBConv head with channel attention. Experiments were conducted on Fish-BJ, an in-house dataset of 3402 images covering 21 species-informed aquarium-fish detection categories, and on a deliberately difficult 1180-image WildFish subset after dataset-specific training. On Fish-BJ, ULFD-YOLO achieved 0.960 mAP@0.5 and 0.732 mAP@0.5:0.95 with 1.3 M parameters, 2.6 GFLOPs, and a 3.0 MB model file, reducing parameters and computation by 50.0% and 58.7% relative to YOLOv11n. Bootstrap resampling yielded 95% confidence intervals of 0.946–0.973 and 0.638–0.821 for the two metrics, respectively. The model achieved 0.803 mAP@0.5 on WildFish and 19–24 FPS at 448 × 640 on a Jetson Orin Nano under its 15 W nvpmodel power mode. These results establish a practical accuracy–efficiency trade-off for embedded fish monitoring rather than peak localization accuracy. Full article

The development of plant-based functional beverages is often limited by inherent matrix defects, particularly undesirable off-flavors, astringency, and colloidal instability. Water kefir (WK), a highly resilient multispecies symbiotic consortium, offers a robust biorefining platform to address these challenges. This review systematically elucidates the underlying micro-ecological logic and biochemical mechanisms of WK-mediated plant matrix remodeling. We first detail how spatial niche differentiation and cross-feeding networks among lactic acid bacteria, yeasts, and acetic acid bacteria drive ecological homeostasis. Next, we highlight core molecular events that elevate sensory quality: protein unfolding for off-flavor elimination, enzymatic depolymerization of phenolics to mitigate astringency, and exopolysaccharide synthesis for rheological and flavor diffusion control. Finally, to overcome industrial scale-up challenges, we outline a precision fermentation framework, integrating systems multi-omics, real-time biomimetic monitoring, and sensory topological modeling. Ultimately, this synthesis provides theoretical guidance for the reverse flavor engineering and targeted nutritional design of novel plant-based beverages. Full article

Urbanization and agricultural expansion have led to widespread habitat loss and fragmentation, profoundly altering avian community structure. To understand how different habitat types shape bird diversity and assembly rules, we investigated bird communities across four major habitats (farmland, forest, urban, and wetland) in Henan province. Our results showed that wetland habitats supported the highest species richness, while forest habitats exhibited the highest Shannon–Wiener diversity and evenness. Rarefaction curves indicated that wetland and forest communities harbored the greatest species diversity even with increased sampling effort, while farmland communities showed early saturation. Venn diagram analysis revealed that 30.0% of species were unique to wetlands, 25.0% to forests, 8.3% to urban areas, and only 5.0% to farmland, with limited species overlap across habitats. Rank-abundance distribution (RAD) models varied significantly by habitat: the lognormal distribution best described farmland communities, preemption fit forest and wetland communities, and the Mandelbrot distribution best fit urban communities. Indicator species analysis identified Spilopelia chinensis as a significant indicator for farmland habitats (Indicator Value = 0.938, p < 0.01), reflecting its strong association with open agricultural landscapes. NMDS ordination (Stress = 0.152) showed partial overlap in community composition across habitats, while redundancy analysis (RDA) revealed that longitude (15.3% variance explained), latitude, altitude, and temperature collectively shaped bird community structure. These findings highlight that habitat type is a key driver of avian diversity and community assembly, with forests and wetlands serving as critical refuges for diverse bird communities. Urban and farmland habitats, while supporting lower diversity, host specialized species adapted to human-altered conditions. Our study emphasizes the need for multi-habitat conservation strategies to maintain avian biodiversity in fragmented landscapes. Full article

Fine-grained poisonous mushroom recognition in natural scenes is challenging because of complex backgrounds, subtle morphological differences, and the limited interpretability of model decisions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Att-FiLM, an attention-enhanced multi-scale Feature-Wise Linear Modulation network for poisonous mushroom image recognition. The model adopts an asymmetric dual-backbone architecture in which a frozen ConvNeXt-Base branch provides global semantic priors, while a trainable EfficientNet-B0 branch learns local discriminative features. Rather than directly concatenating heterogeneous features, Att-FiLM generates scale and shift parameters from semantic features and performs channel-wise modulation on multi-scale EfficientNet features at Stage 2 and Stage 4. This mechanism enables global semantic information to guide local feature learning while reducing feature redundancy and semantic inconsistency. Experimental results show that Att-FiLM achieves an Accuracy of 95.58% and an F1-score of 0.9455 on the poisonous/edible binary classification task. On the 190-class species-level classification task, it achieves a Top-1 Accuracy of 93.63% and a Macro-F1 of 0.9347. Interpretability analysis further shows that decision-relevant responses are frequently associated with morphologically relevant regions, including gills, annuli, volvae, and cap textures. These results indicate that Att-FiLM provides effective recognition performance together with interpretable decision evidence for mushroom recognition in complex natural scenes. Full article

Accurate estimation of pasture biomass components from imagery is essential for sustainable grazing management and precision agriculture. Conventional methods such as destructive harvesting, rising plate meters, and remote sensing are limited by scalability, reliability, or the ability to disaggregate biomass by species. We propose a parameter-efficient multi-output regression framework predicting five biomass components (dry green, dry dead, dry clover, green dry matter, and total dry biomass) from high-resolution top-view pasture images. It employs a pretrained DINOv3 Vision Transformer backbone adapted via a dynamic, depth-aware Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) strategy, in which the adaptation rank and scaling factor increase exponentially with layer depth: early layers encoding generic visual primitives are minimally perturbed, while deeper layers receive stronger task-specific adaptation. This schedule is effective in low-data regimes, where uniform adaptation or full fine-tuning overfits. To handle rectangular image geometry, each image is split into two square halves processed as a dual-view stream with a contrastive alignment loss. The system ensembles ViT-Large and ViT-Huge backbones with test-time augmentation across five-fold cross-validation. On the CSIRO Image2Biomass benchmark, the full pipeline attains a cross-validated weighted R-squared of 0.81, indicating that depth-aware, parameter-efficient adaptation of large vision models is effective for non-invasive biomass estimation under data scarcity. Full article

Cryptomeria japonica var. sinensis Miquel (Chinese cedar) is an ecologically and economically vital evergreen conifer endemic to China. Renowned for its rapid growth and superior timber quality, the species has evolved from a traditional forestry resource into a multifaceted model species for phytochemistry and biotechnology. This review synthesizes recent advancements in its biology, chemical profiling, industrial utilization, and molecular breeding. Taxonomically and morphologically distinct from the Japanese variety, Chinese cedar exhibits robust physiological plasticity and complex transcriptomic responses to abiotic stresses. Phytochemically, the tree is a prolific reservoir of volatile essential oils, complex terpenoids, and flavonoids. These bioactive secondary metabolites demonstrate potent antimicrobial, antioxidant, and neuroprotective properties, driving broad applications in modern pharmacology and sustainable agrochemicals. Industrially, the timber is increasingly utilized in the fabrication of advanced engineered structural composites and circular bioenergy production. Concurrently, breakthrough biotechnological platforms including a chromosome-level reference genome assembly, multi-omics, somatic embryogenesis, and CRISPR/Cas9-mediated genome editing have advanced molecular breeding, accelerating the targeted development of climate-resilient and non-pollen-producing (hypoallergenic) elite cultivars. However, as global climate change and historical habitat fragmentation severely threaten ancient wild populations, this review advocates for integrated in situ and ex situ conservation strategies. By identifying critical research gaps in translational pharmacology, precision gene editing, and comparative genomics, this review provides a comprehensive foundation for understanding the biology, phytochemistry, biotechnology, and utilization of this invaluable botanical resource, offering a strategic roadmap for its sustainable management and commercial valorization. Full article

Stenotrophomonas maltophilia is increasingly recognized as a difficult-to-treat healthcare-associated opportunistic pathogen, particularly in critically ill and immunocompromised patients, in whom it causes severe respiratory, bloodstream, and device-associated infections. Its intrinsic resistance to multiple antimicrobial classes, capacity to acquire additional resistance determinants, and ability to establish persistent biofilms substantially limit therapeutic options. This review integrates current knowledge of the structural basis, regulatory circuitry, and ecological interactions governing S. maltophilia biofilm development and examines how these processes converge with antimicrobial resistance. Biofilm formation is driven by coordinated adhesion and motility, extracellular matrix production, quorum sensing, cyclic di-GMP signaling, two-component regulatory systems, and adaptive responses to iron limitation and oxidative stress. Multidrug efflux systems contribute not only to antibiotic extrusion but also to membrane homeostasis, motility, stress adaptation, and biofilm-associated phenotypes, thereby providing a functional link between antimicrobial resistance and bacterial persistence. In polymicrobial communities, interspecies signaling and competitive or cooperative interactions further reshape biofilm architecture and antimicrobial tolerance. Collectively, current evidence indicates that S. maltophilia biofilm formation arises from interconnected regulatory networks rather than isolated molecular determinants. Targeting matrix assembly, signaling pathways, stress adaptation, or resistance-associated physiology may therefore complement conventional antimicrobial therapy. Future studies should prioritize clinically representative isolates, physiologically relevant multispecies models, and in vivo validation to translate mechanistic insights into effective anti-biofilm interventions. Full article

Parturient paresis remains a major economic challenge in global ruminant production, causing acute periparturient hypocalcemia and predisposing high-yielding animals to a cluster of secondary pathologies. Traditional narratives often treat regulatory pathways in isolation, whereas this review synthesizes multi-organ endocrine networks to address the kinetic dyssynchrony between mammary calcium drain and homeostatic recruitment velocity. Beyond the classical parathyroid hormone–vitamin D axis, we integrate the mammary–gut–bone axis into a unified endocrine model, highlighting the critical role of the serotonin–parathyroid hormone-related protein rheostat for skeletal mineral mobilization and the fibroblast growth factor 23–Klotho axis in prepartum phosphorus-induced feedback suppression. We evaluate the molecular mechanisms underlying target-organ receptor resistance, driven by vitamin D receptor downregulation and epigenetic aging, which precipitate homeostatic feedback failure. Regarding clinical management, this synthesis contrasts reactive parenteral interventions with proactive nutritional priming strategies, such as negative dietary cation–anion difference acidification, zeolite-based gastrointestinal binders, and exogenous vitamin D or 5-hydroxytryptophan supplementation. Additionally, the role of microbiota-derived short-chain fatty acids in gut-bone communication and the potential of genomic selection to breed livestock with heritable metabolic resilience are explored. Ultimately, this comprehensive framework emphasizes a paradigm shift from emergency treatment to precision nutritional and genetic prophylaxis to mitigate PP across diverse ruminant species. Full article

The gut microbiota is a metabolically active ecosystem that influences host physiology through bioactive metabolites and interactions with host signaling pathways. Recent research has established a bidirectional gut–muscle axis in which microbial metabolites and muscle-derived factors (myokines) regulate muscle protein synthesis, degradation, regeneration, fiber-type specification, and overall muscle performance. Studies using germ-free, antibiotic-treated, probiotic-supplemented, and fecal microbiota transplantation models demonstrate that the gut microbiota is a critical determinant of skeletal muscle mass and function. Key mediators include short-chain fatty acids, bile acids, aromatic amino acid metabolites, microbial-associated molecular patterns, and methylamine metabolites. This review summarizes current mechanistic knowledge of gut–muscle communication and its relevance to livestock production. In monogastric livestock, particularly pigs and poultry, microbiota transplantation experiments and targeted probiotic interventions provide causal evidence that gut microbial communities influence muscle growth, muscle fiber composition, intramuscular fat deposition, carcass traits, and meat quality, including tenderness, marbling, water-holding capacity, and flavor. Several studies have also identified specific microbial taxa and metabolites capable of transferring desirable production phenotypes. In contrast, evidence in ruminants remains largely associative and originates mainly from multi-omics and dietary intervention studies. Future research should validate causal mechanisms, identify robust microbial biomarkers, and develop species-specific microbiome-based strategies for precision livestock production. Full article

Calligonum polygonoides is a rare desert shrub that is of high ecological importance in Egypt, yet its habitat requirements and physiological responses to environmental variability remain poorly understood, particularly under increasing climatic and anthropogenic pressures. To address this knowledge gap, this study integrates GIS-based habitat suitability modeling with hyperspectral leaf spectroscopy to evaluate the environmental factors associated with species distribution and leaf optical responses across two ecologically contrasting wadis (Wadi El-Galala and Wadi El-Assiuty). Environmental layers (DEM, EC, TSS, pH, temperature, rainfall, humidity, evaporation) were integrated using a multi-criteria evaluation framework, while plant cover, density, and spectral measurements were collected from 14 field plots. The results show that C. polygonoides favors moderately elevated zones characterized by low salinity, slightly alkaline soils, and intermediate climatic conditions. Approximately 24.3% of the landscape was classified as highly suitable, primarily along channel belts and alluvial fans with improved drainage and reduced salt accumulation. Spectral signatures showed descriptive differences between the two wadis. Plants from Wadi El-Galala showed relatively higher NIR reflectance and more pronounced SWIR water-absorption features compared with Wadi El-Assiuty, which may reflect differences in leaf structure and water status under contrasting habitat conditions. These spectral patterns were broadly consistent with the spatial suitability outputs and provide complementary descriptive information on leaf optical properties. Habitat suitability modeling showed that 91.7% of the recorded field occurrence points (33 out of 36 shrubs) were located within high-suitability zones, while no occurrences were recorded in low-suitability areas. This pattern indicates spatial agreement between observed occurrences and predicted suitability classes, but it should not be interpreted as formal model validation because absence data and independent validation records were not available. Overall, the findings provide preliminary spatial and spectral information that may support future field verification and site-specific conservation planning for C. polygonoides in the investigated wadis. Full article

The Scaly-sided Merganser (Mergus squamatus) is an endangered duck endemic to East Asia. It usually gathers in single-species flocks through winter. Existing field records focus almost entirely on southern winter flocks. No prior work has described lone individuals spending winter in northern China. We conducted standardized three-year winter surveys (2019–2022) across five isolated ice-free river patches along the Taizi River, Liaoning Province, northern China, to document habitat use and flocking behavior of one solitary male. Despite the availability of five discrete overwintering sites, the focal bird only occupied two patches characterized by dense riparian concealment and low human disturbance, avoiding open, highly disturbed sites. Resource Selection Function (RSF) modeling indicated habitat attributes (concealment and human disturbance) strongly predicted site use (AICc weight = 0.79), whereas the abundance of heterospecific flocking partners (Common Mergansers Mergus merganser) exerted negligible influence (AICc weight < 0.01). This solitary male associated only with Common Mergansers, the species with the closest phylogenetic relatedness (mitochondrial genetic distance = 0.04365), and never aggregated with other sympatric waterbirds. Model comparison confirmed phylogenetic relatedness outperformed dietary similarity as a predictor of heterospecific flocking (AICc weight = 0.76). Our three-year observations of this single individual demonstrate that, when conspecifics are absent and suitable winter habitat is limited, this male prioritized high-quality, low-disturbance ice-free patches over social aggregation opportunities, and selectively formed mixed flocks with its closest phylogenetic congener. This multi-year case study provides rare empirical baseline data for understanding winter behavioral trade-offs of endangered cavity-nesting waterfowl under severe frozen river conditions, though all conclusions herein apply only to this focal male and cannot be generalized to the entire species. Full article

Bamboo shoot development influences subsequent culm architecture and material properties, but the biological relevance of GWAS-derived candidates remains unclear. A stepwise candidate-prioritization strategy integrated 99 previously reported property-associated candidates with large-scale moso bamboo transcriptome screening, multi-species bamboo shoot transcriptome–metabolome data, and qRT-PCR analysis. The candidates were classified into three functional layers: environmental adaptation/stress signaling, carbohydrate metabolism/carbon allocation, and cell wall biosynthesis/remodeling. A rule-based ranking that balanced candidate representation across the three functional categories retained 44 genes for transcriptomic evaluation, of which 30 showed strong or moderate expression support across 90 comparisons. Cell wall biosynthesis/remodeling genes exhibited the broadest transcriptional responses, whereas carbohydrate- and regulatory-related genes provided complementary metabolic and upstream evidence. Correlation analysis across 24 matched shoot variables and 5059 metabolites prioritized PH02Gene17228, PH02Gene00247, and PH02Gene51360, which were associated with amino acid/nitrogen metabolism, hormone/signaling-like metabolites, and organic acid/central carbon metabolism, respectively. qRT-PCR analysis independently supported their expression patterns in developing bamboo shoots. These results support a working model in which regulatory signaling, carbon allocation, and cell wall remodeling jointly contribute to bamboo property-related variation. The prioritized genes provide targets for functional validation and may inform future marker development and molecular breeding aimed at improving bamboo culm quality and material properties. Full article

The stable production of crops such as corn, wheat, soybeans, and canola is increasingly threatened by widespread pest infestations. Conventional manual pest surveys are hampered by low operational efficiency, subjective assessment bias, and delayed feedback, thereby impeding their ability to satisfy the demands of precision agriculture. To address these challenges, we proposes an intelligent pest detection framework based on EfficientNet and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) for fast and accurate field pest identification. EfficientNet is adopted as the lightweight attention-embedded backbone to extract hierarchical features, and multi-scale detection plus hierarchical FPN fusion are integrated to improve recognition performance for tiny, inconspicuous pests. The experimental results on 37 common pest species in field crops showed that the proposed model achieves a mean average precision at Intersection-over-Union (IoU) threshold 0.5 (mAP@0.5) of 98.89%, 1.57% average recognition error rate, and with an average inference time of merely 0.048 s per image, balancing outstanding detection accuracy and real-time performance. Furthermore, this approach delivers a lightweight, reliable, and automated monitoring solution for field pest surveillance, thereby facilitating data-driven, precise pest management and advancing the practice of sustainable, green precision agriculture. Full article

Although rice paddies are agricultural land, they also serve as artificial wetlands that deliver essential ecosystem services. Yet how farming systems affect their fish communities—and which metrics best capture those effects—remains poorly quantified in Asia. We compared fish assemblages between eco-friendly and conventional rice paddies in South Korea across the 2015 rice growing season (May–September), sampling 94 events by fyke net in Dangjin City (2704 individuals; 13 species) and analyzing the data with generalized linear mixed models and multivariate methods. Eco-friendly paddies supported 2.3-fold higher abundance and 2.6-fold higher biomass; differences were negligible in May (Cohen’s d ≈ 0) but large from June onward (d > 1.0), with a moderate-to-large pooled effect (d = 0.76–0.89). Community composition differed significantly (PERMANOVA), and eco-friendly assemblages were more consistent among fields (PERMDISP). Carassius auratus and Misgurnus anguillicaudatus were 10.8- and 2.7-fold more abundant under eco-friendly management, whereas α-diversity indices (richness, Shannon, Simpson, evenness) showed no differences, as three taxa comprised over 90% of the catch. In these species-poor, dominance-skewed systems, abundance-based and species-specific metrics detected management effects more sensitively than α-diversity indices, complementing rather than replacing them. Because these results derive from a single growing season in one region, however, they should be regarded as specific to comparable systems and require multi-year, multi-region validation before their use in biomonitoring and eco-friendly agricultural policy can be generalized. Full article