Work-family conflict and withdrawal behavior among mainland China's IT employees: the mediating role of emotional exhaustion and moderating role of job autonomy.

Since the turn of the millennium, the information technology (IT) industry has been growing rapidly in mainland China. One of the significant characteristics of IT employees in mainland China during the past decades was that they tended to work more overtime, which might result in more work-family conflicts and higher turnover rates. Our study tested the mechanism of work-family conflict and work withdrawal behaviors using data from 389 IT employees in mainland China. Using the job demands-resources model and the conservation of resources theory, we examined the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion and the moderating effect of job autonomy. The results indicated that work-to-family conflict was negatively related with work withdrawal behaviors, whereas family-to-work conflict was positively related with work withdrawal behaviors. Moreover, we found the opposite moderating role of job autonomy, which enhanced the relationships between emotional exhaustion and work withdrawal behaviors. That is, the relationship was stronger among employees with higher job autonomy than among those with lower job autonomy. These findings indicate that work-family conflict relates to employees' psychological well-being and behavior, and that job autonomy might play a special role between work-family conflict and work withdrawal behaviors.

Metabolic and Evolutionary Engineering of Diploid Yeast for the Production of First- and Second-Generation Ethanol.

Despite a growing preference for second-generation (2G) ethanol in industries, its application is severely restricted owing to a major obstacle of developing a suitable yeast strain for fermentation using feedstock biomasses. In this study, a yeast strain, Saccharomyces cerevisiae A31Z, for 2G bioethanol production was developed from an industrial strain, Angel, using metabolic engineering by the incorporation of gene clusters involved in the xylose metabolism combined with adaptive evolution for evolving its anti-inhibitory properties. This strain outcompeted its ancestors in xylose utilization and subsequent ethanol production and manifested higher tolerance against common inhibitors from lignocellulosic hydrolysates, and also it lowered the production of glycerol by-product. Furthermore, A31Z outperformed in ethanol production using industrial hydrolysate from dried distillers grains with solubles and whole corn. Overall, this study provided a promising path for improving 2G bioethanol production in industries using S. cerevisiae.

A comparative analysis of RNA sequencing methods with ribosome RNA depletion for degraded and low-input total RNA from formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded samples.

BACKGROUND: Formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) blocks held in clinical laboratories are an invaluable resource for clinical research, especially in the era of personalized medicine. It is important to accurately quantitate gene expression with degraded and small amounts of total RNA from FFPE materials. RESULTS: High concordance in transcript quantifications were shown between FF and FFPE samples using the same kit. The gene expression using the TaKaRa kit showed a difference with other kits, which may be due to the different principle of rRNA depletion or the amount of input total RNA. For seriously degraded RNA from FFPE samples, libraries could be constructed with as low as 50 ng of total RNA, although there was residual rRNA in the libraries. Data analysis with HISAT demonstrated that the unique mapping ratio, percentage of exons in unique mapping reads and number of detected genes decreased along with the decreasing quality of input RNA. CONCLUSIONS: The method of RNA library construction with rRNA depletion can be used for clinical FFPE samples. For degraded and low-input RNA samples, it is still possible to obtain repeatable RNA expression profiling but with a low unique mapping ratio and high residual rRNA.

In-Depth Two-Stage Transcriptional Reprogramming and Evolutionary Engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for Efficient Bioethanol Production from Xylose with Acetate.

In order to achieve rapid xylose utilization in the presence of acetate, improved yeast strains were engineered for higher bioethanol production. First, a six-gene cluster, including XYL1/XYL2/XKS1/TAL1/PYK1/MGT05196, was generated by using an in-depth two-stage (glucose and xylose) transcription reprogramming strategy in an evolutionary adapted strain of CE7, resulting in two improved engineered strains WXY46 and WXY53. Through a combined screening of xylose and glucose stage-specific promoters between tricarboxylic acid (TCA)/HSP and constitutive types, respectively, WXY46 with the constitutive promoters showed a much higher ethanol yield than that of WXY53 with the TCA/HSP promoters. Second, an optimized strain WXY74 was obtained by using more copies of a six-gene cluster, which resulted in a higher ethanol yield of 0.500 g/g total sugars with acetate conditions. At last, simultaneous saccharification and co-fermentation were performed by using the evolved WXY74 strain, which produced 58.4 g/L of ethanol from wheat straw waste and outperformed previous haploid XR-XDH strains.

Prognostic significance of NFIA and NFIB in esophageal squamous carcinoma and esophagogastric junction adenocarcinoma.

The nuclear factor I (NFI) family members, especially NFIA and NFIB, play essential roles in cancers. The roles of NFIA and NFIB in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and esophagogastric junction adenocarcinoma (EJA) remain poorly known. This study aimed to determine the expression of NFIA and NFIB in ESCC and EJA and elucidate their prognostic significance. The expression of NFIA and NFIB was examined in 163 ESCC samples and 26 EJA samples by immunohistochemistry. The results showed that high NFIA expression correlated significantly with poor differentiation, lymph node metastasis, and advanced TNM stage in patients with ESCC. High NFIB expression only correlated with poor differentiation in patients with ESCC. Survival analysis showed that NFIA but not NFIB associated with short overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) of patients with ESCC. On the other hand, high NFIB expression correlated with lymph node metastasis, advanced TNM stage, and short OS and DFS in patients with EJA. Finally, multivariate analysis demonstrated that high NFIA expression was an independent prognostic factor for ESCC. Taken together, these results demonstrated that NFIA and NFIB could serve as prognostic indicators for ESCC and EJA, respectively.