Nitrogen fertilizer amount has minimal effect on rhizosphere bacterial diversity during different growth stages of peanut.

The impact of short-term nitrogen fertilizer input on the structure and diversity of peanut rhizosphere microbiota (RM) at different growth stages (GSs) was explored in the southern paddy soil planting environment. Three levels of nitrogen were applied in the field: control (LN, 0 kg/hm2), medium nitrogen (MN, 55.68 kg/hm2), and high nitrogen (HN, 111.36 kg/hm2). The rhizosphere soil was collected during four GSs for high-throughput sequencing and chemical properties analysis. The effect of nitrogen fertilizer application on peanut RM was minimal and was obvious only at the seedling stage. In the four peanut GSs, a significant increase in relative abundance was observed for only one operational taxonomic unit (OTU) of Nitrospira under HN conditions at the seedling stage and mature stage, while there was no consistent change in other OTUs. The difference in RM among different peanut GSs was greater than that caused by the amount of nitrogen fertilizer. This may be due to the substantial differences in soil chemical properties (especially alkali-hydrolyzable nitrogen, pH, and available potassium or total potassium) among peanut GSs, as these significantly affected the RM structure. These results are of great value to facilitate deeper understanding of the effect of nitrogen fertilizer on peanut RM structure.

Household mold, pesticide use, and childhood asthma: A nationwide study in the U.S.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the associations of household mold and pesticide use with risk of childhood asthma and examine the potential effect modification by child's sex at a national level in the U.S. METHODS: Nationally representative data were drawn from the cross-sectional 2017 and 2018 National Surveys of Children's Health. Household mold and pesticide exposures during the past 12 months and physician-diagnosed childhood asthma were assessed by standard questionnaires administered to primary caregivers. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to calculate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) for current asthma, adjusting for child, caregiver, and household covariates. We also examined potential effect modification by child's sex. Sampling weights accounted for the complex survey design. RESULTS: Among 41,423 U.S. children in 2017-2018, the weighted prevalence of current asthma was 10.8% in household mold-exposed children, compared with 7.2% in non-exposed children (P < 0.001). After adjusting for covariates including child's obesity, children with household mold exposure compared to those with no household mold exposure had a 1.41-fold (95% CI: 1.07, 1.87) higher odds of current asthma. Associations between household mold and current asthma were pronounced among boys (aOR 1.57; 95% CI: 1.03-2.38) but not girls (aOR 1.28; 0.90-1.83; P for interaction <0.001). No significant associations were observed between household pesticide use and current asthma, after adjusting for covariates. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that household mold is associated with current asthma among children, independent of other major risk factors including child's obesity status. Our findings may inform strategies targeting mitigation of household mold as an important indoor environment factor to address childhood asthma.

Semantic-based sound retrieval by ERP in rapid serial auditory presentation paradigm.

"Semantic gap" is the major bottleneck of semantic-based multimedia retrieval technique in the field of information retrieval. Studies have shown that robust semantic-based image retrieval can be achieved by single-trial visual evoked event related potential (ERP) detection. However, the question remains whether auditory evoked ERP can be utilized to achieve semantic-based sound retrieval. In this paper, we investigated this question in the rapid serial auditory presentation (RSAP) paradigm. Eight BCI-naïve participants were instructed to perform target detection in RSAP sequences with the vocalizations of 8 familiar animals as sound stimuli, and we compared ERP components and single-trial ERP classification performance between two conditions, the target was a predefined specific one, and the targets were different but belonged to the same semantic category (i.e., semantic-based sound retrieval). Although the amplitudes of ERP components (e.g., N2 and P3) and classification performance decreased a little due to the difficulty of the semantic-based sound retrieval tasks, the best two participants still achieved the area under the receive operating characteristic curve (AUC) of single-trial ERP detection more than 0.77. It suggested that semantic-based sound retrieval by auditory evoked ERP was potentially feasible.

ERP component analysis for rapid image searching in finer categories.

Event-related potentials (ERP)-based image triage (or search) in the context of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) exploits difference in the human brain response to target and distracted stimuli in the form of an image. So far, most paradigms focus on image triage (or search) among rough object categories. In this paper, we explored the possibility and effectiveness of target detection among finer categories like different animals. We analyzed on the difference of ERP components in two image search tasks, a simple-recognition task in which all images of a target are the same and a discriminative-recognition task in which all images are randomly different but belong to the same target category (the same kind of animal). We observed that the P3 amplitude reduced and the P3 latency delayed on the discriminative-recognition condition due to the increased difficulty of identifying different images belonging to the same category. But the average area under ROC curve reached 0.82 which indicated that rapid target detection among finer categories by single-trial ERP were feasible with trivial contribution of N1 and stable contribution of N2 and P3.

Corticomuscular coherence analysis on hand movement distinction for active rehabilitation.

Active rehabilitation involves patient's voluntary thoughts as the control signals of restore device to assist stroke rehabilitation. Although restoration of hand opening stands importantly in patient's daily life, it is difficult to distinguish the voluntary finger extension from thumb adduction and finger flexion using stroke patients' electroencephalography (EMG) on single muscle activity. We propose to implement corticomuscular coherence analysis on electroencephalography (EEG) and EMG signals on Extensor Digitorum to extract their intention involved in hand opening. EEG and EMG signals of 8 subjects are simultaneously collected when executing 4 hand movement tasks (finger extension, thumb adduction, finger flexion, and rest). We explore the spatial and temporal distribution of the coherence and observe statistically significant corticomuscular coherence appearing at left motor cortical area and different patterns within beta frequency range for 4 movement tasks. Linear discriminate analysis is applied on the coherence pattern to distinguish finger extension from thumb adduction, finger flexion, and rest. The classification results are greater than those by EEG only. The results indicate the possibility to detect voluntary hand opening based on coherence analysis between single muscle EMG signal and single EEG channel located in motor cortical area, which potentially helps active hand rehabilitation for stroke patients.