Do public employment services affect the self-rated health of migrant workers in China?

Migrant workers greatly contributing to China's industrialization and urbanization are confronted with increasing health risks. This study empirically investigates the effects of public employment services on the self-rated health of migrant workers in Shanghai China, by using data from the National Bureau of Statistics from 2015 to 2020. The estimation results under the Ordered Probit model illustrate that public employment services significantly improve the self-rated health of migrant workers, and vocational training, job development and other related services show an apparently positive correlation with the self-rated health. The marginal effect analysis reveals that public employment services obviously reduce the probability of health satisfaction as "average", "relatively satisfied" and "relatively dissatisfied", which translate into a significant increase in the probability of "very satisfied". The mechanism analysis verifies that public employment services enhance the self-rated health by increasing the proportion of medical insurance and injury insurance of migrant workers. The results are still reliable by adopting the methods of subsample regression, Propensity Score Matching and variable substitution to conduct robustness checks. This study further enriches the literature on public employment services and the health status of migrant workers, and provides policy implications on improving the health status of migrant workers and the public employment service system of China under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

TERT promoter regulating melittin expression induces apoptosis and G0/G1 cell cycle arrest in esophageal carcinoma cells.

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma accounts for a large proportion of cancer-associated mortalities in both men and women. Melittin is the major active component of bee venom, which has been reported to possess anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and anti-cancer properties. The aim of the present study was to construct a tumor targeted recombinant plasmid [pc-telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT)-melittin] containing a human TERT promoter followed by a melittin coding sequence and to explore the effects of this plasmid in esophageal cell carcinoma and investigate preliminarily the underlying mechanisms of this effect. TE1 cells were transfected with pcTERT-melittin and the resulting apoptosis was subsequently examined. The viability of TE1 cells transfected with pcTERT-melittin was measured using a Cell Counting Kit-8 assay, which indicated inhibited proliferation. The disruption of mitochondrial membranes and the concomitant production of reactive oxygen species demonstrated an inducible apoptotic effect of melittin in TE1 cells. Apoptotic cells were also counted using an Annexin V-FITC and PI double-staining assay. The upregulation of cleaved caspase-9, cleaved caspase-3, Bax and poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 in pcTERT-melittin transfected TE1 cells, suggested that pcTERT-melittin-induced apoptosis was associated with the mitochondrial pathway. TE1 cells were also arrested in the G0/G1 phase when transfected with pcTERT-melittin, followed by the decline of CDK4, CDK6 and cyclin D1 expression levels. As cell invasion and metastasis are common in patients with esophageal cancer, a cell migration assay was conducted and it was found that pcTERT-melittin transfection reduced the migratory and invasive abilities of TE1 cells. The findings of the present study demonstrated that pcTERT-melittin may induce apoptosis of esophageal carcinoma cells and inhibit tumor metastasis.

High-throughput single-cell cultivation reveals the underexplored rare biosphere in deep-sea sediments along the Southwest Indian Ridge.

Microorganisms in the deep sea play vital roles in marine ecosystems. However, despite great advances brought by high throughput sequencing and metagenomics, only a small portion of microorganisms living in the environment can be cultivated in the laboratory and systematically studied. In this study, an improved high-throughput microfluidic streak plate (MSP) platform was developed to speed up the isolation of microorganisms from deep-sea sediments and evaluated with deep-sea sediments collected from the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR). Based on our previously reported MSP method, we improved its isolation efficiency with a semi-automated droplet picker and improved humidity control to enable long-term cultivation with a low-nutrient medium for up to five months according to the slow-growing nature of most deep-sea species. The improved MSP method allows the isolation of microbes by selection and investigation of microbial diversity by high throughput sequencing of the pooled sample cultures. By picking individual droplets and scale-up cultivation, a total of 772 strains that were taxonomically assigned to 70 species were isolated from the deep-sea sediments in the SWIR, including 15 potential novel species. On the other hand, based on 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing analysis, the microbial diversity of the SWIR was studied and documented with culture-dependent and independent methods in this study. The superiority of the MSP platform in revealing the rare biosphere was also evaluated based on amplicon sequencing. The results show that droplet-based single-cell cultivation of the MSP has a much higher ability than traditional agar plate cultivation in obtaining microbial species and more than 90% of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) detected in the MSP pool belong to the rare biosphere. Our results indicate the high robustness and efficiency of the improved MSP platform in revealing the environmentally rare biosphere, especially for slow-growing species. Overall, the MSP platform has a superior ability to recover microbial diversity than conventional agar plates and it was found to hold great potential for recovering rare microbial resources from various environments.

Interfacial Nanoinjection-Based Nanoliter Single-Cell Analysis.

Single-cell analysis offers unprecedented resolution for the investigation of cellular heterogeneity and the capture of rare cells from large populations. Here, described is a simple method named interfacial nanoinjection (INJ), which can miniaturize various single-cell assays to be performed in nanoliter water-in-oil droplets on standard microwell plates. The INJ droplet handler can adjust droplet volumes for multistep reactions on demand with high precision and excellent monodispersity, and consequently enables a wide range of single-cell assays. Importantly, INJ can be coupled with fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), which is currently the most effective and accurate single-cell sorting and isolation method. FACS-INJ pipelines for high-throughput plate well-based single-cell analyses, including single-cell proliferation, drug-resistance testing, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), reverse-transcription PCR, and whole-genome sequencing are introduced. This FACS-INJ pipeline is compatible with a wide range of samples and can be extended to various single-cell analysis applications in microbiology, cell biology, and biomedical diagnostics.

Virgibacillus indicus sp. nov. and Virgibacillus profundi sp. nov, two moderately halophilic bacteria isolated from marine sediment by using microfluidic streak plates.

Three Gram-variable, moderately halophilic, motile, endospore-forming rods, designated P2-C2T, P3-H5T and P3-B8, were isolated from marine sediment of the Southwest Indian Ocean by using the microfluidic streak plate method. Phylogeny based on 16S rRNA gene sequences showed that strains P2-C2T and P3-H5T formed a robust cluster within the genus Virgibacillus and exhibited 16S rRNA gene similarity levels of 95.3-96.8 and 94.9-96.3 % to the type strains of Virgibacillus species, respectively. The 16S rRNA gene similarity between P2-C2T and P3-H5T was 97.6 %. Strain P3-B8 has an identical 16S rRNA gene sequence to strain P3-H5T. For all the novel strains, the predominant cellular fatty acids were anteiso-C15 : 0 and anteiso-C17 : 0, the main menaquinone was MK-7, and the polar lipid profiles contained diphosphatidylglycerol and phosphatidylglycerol. The genomic DNA G+C contents of strains P2-C2T, P3-H5T and P3-B8 were 38.3, 37.3 and 37.5 mol%, respectively. Combined data from phenotypic and genotypic studies demonstrated that strains P2-C2T and P3-H5T/P3-B8 are representatives of two different novel species of the genus Virgibacillus, for which the name Virgibacillus indicus sp. nov. and Virgibacillusprofundi are proposed. The type strains are P2-C2T (=CGMCC 1.16138T=NBRC 113014T) and P3-H5T (=CGMCC 1.16139T=NBRC 113015T).