Chlorogenic acid (CGA), a natural phenolic compound, is an important bioactive compound, and its antibacterial activity has been widely concerned, but its antibacterial mechanism remains largely unknown. Protein leakage and the solution exosmosis conductivity of Bacillus subtilis 24434 (B. subtilis) reportedly display no noticeable differences before and after CGA treatment. The bacterial cells treated with CGA displayed a consistently smooth surface under the electron microscope, indicating that CGA cannot directly disrupt bacterial membranes. However, CGA induced a significant decrease in the intracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP) concentration, possibly by affecting the material and energy metabolism or cell-signaling transduction. Furthermore, metabolomic results indicated that CGA stress had a bacteriostatic effect by inducing the intracellular metabolic imbalance of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and glycolysis, leading to metabolic disorder and death of B. subtilis. These findings improve the understanding of the complex action mechanisms of CGA antimicrobial activity and provide theoretical support for the application of CGA as a natural antibacterial agent.
Despite the market dominance of WeChat in contemporary China, we currently know little about its significance for Chinese politics. WeChat enables strong-tie communicative networks, which prior research indicates is consequential for contentious political engagement. Drawing on evidence from focus groups conducted with Chinese citizens in the United Kingdom, we reveal that although WeChat users are often connected through offline social and professional networks, contentious politics manifests on the app only under a narrow range of circumstances. Furthermore, political contention on WeChat is reported by our respondents to be largely confined to matters of ‘interest-oriented’ and/or ‘safe’ topics that do not challenge the wider political system. This trend is driven by a combination of political and cultural dynamics which we elaborate in a theoretically informed thematic analysis, arguing that engaging with the concept of guanxi provides more insight into the political repercussions of WeChat in China than a focus on tie strength.
This article examines how WeChat, contemporary China's most popular mobile phone application, is affecting digitally enabled citizen journalism. Based on focus-group research with WeChat users, and building on the insights of previous studies of digitally enabled citizen journalism within and outside of China, we find that WeChat's integration of multiple communicative networks renders it a multiversal space where citizen journalistic practice can bleed across public, semipublic, and private spheres. We show that WeChat offers diverse communicative affordances facilitating practices of "metavoicing" as a form of citizen journalism, blurring divides between news production and consumption. This dynamic affects users' experiences of news and can influence news agendas story lifecycles. WeChat also faces important limitations as a citizen journalism platform: it is a space where political discussion can be readily reported, where the tone of current affairs coverage is often sensationalized, and where the reliability of content can be difficult to discern.
This study uses the logit model through questionnaire data of Beijing in 2019 to investigate the participation willingness of online timebank elderly care, especially to discover different influencing factors on the participation willingness between the youth group and the elderly group. We find that: First, the health status of elderly people and the number of elder families of young people have significant positive impacts on their willingness to participate in online timebank. Second, the experience of participating in voluntary activities has a significant positive effect and it has a far greater impact in the young group than that in the elderly group. Third, the more the free time, the higher the participation willingness in the young group, but it is the opposite in the elderly group. Fourth, the years of education and party member have significant promoting effects on the participation willingness in both groups. Such heterogeneous influencing factors can help develop online timebank nursing for dealing with the increasingly serious population aging problem in China and also other developing countries.
By exploring genre approaches in systemic functional linguistics and examining the analytic tools that can be applied to the process of English learning and teaching, this paper seeks to find a way of applying genre approaches to English writing class.
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