Indoor airborne culturable fungi exposure has been closely linked to occupants' health. However, conventional measurement of indoor airborne fungal concentration is complicated and usually requires around one week for fungi incubation in laboratory. To provide an ultra-fast solution, here, for the first time, a knowledge-based machine learning model is developed with the inputs of indoor air quality data for estimating the concentration of indoor airborne culturable fungi. To construct a database for statistical analysis and model training, 249 data groups of air quality indicators (concentration of indoor airborne culturable fungi, indoor/outdoor PM and PM concentrations, indoor temperature, indoor relative humidity, and indoor CO concentration) were measured from 85 residential buildings of Baoding (China) during the period of 2016.11.15-2017.03.15. Our results show that artificial neural network (ANN) with one hidden layer has good prediction performances, compared to a support vector machine (SVM). With the tolerance of ± 30%, the prediction accuracy of the ANN model with ten hidden nodes can at highest reach 83.33% in the testing set. Most importantly, we here provide a quick method for estimating the concentration of indoor airborne fungi that can be applied to real-time evaluation.

SummarySalinity is an important environmental factor that adversely impacts crop growth and productivity. Malate dehydrogenases (MDHs) catalyse the reversible interconversion of malate and oxaloacetate using NAD(H)/NADP(H) as a cofactor and regulate plant development and abiotic stress tolerance. Vitamin B6 functions as an essential cofactor in enzymatic reactions involved in numerous cellular processes. However, the role of plastidial MDH in rice (Oryza sativa) in salt stress response by altering vitamin B6 content remains unknown. In this study, we identified a new loss‐of‐function osmdh1 mutant displaying salt stress‐tolerant phenotype. The OsMDH1 was expressed in different tissues of rice plants including leaf, leaf sheath, panicle, glume, bud, root and stem and was induced in the presence of NaCl. Transient expression of OsMDH1‐GFP in rice protoplasts showed that OsMDH1 localizes to chloroplast. Transgenic rice plants overexpressing OsMDH1 (OsMDH1OX) displayed a salt stress‐sensitive phenotype. Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC‐MS) metabolic profiling revealed that the amount of pyridoxine was significantly reduced in OsMDH1OX lines compared with the NIP plants. Moreover, the pyridoxine content was higher in the osmdh1 mutant and lower in OsMDH1OX plants than in the NIP plants under the salt stress, indicating that OsMDH1 negatively regulates salt stress‐induced pyridoxine accumulation. Furthermore, genome‐wide RNA‐sequencing (RNA‐seq) analysis indicated that ectopic expression of OsMDH1 altered the expression level of genes encoding key enzymes of the vitamin B6 biosynthesis pathway, possibly reducing the level of pyridoxine. Together, our results establish a novel, negative regulatory role of OsMDH1 in salt stress tolerance by affecting vitamin B6 content of rice tissues.

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A photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with high relative sensitivity was designed and investigated for the detection of chemical analytes in the terahertz (THz) regime. To ease the complexity, an extremely simple cladding employing four struts is adopted, which forms a rectangular shaped core area for filling with analytes. Results of enormous simulations indicate that a minimum 87.8% relative chemical sensitivity with low confinement and effective material absorption losses can be obtained for any kind of analyte, e.g., HCN (1.26), water (1.33), ethanol (1.35), KCN (1.41), or cocaine (1.50), whose refractive index falls in the range of 1.2 to 1.5. Besides, the PCF can also achieve high birefringence (∼0.01), low and flat dispersion, a large effective modal area, and a large numerical aperture within the investigated frequency range from 0.5 to 1.5 THz. We believe that the proposed PCF can be applied to chemical sensing of liquid and THz systems requiring wide-band polarization-maintaining transmission and low attenuation.

Transcrystalline structures for the first time were observed at the interface of OBC/PP fiber, proving that the partially melted (170 °C) and totally melted (190 °C) PP fibers have stronger interactions with OBC than unmelted PP fibers does.