gong, y. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2020

A Fast Detection Method for Wheat Mould Based on Biophotons

Mould is a common phenomenon in stored wheat. First, mould will decrease the quality of wheat kernels. Second, the mycotoxins metabolized by mycetes are very harmful for humans. Therefore, the fast and accurate examination of wheat mould is vitally important to evaluating its storage quality and subsequent processing safety. Existing methods for examining wheat mould mainly rely on chemical methods, which always involve complex and long pretreatment processes, and the auxiliary chemical materials used in these methods may pollute our environment. To improve the determination of wheat mould, this paper proposed a type of green and nondestructive determination method based on biophotons. The specific implementation process is as follows: first, the ultra-weak luminescence between healthy and mouldy wheat samples are measured repeatedly by a biophotonic analyser, and then, the approximate entropy and multiscale approximate entropy are separately introduced as the main classification features. Finally, the classification performances have been tested using the support vector machine(SVM). The ROC curve of the newly established classification model shows that the highest recognition rate can reach 93.6%, which shows that our proposed classification model is feasible and promising for detecting wheat mould.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2020

A systematic dissection of human primary osteoblasts in vivo at single-cell resolution

Osteoblasts are multifunctional bone cells, which play essential roles in bone formation, angiogenesis regulation, as well as maintenance of hematopoiesis. Although both in vivo and in vitro studies on mice have identified several potential osteoblast subtypes based on their different transition stages or biological responses to external stimuli, the categorization of primary osteoblast subtypes in vivo in humans has not yet been achieved. Here, we used single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to perform a systematic cellular taxonomy dissection of freshly isolated human osteoblasts. Based on the gene expression patterns and cell lineage reconstruction, we identified three distinct cell clusters including preosteoblasts, mature osteoblasts, and an undetermined rare osteoblast subpopulation. This novel subtype was mainly characterized by the nuclear receptor subfamily 4 group A member 1 and 2 (NR4A1 and NR4A2), and its existence was confirmed by immunofluorescence staining. Trajectory inference analysis suggested that the undetermined cluster, together with the preosteoblasts, are involved in the regulation of osteoblastogenesis and also give rise to mature osteoblasts. Investigation of the biological processes and signaling pathways enriched in each subpopulation revealed that in addition to bone formation, preosteoblasts and undetermined osteoblasts may also regulate both angiogenesis and hemopoiesis. Finally, we demonstrated that there are systematic differences between the transcriptional profiles of human osteoblasts in vivo and mouse osteoblasts both in vivo and in vitro, highlighting the necessity for studying bone physiological processes in humans rather than solely relying on mouse models. Our findings provide novel insights into the cellular heterogeneity and potential biological functions of human primary osteoblasts at the single-cell level, which is an important and necessary step to further dissect the biological roles of osteoblasts in bone metabolism under various (patho-) physiological conditions.

bioinformatics↗