Weitao Wang

Long-term application of synthetic pesticides for potato late blight control has raised many ecological concerns, while broader impacts of biopesticides on production systems remain unclear. Field trials compared the effects of pesticides dimethomorph (synthetic) and carvacrol (biological) against an untreated control in a potato production system, integrating untargeted metabolomics, metabarcoding and quality trait analyses. Compared with the control group, both pesticide treatments upregulated tuber lipid metabolism but downregulated leaf defense-associated metabolism. For rhizosphere communities, while both treatments reduced beneficial bacterial taxa, carvacrol exerted less suppressive effects than dimethomorph and resulted in superior pathogen suppression. These changes were associated with enhanced potato quality under carvacrol treatment, with starch, flavonoid, and vitamin C contents each more than 10% higher than under dimethomorph. This study highlights the importance of evaluating both productivity end points and soil ecological consequences in field conditions, providing novel insights into the integration of biopesticides in sustainable crop production.

In recent years, AI-generated music has made significant progress, with several models performing well in multimodal and complex musical genres and scenes. While objective metrics can be used to evaluate generative music, they often lack interpretability for musical evaluation. Therefore, researchers often resort to subjective user studies to assess the quality of the generated works, which can be resource-intensive and less reproducible than objective metrics. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate the subjective, objective, and combined methodologies for assessing AI-generated music, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Ultimately, this study provides a valuable reference for unifying generative AI in the field of music evaluation.

Thermally processed food always contains various types of harmful substances. Control of their levels in food is important for human health. This work used the extracts from green tea dust, old green tea, yellow tea, white tea, oolong tea, and black tea to simultaneously mitigate diverse harmful substances in fried potato chips. The six tea extracts (30 g/L) all showed considerable inhibitory effects on the formation of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (reduced by 19.8%–53.2%), glyoxal (26.9%–36.6%), and methylglyoxal (16.1%–75.1%). Green tea and black tea extracts exhibited better inhibitory abilities than the other three teas and were further investigated for other harmful compounds by various concentration treatments. Finally, pre-soaking of fresh potato slices in 50 g/L extracts of green tea dust displayed, overall, the most promising inhibitory capacity of HMF (decreased by 73.3%), glyoxal (20.3%), methylglyoxal (69.7%), acrylamide (21.8%), and fluorescent AGEs (42.9%) in fried potato chips, while it exhibited the least impact on the color and texture. The high level of catechins in green tea dust may contribute most to its outstanding inhibitory effect, whereas the distinguished inhibitory effect of black tea extract was speculated to be attributable to the high levels of theaflavins and amino acids in the fully fermented tea. This study indicated that green tea dust, a predominant waste of the tea industry, had great potential to be exploited to improve food quality and safety.

Rhizome, a modified subterranean plant stem, has been used in China for centuries as a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Polygonati Rhizome (PR) is a well-known species in the Rhizome family. Preliminary studies show that PR might be beneficial in the treatment of osteoporosis, cancer, diabetes, and many other diseases because of its characteristics such as antioxidant property. Thus cultivated PR strains were developed to fulfil the increasing demands. However, the metabolite profile differences between wild-type and cultivated PR remain largely unknown. Using unbiased and untargeted quantitative mass spectrometry-based metabolomic, the present study identified 1126 metabolites from 3 cultivated strains and 1 wild strain. Analyses of these data with unsupervised and supervised approaches identified both common metabolites on all 4 strains and unique metabolites in each strain. Next, we conducted a metabolomic-wide pairwise correlation analysis and discovered 577 significantly correlated metabolite-metabolite pairs by Pearson’s correlation test. Importantly, KEGG enrichment analysis indicated that phenylpropanoids biosynthesis is the most differentially expressed pathway between cultivated and wild-type PR. By contrast, common metabolites on all 4 strains might suggest shared therapeutic targets. In summary, the systematic, untargeted metabolomics profiling of 4 PR strains and comprehensive data analyses provide invaluable resources to the understanding of the metabolite landscape and shed light on potential therapeutic applications for the treatment of diseases.