Publications by authors named "Junhuan Xu"

Article Synopsis
  • Microbes and enzymes are crucial for soil and plant health, particularly in the hemp rhizosphere, but fungicides can negatively affect microorganism diversity and enzyme activity.
  • Soil samples from four hemp cultivars were tested under different conditions (natural, inoculated, and fungicide-treated), revealing that fungicides dramatically altered microbiota structure by increasing some microbial phyla while decreasing others.
  • Enzymatic activities related to organic matter metabolism were also significantly reduced in fungicide-treated samples across all hemp cultivars, highlighting the ecological implications of fungicide use on soil health.
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The scientific interest in cannabis plants' beneficial properties has recently sparked certain interest in the possible functional characterization of plant-derived extracellular vesicles (PDEVs). Establishing the most appropriate and efficient isolation procedure for PDEVs remains a challenge due to vast differences in the physio-structural characteristics of different plants within the same genera and species. In this study, we employed a crude but standard isolation procedure for the extraction of apoplastic wash fluid (AWF) which is known to contain the PDEVs.

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The purpose of this study was to evaluate the survival rates and fermentation performance of three freeze-dried lactic acid bacterial cultures previously isolated from Ghanaian traditional fermented milk. LAB cultures, i.e.

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The rise of antimicrobial resistance is a global public health crisis that threatens the effective control and prevention of infections. Due to the emergence of pandrug-resistant bacteria, most antibiotics have lost their efficacy. Bacteriophages or their components are known to target bacterial cell walls, cell membranes, and lipopolysaccharides (LPS) and hydrolyze them.

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New generation antibiotics are needed to combat the development of resistance to antimicrobials. One of the most promising new classes of antibiotics is cannabidiol (CBD). It is a non-toxic and low-resistance chemical that can be used to treat bacterial infections.

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The gut microbiome is a collection of microorganisms and parasites in the gastrointestinal tract. Many factors can affect this community's composition, such as age, sex, diet, medications, and environmental triggers. The relationship between the human host and the gut microbiota is crucial for the organism's survival and development, whereas the disruption of this relationship can lead to various inflammatory diseases.

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Products derived from L. have gained increased interest and popularity. As these products become common amongst the public, the health and potential therapeutic values associated with hemp have become a premier focus of research.

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Marafiviruses, including maize rayado fino virus (MRFV) and oat blue dwarf virus (OBDV), encode two carboxy co-terminal coat proteins, CP1 and CP2, which encapsidate the genome to form icosahedral virions. While CP2 expression is expected to be solely driven from a second start codon of a subgenomic RNA under a marafibox promoter sequence, the larger CP1 with an in-frame N-terminal extension relative to CP2 could potentially be expressed either by proteolytic release from the MRFV polyprotein or from subgenomic RNA translation. We examined MRFV CP expression strategy with a series of mutations in the CP coding region and identified mutants viable and nonviable for systemic plant infection.

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The corn leafhopper (Dalbulus maidis) is an important vector of maize rayado fino virus (MRFV), a positive-strand RNA (+ssRNA) marafivirus which it transmits in a persistent propagative manner. The interaction of D. maidis with MRFV, including infection of the insect and subsequent transmission to new plants, is not well understood at the molecular level.

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Background: Maize dwarf mosaic virus (MDMV), a member of the genus Potyvirus, infects maize and is non-persistently transmitted by aphids. Several plant viruses have been developed as tools for gene expression and gene silencing in plants. The capacity of MDMV for both gene expression and gene silencing were examined.

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The green peach aphid (Myzus persicae) is a phloem-feeding insect that causes economic damage on a wide array of crops. Using a luminol-based assay, a superoxide-responsive reporter gene (Zat12::luciferase), and a probe specific to hydrogen peroxide (HyPer), we demonstrated that this aphid induces accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in Arabidopsis thaliana. Similar to the apoplastic oxidative burst induced by pathogens, this response to aphids was rapid and transient, with two peaks occurring within 1 and 4 hr after infestation.

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The alfalfa leafcutting bee, is widely used in the western United States as a pollinator for alfalfa seed production. Unfortunately, immatures experience high mortality in agriculturally managed populations. Quantified gene expression could be used to identify how this bee responds during different life stages to pathogens, environmental toxins, and other stresses, but stably expressed reference genes are needed to normalize transcription data.

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(MRFV) is the type species of the genus in the family . It infects maize (), its natural host, to which it is transmitted by leafhoppers including and in a persistent-propagative manner. The MRFV monopartite RNA genome encodes a precursor polyprotein that is processed into replication-associated proteins.

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Superoxide (O) and other reactive oxygen species (ROS) are generated in response to numerous biotic and abiotic stresses. Different ROS have been reported to elicit different transcriptional responses in plants, and so ROS-responsive marker genes and promoter::reporter gene fusions have been proposed as indirect means of detecting ROS and discriminating among different species. However, further information about the specificity of transcriptional responses to O is needed in order to assess potential markers for this critical stress-responsive signaling molecule.

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Background: The Hunt bumble bee (Bombus huntii Greene, Hymenoptera: Apidae) is a holometabolous, social insect important as a pollinator in natural and agricultural ecosystems in western North America. Bumble bees spend a significant amount of time foraging on a wide variety of flowering plants, and this activity exposes them to both plant toxins and pesticides, posing a threat to individual and colony survival. Little is known about what detoxification pathways are active in bumble bees, how the expression of detoxification genes changes across life stages, or how the number of detoxification genes expressed in B.

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Background: Rust fungi are biotrophic basidiomycete plant pathogens that cause major diseases on plants and trees world-wide, affecting agriculture and forestry. Their biotrophic nature precludes many established molecular genetic manipulations and lines of research. The generation of genomic resources for these microbes is leading to novel insights into biology such as interactions with the hosts and guiding directions for breakthrough research in plant pathology.

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A consortium of investigators is engaged in a functional genomics project centered on the filamentous fungus Neurospora, with an eye to opening up the functional genomic analysis of all the filamentous fungi. The overall goal of the four interdependent projects in this effort is to accomplish functional genomics, annotation, and expression analyses of Neurospora crassa, a filamentous fungus that is an established model for the assemblage of over 250,000 species of non yeast fungi. Building from the completely sequenced 43-Mb Neurospora genome, Project 1 is pursuing the systematic disruption of genes through targeted gene replacements, phenotypic analysis of mutant strains, and their distribution to the scientific community at large.

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The colonies of green peach aphid, Myzus persicae, on detached cabbage leaves (8 replicates) were initiated with each including 3 apterae exposed to 'spore shower' of the entomophthoraceous fungus, Pandora delphacis, to evaluate its potential for aphid control. The colonies were then allowed to freely propagate and infect from one to another for mycosis development at different regimes of temperature (10-30 degrees C) and relative humidity (74-100% RH). During a period of 30-day observation, aphid mycosis developed much more rapidly at the regimes of higher temperature (20-30 degrees C) and humidity (> or = 95% RH), at which, nymphs were effectively infected by contacting the conidia discharged from apterous cadavers.

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