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Many natural food proteins with desirable functional properties are limited by poor water dispersibility, which restricts their practical application. In this study, egg yolk granules (EYG) and zein, two intrinsically water-insoluble proteins with distinct origins of insolubility, were used to construct soluble protein complexes through a simple pH-driven co-assembly process. Stable EYG-Zein complexes were obtained within a defined compositional range, and the optimal mass ratio of 2:3 showed the smallest hydrodynamic diameter and the highest colloidal stability. Multiscale characterization indicated that the mutual solubilization of EYG and zein was governed primarily by non-covalent interactions and accompanied by structural reconstruction. Fluorescence quenching and thermodynamic analysis further suggested that hydrophobic interactions were the dominant driving force for complex formation. Compared with dissociated EYG, the EYG-Zein complexes exhibited higher surface hydrophobicity and showed enhanced ice recrystallization inhibition activity, which became stronger with an increasing proportion of zein. In an ice cream system, incorporation of EYG-Zein effectively suppressed ice crystal growth while causing minor changes in color and no significant adverse effects on melting behavior, texture, or aroma-related properties. These results demonstrate that pH-driven all-protein co-assembly can serve as an effective strategy for converting EYG and zein into functional colloidal complexes and highlight the potential of EYG-Zein complexes as antifreeze ingredients in frozen foods.
This paper studies the scheduling problem of flexible assembly systems (FAS) with blocking and deadlock constraints. A place-timed Petri net (PTPN) model is developed to describe system dynamics and constraints, and the problem is formulated as minimizing the makespan under blocking and deadlock constraints. To ensure feasibility, a deadlock repair strategy based on earliest firing time is proposed, which detects and repairs infeasible transitions in candidate sequences according to deadlock avoidance policy. To address this problem, an efficient solution approach called distributed memetic algorithm (DMA) with heterogeneous co-evolutionary mechanism is further proposed based on a hierarchically coordinated distributed evolutionary architecture (HCDEA). The framework consists of a coordination layer and an evolutionary layer. The coordination layer contains a balance population that performs individual role assignment and manages the distribution and collection of individuals, dynamically assigning superior, inferior, and stagnated individuals to different subpopulations and merging updated solutions after evolution. The evolutionary layer includes three subpopulations: an exploitation population for greedy local search with adaptive operator selection, an exploration population for longest-common-subsequence-guided probabilistic offspring generation, and a restart population for diversity restoration using random reinitialization and Pareto-based selection. The deadlock repair strategy is embedded into both initialization and evolution stages to ensure feasibility of all solutions. Experimental results show that the proposed DMA achieves a good balance between exploration and exploitation, maintains feasibility under complex constraints, and outperforms existing methods for the FAS under consideration.
The ZmNAC100-ZmWAK3 transcriptional module enhances maize cold tolerance by coordinately enhancing antioxidant defense and improving photosynthetic efficiency. Low temperature is a major abiotic stress that constrains agricultural productivity by severely inhibiting crop growth and development, leading to substantial yield losses. As a chilling-sensitive crop, maize is particularly vulnerable to cold stress. Cold conditions induce excessive accumulation of reactive oxygen species in plants, disrupting photosynthetic performance, compromising antioxidant defense systems, and disturbing cellular ion homeostasis. In this study, we demonstrated that the maize wall-associated receptor kinase gene ZmWAK3 positively regulates the response to low temperature. Using overexpression and mutant lines, we found that ZmWAK3 overexpression enhanced chilling tolerance by improving ROS scavenging capacity and photosynthetic efficiency. In contrast, zmwak3 mutant exhibited a cold-sensitive phenotype. At the molecular level, combined evidence from yeast one-hybrid, dual-luciferase reporter, and chromatin immunoprecipitation assays confirmed that the transcription factor ZmNAC100 directly binds to the ZmWAK3 promoter and activates its transcription. Furthermore, silencing ZmNAC100 in maize not only reduced cold tolerance but also downregulated ZmWAK3 expression. Collectively, our results elucidate a low-temperature response pathway in maize mediated by the ZmNAC100-ZmWAK3 module, which enhances cold tolerance by increasing antioxidant enzyme activities, alleviating oxidative damage, and improving photosynthetic performance.
Mitigating the adverse effects of waterlogging in farmland caused by heavy rainfall and poor drainage is essential for maintaining agricultural productivity and ensuring global food security. This study conducted a two-year field experiment to evaluate different straw blind ditch drainage spacings (2, 3, 4, and 5 m) and subsurface pipe drainage spacings (6, 9, and 12 m), with open ditch drainage as the control (CK). The results indicated that, compared to CK, straw blind ditch drainage reduced the groundwater table and soil water content by 28.0
Trilobatin (TLB), a natural dihydrochalcone abundant in Lithocarpus litseifolius (Hance) Chun, was the focus of this study, which sought to explore its regulatory role in lipid accumulation and the associated potential molecular mechanisms, aiming to provide preliminary theoretical support for its subsequent development and application. In free fatty acid (FFA)-induced HepG2 cells, TLB was found to reduce intracellular TC and TG levels and mitigate lipid accumulation. In high-glucose-induced C. elegans, TLB lowered glucose, TC, and TG levels, prolonged the lifespan of C. elegans, and alleviated glucotoxicity-induced oxidative stress to some extent. In high-fat diet (HFD)-induced mice, 100 mg/kg TLB decreased body weight by 10.32
