The number of obese people is increasing dramatically worldwide, and one of the major causes of obesity is excess energy due to high-fat diets. Several studies have shown that reducing food and energy intake represents a key intervention or treatment to combat overweight/obesity. Here, we conducted a 12-week energy-restricted dietary intervention for high-fat diet-induced obese mice (C57BL/6J) to investigate the effectiveness of diet change in improving obesity. The results revealed that the diet change from HFD to NFD significantly reduced weight gain and subcutaneous adipose tissue weight in high-fat diet-induced obese mice, providing scientific evidence for the effectiveness of diet change in improving body weight and fat deposition in obese individuals. Regarding the potential explanations for these observations, weight reduction may be attributed to the excessive enlargement of adipocytes in the white adipose tissue of obese mice that were inhibited. Diet change significantly promoted lipolysis in the adipose tissue (eWAT: Adrb3, Plin1, HSL, and CPTA1a; ingWAT: CPT1a) and liver (reduced content of nonesterified fatty acids), and reduced lipogenesis in ingWAT (Dgat2). Moreover, the proportion of proliferative stem cells in vWAT and sWAT changed dramatically with diet change. Overall, our study reveals the phenotypic, structural, and metabolic diversity of multiple tissues (vWAT and sWAT) in response to diet change and identifies a role for adipocyte stem cells in the tissue specificity of diet change.
Living foodborne pathogens pose a serious threat to public and population health. To ensure food safety, it is necessary to complete the detection of viable bacteria in a short time (several hours to 1 day). However, the traditional methods by bacterial culture, as the gold standard, are cumbersome and time-consuming. To break through the resultant research bottleneck, PCR mediated nucleic acid molecular recognition technologies, including RNA-based reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) and DNA-based viability PCR (vPCR) have been developed in recent years. They not only sensitively amplify detection signals and quickly report detection results, but also distinguish viable and dead bacteria. Therefore, this review introduces these PCR-mediated techniques independent of culture for viable and dead foodborne pathogen detection from the nucleic acid molecular recognition principal level and describes their whole-process applications in food quality supervision, which provides a useful reference for the development of detection of foodborne pathogens in the future.
Jaundice is a symptom of high blood bilirubin levels affecting about 80% of neonates. In neonates fed with breast milk, jaundice is particularly prevalent and severe, which is likely multifactorial. With the development of genomics and metagenomics, a deeper understanding of the neonatal gut microbiota has been achieved. We find there are accumulating evidence to indicate the importance of the gut microbiota in the mechanism of jaundice. In this paper, we present new comprehensive insight into the relationship between the microbiota and jaundice. In the new perspective, the gut is a crucial crossroad of bilirubin excretion, and bacteria colonizing the gut could play different roles in the excretion of bilirubin, including Escherichia coli as the main traffic jam causers, some Clostridium and Bacteroides strains as the traffic police, and most probiotic Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus strains as bystanders with no effect or only a secondary indirect effect on the metabolism of bilirubin. This insight could explain why breast milk jaundice causes a longer duration of blood bilirubin and why most probiotics have limited effects on neonatal jaundice. With the encouragement of breastmilk feeding, our perspective could guide the development of new therapy methods to prevent this side effect of breastfeeding.