Dong Wei

Abstract The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Xinjiang, in the heart of Inner Asia, and the languages that they spoke have long been debated and remain contentious 1 . Here we present genomic data from 5 individuals dating to around 3000–2800 bc from the Dzungarian Basin and 13 individuals dating to around 2100–1700 bc from the Tarim Basin, representing the earliest yet discovered human remains from North and South Xinjiang, respectively. We find that the Early Bronze Age Dzungarian individuals exhibit a predominantly Afanasievo ancestry with an additional local contribution, and the Early–Middle Bronze Age Tarim individuals contain only a local ancestry. The Tarim individuals from the site of Xiaohe further exhibit strong evidence of milk proteins in their dental calculus, indicating a reliance on dairy pastoralism at the site since its founding. Our results do not support previous hypotheses for the origin of the Tarim mummies, who were argued to be Proto-Tocharian-speaking pastoralists descended from the Afanasievo 1,2 or to have originated among the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex 3 or Inner Asian Mountain Corridor cultures 4 . Instead, although Tocharian may have been plausibly introduced to the Dzungarian Basin by Afanasievo migrants during the Early Bronze Age, we find that the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population that adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert.

Industrial microalgae, as a big family of promising producers of renewable biomass feedstock, have been commercially exploited for functional food, living feed and feed additives, high-value chemicals in nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals, and chemical reagents. Recently, microalgae have also been considered as a group that might play an important role in biofuel development and environmental protection. Almost all current products of industrial microalgae are derived from their biomass; however, large amounts of spent cell-free media are available from mass cultivation that is mostly unexploited. In this contribution we discuss that these media, which may contain a remarkable diversity of bioactive substances are worthy to be recovered for further use. Obviously, the extracellular metabolites from industrial microalgae have long been neglected in the development of production methods for valuable metabolites. With the advances in the last ten years, more and more structures and properties from extracellular metabolites have been identified, and the potential utilization over wide fields is attracting attention. Some of these extracellular metabolites can be potentially used as drugs, antioxidants, growth regulators or metal chelators. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of the known extracellular metabolites from industrial microalgae which might be of commercial interest. The attention mainly focuses on the reports of extracellular bioactive metabolites and their potential application in biotechnology.

Mycotoxins are highly toxic metabolites produced by fungi that pose a huge threat to human and animal health. Contamination of food and feed with mycotoxins is a worldwide issue, which leads to huge financial losses, annually. Decades of research have developed various approaches to degrade mycotoxins, among which the biological methods have been proved to have great potential and advantages. This review provides an overview on the important advances in the biological removal of mycotoxins over the last decade. Here, we provided further insight into the chemical structures and the toxicity of the main mycotoxins. The innovative strategies including mycotoxin degradation by novel probiotics are summarized in an in-depth discussion on potentialities and limitations. We prospected the promising future for the development of multifunctional approaches using recombinant enzymes and microbial consortia for the simultaneous removal of multiple mycotoxins.

Diatoms are unicellular photosynthetic microalgae existing ubiquitously in marine and freshwater environments. This review focuses on high-value compounds produced from diatoms, including chrysolaminarin (Chrl), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and fucoxanthin (Fx), which can be applied in aquaculture, human health foods, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics. In addition, this review provides an overview of their biosynthesis in diatoms and technologies for production. EPA and Fx typically accumulate synergistically in diatoms, while Chrl competes with EPA and Fx for carbon precursors. Several diatom strains have been employed that simultaneously accumulate these three compounds, but limitations and challenges still exist during commercialization. To address the bottleneck in biomass and high-value compound production, the optimization of cultivation parameters, the trophic mode, elicitor- or bacteria-assisted stimulations, and genetic modifications via mutant breeding, adaptive evolution engineering, and metabolic engineering have been developed in diatoms to establish improved technologies. Currently, large-scale cultivation of diatoms occurs mostly in open ponds and photobioreactors in autotrophic mode. Mixotrophic cultivation and coextraction approaches for multiple products represent novel strategies for economically enhancing the future production of biomass and high-value compounds on an industrial scale.