Access to off-farm employment has been expected to be a critical approach to ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition, two important targets of achieving Zero Hunger.  This study aims to investigate the role of off-farm employment in improving dietary diversity through substitution effect and complementary effect with agricultural production activities and income effect.  This study adopts Poisson/Tobit/Probit/OLS regressions and the instrument variable method based on the primary survey data collected among 1,282 households at 12 sites in environmentally and economically vulnerable areas of China, Nepal, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar in 2019.  The results show that off-farm employment is positively associated with household dietary diversity and the consumption of flesh meat, fish and other aquatic animals, fruits, and milk and dairy products, which are rich in protein and micronutrients.  The results of mechanism analysis show that off-farm employment contributes to household dietary diversity by improving crop diversity, especially for poor households, boosting the probability of livestock raising for households with the middle one-third disposal income, and increasing household income.  The positive association between off-farm employment and household dietary diversity is much higher for households with the bottom one-third disposal income, low illiteracy, and from upper-middle income countries.  These findings imply that off-farm employment does play a vital role in achieving multiple benefits of poverty alleviation, malnutrition reduction, and agrobiodiversity conservation in environmentally and economically vulnerable areas.  However, it may enlarge the gaps in dietary diversity between households with low human capital and from low and lower-middle income countries and those with high human captal and from middle-high countries.

Botrytis cinerea is a typical necrotrophic pathogenic fungus that causes severe diseases in a wide range of plant species, leading to significant economic losses.  Our previous study showed that BcSDR1 positively regulates growth, development, and pathogenicity of B. cinerea.  However, the regulation mechanism of BcSDR1 and the relationship between BcSDR1 and cAMP and MAPK signaling pathways are not well understood.  In this study, transcriptome data showed that BcSDR1 is involved in glucose transmembrane transport, signal transduction, secondary metabolism, and other biological processes.  BcSDR1 mutant (BCt41) showed remarkably weak sensitivity to cAMP and MAPK signaling pathways specific inhibitors, SQ22536 and U0126, and significantly decreased cAMP content.  The key genes of cAMP and MAPK signaling pathways, BcGB1, BcBTP1, BcBOS1, BcRAS1, and BcBMP3 were significantly upregulated, whereas BcPLC1, BcBCG1, BcCDC4, BcSAK1, BcATF1, and BcBAP1 were significantly downregulated (P<0.05).   BcSDR1 was obviously upregulated in BcBCG2, BcBCG3, BcPKA1, and BcPKAR RNA interference (RNAi)  mutants, but significantly downregulated in BcPKA2, BcBMP1, and BcBMP3 RNAi mutants.  Thus, BcBCG2, BcBCG3, BcPKA1, and BcPKAR negatively regulate BcSDR1 expression, whereas BcPKA2, BcBMP1, and BcBMP3 positively regulate BcSDR1 expression.

Auxin (indole-3-acetic acid, IAA) has a considerable impact on the regulation of plant carbohydrate levels and growth, but the mechanism by which it regulates sugar levels in plants has received little attention.  In this study, we found that exogenous IAA altered fructose (Fru), glucose (Glc), and sucrose (Suc) concentrations in shoot tips mainly by regulating MdSUSY1, MdFRK2, MdHxK1 and MdSDH2 transcript levels.  Additionally, we used 5-year-old ‘Royal Gala’ apple trees to further verify that these genes play primary roles in regulating sink strength.  The results showed that MdSUSY1, MdFRK2, MdHxK1/3 and MdSDH2 might be major contributors to sink strength regulation.  Taken together, these results provide new insight into the regulation of the carbohydrate metabolism mechanism, which will be helpful for regulating sink strength and yield.