Targeted poverty alleviation is a unique approach adopted in China to help achieve the vision of a moderately prosperous society in all aspects and the “Chinese Dream”.  Industrial development as a means of poverty alleviation is an integral part of the “Five-pronged Poverty Alleviation Measures” Project of targeted poverty alleviation, and a critical foundation for other poverty alleviation measures.  In this study, a comprehensive evaluation method was used to measure farmers’ livelihood based on the framework of sustainable livelihood.  Specifically, the effects of industrial development on farmers’ livelihood capital were estimated by employing the propensity score matching combined with the difference-in-differences (PSM-DID) approach.  Findings suggest that industrial development had a significantly positive effect on the livelihood capital of farmers.  Industrial development can significantly enhance farmers’ human, social and financial capital, while it cannot significantly affect the natural and physical capital.  Industrial development had heterogeneous effects on farmers’ livelihood capital, more efficiently impacting on the non-poor than the poor.  The effects on farmers’ livelihood capital varied across regions, with Guizhou experiencing a larger effect than Sichuan.  However, the effect was insignificant for farmers in Gansu.  To improve farmers’ livelihood capital, it is necessary to take measures to strengthen their human capital, promote the innovation of financial products, and make good use of their social capital; it is also essential to strengthen the support of industrial development to the poor. 

Nitrogen (N) deep placement has been found to reduce N leaching and increase N use efficiency in paddy fields.  However, relatively little is known how bacterial consortia, especially abundant and rare taxa, respond to N deep placement, which is critical for understanding the biodiversity and function of agricultural ecosystem.  In this study, Illumina sequencing and ecological models were conducted to examine the diversity patterns and underlying assembly mechanisms of abundant and rare taxa in rice rhizosphere soil under different N fertilization regimes at four rice growth stages in paddy fields.  The results showed that abundant and rare bacteria had distinct distribution patterns in rhizosphere samples.  Abundant bacteria showed ubiquitous distribution; while rare taxa exhibited uneven distribution across all samples.  Stochastic processes dominated community assembly of both abundant and rare bacteria, with dispersal limitation playing a more vital role in abundant bacteria, and undominated processes playing a more important role in rare bacteria.  The N deep placement was associated with a greater influence of dispersal limitation than the broadcast N fertilizer (BN) and no N fertilizer (NN) treatments in abundant and rare taxa of rhizosphere soil; while greater contributions from homogenizing dispersal were observed for BN and NN in rare taxa.  Network analysis indicated that abundant taxa with closer relationships were  usually more likely to occupy the central position of the network than rare taxa.  Nevertheless, most of the keystone species were rare taxa and might have played essential roles in maintaining the network stability.  Overall, these findings highlighted that the ecological mechanisms and co-occurrence patterns of abundant and rare bacteria in rhizosphere soil under N deep placement.

 

Parent materials and the fertility levels of paddy soils are highly variable in subtropical China.  Bacterial diversity and community composition play pivotal roles in soil ecosystem processes and functions.  However, the effects of parent material and fertility on bacterial diversity and community composition in paddy soils are unclear.  The key soil factors driving the changes in bacterial diversity, community composition, and the specific bacterial species in soils that are derived from different parent materials and have differing fertility levels are unknown.  Soil samples were collected from paddy fields in two areas with different parent materials (quaternary red clay or tertiary sandstone) and two levels of fertility (high or low).  The variations in bacterial diversity indices and communities were evaluated by 454 pyrosequencing which targeted the V4–V5 region of the 16S rRNA gene.  The effects of parent material and fertility on bacterial diversity and community composition were clarified by a two-way ANOVA and a two-way PERMANOVA.  A principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), a redundancy analysis (RDA), and multivariate regression trees (MRT) were used to assess changes in the studied variables and identify the factors affecting bacterial community composition.  Co-occurrence network analysis was performed to find correlations between bacterial genera and specific soil properties, and a statistical analysis of metagenomic profiles (STAMP) was used to determine bacterial genus abundance differences between the soil samples.  The contributions made by parent material and soil fertility to changes in the bacterial diversity indices were comparable, but soil fertility accounted for a larger part of the shift in bacterial community composition than the parent material.  Soil properties, especially soil texture, were strongly associated with bacterial diversity.  The RDA showed that soil organic carbon (SOC) was the primary factor influencing bacterial community composition.  A key threshold for SOC (25.5 g kg^–1) separated low fertility soils from high fertility soils.  The network analysis implied that bacterial interactions tended towards cooperation and that copiotrophic bacteria became dominant when the soil environment improved.  The STAMP revealed that copiotrophic bacteria, such as Massilia and Rhodanobacter, were more abundant in the high fertility soils, while oligotrophic bacteria, such as Anaerolinea, were dominant in low fertility soils.  The results showed that soil texture played a role in bacterial diversity, but nutrients, especially SOC, shaped bacterial community composition in paddy soils with different parent materials and fertility levels.

The rice mutant ossac4 (starch accumulating 4) was raised from seeds of the rice (Oryza sativa L.) indica maintainer line Xinong 1B treated with ethyl methanesulfonate.  The distal and medial portions of the second leaf displayed premature senescence in the ossac4 mutant at the four-leaf stage.  Physiological and biochemical analysis, and cytological examination revealed that the ossac4 mutant exhibited the premature leaf senescence phenotype.  At the four-leaf stage, the leaves of the ossac4 mutant exhibited significantly increased contents of starch compared with those of the wild type (WT).  Quantitative real-time PCR analysis showed that the expression levels of photosynthesis-associated genes were down-regulated and the expression levels of glucose metabolism-associated genes were abnormal.  Genetic analysis indicated that the ossac4 mutation was controlled by a single recessive nuclear gene.  The OsSAC4 gene was localized to a 322.7-kb interval between the simple-sequence repeat marker XYH11-90 and the single-nucleotide polymorphism marker SNP5300 on chromosome 11.  The target interval contained 20 annotated genes.  The present results demonstrated that ossac4 represents a novel starch accumulation and premature leaf senescence mutant, and lays the foundation for cloning and functional analysis of OsSAC4.