Research on the Chemical Hazard Risk of Toys Exported to EU from China Based on the Analysis of the EU “Safety Gate” Alerts Cases

Based on the analysis of the 2544 alert cases from “Safety Gate” (the EU rapid alert system for dangerous non-food products) of toys exported to the EU market from China in the past five years (2017-2021), this study focuses on the chemical hazards as the key research object, investigates and identifies categories of toy products and related chemicals with high notification rate. The research results have shown that the most seriously and frequently alerted toy products due to chemical hazards from China exported to the EU are plastic dolls, slimes, rubber toy balloons, toy guns and squeezable toys, while the high failure rate of chemicals in sequence are phthalates, boron element, N-Nitrosamines and N-Nitrosatable substances, and bis(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl) ether. This study aims to improve the efficiency of inspection and test of export toys, and provide decision-making references for Chinese toy export enterprises to respond to EU technical trade measures.

Genome-wide DNA methylation landscape of four Chinese populations and epigenetic variation linked to Tibetan high-altitude adaptation

DNA methylation(DNAm)is one of the major epigenetic mechanisms in humans and is important in diverse cellular processes.The variation of DNAm in the human population is related to both genetic and environmental factors.However,the DNAm profiles have not been investigated in the Chinese population of diverse ethnicities.Here,we performed double-strand bisulfite sequencing(DSBS)for 32 Chinese individuals representing four major ethnic groups including Han Chinese,Tibetan,Zhuang,and Mongolian.We identified a total of 604,649 SNPs and quantified DNAm at more than 14 million Cp Gs in the population.We found global DNAm-based epigenetic structure is different from the genetic structure of the population,and ethnic difference only partially explains the variation of DNAm.Surprisingly,non-ethnic-specific DNAm variations showed stronger correlation with the global genetic divergence than these ethnic-specific DNAm.Differentially methylated regions(DMRs)among these ethnic groups were found around genes in diverse biological processes.Especially,these DMR-genes between Tibetan and nonTibetans were enriched around high-altitude genes including EPAS1 and EGLN1,suggesting DNAm alteration plays an important role in high-altitude adaptation.Our results provide the first batch of epigenetic maps for Chinese populations and the first evidence of the association of epigenetic changes with Tibetans'high-altitude adaptation.

Comparison and correction of IDW based wind speed interpolation methods in urbanized Shenzhen

Based on the 2-min average wind speed observations at 100 automatic weather stations in Shenzhen from January 2008 to December 2018,this study tries to explore the ways to improve wind interpolation quality over the Shenzhen region.Three IDW based methods,i.e.,traditional inverse distance weight(IDW),modified inverse distance weight(MIDW),and gradient inverse distance weight(GIDW)are used to interpolate the near surface wind field in Shenzhen.In addition,the gradient boosted regression trees(GBRT)model is used to correct the wind interpolation results based on the three IDW based methods.The results show that among the three methods,GIDW has better interpolation effects than the other two in the case of stratified sampling.The MSE and R2 for the GIDW’s in different months are in the range of 1.096-1.605 m/s and 0.340-0.419,respectively.However,in the case of leave-one-group-out crossvalidation,GIDW has no advantage over the other two methods.For the stratified sampling,GBRT effectively corrects the interpolated results by the three IDW based methods.MSE decreases to the range of 0.778-0.923 m/s,and R2 increases to the range of 0.530-0.671.In the nonstation area,the correction effect of GBRT is still robust,even though the elevation frequency distribution of the non-station area is different from that of the stations’area.The correction performance of GBRT mainly comes from its consideration of the nonlinear relationship between wind speed and the elevation,and the combination of historical and current observation data.