Trees such as Populus are planted extensively for reforestation and afforestation. However, their successful establishment greatly depends upon ambient environmental conditions and their relative ...resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses. Polyphenol oxidase (PPO) is a ubiquitous metalloproteinase in plants, which plays crucial roles in mediating plant resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses. Although the whole genome sequence of Populus trichocarpa has long been published, little is known about the PPO genes in Populus, especially those related to drought stress, mechanical damage, and insect feeding. Additionally, there is a paucity of information regarding hormonal responses at the whole genome level.
A genome-wide analysis of the poplar PPO family was performed in the present study, and 18 PtrPPO genes were identified. Bioinformatics and qRT-PCR were then used to analyze the gene structure, phylogeny, chromosomal localization, gene replication, cis-elements, and expression patterns of PtrPPOs. Sequence analysis revealed that two-thirds of the PtrPPO genes lacked intronic sequences. Phylogenetic analysis showed that all PPO genes were categorized into 11 groups, and woody plants harbored many PPO genes. Eighteen PtrPPO genes were disproportionally localized on 19 chromosomes, and 3 pairs of segmented replication genes and 4 tandem repeat genomes were detected in poplars. Cis-acting element analysis identified numerous growth and developmental elements, secondary metabolism processes, and stress-related elements in the promoters of different PPO members. Furthermore, PtrPPO genes were expressed preferentially in the tissues and fruits of young plants. In addition, the expression of some PtrPPOs could be significantly induced by polyethylene glycol, abscisic acid, and methyl jasmonate, thereby revealing their potential role in regulating the stress response. Currently, we identified potential upstream TFs of PtrPPOs using bioinformatics.
Comprehensive analysis is helpful for selecting candidate PPO genes for follow-up studies on biological function, and progress in understanding the molecular genetic basis of stress resistance in forest trees might lead to the development of genetic resources.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
Molybdenum disulfide has broad applications in catalysis, optoelectronics, and solid lubrication, where lanthanide (Ln) doping can be used to tune its physicochemical properties. The ...reduction of oxygen is an electrochemical process important in determining fuel cell efficiency, or a possible environmental-degradation mechanism for nanodevices and coatings consisting of Ln-doped MoS
2
. Here, by combining density-functional theory calculations and current-potential polarization curve simulations, we show that the dopant-induced high oxygen reduction activity at Ln-MoS
2
/water interfaces scales as a biperiodic function of Ln type. A defect-state pairing mechanism, which selectively stabilizes the hydroxyl and hydroperoxyl adsorbates on Ln-MoS
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, is proposed for the activity enhancement, and the biperiodic chemical trend in activity is found originating from the similar trends in intraatomic 4
f
–5
d
6
s
orbital hybridization and interatomic Ln–S bonding. A generic orbital-chemistry mechanism is described for explaining the simultaneous biperiodic trends observed in many electronic, thermodynamic, and kinetic properties.
More than 50% of Chinese mangroves were lost between 1950 and 2000 to habitat destruction, prompting an urge for conservation. To assess the importance of the protected Maowei Gulf mangrove estuary ...for fish population assemblage in the Beibu Gulf (China), we studied species composition and abundance of juvenile fish (including larvae) from July 2012 to June 2013. A total of 11 691 specimens were collected, which belonged to 24 species and 15 families. Six perciform species constituted 93% of the total sample. Pseudogobius javanicus (53.29%) was the dominant species from August to November, Omobranchus elegans (28.49%) from April to July, non-identified species in December and January, and Liza carinata in February and March. A number of commercially important fish species were also identified. Abundance was the highest in summer/early autumn (max 162.4 in Sep), and lowest in winter/early spring (Mar = 4.5). Diversity (H') and richness (Dma) indices (both max. in May: 1.67 and 1.95 respectively) were generally positively correlated with tide and temperature, and negatively with salinity. Seasonal variations play a more important role in the fish assemblage structure than tidal rhythm, with differences particularly pronounced between colder and warmer months. Despite the prominent seasonal differences in abiotic factors, this study indicates that Maowei mangroves provide habitat and food for juvenile fish throughout the year and thus are indispensable for the fish diversity in the Beibu Gulf.
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Abstract
The size of photovoltaic power generation has a certain uncertainty, which affects the quality of photovoltaic power generation, and affects the safety and stable operation of the power ...grid. By predicting the photovoltaic power generation, this problem can be better solved. A photovoltaic power generation power prediction method combining SOA (Seagull optimization algorithm) and BP neural network is proposed. The convergence speed of BP neural network prediction model is relatively slow, and it is easy to fall into local optimum. Optimizing its weights and thresholds through SOA can improve these situations. Through experiments, Through experimental comparison, it is found that the BP neural network method optimized by seagull algorithm has higher accuracy in predicting photovoltaic power generation.
Dramatically increased CO
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concentration from several point sources is perceived to cause severe greenhouse effect towards the serious ongoing global warming with associated climate destabilization, ...inducing undesirable natural calamities, melting of glaciers, and extreme weather patterns. CO
2
capture and utilization (CCU) has received tremendous attention due to its significant role in intensifying global warming. Considering the lack of a timely review on the state-of-the-art progress of promising CCU techniques, developing an appropriate and prompt summary of such advanced techniques with a comprehensive understanding is necessary. Thus, it is imperative to provide a timely review, given the fast growth of sophisticated CO
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capture and utilization materials and their implementation. In this work, we critically summarized and comprehensively reviewed the characteristics and performance of both liquid and solid CO
2
adsorbents with possible schemes for the improvement of their CO
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capture ability and advances in CO
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utilization. Their industrial applications in pre- and post-combustion CO
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capture as well as utilization were systematically discussed and compared. With our great effort, this review would be of significant importance for academic researchers for obtaining an overall understanding of the current developments and future trends of CCU. This work is bound to benefit researchers in fields relating to CCU and facilitate the progress of significant breakthroughs in both fundamental research and commercial applications to deliver perspective views for future scientific and industrial advances in CCU.
This review covers the sustainable development of advanced improvements in CO
2
capture and utilization.
Graphite flakes with sizes in the range of 3–20μm can be completely converted into single-layer graphene oxide (GO) with a high yield of 171±4% via an improved Hummers method. This yield is much ...higher than that (110±3%) from larger graphite flakes with sizes of 10–100μm. The structures, qualities and size distributions of the GO sheets prepared from both graphite precursors are nearly identical. More importantly, in the case of using small graphite flakes, the GO dispersion can be directly purified without the requirement of centrifugation to remove unoxidized residuals. Considering the high yield, simplified purification procedure, and high-quality of GO, the modification of using graphite flakes with small sizes is an important step towards the mass-production of GO at industrial scale.
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37.
Learning Robust Visual-Semantic Embeddings Tsai, Yao-Hung Hubert; Liang-Kang Huang; Salakhutdinov, Ruslan
2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV),
2017-Oct.
Conference Proceeding
Open access
Many of the existing methods for learning joint embedding of images and text use only supervised information from paired images and its textual attributes. Taking advantage of the recent success of ...unsupervised learning in deep neural networks, we propose an end-to-end learning framework that is able to extract more robust multi-modal representations across domains. The proposed method combines representation learning models (i.e., auto-encoders) together with cross-domain learning criteria (i.e., Maximum Mean Discrepancy loss) to learn joint embeddings for semantic and visual features. A novel technique of unsupervised-data adaptation inference is introduced to construct more comprehensive embeddings for both labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate our method on Animals with Attributes and Caltech-UCSD Birds 200-2011 dataset with a wide range of applications, including zero and few-shot image recognition and retrieval, from inductive to transductive settings. Empirically, we show that our frame-work improves over the current state of the art on many of the considered tasks.
3D rotation is one of many fundamental manipulations to cells and imperative in a wide range of applications in single cell analysis involving biology, chemistry, physics and medicine. In this ...article, we report a dielectrophoresis-based, on-chip manipulation method that can load and rotate a single cell for 3D cell imaging and multiple biophysical property measurements. To achieve this, we trapped a single cell in constriction and subsequently released it to a rotation chamber formed by four sidewall electrodes and one transparent bottom electrode. In the rotation chamber, rotating electric fields were generated by applying appropriate AC signals to the electrodes for driving the single cell to rotate in 3D under control. The rotation spectrum for in-plane rotation was used to extract the cellular dielectric properties based on a spherical single-shell model, and the stacked images of out-of-plane cell rotation were used to reconstruct the 3D cell morphology to determine its geometric parameters. We have tested the capabilities of our method by rotating four representative mammalian cells including HeLa, C3H10, B lymphocyte, and HepaRG. Using our device, we quantified the area-specific membrane capacitance and cytoplasm conductivity for the four cells, and revealed the subtle difference of geometric parameters (i.e., surface area, volume, and roughness) by 3D cell imaging of cancer cells and normal leukocytes. Combining microfluidics, dielectrophoresis, and microscopic imaging techniques, our electrorotation-on-chip (EOC) technique is a versatile method for manipulating single cells under investigation and measuring their multiple biophysical properties.
The advanced Internet of Things (IoT) enables more and more interactions between people and machines in the emerging applications, which rely on real-time communication and computing. However, the ...limited battery capacity and low computing capacity of IoT nodes can hardly support high-performance computing applications. The integration of wireless power transmission (WPT) and mobile edge computing (MEC) is a feasible and promising solution to address the energy shortage and computing capacity limitation of IoT nodes by harvesting radio frequency signal's energy and offloading the nodes' computation tasks to edge computing servers (ECSs). In this work, we focus on the wireless powered MEC network with an ECS and multiple edge devices (EDs), and study the joint optimization of WPT duration, transmission time allocation of each ED and partial offloading decision to maximize the sum computation rate. First, we formulate this as a non-convex problem which is hard to solve. Second, to conquer this problem, we decompose the original offloading problem into the sub-problem of optimizing the offloading time allocation among EDs and the proportion of harvested energy allocated for offloading at each ED under a given WPT duration and the top-problem of optimizing the WPT duration. Finally, we design an online DRL-based framework where one DNN together with its exploration strategy and training strategy is adopted to learn the near-optimal WPT duration and an efficient optimal algorithm is designed to solve the sub-problem. Numerical results show that the DRL-based offloading algorithm achieves the near-maximal sum computation rate while greatly reducing the processing time by at least three orders of magnitude compared with using the solver CVX for the sub-problem and the DNN for the top-problem.
Eukaryotic dehydrodolichyl diphosphate synthases (DHDDSs), cis‐prenyltransferases (cis‐PTs) synthesizing precursors of dolichols to mediate glycoprotein biosynthesis require partners, for eample Nus1 ...in yeast and NgBR in animals, which are cis‐PTs homologues without activity but to boost the DHDDSs activity. Unlike animals, plants have multiple cis‐PT homologues to pair or stand alone to produce various chain‐length products with less known physiological roles. We chose Cinnamomum kanehirae, a tree that contains two DHDDS‐like and three NgBR‐like proteins from genome analysis, and found that one DHDDS‐like protein acted as a homodimeric cis‐PT to make a medium‐chain C55 product, while the other formed heterodimeric complexes with either one of two NgBR homologues to produce longer‐chain products. Both complexes were functional to complement the growth defect of the yeast rer2 deficient strain at a higher temperature. From the roles for the polyprenol and dolichol biosynthesis and sequence motifs, their homologues in various species were compared to reveal their possible evolutionary paths.
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