The white-spotted flower chafer (WSFC), Protaetia brevitarsis Lewis, is native to East Asia. Although their larvae are considered a potential resource insect for degrading plant residues, producing ...protein fodder, and processing to traditional medicine, adult WSFCs inflict damage to dozens of fruit and economic crops. The control of the WSFC still relies heavily on pesticides and the inefficient manual extraction of adults. Here, we report the identification and evaluation of the aggregation pheromone of WSFCs. From the headspace volatiles emitted from WSFC adults, anisole, 4-methylanisole, 2-heptanone and 2-nonanone were identified as WSFC-specific components. However, only anisole and 4-methylanisole elicited positive dose-response relationship in electroantennography tests, and only 4-methylanisole significantly attracted WSFCs of both sexes in olfactometer bioassays and field experiments. These results concluded that 4-methylanisole is the aggregation pheromone of WSFCs. Furthermore, we developed polyethylene vials as long-term dispensers of 4-methylanisole to attract and kill WSFCs. The polyethylene vial lures could effectively attracted WSFCs for more than four weeks. Pheromone-based lures can be developed as an environmentally friendly protocol for monitoring and controlling WSFC adults.
The theme of love is reflected in a variety of ways in all the works of L.D. Zinovieva-Annibal. As one of the most representative works of the writer, the story “The Thirty-Three Freaks” is an ...important and particularly revealing link in proving the process of change in the creative method and worldview of the author. The aim of the study is to show the complex relationship between love and eros, not only in the story “The Thirty-Three Freaks”, but also in the real married life of Vyacheslav Ivanov and L.D. Zinovieva-Annibal. The writer's artistic embodiment of the ideas of her husband, the symbolist poet V. Ivanov, on the creation of a new religion, where Eros is “entrenched” and becomes a bearer of “solidarity”, is traced. V. Ivanov's utopian ideal project of organizing a new social form, although it ultimately failed, originally meant the intention to overcome individualism among the initiates, among the participants of the love action, which proves the influence of V. Solovyov's philosophy on the symbolists and, in particular, on the circle of visitors of “The Tower”. The study uses biographical, intertextual, and comparative-historical methods. The conclusion is made that in the ideal form of society, in which there is no place for individualism and egoism, the concept of inseparability of spirit and body should have prevailed. However, analysis of the novel “The Thirty-Three Freaks” shows that the heroine had not overcome individualism, that the path to comprehending of eros was theoretically declared, but was not realized in practice. Hence the tragic sound of the work and its disastrous finale.
Most single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) analyses begin with cell clustering; thus, the clustering accuracy considerably impacts the validity of downstream analyses. In contrast with the abundance ...of clustering methods, the tools to assess the clustering accuracy are limited. We propose a new Clustering Deviation Index (CDI) that measures the deviation of any clustering label set from the observed single-cell data. We conduct in silico and experimental scRNA-seq studies to show that CDI can select the optimal clustering label set. As a result, CDI also informs the optimal tuning parameters for any given clustering method and the correct number of cluster components.
With the explosive growth of the amount of information in social networks, the recommendation system, as an application of social networks, has attracted widespread attention in recent years on how ...to obtain user-interested content in massive data. At present, in the process of algorithm design of the recommending system, most methods ignore structural relationships between users. Therefore, in this paper, we designed a personalized sliding window for different users by combining timing information and network topology information, then extracted the information sequence of each user in the sliding window and obtained the similarity between users through sequence alignment. The algorithm only needs to extract part of the data in the original dataset, and the time series comparison shows that our method is superior to the traditional algorithm in recommendation Accuracy, Popularity, and Diversity.
Ecdysone receptor (EcR) and chitinase play a critical role in the molting stage of insect pests. Each of them is considered a promising target for the development of novel insect growth regulators ...(IGRs). In the present paper, a total of 24 (23 novel) hexacyclic pyrazolamide derivatives were designed and synthesized by reducing the heptacycle and inserting small flexible linkers on the basis of the previously discovered dual-target compound
acting simultaneously on EcR and
chitinase (
ChtI). Their insecticidal activities against
,
, and
larvae were evaluated. The results revealed that the insecticidal activity was not significantly enhanced when the heptacycle on the pyrazole ring was reduced to a hexacycle. However, the insertion of an additional methylene spacer between the substituted phenyl ring and the amide bond can improve the insecticidal activity. Among the derivatives, the most potent compound,
, exhibited promising insecticidal activities against
and
. Further protein binding assays and molecular docking indicated that
could target both EcR and
ChtI, and is a potential lead compound for IGRs. The present work provides valuable clues for the development of new dual-target IGRs.
How Quaternary climatic oscillations affected range distributions and intraspecific divergence of alpine plants on the Qinghai‐Tibetan Plateau (QTP) remains largely unknown. Here, we report a survey ...of chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) and nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) DNA variation aimed at exploring the phylogeographical history of the QTP alpine endemic Aconitum gymnandrum. We sequenced three cpDNA fragments (rpl20–rps12 intergenic spacer, the trnV intron and psbA‐trnH spacer) and also the nuclear (ITS) region in 245 individuals from 23 populations sampled throughout the species’ range. Two distinct lineages, with eastern and western geographical distributions respectively, were identified from a phylogenetic analysis of ITS sequence variation. Based on a fast substitution rate, these were estimated to have diverged from each other in the early Pleistocene approximately 1.45 Ma. The analysis of cpDNA variation identified nine chlorotypes that clustered into two major clades that were broadly congruent in geographical distribution with the two ITS lineages. The east–west split of cpDNA divergence was supported by an amova which partitioned approximately half of the total variance between these two groups of populations. Analysis of the spatial distribution of chlorotypes showed that each clade was subdivided into two groups of populations such that a total of four population groups existed in the species. It is suggested that these different groups derive from four independent glacial refugia that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and that three of these refugia were located at high altitude on the QTP platform itself at that time. Coalescent simulation of chlorotype genealogies supported both an early Pleistocene origin of the two main cpDNA clades and also the ‘four‐refugia’ hypothesis during the LGM. Two previous phylogeographical studies of QTP alpine plants indicated that such plants retreated to refugia at the eastern/south‐eastern plateau edge during the LGM and/or previous glacial maxima. However, the results for A. gymnandrum suggest that at least some of these cold‐tolerant species may have also survived centrally on the QTP platform throughout the Quaternary.
Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease with diverse outcomes ranging from self-healing lesions, to progressive non-healing lesions, to metastatic spread and destruction of mucous membranes. ...Although resolution of cutaneous leishmaniasis is a classic example of type-1 immunity leading to self-healing lesions, an excess of type-1 related inflammation can contribute to immunopathology and metastatic spread. Leishmania genetic diversity can contribute to variation in polarization and robustness of the immune response through differences in both pathogen sensing by the host and immune evasion by the parasite. In this study, we observed a difference in parasite chemokine suppression between the Leishmania (L.) subgenus and the Viannia (V.) subgenus, which is associated with severe immune-mediated pathology such as mucocutaneous leishmaniasis. While Leishmania (L.) subgenus parasites utilize the virulence factor and metalloprotease glycoprotein-63 (gp63) to suppress the type-1 associated host chemokine CXCL10, L. (V.) panamensis did not suppress CXCL10. To understand the molecular basis for the inter-species variation in chemokine suppression, we used in silico modeling to identify a putative CXCL10-binding site on GP63. The putative CXCL10 binding site is in a region of gp63 under significant positive selection, and it varies from the L. major wild-type sequence in all gp63 alleles identified in the L. (V.) panamensis reference genome. Mutating wild-type L. (L.) major gp63 to the L. (V.) panamensis sequence at the putative binding site impaired cleavage of CXCL10 but not a non-specific protease substrate. Notably, Viannia clinical isolates confirmed that L. (V.) panamensis primarily encodes non-CXCL10-cleaving gp63 alleles. In contrast, L. (V.) braziliensis has an intermediate level of activity, consistent with this species having more equal proportions of both alleles. Our results demonstrate how parasite genetic diversity can contribute to variation in immune responses to Leishmania spp. infection that may play critical roles in the outcome of infection.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Genes associated with increased susceptibility to multiple sclerosis (MS) have been identified, but their functions are incompletely understood. One of these genes codes for the RNA helicase ...DExD/H-Box Polypeptide 39B (DDX39B), which shows genetic and functional epistasis with interleukin-7 receptor-α gene (
) in MS-risk. Based on evolutionary and functional arguments, we postulated that DDX39B enhances immune tolerance thereby decreasing MS risk. Consistent with such a role we show that DDX39B controls the expression of many MS susceptibility genes and important immune-related genes. Among these we identified
(
), which codes for the master transcriptional factor in CD4
/CD25
T regulatory cells. DDX39B knockdown led to loss of immune-regulatory and gain of immune-effector expression signatures. Splicing of
introns, which belong to a previously unrecognized type of introns with C-rich polypyrimidine tracts, was exquisitely sensitive to DDX39B levels. Given the importance of FOXP3 in autoimmunity, this work cements DDX39B as an important guardian of immune tolerance.
As the largest component of crops, water has an important impact on the growth and development of crops. Timely, rapid, continuous, and non-destructive detection of crop water stress status is ...crucial for crop water-saving irrigation, production, and breeding. Indices based on leaf or canopy temperature acquired by thermal imaging are widely used for crop water stress diagnosis. However, most studies fail to achieve high-throughput, continuous water stress detection and mostly focus on two-dimension measurements. This study developed a low-cost three-dimension (3D) motion robotic system, which is equipped with a designed 3D imaging system to automatically collect potato plant data, including thermal and binocular RGB data. A method is developed to obtain 3D plant fusion point cloud with depth, temperature, and RGB color information using the acquired thermal and binocular RGB data. Firstly, the developed system is used to automatically collect the data of the potato plants in the scene. Secondly, the collected data was processed, and the green canopy was extracted from the color image, which is convenient for the speeded-up robust features algorithm to detect more effective matching features. Photogrammetry combined with structural similarity index was applied to calculate the optimal homography transform matrix between thermal and color images and used for image registration. Thirdly, based on the registration of the two images, 3D reconstruction was carried out using binocular stereo vision technology to generate the original 3D point cloud with temperature information. The original 3D point cloud data were further processed through canopy extraction, denoising, and k-means based temperature clustering steps to optimize the data. Finally, the crop water stress index (CWSI) of each point and average CWSI in the canopy were calculated, and its daily variation and influencing factors were analyzed in combination with environmental parameters. The developed system and the proposed method can effectively detect the water stress status of potato plants in 3D, which can provide support for analyzing the differences in the three-dimensional distribution and spatial and temporal variation patterns of CWSI in potato.
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