Plant WRKY transcription factors play crucial roles in plant growth and development, as well as plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. In this study, we identified and characterized a WRKY ...transcription factor in rice, OsWRKY50. OsWRKY50 functions as a transcriptional repressor in the nucleus. The transcription of OsWRKY50 was repressed under salt stress conditions, but activated after abscisic acid (ABA) treatment. OsWRKY50-overexpression (OsWRKY50-OX) plants displayed increased tolerance to salt stress compared to wild type and control plants. The expression of OsLEA3, OsRAB21, OsHKT1;5, and OsP5CS1 in OsWRKY50-OX were much higher than wild type and control plants under salt stress. Furthermore, OsWRKY50-OX displayed hyposensitivity to ABA-regulated seed germination and seedling establishment. The protoplast-based transient expression system and yeast hybrid assay demonstrated that OsWRKY50 directly binds to the promoter of OsNCED5, and thus further inhibits its transcription. Taken together, our results demonstrate that rice transcription repressor OsWRKY50 mediates ABA-dependent seed germination and seedling growth and enhances salt stress tolerance via an ABA-independent pathway.
Ship fires are one of the main factors that endanger the safety of ships; because the ship is far away from land, the fire can be difficult to extinguish and could often cause huge losses. The engine ...room has many pieces of equipment and is the principal place of fire; however, due to its complex internal environment, it can bring many difficulties to the task of fire detection. The traditional detection methods have their own limitations, but fire detection using deep learning technology has the characteristics of high detection speed and accuracy. In this paper, we improve the YOLOv7-tiny model to enhance its detection performance. Firstly, partial convolution (PConv) and coordinate attention (CA) mechanisms are introduced into the model to improve its detection speed and feature extraction ability. Then, SIoU is used as a loss function to accelerate the model's convergence and improve accuracy. Finally, the experimental results on the dataset of the ship engine room fire made by us shows that the mAP@0.5 of the improved model is increased by 2.6%, and the speed is increased by 10 fps, which can meet the needs of engine room fire detection.
A novel potassium-carbonate-based absorption process is currently being developed to reduce the energy consumption when capturing CO2 from coal combustion flue gas. The process employs the enzyme ...carbonic anhydrase (CA) as a catalyst to accelerate the rate of CO2 absorption. This study focused on the immobilization of a new variant of the CA enzyme onto a new group of nonporous nanoparticles to improve the enzyme’s thermal stability and its chemical resistance to major impurities from the flue gas. The CA enzyme was manufactured at the pilot scale by a leading enzyme company. As carrier materials, two different batches of SiO2–ZrO2 composite nanoparticles and one batch of silica nanoparticle were synthesized using a flame spray pyrolysis method. Classic Danckwerts absorption theory with reaction was applied to determine the kinetics of the immobilized enzymes for CO2 absorption. The immobilized enzymes retained 56–88% of their original activity in a K2CO3/KHCO3 solution over a 60-day test period at 50 °C, compared with a 30% activity retention for their free CA enzyme counterpart. The immobilized CA enzymes also revealed improved chemical stability. The inactivation kinetics of the free and immobilized CA enzymes in the K2CO3/KHCO3 solution were experimentally quantified.
Draw textured yarn (DTY) packages is a significant raw material in manufacturing. Various defects will be generated on surface during production and transportation, of which hairiness is the most ...common and intractable defect. Many methods have been applied for fabric surface defect detection, but little research is aimed at DTY packages hairiness defects. In order to achieve the accuracy of DTY packages hairiness detection in industrial production, a method based on multi-directional anisotropic Gaussian directional derivatives was proposed to accomplish the DTY packages hairiness defect detection. Firstly, the original defect images were obtained by a device consisting of plane array light source, camera, and computer with image processing algorithm. Secondly, the gradient information of DTY packages images was constructed by anisotropic Gaussian directional derivative to characterize the defect. Then image response maps with all directions were fused to obtain the final response map. After that, a special difference of median (DOM) filter was proposed to remove useless information. Finally, the segmentation result was obtained by threshold method and morphological processing. Compared with various classical methods, the proposed method obtained the best performance in our evaluation experiments about DTY packages hairiness detection.
Norovirus (NoV) is a major cause of sporadic cases and outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis (AGE), thereby imposing threat to health globally. It is unclear how quantitation of wastewater NoV reflects ...the incidence of human AGE infections; therefore, we conducted this systematic review and meta-analysis of published NoV wastewater surveillance studies. A literature search was performed, and all studies on NoV wastewater surveillance were identified. Quantitative results were evaluated. The results showed that the overall detection rate of NoV in wastewater was 82.10% (95% confidence interval CI: 74.22–89.92%); NoV concentration was statistically significant in terms of season (
P
< 0.001), with higher concentration in spring and winter. There were positive correlations between NoV GII concentration in wastewater and GII AGE cases (
r
s
= 0.51, 95% CI: 0.18–0.74,
I
2
= 0%), total AGE cases (
r
s
= 0.40, 95% CI: 0.15–0.61,
I
2
= 23%) and NoV outbreaks (
r
s
= 0.47, 95% CI: 0.30–0.62,
I
2
= 0%). Results of cross-correlation analysis of partial data indicated that variations in GII concentration were consistent with or ahead of those in the number of AGE cases. The diversity of NoV genotypes in wastewater was elucidated, and the dominant strains in wastewater showed a consistent temporal distribution with those responsible for human AGE. Our study demonstrated the potential association of NoV detected in wastewater with AGE infections, and further studies are needed to confirm this conclusion.
Angiogenesis is a complex, highly-coordinated and multi-step process of new blood vessel formation from pre-existing blood vessels. When initiated, the sprouting process is spearheaded by the ...specialized endothelial cells (ECs) known as tip cells, which guide the organization of accompanying stalk cells and determine the function and morphology of the finally-formed blood vessels. Recent studies indicate that the orchestration and coordination of angiogenesis involve dynamic tip cell selection, which is the competitive selection of cells to lead the angiogenic sprouts. Therefore, this review attempt to summarize the underlying mechanisms involved in tip cell specification in a dynamic manner to enable readers to gain a systemic and overall understanding of tip cell formation, involving cooperative interaction of cell rearrangement with Notch and YAP/TAZ signaling. Various mechanical and chemical signaling cues are integrated to ensure the right number of cells at the right place during angiogenesis, thereby precisely orchestrating morphogenic functions that ensure correct patterning of blood vessels. Video Abstract.
Abstract
Multi-label image classification is a practical and challenging task in the field of machine learning. It is a fundamental but essential task used in auto driving, internet image ...classification, and other fields. Many researchers have done various researches on relevant aspects. Deep Semantic Dictionary Learning (DSDL) is a multi-label image classification method brought out by previous researchers which combines the semantic meaning information into the classification task. However, it only uses one kind of feature extraction network as the feature map generator without considering other alternatives. In this paper, six types of pretrained networks are applied as alternative choices to validate the performance of DSDL on different neural networks. Experiments are conducted on the VOC2007 dataset and the result shows the inner relation of different series of neural networks and demonstrates that different feature extraction networks perform variously on different tasks. The ResNet-152 achieves the mean average precision (mAP) of 94.5% and outperforms the original DSDL method of 0.3% mAP.
Understanding the long-term kinetic characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and the impact of inactivated vaccines on SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in convalescent patients can provide information for ...developing and improving vaccination strategies in such populations.
In this cohort, 402 convalescent patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR from 1 January to 22 June 2020 in Jiangsu, China, were enrolled. The epidemiological data included demographics, symptom onset, and vaccination history. Blood samples were collected and tested for antibody levels of specific IgG, IgM, RBD-IgG, S-IgG, and neutralizing antibodies using a the commercial magnetic chemiluminescence enzyme immunoassay.
The median follow-up time after symptom onset was 15.6 months (IQR, 14.6 to 15.8). Of the 402 convalescent patients, 44 (13.84%) received an inactivated vaccine against COVID-19. A total of 255 (80.19%) patients were IgG-positive and 65 (20.44%) were IgM-positive. The neutralizing antibody was 83.02%. Compared with non-vaccinated individuals, the IgG antibody levels in vaccinated people were higher (P=0.007). Similarly, antibody levels for RBD-IgG, S-IgG, and neutralizing antibodies were all highly increased in vaccinated individuals (P<0.05). IgG levels were significantly higher after vaccination than before vaccination in the same population. IgG levels in those who received 'single dose and ≥14d' were similar to those with two doses (P>0.05). Similar conclusions were drawn for RBD-IgG and the neutralizing antibody.
15.6 months after symptom onset, the majority of participants remained positive for serum-specific IgG, RBD-IgG, S-IgG, and neutralizing antibodies. For convalescent patients, a single dose of inactivated vaccine against COVID-19 can further boost antibody titres.
Aim:
Intermittent hypoxia (IH) is the prominent feature of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) pathophysiology, which is an in dependent risk factor of cardiovascular complications. The effects of IH on ...adipocyte metabolism were explored by high-throughput sequencing technology.
Methods:
Plasma was collected from OSA patients and control group to perform mRNA sequencing. 3T3-L1 cells were differentiated into adipocytes then subjected to a 5%–21% O
2
hypoxic environment (IH) for 24 h. High-throughput sequencing method was used to determine differential mRNA and miRNA patterns in fat cells exposed to IH. We then performed Gene Ontology (GO) analysis, identified relevant KEGG pathways and miRNA-target-pathways.
Results:
Sequencing data showed that OSA affected the expression of 343 mRNAs in the plasma. At the same time, we found that IH affected the expression of 3034 mRNAs in the adipocytes. In addition, 68 differentially expressed mRNAs were overlapped in plasma from OSA patient and IH-induced adipocyte model. We observe that 68 differential genes could be connected to 49 reciprocally expressed miRNAs. We showed that IH significantly reduced the expression of miR-182-5p and miR-30c-2-3p. KEGG predicted that the function of expressed miR-182-5p and miR-30c-2-3p was enriched to AKT signaling pathway. Notably, IH activated PI3K/AKT pathway in fat cells.
Conclusion:
Our results demonstrated that IH might induce adipocyte metabolism by regulating miR-182-5p and miR-30c-2-3p.
Carbonic anhydrase (CA) enzyme-mediated absorption processes are regarded as promising alternatives to the conventional amine-based process for CO2 capture because of their low energy penalty and low ...risk of causing secondary pollution. The activity and stability of the CA enzyme are crucial to reducing the equipment and operating costs of the enzyme-mediated process. This work investigated three cationic and nonionic surfactants to improve the activity and stability of a technical-grade CA enzyme in a 20 wt % potassium carbonate solution. Experimental results revealed that the impact of the surfactants on the CA enzyme depended on their properties. For example, the cationic surfactant significantly enhanced the activity of CA enzyme but adversely affected enzyme stability. However, in the presence of the cationic surfactant after 30 days at 50 °C, the activity of the CA enzyme still outperformed that of CA without added surfactant. The nonionic surfactant significantly improved enzyme stability. Furthermore, the addition of surfactants within a critical micelle concentration of 1.0 did not distinctly influence the gas–liquid mass transfer, indicating that surfactant–enzyme interaction was responsible for the observed variations in the activity and stability of the tested enzyme.
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