Genetic information can be critical in identifying conservation priorities and developing conservation strategies. There is an urgent need for noninvasive genetic tools to study the wild populations ...of Asian colobine monkeys. The majority of these species are threatened with habitat destruction, population reduction and even extinction, but generally lack information on their genetic diversity and population structure. Genetic sampling and tissue collection have been scarce in these species owing to strict regulations on manipulation of endangered species, and the difficulties and risks associated with capturing these arboreal and fast‐moving monkeys in the challenging environments that they inhabit. These difficulties have hindered the development of molecular genetic markers, which are usually derived from tissues or blood. In this study, we present a method for de novo microsatellite isolation and genotyping using DNA from noninvasive origins of a critically endangered Asian colobine, the white‐headed langur (Trachypithecus leucocephalus). Genomic DNA isolated from hair was shown to be sufficient for microsatellite enrichment and isolation, with similar isolation efficiencies as from tissue DNA. We identified and characterized 20 polymorphic microsatellite loci, and evaluated their amplification success and genotyping reliability with 86 field‐collected fecal samples. These results show that this panel of loci can produce reliable genotypes from fecal samples, and represent a useful tool for noninvasive investigation of genetic structure, individual identification and kinship assessment in this highly endangered species. Our approach can be applied to conservation genetic studies of other wild species that lack sequence information and tissue samples.
In recent years, accreditation standards for international engineering education have led to a dramatic rise in the use of outcome-based education at universities. In this system, enticing new ...undergraduate students to science and engineering, although challenging, is the first important step toward building students' career competencies. An ongoing effort to attract students to biotechnology was initiated 13 years ago in the School of Biotechnology at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. We describe the design and organization of the Microbe Competition, a program attracting a total of nearly 6,500 students as of 2018. In the competition, students need to pass the microbiology knowledge test, provide a practical experiment proposal related to the topic of competition, and finish the experiment under the supervision of teachers before getting final prizes. The competition develops students' competencies in acquiring and applying knowledge, problem solving, teamwork, communication, and experimental skills. By investigating students' feedback, we have been continuously improving the quality of competition to attract more students from the biotechnology major. We hope that by sharing our experience, we can help educators at other universities organize similar introductory activities on their own campuses.
Lincomycin is a lincosamide antibiotic produced by Streptomyces lincolnensis. Through mutagenesis by ethylmethansulfonate (EMS) and ultraviolet (UV) irradiation repeatedly, M2 was picked out in plate ...with glutamine and propylproline orderly. In 50-L stirred bioreactor, the production of lincomycin, fermented by M2, was increased to 8136 u/ml under the optimal condition as compared to original strain S. lincolnensis 07-5 (6634 u/ml). Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-D GE) and mass spectrometry (MS)-shown LmbG, LmbI, and acetohydroxy acid isomeroreductase were remarkably synthesized in M2. The gene lmbG and lmbI are responsible for methylation in the lincomycin biosynthetic cluster, while acetohydroxy acid isomeroreductase contributes to stronger metabolic capability. Finally, we obtained a better strain for industrial production.
It remains a great challenge to develop polymer‐based materials with efficient and color‐tunable organic afterglow. Two indolocarbazole derivatives IaCzA and IbCzA have been synthesized and doped ...into poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) matrices. It is found that the resulting films can produce unique dual‐mode afterglow, which is composed of persistent thermally activated delayed fluorescence and ultralong organic phosphorescence. Besides, the IbCzA‐doped PVA film exhibits intense blue afterglow with Φafterglow and τafterglow up to 19.8 % and 1.81 s, respectively, representing state‐of‐the‐art dual‐mode organic afterglow performance. Moreover, our reported film has high flexibility, excellent transparency, and large‐area producibility; and the afterglow color of the film can be linearly tuned by temperature. Inspired by these distinctive properties, the PVA doped with IbCzA was employed as temperature‐sensitive security ink for anti‐counterfeiting and information encryption.
Two indolocarbazole derivatives IaCzA and IbCzA have been synthesized and doped into poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) matrices. It is found that the resulting films simultaneously produce persistent thermally activated delayed fluorescence and ultralong organic phosphorescence, and their afterglow colors can be linearly tuned by temperature. Besides, the IbCzA‐doped PVA film presents state‐of‐the‐art dual‐mode organic afterglow performance.
BACKGROUNDKidneys from very small pediatric donors (≤10 kg) are underutilized. Compared to en bloc kidney transplantation (EBKT), single kidney transplantation (SKT) can maximize donor resources. ...However, it remains unknown whether it's appropriate to perform SKTs from donors weighing ≤10 kg. METHODSA total of 35 adult recipients undergoing kidney transplantation from donors weighing ≤10 kg at our center from December 2014 to December 2019 were included and grouped into SKT group (n=20) and EBKT group (n=15). Transplant outcomes were retrospectively analyzed and compared between 2 groups. RESULTSThe 1-year and 3-year death-censored graft survival in SKT group was 95%, it is not significantly higher than that in EBKT group (80%, log-rank test, P=0.38). Significant improvement in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was noted in both groups, despite eGFR at 1 year was lower in the SKT group (P<0.01). Proteinuria was common in both groups but subsided gradually during the follow-up time. Complication rates were similar between 2 groups with no vascular thrombosis in the SKT group. CONCLUSIONSIn conclusion, SKTs from donors weighing ≤10 kg to adult recipients achieves comparable outcomes with EBKTs, which provides evidence to support performing SKTs from donors weighing ≤10 kg in certain donor and recipient scenarios.
Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics ...and behaviors across various tasks. We present a model-based RL method that learns to transfer potentially useful dynamics and action demonstrations from offline data to a novel task. The main idea is to use the world models not only as simulators for behavior learning but also as tools to measure the task relevance for both dynamics representation transfer and policy transfer. We build a time-varying, domain-selective distillation loss to generate a set of offline-to-online similarity weights. These weights serve two purposes: (i) adaptively transferring the task-agnostic knowledge of physical dynamics to facilitate world model training, and (ii) learning to replay relevant source actions to guide the target policy. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods in Meta-World and DeepMind Control Suite.
World models learn the consequences of actions in vision-based interactive systems. However, in practical scenarios like autonomous driving, noncontrollable dynamics that are independent or sparsely ...dependent on action signals often exist, making it challenging to learn effective world models. To address this issue, we propose Iso-Dream++, a model-based reinforcement learning approach that has two main contributions. First, we optimize the inverse dynamics to encourage the world model to isolate controllable state transitions from the mixed spatiotemporal variations of the environment. Second, we perform policy optimization based on the decoupled latent imaginations, where we roll out noncontrollable states into the future and adaptively associate them with the current controllable state. This enables long-horizon visuomotor control tasks to benefit from isolating mixed dynamics sources in the wild, such as self-driving cars that can anticipate the movement of other vehicles, thereby avoiding potential risks. On top of our previous work, we further consider the sparse dependencies between controllable and noncontrollable states, address the training collapse problem of state decoupling, and validate our approach in transfer learning setups. Our empirical study demonstrates that Iso-Dream++ outperforms existing reinforcement learning models significantly on CARLA and DeepMind Control.
Insufficient clinical experience and heavy workload may lead to misdiagnosis or omission when manually analyzing laryngoscope images and diagnosing diseases. Based on deep learning, automatic ...diagnosis and generation of endoscopic reports are of great importance. Therefore, based on both text and image modalities, we propose the multimodal internal-related feature representation learning (MIFRL) network model for multi-attribute recognition and endoscopic reports generation. Firstly, text and image encoding modules are used to extract feature, which simplifies the process of manually labeling images. Next, internal-related feature mining module is designed for multimodal information fusion and class imbalance problem. Finally, a multi-branch structure is designed to output the multi-attribute recognition of the lesions and generate endoscopic reports. In addition, asymmetric loss (ASL) is introduced to further mitigate the class imbalance problem. Based on our dataset, the average accuracy of endoscopic reports and attributes classification were 85.5% and 90.7%, respectively. In the recognition of the smallest number of leukoplakia images, mean average precision (mAP) was improved from 81.4% to 86.7%. Compared with other models, our model also achieved better results.
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