Sophora alopecuroides
L. is a traditional Chinese medicine used for the treatment of several different disease states including bacillary dysentery and enteritis. But importantly, it also plays a ...role as an anti-tumor agent. That said, little is known about the role endophytes play regarding the clinically bioactive metabolites in
S. alopecuroides
. In order to explore the effects of endophytic fungi on the accumulation, quality, and correlation in the content of the medicinal compounds, the structural diversity of endophytic fungi in
S. alopecuroides
was analyzed. The relationship between endophytes and quinolizidine alkaloids (QAs), housed within the seeds of
S. alopecuroides
, which were interpreted based on established methods of high-throughput sequencing and high-performance liquid chromatography. A total of 1,034,418 effective sequence reads and 257 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained from 33 samples which were sourced from 11 different sampling sites and further classified into 9 phyla, 20 classes, 45 orders, 85 families, and 118 genera. Ascomycota was found to be the dominant phylum of endophytic fungi in
S. alopecuroides
, with a relative abundance ranging from 60.85 to 98.30%.
Alternaria
,
Cladosporium
,
Filobasidium
, and an unidentified Ascomycota were the core-shared endophytes, accounting for 49.96, 27.12, 14.83, and 7.88%, respectively. Correlation analysis showed that the Simpson’s diversity index of endophytic fungal community in
S. alopecuroides
was significantly positively correlated with the Oxymatrine (OMA) content in different areas, while the Chao and Shannoneven indexes were significantly negatively correlated with OMA. The endophytic fungi of
Alternaria
were positively correlated with the content of OMA, Oxysophocarpine (OSC), and total QAs. This study has mastered the endophytic fungi resources of
S. alopecuroides
, explored potential functional endophytic fungi, and provided a scientific basis for using biological fertilization strategies to improve the quality of
S. alopecuroides
.
Disease and pest detection of grape foliage is essential for grape yield and quality. RGB image (RGBI), multispectral image (MSI), and thermal infrared image (TIRI) are widely used in the health ...detection of plants. In this study, we collected three types of grape foliage images with six common classes (anthracnose, downy mildew, leafhopper, mites, viral disease, and healthy) in the field. ShuffleNet V2 was used to build up detection models. According to the accuracy of RGBI, MSI, TIRI, and multi-source data concatenation (MDC) models, and a multi-source data fusion (MDF) decision-making method was proposed for improving the detection performance for grape foliage, aiming to enhance the decision-making for RGBI of grape foliage by fusing the MSI and TIRI. The results showed that 40% of the incorrect detection outputs were rectified using the MDF decision-making method. The overall accuracy of MDF model was 96.05%, which had improvements of 2.64%, 13.65%, and 27.79%, compared with the RGBI, MSI, and TIRI models using label smoothing, respectively. In addition, the MDF model was based on the lightweight network with 3.785 M total parameters and 0.362 G multiply-accumulate operations, which could be highly portable and easy to be applied.
Owning to their extreme environmental conditions, lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau have typically displayed a simplistic food web structure, rendering them more vulnerable to climate change ...compared to lakes in plains. Phytoplankton, undergoing a changing aquatic environment, play a crucial role in the material cycle and energy flow of the food chain, particularly important for the unique fish species of the Tibetan Plateau. To identify the changing environment indexes and determine the response of phytoplankton composition to the environment change in alpine lakes, three lakes-Lake Qinghai, Lake Keluke and Lake Tuosu-were selected as study areas. Seasonal sampling surveys were conducted in spring and summer annually from 2018 to 2020. Our findings revealed there were significant changes in physicochemical parameters and phytoplankton in the three lakes. Bacillariophyta was the predominant phytoplankton in Lake Qinghai from 2018 to 2020, with the genera
sp.,
sp.,
sp. and
sp. predominated alternately. Lake Keluke alternated between being dominated by Bacillariophyta and cyanobacteria during the same period.
sp., a cyanobacteria, was prevalent in the summer of 2018 and 2019 and in the spring of 2020. In Lake Tuosu, Bacillariophyta was the predominant phytoplankton from 2018 to 2020, except in the summer of 2019, which was dominated by cyanobacteria.
sp.,
sp.,
sp.,
sp. and
sp. appeared successively as the dominant genera. Analysis revealed that all three lakes exhibited higher phytoplankton abundance in 2018 that in 2019 and 2020. Concurrently, they experienced higher average temperatures in 2018 than in the subsequent years. The cyanobacteria, Bacillariophyta, Chlorophyta and overall phytoplankton increased with temperature and decreased with salinity and NH
-N. Besides, the ratios of cyanobacteria, and the ratios of Bacillariophyta accounted in total phytoplankton increased with temperature. These findings suggest that cyanobacteria and phytoplankton abundance, especially Bacillariophyta, may have an increase tendency in the three alpine lakes under warm and wet climate.
Disease and pest are the main factors causing grape yield reduction. Correct and timely identification of these symptoms are necessary for the vineyard. However, the commonly used CNN models limit ...their performance on leaf images with complex backgrounds, due to the lack of global receptive field. In this article, we propose an effective and accurate approach based on Ghost-convolution and Transformer networks for diagnosing grape leaf in field. First, a grape leaf disease and pest dataset containing 11 classes and 12,615 images, namely GLDP12k is collected. Ghost network is adopted as the convolutional backbone to generate intermediate feature maps with cheap linear operations. Transformer encoders with multi-head self-attention are integrated behind to extract deep semantic features. Then we get the Ghost enlightened Transformer model, namely GeT. After analyzing five hyper-parameters, the optimized GeT is transfer-learnt from ImageNet which provides a 4.3% accuracy bonus. As the results show, with 180 frame-per-second, 1.16 M weights and 98.14% accuracy, GeT surpasses other models, and is 1.7 times faster and 3.6 times lighter than MobilenetV3_large (97.7%). This study shows that the GeT model is effective and provides an optional benchmark for field grape leaf diagnosis.
Sophora alopecuroides L. has great medicinal and ecological value in northwestern China. The host and its microbiota are mutually symbiotic, collectively forming a holobiont, conferring beneficial ...effects to the plant. However, the analysis of diversity, mycobiota composition, and the ecological function of endophytic fungi in the holobiont of S. alopecuroides is relatively lacking. In this article, the fungal community profiling of roots, stems, leaves, and seeds of S. alopecuroides (at the fruit maturity stage) from Huamachi and Baofeng in Ningxia, China were investigated based on the ITS1 region, using high-throughput sequencing technology. As a result, a total of 751 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained and further classified into 9 phyla, 27 classes, 66 orders, 141 families, 245 genera, and 340 species. The roots had the highest fungal richness and diversity, while the stems had the highest evenness and pedigree diversity. There also was a significant difference in the richness of the endophytic fungal community between root and seed (p < 0.05). The organ was the main factor affecting the community structure of endophytic fungi in S. alopecuroides. The genera of unclassified Ascomycota, Tricholoma, Apiotrichum, Alternaria, and Aspergillus made up the vast majority of relative abundance, which were common in all four organs as well. The dominant and endemic genera and biomarkers of endophytic fungi in four organs of S. alopecuroides were different and exhibited organ specificity or tissue preference. The endophytic fungi of S. alopecuroides were mainly divided into 15 ecological function groups, among which saprotroph was absolutely dominant, followed by mixotrophic and pathotroph, and the symbiotroph was the least. With this study, we revealed the diversity and community structure and predicted the ecological function of the endophytic fungi of S. alopecuroides, which provided a theoretical reference for the further development and utilization of the endophytic fungi resources of S. alopecuroides.
Endophytic fungi of medicinal plants are symbiotic with the host and play an important role in determining metabolites. To understand the relationship between the accumulation of
' medicinal ...bioactive compounds and the ecological succession of endophytic fungi, here we collected samples from
at four developmental stages (adult, flowering, podding, and mature) and different organs (roots, stems, leaves, and seeds) at the mature stage. We then used high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and high-throughput sequencing on the internal transcribed spacer region to identify the medicinal compounds and endophytic fungal communities in each sample. The endophytic fungal community characteristics and accumulation of medicinally bioactive compounds of
varied with the host's developmental stages and organs, with the highest total alkaloids content of 111.9 mg/g at the mature stage. Membership analysis and network connection analysis showed a total of 15 core endophytic fungi in different developmental stages and 16 core endophytic fungi in different organs at the mature stage. The unclassified Ascomycota,
, and
were significantly and positively correlated with the medicinal compounds of
at the mature stage (
> 0.6 or
< -0.6;
< 0.05). In this study, we identified key endophytic fungal resources that affect the content of medicinally bioactive compounds in
. This discovery could lay the foundation for enhancing the yield of medicinally bioactive compounds in
and the development and application of functional endophytic fungi.IMPORTANCE
is a traditional Chinese herbal medicine. The major medicinal chemicals are considered to be quinolizidine alkaloids. Quinolizidine alkaloids have been widely used for the treatment of tumors, dysentery, and enteritis. Previous studies have found that endophytic fungi in
can promote the accumulation of host quinolizidine alkaloids. However, the relationship between the accumulation of
' medicinal bioactive compounds and the ecological succession of endophytic fungi remains unclear. In this study, we screened the key endophytic fungal resources affecting the content of medicinally bioactive compounds and laid the foundation for subsequent research on the mechanism by which endophytic fungi promote the accumulation of medicinally bioactive compounds in
.
Wheat blue dwarf disease (WBD) was first reported in China in the 1960s. It has caused severe losses on several occasions in winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) in northwestern China, and the nature of ...the pathogenic agent has been unknown. Here we have shown that WBD was caused by a 16SrI-C phytoplasma transmitted by Psammotettix striatus. This finding was based on molecular diagnostics, insect transmission trials, and host-range determination. Portions of the 16S rRNA and ribosomal protein (rp) genes, rpsS (rps19), rplV (rpl22), and rpsC (rps3), were amplified from DNA samples of WBD-infected wheat seedlings by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) utilizing phytoplasma specific primer pairs. The nucleotide sequences of these amplicons showed high identity to these genes from phytoplasma strains in the aster yellows group (16SrI). Pairwise nucleotide sequence identities of WBD 16S rDNA compared to representative genes of 16SrI group strains ranged from 98.9 to 99.9%, whereas compared to 17 other phytoplasma groups (16SrII to 16SrXVIII), sequence identity ranged from 88.6 to 96.0%. Similarly, the sequence identities of rps19, rpl22, and rps3 between WBD and 16SrI group strains varied from 96.6 to 99.7%, but only 60.3 to 65% between WBD and other phytoplasma groups. Phylogenetic analyses were carried out on sequences from 16S rRNA and ribosomal protein genes (rps19, rpl22, and rps3), respectively, and both results indicated that WBD phytoplasma was a member of the 16SrI group and most closely related to subgroup 16SrI-C. WBD-infected P. striatus were present in wheat fields with WBD, and phytoplasma infection was verified by PCR detection followed by DNA sequencing. Insect transmission trials confirmed that P. striatus transmitted the WBD phytoplasmal agent from infected wheat to healthy wheat seedlings and seven other different plant species in the greenhouse. A survey of various weed species near WBD-infected wheat fields found 10 plant species in seven families to be positive for the presence of WBD phytoplasma.
In this paper, two trophic lakes: Lake Taihu and Lake Yanghe, and three alpine lakes: Lake Qinghai, Lake Keluke, and Lake Tuosu, were investigated to discover the connections between environmental ...factors and the phytoplankton community in lakes with differences in trophic levels and climatic conditions. Three seasonal data, including water quality and phytoplankton, were collected from the five lakes. The results demonstrated clear differences in water parameters and phytoplankton compositions in different lakes. The phytoplankton was dominated by Bacillariophyta, followed by Cyanobacteria and Chlorophyta in Lake Qinghai, Lake Keluke, and Lake Tuosu. It was dominated by Cyanobacteria (followed by Chlorophyta and Bacillariophyta in Lake Yanghe) and Cyanobacteria (followed by Chlorophyta and Cryptophyta in Lake Taihu). The temperature was an essential factor favoring the growth of Cyanobacteria, Chlorophyta, and Bacillariophyta, especially Cyanobacteria and Chlorophyta. The pH had significantly negative relationships with Cyanobacteria, Chlorophyta, and Bacillariophyta. Particularly, a high pH might be a strong and negative factor for phytoplankton growth in alpine lakes. A high salinity was also an adverse factor for phytoplankton. Those results could provide fundamental information about the phytoplankton community and their correlated factors in the alpine lakes of the Tibetan Plateau, contributing to the protection and management of alpine lakes.
•The paper presents a summary of effort made for the employment of IVR to CAP1400.•Some design improvements are carried out upon the results of IVR-relevant phenomenology.•A method of Decomposition ...Event Tree (DET) is developed to evaluate and quantify IVR strategy in CAP1400.
In-Vessel Retention (IVR), which arrests relocated molten core materials in the vessel during severe accident, is an appealing accident management approach to many newly-designed reactors. It is implemented in CAP1400 because it’s highly compatible with CAP1400 design philosophy. Extensive studies of relevant phenomena are carried out to investigate the possible effect on IVR strategy, which include core melting and relocation, in-vessel steam explosion, corium material interaction, heat flux to RPV (Reactor Pressure Vessel) wall under the assumption of different corium pool configuration, ex-vessel CHF (Critical Heat Flux) test, RPV structural analysis and so on. For those that may have negative impact on IVR success, the corresponding design improvements are conducted to aid and facilitate the employment of IVR, such as lowering core support plate, increasing the mass of core internals, optimizing ex-vessel insulator and so on. The benefit of taking decay heat from in to vessel cooling is also achieved by reflooding breaks or injecting RCS (Reactor Coolant System) under the instructions of SAMG (Severe Accident Mitigation Guideline). All the IVR-related phenomena and operator actions are reflected and linked together by IVR decomposition event tree (DET) to evaluate CAP1400 IVR strategy in a comprehensive manner. There is reasonable assurance that the IVR strategy implemented in CAP1400 is successful. About 93% of core damage sequences can be terminated by retaining corium in the vessel.
•The prototypic materials have been conducted to investigate the stratification behavior of the steady molten pool.•The synergistic effect of MFe/M∑ and Cn on redistribution of the corium ...components.•The reason for layer inversion of the molten pool occurred is studied.
The prototypic materials have been used to investigate the stratification behavior of the steady molten pool at 3100 K in the context of the IVR condition. Induction heating in a cold crucible was used for melting of the 2 kg-scale UO2-ZrO2-Zr-Fe. A post-test examination of SEM, EDS, and XRD has been performed to investigate the metallic and oxide layers for all ingots. The effects of MFe/M∑ (initial iron to corium ratio) and Cn (initial degree of zirconium oxidation) on the configuration of the molten pool were studied. The results indicate that structure of the molten pools consists of the top light metallic layer and oxide layer. Nevertheless, a layer inversion may occur when the density of the metallic layer increased. The synergistic effect of MFe/M∑ and Cn on redistribution of the corium components leads to a significant increase of the uranium concentration for the metallic phase, which can explain why the layer inversion of the molten pool occurred.
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