Metasurface polarization optics that consist of 2D array of birefringent nano‐antennas have proven remarkable capabilities to generate and manipulate vectorial fields with subwavelength resolution ...and high efficiency. Integrating this new type of metasurface with the standard vertical cavity surface‐emitting laser (VCSEL) platform enables an ultracompact and powerful solution to control both phase and polarization properties of the laser on a chip, which allows to structure a VCSEL into vector beams with on‐demand wavefronts. Here, this concept is demonstrated by directly generating versatile vector beams from commercially available VCSELs through on‐chip integration of high‐index dielectric metasurfaces. Experimentally, the versatility of the approach for the development of vectorial VCSELs are validated by implementing a variety of functionalities, including directional emission of multibeam with specified polarizations, vectorial holographic display, and vector vortex beams generations. Notably, the proposed vectorial VCSELs integrated with a single layer of beam shaping metasurface bypass the requirements of multiple cascaded optical components, and thus have the potential to promote the advancements of ultracompact, lightweight, and scalable vector beams sources, enriching and expanding the applications of VCSELs in optical communications, laser manipulation and processing, information encryption, and quantum optics.
On‐chip generation and manipulation of vector beams are demonstrated by monolithically integrating vectorial metasurfaces with standard vertical cavity surface‐emitting lasers (VCSELs). The developed approach enables a powerful tool to structure the complex wavefronts of a VCSEL in an ultracompact way, providing the access to previously unattainable both phase and polarization degrees of freedom.
Summary
Plant microbiomes are essential to host health and productivity but the ecological processes that govern crop microbiome assembly are not fully known.
Here we examined bacterial communities ...across 684 samples from soils (rhizosphere and bulk soil) and multiple compartment niches (rhizoplane, root endosphere, phylloplane, and leaf endosphere) in maize (Zea mays)‐wheat (Triticum aestivum)/barley (Hordeum vulgare) rotation system under different fertilization practices at two contrasting sites.
Our results demonstrate that microbiome assembly along the soil‐plant continuum is shaped predominantly by compartment niche and host species rather than by site or fertilization practice. From soils to epiphytes to endophytes, host selection pressure sequentially increased and bacterial diversity and network complexity consequently reduced, with the strongest host effect in leaf endosphere. Source tracking indicates that crop microbiome is mainly derived from soils and gradually enriched and filtered at different plant compartment niches. Moreover, crop microbiomes were dominated by a few dominant taxa (c. 0.5% of bacterial phylotypes), with bacilli identified as the important biomarker taxa for wheat and barley and Methylobacteriaceae for maize.
Our work provides comprehensive empirical evidence on host selection, potential sources and enrichment processes for crop microbiome assembly, and has important implications for future crop management and manipulation of crop microbiome for sustainable agriculture.
Vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have made indispensable contributions to the development of modern optoelectronic technologies. However, arbitrary beam shaping of VCSELs within a ...compact system has remained inaccessible until now. The emerging ultra-thin flat optical structures, namely metasurfaces, offer a powerful technique to manipulate electromagnetic fields with subwavelength spatial resolution. Here, we show that the monolithic integration of dielectric metasurfaces with VCSELs enables remarkable arbitrary control of the laser beam profiles, including self-collimation, Bessel and Vortex lasers, with high efficiency. Such wafer-level integration of metasurface through VCSEL-compatible technology simplifies the assembling process and preserves the high performance of the VCSELs. We envision that our approach can be implemented in various wide-field applications, such as optical fibre communications, laser printing, smartphones, optical sensing, face recognition, directional displays and ultra-compact light detection and ranging (LiDAR).
Summary
Plants harbour highly diverse mycobiomes which sustain essential functions for host health and productivity. However, ecological processes that govern the plant–mycobiome assembly, ...interactions and their impact on ecosystem functions remain poorly known. Here we characterized the ecological role and community assembly of both abundant and rare fungal taxa along the soil–plant continuums (rhizosphere, phyllosphere and endosphere) in the maize–wheat/barley rotation system under different fertilization practices at two contrasting sites. Our results indicate that mycobiome assembly is shaped predominantly by compartment niche and host species rather than by environmental factors. Moreover, crop‐associated fungal communities are dominated by few abundant taxa mainly belonging to Sordariomycetes and Dothideomycetes, while the majority of diversity within mycobiomes are represented by rare taxa. For plant compartments, the abundant sub‐community is mainly determined by stochastic processes. In contrast, the rare sub‐community is more sensitive to host selection and mainly governed by deterministic processes. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that rare taxa play an important role in fungal co‐occurrence network and ecosystem functioning like crop yield and soil enzyme activities. These results significantly advance our understanding of crop mycobiome assembly and highlight the key role of rare taxa in sustaining the stability of crop mycobiomes and ecosystem functions.
Agricultural food production is at the base of food and fodder, with fertilization having fundamentally and continuously increased crop yield over the last decades. The performance of crops is ...intimately tied to their microbiome as they together form holobionts. The importance of the microbiome for plant performance is, however, notoriously ignored in agricultural systems as fertilization disconnects the dependency of plants for often plant-beneficial microbial processes. Moreover, we lack a holistic understanding of how fertilization regimes affect the soil microbiome. Here, we examined the effect of a 2-year fertilization regime (no nitrogen fertilization control, nitrogen fertilization, and nitrogen fertilization plus straw amendment) on entire soil microbiomes (bacteria, fungi, and protist) in three common agricultural soil types cropped with maize in two seasons.
We found that the application of nitrogen fertilizers more strongly affected protist than bacterial and fungal communities. Nitrogen fertilization indirectly reduced protist diversity through changing abiotic properties and bacterial and fungal communities which differed between soil types and sampling seasons. Nitrogen fertilizer plus straw amendment had greater effects on soil physicochemical properties and microbiome diversity than nitrogen addition alone. Moreover, nitrogen fertilization, even more together with straw, increased soil microbiome network complexity, suggesting that the application of nitrogen fertilizers tightened soil microbiomes interactions.
Together, our results suggest that protists are the most susceptible microbiome component to the application of nitrogen fertilizers. As protist communities also exhibit the strongest seasonal dynamics, they serve as the most sensitive bioindicators of soil changes. Changes in protist communities might have long-term effects if some of the key protist hubs that govern microbiome complexities as top microbiome predators are altered. This study serves as the stepping stone to promote protists as promising agents in targeted microbiome engineering to help in reducing the dependency on exogenous unsustainably high fertilization and pesticide applications.
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques provides the concepts and techniques in processing gathered data or information, which will be used in various applications. Specifically, it explains data mining ...and the tools used in discovering knowledge from the collected data. This book is referred as the knowledge discovery from data (KDD). It focuses on the feasibility, usefulness, effectiveness, and scalability of techniques of large data sets. After describing data mining, this edition explains the methods of knowing, preprocessing, processing, and warehousing data. It then presents information about data warehouses, online analytical processing (OLAP), and data cube technology. Then, the methods involved in mining frequent patterns, associations, and correlations for large data sets are described. The book details the methods for data classification and introduces the concepts and methods for data clustering. The remaining chapters discuss the outlier detection and the trends, applications, and research frontiers in data mining. This book is intended for Computer Science students, application developers, business professionals, and researchers who seek information on data mining. * Presents dozens of algorithms and implementation examples, all in pseudo-code and suitable for use in real-world, large-scale data mining projects * Addresses advanced topics such as mining object-relational databases, spatial databases, multimedia databases, time-series databases, text databases, the World Wide Web, and applications in several fields * Provides a comprehensive, practical look at the concepts and techniques you need to get the most out of your data
Eleutheroside B (EB) is the main active constituent derived from the Chinese herb Acanthopanax senticosus (AS) that has been reported to possess cardioprotective effects. In this study we ...investigated the effects of EB on cardiac electrophysiology and its suppression on atrial fibrillation (AF). Whole-cell recording was conducted in isolated rabbit atrial myocytes. The intracellular calcium (Ca
) concentration was measured using calcium indicator Fura-2/AM fluorescence. Monophasic action potential (MAP) and electrocardiogram (ECG) synchronous recordings were conducted in Langendorff-perfused rabbit hearts using ECG signal sampling and analysis system. We showed that EB dose-dependently inhibited late sodium current (I
), transient sodium current (I
), and sea anemone toxin II (ATX II)-increased I
with IC
values of 167, 1582, and 181 μM, respectively. On the other hand, EB (800 μM) did not affect L-type calcium current (I
), inward rectifier potassium channel current (I
), and action potential duration (APD). Furthermore, EB (300 μM) markedly decreased ATX II-prolonged the APD at 90% repolarization (APD
) and eliminated ATX II-induced early afterdepolarizations (EADs), delayed afterdepolarizations (DADs), and triggered activities (TAs). Moreover, EB (200 μM) significantly suppressed ATX II-induced Na
-dependent Ca
overload in atrial myocytes. In the Langendorff-perfused rabbit hearts, application of EB (200 μM) or TTX (2 μM) substantially decreased ATX II-induced incidences of atrial fibrillation (AF), ventricular fibrillation (VF), and heart death. These results suggest that augmented I
alone is sufficient to induce AF, and EB exerts anti-AF actions mainly via blocking I
, which put forward the basis of pharmacology for new clinical application of EB.
Cranberry, a polyphenol-rich functional food, is commonly used for the prophylaxis of urinary tract infections. Gefitinib, an anticancer agent clinically prescribed to treat non-small-cell lung ...cancer, is a substrate of P-glycoprotein (P-gp) and breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), and metabolized mainly by cytochrome P450 (CYP) 3A4 and CYP2D6. This study used gefitinib as a probe substrate to investigate the modulation of cranberry on P-gp, BCRP, CYP3A4 and CYP2D6. Rats were administered gefitinib with and without 5.0 g/kg of cranberry as juice (CJ). The concentration of gefitinib in serum was determined by LC-MS/MS. The results showed that CJ significantly increased the Cmax and AUC0-t of gefitinib by 28% and 55%, respectively. Mechanism studies indicated that CJ activated P-gp, and cranberry metabolites (CM) inhibited CYP2D6. Moreover, the protein level of P-gp in rat enterocytes was decreased, whereas that in hepatocytes was increased. In addition, the protein levels of BCRP, CYP3A4 and CYP2D6 in enterocytes and hepatocytes were decreased. In conclusion, CJ ingestion affected the activities and protein levels of P-gp, BCRP, CYP3A4 and CYP2D6.
Polarization response of artificially structured nano-antennas can be exploited to design innovative optical components, also dubbed "vectorial metasurfaces", for the modulation of phase, amplitude, ...and polarization with subwavelength spatial resolution. Recent efforts in conceiving Jones matrix formalism led to the advancement of vectorial metasurfaces to independently manipulate any arbitrary phase function of orthogonal polarization states. Here, we are taking advantages of this formalism to design and experimentally validate the performance of CMOS compatible Jones matrix metasurfaces monolithically integrated with standard VCSELs for on-chip spin-decoupling and phase shaping. Our approach enables accessing the optical spin states of VCSELs in an ultra-compact way with previously unattainable phase controllability. By exploiting spin states as a new degree of freedom for laser wavefront engineering, our platform is capable of operating and reading-out the spin-momentum of lasers associated with injected spin carriers, which would potentially play a pivotal role for the development of emerging spin-optoelectronic devices.
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