With the information of elite group for Zn, more details of favourable germplasms for different breeding schemes were accessible using the Germplasm module. (b) With aid of the Haplotype module, a ...list of 22 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) based on the transcriptomic and phosphoproteomic analyses between near‐isogenic line (NILqgl3) and its recurrent parent (RP) were significantly reduced by 31.8%. (c) Based on GWAS mapping results of tiller number (TN) in a set of germplasms, some candidate regions were submitted to the Haplotype module for confirmation by haplotype analysis. (d) A chromosome region controlling leaf rolling trait (LRI), qRl4‐2 was scanned for SNP & InDel variations using the SNP & InDel module. In this case, by GWAS mapping, we found a loci qSV3e, which was harbouring a known gene Os03 g0856700 coding Gibberellin 20 oxidase 1 affecting both tiller number (TN) and plant height (PH) at the seedling stage under a paddy direct seeding rice (PDSR) system. Since relatively higher TN would be favourable trait for rice breeders, we carried our haplotype analysis for Os03 g0856700 with TN data uploaded using the Haplotype module. ...in order set up an open platform to the public, two functions are now available.
Objective
To investigate the effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on serum levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), interleukin (IL)-1β, and tumor necrosis factor ...(TNF)-α in elderly patients with refractory depression.
Methods
A total of 58 elderly patients diagnosed with refractory depression between January 2015 and December 2016 were divided randomly into two groups: 29 patients who received rTMS and 29 controls without rTMS. Thirty healthy individuals were also enrolled and all received rTMS. Serum levels of BDNF, IL-1β, and TNF-α were measured before the study (0 days), and at 48 hours and 1, 2, 3, and 4 weeks after the first TMS treatment.
Results
BDNF levels gradually increased with treatment duration in the rTMS group and were significantly higher compared with the control group. In contrast, IL-1β and TNF-α levels gradually decreased and were significantly lower than in the control group. None of the serum factors were affected by rTMS in the healthy individuals. BDNF levels were negatively correlated and IL-1β and TNF-α levels were positively correlated with Hamilton Depression Rating Scale-24 scores.
Conclusion
These results suggest that rTMS may increase BDNF and decrease IL-1β and TNF-α serum levels in elderly patients with refractory depression.
We studied the mechanism of the significant enhancement in the enzymatic saccharification of lignocelluloses at an elevated pH of 5.5–6.0. Four lignin residues with different sulfonic acid contents ...were isolated from enzymatic hydrolysis of lodgepole pine pretreated by either dilute acid (DA) or sulfite pretreatment to overcome recalcitrance of lignocelluloses (SPORL). The adsorption isotherms of a commercial Trichoderma reesi cellulase cocktail (CTec2) produced by these lignin residues at 50 °C were measured in the pH range of 4.5–6.0. The zeta potentials of these lignin samples were also measured. We discovered that an elevated pH significantly increased the lignin surface charge (negative), which causes lignin to become more hydrophilic and reduces its coordination affinity to cellulase and, consequently, the nonspecific binding of cellulase. The decreased nonspecific cellulase binding to lignin is also attributed to enhanced electrostatic interactions at elevated pH through the increased negative charges of cellulase enzymes with low pI. The results validate the hypothesis that the increases in enzymatic saccharification efficiencies at elevated pH for different pretreated lignocelluloses are solely the result of decreased nonspecific cellulase binding to lignin. This study contradicts the well‐established concept that the optimal pH is 4.8–5.0 for enzymatic hydrolysis using Trichoderma reesi cellulose, which is widely accepted and exclusively practiced in numerous laboratories throughout the world. Because an elevated pH can be easily implemented commercially without capital cost and with minimal operating cost, this study has both scientific importance and practical significance.
Phenomenon: We investigate the mechanism of the significant enhancement in the enzymatic saccharification of lignocelluloses at an elevated pH of 5.5–6.0. An elevated pH significantly increases the lignin surface charge, which causes lignin to become more hydrophilic and facilitates the electrostatic interactions between cellulose and lignin to reduce its coordination affinity to cellulase and, consequently, the nonspecific binding of cellulase.
High angular momentum partial waves are indispensable in the numerical calculations of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE) for the interaction between atoms and strong long-wavelength ...laser pulses. In these cases, the widely-applied Lanczos propagator, used to solve the TDSE, requires an extremely small time step to be convergent. By splitting out the centrifugal potential from the whole Hamiltonian, we demonstrate that the stiffness of the TDSE can be reduced and a rather large time step is allowed for the present Split-Lanczos propagator. Compared with the ordinary Lanczos propagator, the efficiency of the propagation can be improved by more than 100 times for large angular momentum in present tests.
Summary
Soybean (Glycine max) is one of the most important oilseed crops. However, the regulatory mechanism that governs the process of oil accumulation in soybean remains poorly understood.
In this ...study, GmZF392, a tandem CCCH zinc finger (TZF) protein which was identified in our previous RNA‐seq analysis of seed‐preferred transcription factors, was found to function as a positive regulator of lipid production.
GmZF392 promotes seed oil accumulation in both transgenic Arabidopsis and stable transgenic soybean plants by binding to a bipartite cis‐element, containing TG‐ and TA‐rich sequences, in promoter regions, activating the expression of genes in the lipid biosynthesis pathway. GmZF392 physically interacts with GmZF351, our previously identified transcriptional regulator of lipid biosynthesis, to synergistically promote downstream gene expression. Both GmZF392 and GmZF351 are further upregulated by GmNFYA, another transcription factor involved in lipid biosynthesis, directly (in the former case) and indirectly (in the latter case). Promoter sequence diversity analysis showed that the GmZF392 promoter may have been selected at the origin of the Glycine genus and further mildly selected during domestication from wild soybeans to cultivated soybeans.
Our study reveals a regulatory module containing three transcription factors in the lipid biosynthesis pathway, and manipulation of the module may improve oil production in soybean and other oilseed crops.
Since the birth of cyanidation, it has been dominant in the gold extraction industry. Recently, with the increasing awareness of environmental hazards and potential risks posed by the severe toxicity ...of cyanide, attempts to seek alternative lixiviants have arisen. Over the past three decades, a significant amount of literature has examined alternative lixiviants to cyanide for recovering gold, while few industrial applications have been reported due to various obstacles, such as toxicity, excessive consumption, or low leaching efficiency. These obstacles are progressively overcome in multiple ways, including process improvement, system optimization, use of co-intensifying systems, and development of additives. In this paper, related studies about alternative lixiviants and methods such as cyanide, thiosulfate, thiourea, thiocyanate, polysulfides, halides, and microbial leaching are summarized. The history, fundamentals, advancements, and challenges of alternative lixiviants are fully concluded to provide a reference for cleaner gold production. In addition, the comprehensive performance of lixiviants was evaluated according to a novel evaluation criterion proposed in terms of economy, efficiency, and environment.
Display omitted
•The history and mechanisms of gold lixiviants in gold extraction were reviewed.•A novel evaluation criterion was proposed to evaluate the performance of lixiviants.•The current advances and progress of each lixiviant were summarized.•The challenges and prospects of each lixiviant were forecasted.
•CaCO3 significantly enhanced the hydrogen production from SCB by Clostridium thermocellum.•The biomass of Clostridium thermocellum was enhanced by supplementing CaCO3.•The buffering capacity of ...carbonate contributed to the hydrogen fermentation by Clostridium thermocellum.
Clostridium thermocellum ATCC 27405 was used to degrade sugarcane bagasse (SCB) directly for hydrogen production, which was significantly enhanced by supplementing medium with CaCO3. The effect of CaCO3 concentration on the hydrogen production was investigated. The hydrogen production was significantly enhanced with the CaCO3 concentration increased from 10mM to 20mM. However, with the CaCO3 concentration further increased from 20mM to 100mM, the hydrogen production didn’t increase further. Under the optimal CaCO3 concentration of 20mM, the hydrogen production reached 97.83±5.19mmol/L from 2% sodium hydroxide-pretreated SCB, a 116.72% increase over the control (45.14±1.03mmol/L), and the yield of hydrogen production reached 4.89mmol H2/g SCBadded. Additionally, CaCO3 promoted the biodegradation of SCB and the growth of C. thermocellum. The stimulatory effects of CaCO3 on biohydrogen production are mainly attributed to the buffering capacity of carbonate. The study provides a novel strategy to enhance biohydrogen production from lignocellulose.
Unsupervised domain adaptation person re-identification (UDA ReID) aims at leveraging knowledge from the source domain to help perform ReID in the unlabeled target domain. Most of existing ...investigations usually assign target instances identification labels through clustering them into the source person identification patterns. Unfortunately, inaccurate labels are frequently generated in such clustering setting, which undesirably deteriorates the accuracy of UDA ReID. Although a variety of noise label correcting works have been published to attempt addressing these misclustered labels, their effectiveness critically depends on the quality of the generated clustering representations, especially their differentiability, tending to result in limited efficacy. In this work, we design a desirable plug-and-play noise-label correction (PP-NLC) framework to efficiently correct the predicted target domain noise labels. Specifically, in PP-NLC we construct a noise label corrector (NLCr) and treat the predicted target domain noise labels as its probabilistic label variables (PLVs). Consequently, these noise labels are implicitly and automatically corrected through explicitly updating PLVs in the back-propagation process of NLCr, instead of conducting corrections directly on the generated noise pseudo-labels. Notably, the proposed PP-NLC framework enjoys desirable universality and can be deployed to existing UDA ReID approaches. Comprehensive experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
To facilitate developing rice varieties tolerant to salt stress, a panel of 208 rice mini-core accessions collected from 25 countries were evaluated for 13 traits associated with salt tolerance (ST) ...at the germination and seedling stages. The rice panel showed tremendous variation for all measured ST traits and eight accessions showing high levels of ST at either and/or both the germination and seedling stages. Using 395,553 SNP markers covering ~372 Mb of the rice genome and multi-locus mixed linear models, 20 QTN associated with 11 ST traits were identified by GWAS, including 6 QTN affecting ST at the germination stage and 14 QTN for ST at the seedling stage. The integration of bioinformatic with haplotype analyses for the ST QTN lets us identify 22 candidate genes for nine important ST QTN (qGR3, qSNK1, qSNK12, qSNC1, qSNC6, qRNK2, qSDW9a, qSST5 and qSST9). These candidate genes included three known ST genes (SKC1, OsTZF1 and OsEATB) for QTN qSNK1 qSST5 and qSST9. Candidate genes showed significant phenotypic differences in ST traits were detected between or among 2-4 major haplotypes. Thus, our results provided useful materials and genetic information for improving rice ST in future breeding and for molecular dissection of ST in rice.
Abstract
Background
Long-term care facilities (LTCFs) were high-risk settings for COVID-19 outbreaks.
Objective
To assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on LTCFs, including rates of infection, ...hospitalisation, case fatality, and mortality, and to determine the association between control measures and SARS-CoV-2 infection rates in residents and staff.
Method
We conducted a systematic search of six databases for articles published between December 2019 and 5 November 2021, and performed meta-analyses and subgroup analyses to identify the impact of COVID-19 on LTCFs and the association between control measures and infection rate.
Results
We included 108 studies from 19 countries. These studies included 1,902,044 residents and 255,498 staff from 81,572 LTCFs, among whom 296,024 residents and 36,807 staff were confirmed SARS-CoV-2 positive. The pooled infection rate was 32.63% (95%CI: 30.29 ~ 34.96%) for residents, whereas it was 10.33% (95%CI: 9.46 ~ 11.21%) for staff. In LTCFs that cancelled visits, new patient admissions, communal dining and group activities, and vaccinations, infection rates in residents and staff were lower than the global rate. We reported the residents’ hospitalisation rate to be 29.09% (95%CI: 25.73 ~ 32.46%), with a case-fatality rate of 22.71% (95%CI: 21.31 ~ 24.11%) and mortality rate of 15.81% (95%CI: 14.32 ~ 17.30%). Significant publication biases were observed in the residents’ case-fatality rate and the staff infection rate, but not in the infection, hospitalisation, or mortality rate of residents.
Conclusion
SARS-CoV-2 infection rates would be very high among LTCF residents and staff without appropriate control measures. Cancelling visits, communal dining and group activities, restricting new admissions, and increasing vaccination would significantly reduce the infection rates.
PDF
