Curated genome annotation of Oryza sativa ssp. japonica and comparative genome analysis with Arabidopsis thaliana

We present here the annotation of the complete genome of rice Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica cultivar Nipponbare. All functional annotations for proteins and non-protein-coding RNA (npRNA) candidates were manually curated. Functions were identified or inferred in 19,969 (70%) of the proteins, and 131 possible npRNAs (including 58 antisense transcripts) were found. Almost 5000 annotated protein-coding genes were found to be disrupted in insertional mutant lines, which will accelerate future experimental validation of the annotations. The rice loci were determined by using cDNA sequences obtained from rice and other representative cereals. Our conservative estimate based on these loci and an extrapolation suggested that the gene number of rice is ~32,000, which is smaller than previous estimates. We conducted comparative analyses between rice and Arabidopsis thaliana and found that both genomes possessed several lineage-specific genes, which might account for the observed differences between these species, while they had similar sets of predicted functional domains among the protein sequences. A system to control translational efficiency seems to be conserved across large evolutionary distances. Moreover, the evolutionary process of protein-coding genes was examined. Our results suggest that natural selection may have played a role for duplicated genes in both species, so that duplication was suppressed or favored in a manner that depended on the function of a gene

Impact of artificial lateral quantum confinement on exciton-spin relaxation in a two-dimensional GaAs electronic system

We demonstrate the effect of artificial lateral quantum confinement on exciton-spin relaxation in a GaAs electronic system. GaAs nanodisks (NDs) were fabricated from a quantum well (QW) by top-down nanotechnology using neutral-beam etching aided by protein-engineered bio-nano-templates. The exciton-spin relaxation time was 1.4 ns due to ND formation, significantly extended compared to 0.44 ns for the original QW, which is attributed to weakening of the hole-state mixing in addition to freezing of the carrier momentum. The temperature dependence of the spin-relaxation time depends on the ND thickness, reflecting the degree of quantum confinement. (C) 2014 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Experimental demonstration of position-controllable topological interface states in high-frequency Kitaev topological integrated circuits

Abstract Topological integrated circuits are integrated-circuit realizations of topological systems. Here we show an experimental demonstration by taking the case of the Kitaev topological superconductor model. An integrated-circuit implementation enables us to realize high resonant frequency as high as 13GHz. We explicitly observe the spatial profile of a topological edge state. In particular, the topological interface state between a topological segment and a trivial segment is the Majorana-like state. We construct a switchable structure in the integrated circuit, which enables us to control the position of a Majorana-like interface state arbitrarily along a chain. Our results contribute to the development of topological electronics with high frequency integrated circuits

Integration of a CMOS LSI Chiplet into Micro Flexible Devices for Remote Electrostatic Actuation

International audienceIn this paper, we proposed an integration method of a mm-scale high voltage (HV) driver and electrostatic actuators on a Parylene-C flexible substrate. With our unique three-layer metal structure (Cr/Au/Cr), we have demonstrated the contamination-less integration of an HV driver made of deep trench separated series silicon P-N junctions, bonded on the gold electrodes of the actuator. This technique enables CMOS LSI chips to directly be integrated with flexible electronics. Thus, novel applications of flexible electronics in various fields will be developed with the enhanced ability of signal processing, communications, and power delivery by CMOS LSI

Effects of GaP Insertion Layer on the Properties of InP Nanostructures by Metal-Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy

The influence of thin GaP insertion layers (0 – 4) monolayers (MLs) on the properties of InP self-assembled quantum dots (SAQDs) embedded in In0.49Ga0.51P matrix on GaAs (001) substrate grown by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy was reported. In order to reduce the dots diameter and improve the size uniformity and photoluminescence (PL) emission, GaP layers thickness (0-4) monolayers (MLs) were inserted. The growth of thin GaP insertion layer (IL) between In0.49Ga0.51P matrix and InP QDs layer reduced the mean height and size fluctuation and increased the density of InP QDs. The room-temperature (RT) PL emission could be observed around 780 nm red spectral range. The blue-shift of the PL peak was enhanced with thicker GaP insertion layer. The measurement of lowtemperature (20 - 250 K) shows dependence of PL intensity on temperature