Regulating Cytoplasmic Calcium Homeostasis Can Reduce Aluminum Toxicity in Yeast

Our previous study suggested that increased cytoplasmic calcium (Ca) signals may mediate aluminum (Al) toxicity in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). In this report, we found that a yeast mutant, pmc1, lacking the vacuolar calcium ion (Ca2+) pump Ca2+-ATPase (Pmc1p), was more sensitive to Al treatment than the wild-type strain. Overexpression of either PMC1 or an anti-apoptotic factor, such as Bcl-2, Ced-9 or PpBI-1, decreased cytoplasmic Ca2+ levels and rescued yeast from Al sensitivity in both the wild-type and pmc1 mutant. Moreover, pretreatment with the Ca2+ chelator BAPTA-AM sustained cytoplasmic Ca2+ at low levels in the presence of Al, effectively making the cells more tolerant to Al exposure. Quantitative RT-PCR revealed that the expression of calmodulin (CaM) and phospholipase C (PLC), which are in the Ca2+ signaling pathway, was down-regulated under Al stress. This effect was largely counteracted when cells overexpressed anti-apoptotic Ced-9 or were pretreated with BAPTA-AM. Taken together, our results suggest that the negative regulation of Al-induced cytoplasmic Ca signaling is a novel mechanism underlying internal resistance to Al toxicity

Вирусная реклама как средство привлечения внимания к услугам организации

ВКР посвящена изучению вирусной рекламы как средства привлечения внимания к услугам организации. Автором был разработан комплекс необходимых рекламных продуктов и мероприятий для привлечения внимания к услугам магазина детских товаров нового сегмента целевой аудитории

Identification of genes related to the development of bamboo rhizome bud

Bamboo (Phyllostachys praecox) is one of the largest members of the grass family Poaceae, and is one of the most economically important crops in Asia. However, complete knowledge of bamboo development and its molecular mechanisms is still lacking. In the present study, the differences in anatomical structure among rhizome buds, rhizome shoots, and bamboo shoots were compared, and several genes related to the development of the bamboo rhizome bud were identified. The rice cross-species microarray hybridization showed a total of 318 up-regulated and 339 down-regulated genes, including those involved in regulation and signalling, metabolism, and stress, and also cell wall-related genes, in the bamboo rhizome buds versus the leaves. By referring to the functional dissection of the homologous genes from Arabidopsis and rice, the putative functions of the 52 up-regulated genes in the bamboo rhizome bud were described. Six genes related to the development of the bamboo rhizome bud were further cloned and sequenced. These show 66–90% nucleotide identity and 68–98% amino acid identity with the homologous rice genes. The expression patterns of these genes revealed significant differences in rhizome shoots, rhizome buds, bamboo shoots, leaves, and young florets. Furthermore, in situ hybridization showed that the PpRLK1 gene is expressed in the procambium and is closely related to meristem development of bamboo shoots. The PpHB1 gene is expressed at the tips of bamboo shoots and procambium, and is closely related to rhizome bud formation and procambial development. To our knowledge, this is the first report that uses rice cross-species hybridization to identify genes related to bamboo rhizome bud development, and thereby contributes to the further understanding of the molecular mechanism involved in bamboo rhizome bud development

A Counterfactual Framework Based on the Machine Learning Method and Its Application to Measure the Impact of COVID-19 Local Outbreaks on the Chinese Aviation Market

COVID-19 affects aviation around the world. China’s civil aviation almost recovered to its pre-epidemic levels in the domestic market, but there are still local outbreaks that affect air traffic. This paper proposes measuring the impact of local outbreaks of COVID-19 by the machine learning method and the synthetic control method as a counterfactual control group to measure such an impact. In this study, we use the LightGBM algorithm to construct a counterfactual control group and transform the prediction problem from time series to the fitting problem at the spatial level. We find that machine learning methods can measure such an impact more accurately. We take local outbreaks in Beijing and Dalian as examples, and our measure of their impacts shows that the impact of an outbreak on intercity air traffic can be divided into lag, decline, stable, and recovery periods, and will last for a long period (more than 40 days) unless there are external stimuli, such as legal holidays. The outbreaks reduced the number of passengers in the cities by 90%. Finally, we show the impact on the air traffic network, and find that when a local outbreak happens in a big city, tourist cities or small stations will be greatly affected

SGDAN—A Spatio-Temporal Graph Dual-Attention Neural Network for Quantified Flight Delay Prediction

There has been a lot of research on flight delays. But it is more useful and difficult to estimate the departure delay time especially three hours before the scheduled time of departure, from which passengers can reasonably plan their travel time and the airline and airport staff can schedule flights more reasonably. In this paper, we develop a Spatio-temporal Graph Dual-Attention Neural Network (SGDAN) to learn the departure delay time for each flight with real-time conditions at three hours before the scheduled time of departure. Specifically, it first models the air traffic network as graph sequences, what is, using a heterogeneous graph to model a flight and its adjacent flights with the same departure or arrival airport in a special time interval, and using a sequence to model the flight and its previous flights that share the same aircraft. The main contributions of this paper are using heterogeneous graph-level attention to learn the influence between the flight and its adjacent flight together with sequence-level attention to learn the influence between the flight and its previous flight in the flight sequence. With aggregating features from the learned influence from both graph-level and sequence-level attention, SGDAN can generate node embedding to estimate the departure delay time. Experiments on a real-world large-scale data set show that SGDAN produces better results than state-of-the-art models in the accurate flight delay time estimation task

A Case of Multidomain Integrated Treatment Strategy for Complex Primary Pulmonary Sarcomatoid Carcinoma

Pulmonary sarcomatoid carcinoma (PSC) is a rare and highly malignant tumor, which includes the following five pathologic types: pleomorphic carcinoma, spindle cell carcinoma, giant cell carcinoma, carcinosarcoma and pulmonary blastoma. The onset of PSC is occult with non-specific clinical symptoms and signs. The clinical manifestations include irritating cough, bloody sputum, dyspnea, chest pain and so on, which are closely related to the growth and invasion site of the tumor. PSC tends to metastasize early, so most patients are already in local advanced stage or advanced stage with a median survival of 9 months at the time of hospital visit. A patient with primary PSC which led to 90% stenosis in central airway was treated by combined method of vascular and tracheoscopic intervention in our respiratory center. This treatment prolonged the patient’s survival time and got a satisfactory effect at 19-month follow-up after surgery. Herein we report the case for clinical reference

Function, Mechanism, and Application of Plant Melatonin: An Update with a Focus on the Cereal Crop, Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.)

Melatonin is a multiple-function molecule that was first identified in animals and later in plants. Plant melatonin regulates versatile processes involved in plant growth and development, including seed germination, root architecture, flowering time, leaf senescence, fruit ripening, and biomass production. Published reviews on plant melatonin have been focused on two model plants: (1) Arabidopsis and (2) rice, in which the natural melatonin contents are quite low. Efforts to integrate the function and the mechanism of plant melatonin and to determine how plant melatonin benefits human health are also lacking. Barley is a unique cereal crop used for food, feed, and malt. In this study, a bioinformatics analysis to identify the genes required for barley melatonin biosynthesis was first performed, after which the effects of exogenous melatonin on barley growth and development were reviewed. Three integrated mechanisms of melatonin on plant cells were found: (1) serving as an antioxidant, (2) modulating plant hormone crosstalk, and (3) signaling through a putative plant melatonin receptor. Reliable approaches for characterizing the function of barley melatonin biosynthetic genes and to modulate the melatonin contents in barley grains are discussed. The present paper should be helpful for the improvement of barley production under hostile environments and for the reduction of pesticide and fungicide usage in barley cultivation. This study is also beneficial for the enhancement of the nutritional values and healthcare functions of barley in the food industry

Transcriptional and protein structural characterization of homogentisate phytyltransferase genes in barley, wheat, and oat

Abstract Background Homogentisate phytyltransferase (HPT) is the critical enzyme for the biosynthesis of tocopherols (vitamin E), which are the major lipid-soluble antioxidants and help plants adapt to various stress conditions. HPT is generally strictly conserved in various plant genomes; however, a divergent lineage HPT2 was identified recently in some Triticeae species. The molecular function and transcriptional profiles of HPT2 remain to be characterized. Results In this study, we performed comprehensive transcriptome data mining of HPT1 and HPT2 in different tissues and stages of barley (Hordeum vulgare), wheat (Triticum aestivum), and oat (Avena sativa), followed by qRT-PCR experiments on HPT1 and HPT2 in different tissues of barley and wheat. We found that the common HPT1 genes (HvHPT1, TaHPT1s, and AsHPT1s) displayed a conserved transcriptional pattern in the three target species and were universally transcribed in various tissues, with a notable preference in leaf. In contrast, HPT2 genes (HvHPT2, TaHPT2, and AsHPT2) were specifically transcribed in spike (developmentally up-regulated) and shoot apex tissues, displaying a divergent tissue-specific pattern. Cis-regulatory elements prediction in the promoter region identified common factors related to light-, plant hormone-, low temperature-, drought- and defense- responses in both HPT1s and HPT2s. We observed the transcriptional up-regulation of HvHPT1 and HvHPT2 under various stress conditions, supporting their conserved function in environmental adaption. We detected a clear, relaxed selection pressure in the HPT2 lineage, consistent with the predicted evolution pattern following gene duplication. Protein structural modelling and substrate docking analyses identified putative catalytic amino acid residues for HvHPT1 and HvHPT2, which are strictly conserved and consistent with their function in vitamin E biosynthesis. Conclusions We confirmed the presence of two lineages of HPT in Triticeae and Aveninae, including hexaploid oat, and characterized their transcriptional profiles based on transcriptome and qRT-PCR data. HPT1s were ubiquitously transcribed in various tissues, whilst HPT2s were highly expressed in specific stages and tissue. The active transcription of HPT2s, together with its conserved cis-elements and protein structural features, support HPT2s’ role in tocopherol production in Triticeae. This study is the first protein structural analysis on the membrane-bound plant HPTs and provides valuable insights into its catalytic mechanism

Function, Mechanism, and Application of Plant Melatonin: An Update with a Focus on the Cereal Crop, Barley (<i>Hordeum vulgare</i> L.)

Melatonin is a multiple-function molecule that was first identified in animals and later in plants. Plant melatonin regulates versatile processes involved in plant growth and development, including seed germination, root architecture, flowering time, leaf senescence, fruit ripening, and biomass production. Published reviews on plant melatonin have been focused on two model plants: (1) Arabidopsis and (2) rice, in which the natural melatonin contents are quite low. Efforts to integrate the function and the mechanism of plant melatonin and to determine how plant melatonin benefits human health are also lacking. Barley is a unique cereal crop used for food, feed, and malt. In this study, a bioinformatics analysis to identify the genes required for barley melatonin biosynthesis was first performed, after which the effects of exogenous melatonin on barley growth and development were reviewed. Three integrated mechanisms of melatonin on plant cells were found: (1) serving as an antioxidant, (2) modulating plant hormone crosstalk, and (3) signaling through a putative plant melatonin receptor. Reliable approaches for characterizing the function of barley melatonin biosynthetic genes and to modulate the melatonin contents in barley grains are discussed. The present paper should be helpful for the improvement of barley production under hostile environments and for the reduction of pesticide and fungicide usage in barley cultivation. This study is also beneficial for the enhancement of the nutritional values and healthcare functions of barley in the food industry