202 research outputs found
Strangelets at finite temperature: nucleon emission rates, interface and shell effects
We investigate the properties of strangelets at finite temperature , where
an equivparticle model is adopted with both the linear confinement and
leading-order perturbative interactions accounted for using density-dependent
quark masses. The shell effects are examined by solving the Dirac equations for
quarks in the mean-field approximation, which diminish with temperature as the
occupation probability of each single-particle levels fixed by the Fermi-Dirac
statistics, i.e., shell dampening. Consequently, instead of decreasing with
temperature, the surface tension extracted from a liquid-drop formula increases
with until reaching its peak at -40 MeV with vanishing shell
corrections, where the formula roughly reproduces the free energy per baryon of
all strangelets. The curvature term, nevertheless, decreases with despite
the presence of shell effects. The neutron and proton emission rates are fixed
microscopically according to the external nucleon gas densities that are in
equilibrium with strangelets, which generally increase with (
MeV) for stable strangelets but decrease for those that are unstable against
nucleon emission at . The energy, free energy, entropy, charge-to-mass
ratio, strangeness per baryon, and root-mean-square radius of -stable
strangelets obtained with various parameter sets are presented as well. The
results indicated in this work are useful for understanding the products of
binary compact star mergers and heavy-ion collisions
Mirror: A Universal Framework for Various Information Extraction Tasks
Sharing knowledge between information extraction tasks has always been a
challenge due to the diverse data formats and task variations. Meanwhile, this
divergence leads to information waste and increases difficulties in building
complex applications in real scenarios. Recent studies often formulate IE tasks
as a triplet extraction problem. However, such a paradigm does not support
multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility. To this end, we
reorganize IE problems into unified multi-slot tuples and propose a universal
framework for various IE tasks, namely Mirror. Specifically, we recast existing
IE tasks as a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and devise a
non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single
step. It is worth noting that this graph structure is incredibly versatile, and
it supports not only complex IE tasks, but also machine reading comprehension
and classification tasks. We manually construct a corpus containing 57 datasets
for model pretraining, and conduct experiments on 30 datasets across 8
downstream tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our model has
decent compatibility and outperforms or reaches competitive performance with
SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings. The code, model weights,
and pretraining corpus are available at https://github.com/Spico197/Mirror .Comment: Accepted to EMNLP23 main conferenc
Dissection of the genetic basis of oil content in Chinese peanut cultivars through association mapping
Background: Peanut is one of the primary sources for vegetable oil worldwide, and enhancing oil content is the
main objective in several peanut breeding programs of the world. Tightly linked markers are required for faster
development of high oil content peanut varieties through genomics-assisted breeding (GAB), and association
mapping is one of the promising approaches for discovery of such associated markers.
Results: An association mapping panel consisting of 292 peanut varieties extensively distributed in China was
phenotyped for oil content and genotyped with 583 polymorphic SSR markers. These markers amplified 3663 alleles
with an average of 6.28 alleles per locus. The structure, phylogenetic relationship, and principal component analysis
(PCA) indicated two subgroups majorly differentiating based on geographic regions. Genome-wide association analysis
identified 12 associated markers including one (AGGS1014_2) highly stable association controlling up to 9.94%
phenotypic variance explained (PVE) across multiple environments. Interestingly, the frequency of the favorable alleles
for 12 associated markers showed a geographic difference. Two associated markers (AGGS1014_2 and AHGS0798) with
6.90–9.94% PVE were verified to enhance oil content in an independent RIL population and also indicated selection
during the breeding program.
Conclusion: This study provided insights into the genetic basis of oil content in peanut and verified highly associated
two SSR markers to facilitate marker-assisted selection for developing high-oil content breeding peanut varieties
Fibrosis progression in interferon treatment-naive Chinese plasma donors with chronic hepatitis C for 20 years: a cohort study
SummaryObjectivesTo evaluate the progression of fibrosis and factors influencing this in interferon (IFN) treatment-naive Chinese plasma donors infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) for approximately 20 years.MethodsFrom July 2010 to June 2011, we investigated 122 IFN treatment-naive chronic hepatitis C (CHC) patients infected by plasma donation in 1992–1995. Liver fibrosis stage and inflammation grade were evaluated by Metavir and Scheuer scoring systems, respectively.ResultsOne hundred and twenty patients underwent liver biopsy. Liver biopsy was not performed in one patient with cirrhosis due to ascites, and another patient was excluded because of an invalid biopsy specimen. Cirrhosis was observed in three patients (fibrosis stage F4 in two patients revealed by biopsy, and one patient with ascites confirmed by physical and Doppler ultrasound examination). Fibrosis stages F1 and F2 were present in 55 and 50 patients, respectively. The severity of liver inflammation was independently related to moderate to severe fibrosis (F ≥2). Older age and male sex showed an increasing tendency for more severe fibrosis (F3/F4) in the present cohort.ConclusionsBased on histopathology results, the progression of fibrosis in patients with CHC infected by repeated plasma donation is slow after HCV infection of approximately 20 years. Liver inflammation is closely related to the development of moderate to severe liver fibrosis
Genome‐wide expression quantitative trait locus analysis in a recombinant inbred line population for trait dissection in peanut
The transcriptome connects genome to the gene function and ultimate phenome in biology. Sofar, transcriptomic approach was not used in peanut for performing trait mapping in bi-parentalpopulations. In this research, we sequenced the whole transcriptome in immature seeds in apeanut recombinant inbred line (RIL) population and explored thoroughly the landscape oftranscriptomic variations and its genetic basis. The comprehensive analysis identified total49 691 genes in RIL population, of which 92 genes followed a paramutation-like expressionpattern. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analysis identified 1207 local eQTLs and15 837 distant eQTLs contributing to the whole-genome transcriptomic variation in peanut.There were 94 eQTL hot spot regions detected across the genome with the dominance of distanteQTL. By integrating transcriptomic profile and annotation analyses, we unveiled a putativecandidate gene and developed a linked marker InDel02 underlying a major QTL responsible forpurple testa colour in peanut. Our result provided a first understanding of genetic basis of whole-genome transcriptomic variation in peanut and illustrates the potential of the transcriptome-aidapproach in dissecting important traits in non-model plants
- …