MECHANISM OF DREAM COMPONENT TSO1 IN PLANT STEM CELL REGULATION

Plants are important for human survival and the environment. They provide oxygen, food, medicine and fuel. Understanding the development of plants has been a fundamental research question. Among all the plant tissues, the most important ones are the meristems. Sitting at the tip of the shoot and the root are the shoot apical meristem (SAM) and the root apical meristem (RAM). The shoot apical meristem gives rise to the above-ground organs like leaves and flowers while the root apical meristem produces all the root tissues that help to anchor the plants and transport water and nutrients. As the meristem is capable of producing new organs throughout the lifespan of a plant, the study of meristem maintenance and development provides the key to the understanding of plant development.Arabidopsis transcription factor TSO1 plays an essential role for the proper development of shoot apical meristem and root apical meristem. TSO1 encodes a protein with a cysteine-rich repeats domain and TSO1 is a potential component of a cell cycle regulating complex, the DREAM complex. The tso1-1 mutant has fasciated SAM due to shoot meristem cell over-proliferation and complete sterility due to lack of differentiated female and male floral organs. Interestingly, the tso1-1 mutant also produces shorter root than the wild type, presumably caused by early differentiation of the cells in the RAM. A prior mutagenesis screen identified two major suppressors of tso1-1. Characterization of these tso1-1 suppressor mutations provides important insights to the understanding of TSO1-regulatory pathways. My dissertation project focuses on analyzing one of these suppressors that was shown to be a mutated type-A cyclin gene named CYCA3;4. Mutations in CYCA3;4 suppress the shoot phenotype but not the root phenotype of tso1-1. The suppressed plants can produce normal floral organs and become partially fertile. Using transgenic method, I showed that the expression of CYCA3;4 was increased in the tso1-1 SAM, and overexpression of CYCA3;4 in the tso1-3 mutant enhanced the fertility defect, suggesting that overexpression of CYCA3;4 partially mediates the tso1-1 shoot phenotype. In addition, I provided evidence supporting that TSO1 likely represses CYCA3;4 gene expression indirectly through MYB3R1, whose mutations also suppress tso1-1 mutants. My dissertation provides an important link between TSO1, a potential cell cycle regulatory complex component and meristem regulator, and cyclin A, a protein directly involved in cell cycle regulation. This link provides an important mechanistic insight into how plant meristems maintain their identity by limiting their cell division activity. To further investigate the mechanism of TSO1 action in the root, I collaborated with two other scientists to profile the gene expression in the tso1-1 root at single cell level. I compared the single cell RNA sequencing data of tso1-1 and wild type roots and identified molecular defects in the tso1-1 root vasculature. Correspondingly, the known regulators of vasculature development, the HD-ZIP III genes, are ectopically expressed in some of the vascular cells in the tso1-1 root. It suggests that the defects of root vasculature may be attributed to mis-expressed HD-ZIP III genes in the tso1-1 mutant. The HD-ZIPIII function was previously linked to their regulation of cytokinin biosynthesis genes, which were ectopically expressed in tso1-1 roots as revealed by our scRNA-seq data. Together, our data suggest that the over-production of cytokinin might be the cause of tso1-1 short root phenotype. In summary, my dissertation research revealed previously unknown links between TSO1 and cell cycle regulation in the shoot and root meristems as well as the molecular mechanisms of TSO1 function in the root vascular development at single cell level. These findings have furthered our understanding of how cell cycle regulation is integrated with plant development

Robust MIMO Channel Estimation from Incomplete and Corrupted Measurements

Location-aware communication is one of the enabling techniques for future 5G networks. It requires accurate temporal and spatial channel estimation from multidimensional data. Most of the existing channel estimation techniques assume that the measurements are complete and noise is Gaussian. While these approaches are brittle to corrupted or outlying measurements, which are ubiquitous in real applications. To address these issues, we develop a lp-norm minimization based iteratively reweighted higher-order singular value decomposition algorithm. It is robust to Gaussian as well as the impulsive noise even when the measurement data is incomplete. Compared with the state-of-the-art techniques, accurate estimation results are achieved for the proposed approach

Trust-Based Distributed Kalman Filtering for Target Tracking under Malicious Cyber Attacks

As one of the widely used applications in wireless sensor networks, target tracking has attracted considerable attention. Although many tracking techniques have been developed, it is still a challenging problem if the network is under cyber attacks. Inaccurate or false information is maliciously broadcast by the compromised nodes to their neighbors. They are likely to threaten the security of the system and result in performance deterioration. In this paper, a distributed Kalman filtering technique with trust-based dynamic combination strategy is developed to improve resilience against cyber attacks. Furthermore, it is efficient in terms of communication load, only local instantaneous estimates are exchanged with the neighboring nodes. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by considering random, false data injection and replay attacks

An Efficient V2X Based Vehicle Localization Using Single RSU and Single Receiver

High accuracy vehicle localization information is critical for intelligent transportation systems and future autonomous vehicles. It is challenging to achieve the required centimeter-level localization accuracy, especially in urban or global navigation satellite system denied environments. Here we propose a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)-based vehicle localization algorithm. First, it is low-cost and hardware requirements are simplified, the minimum requirement is a single roadside unit and single on-board receiver. Second, it is computationally efficient, the available V2I information is formulated as an over-determined system. Then, the vehicle position is estimated in a closed-form manner via the widely used weighted linear least squares (WLLS) method and meter level accuracy is achievable. Furthermore, the numerical performance of WLLS is consistent with the theoretical results in larger signal-to-noise ratio region

Biosensors fabricated by laser-induced metallization on DLP composite resin

With the growing emphasis on medical testing, people are seeking more technologies to detect indexes of the human body quickly and at a low cost. The electrochemical biosensors became a research hotspot due to their excellent properties. In this study, dicopper hydroxide phosphate (Cu2(OH)PO4) was incorporated in resin, and the resin sheets were prepared by digital light processing (DLP). The copper base points were activated on the resin sheet surface by Nd: YAG laser and then covered by the electroless copper plating and the electroless silver plating. The laser could effectively activate copper base points on the resin surface. Furthermore, silver electrodes on the detection chips could distinguish glucose solutions of different concentrations well. Finally, a novel detection kit with a three-electrode chip was designed for rapid health testing at home or in medical institutions in the future

Big-five personality and BIS/BAS traits as predictors of career exploration: The mediation role of career adaptability

Based on career construction theory, the current research examined whether career adaptability mediates the relations of the personality traits (Five-Factor Model personality traits and behavioral inhibition and activation systems (BIS/BAS)) to career exploration behavior. Results from a survey in Chinese university students (N = 264) showed that career exploration correlated negatively with neuroticism, and positively with openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and BAS. Results of regression analyses further showed that openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness and BAS served as the strongest predictors for career exploration. In addition, career adaptability was shown to be a key mediator for the relationships between personality traits and career exploration behavior. Career concern and career curiosity were the more important dimensions in the mediation model. These findings advance current understandings on how different personality traits predict career exploration behavio