Scaling up from smallholder agriculture in China, North Branch River Vegetable Cooperative

Zhang Guan liang is a Chinese agricultural entrepreneur, who lives in Fuyang, China. In 2009, he founded North Branch River Vegetable Cooperative, with a vision of creating a vegetable production and distribution entity of significant scale. He has successfully launched the venture, with more than 200 farmers producing vegetables for it. Today, he faces significant challenges to further growth; some common to entrepreneurs, others unique to agriculture, and others unique to growing an agricultural venture in China. The case charts Zhang\u27s efforts to increase production capacity, access growth capital, and manage food safety issues. In a larger sense, the case charts the agrifood supply chain struggles that are particularly acute in China today

Multi-level reproducibility of signature hubs in human interactome for breast cancer metastasis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It has been suggested that, in the human protein-protein interaction network, changes of co-expression between highly connected proteins ("hub") and their interaction neighbours might have important roles in cancer metastasis and be predictive disease signatures for patient outcome. However, for a cancer, such disease signatures identified from different studies have little overlap.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here, we propose a systemic approach to evaluate the reproducibility of disease signatures at multiple levels, on the basis of some statistically testable biological models. Using two datasets for breast cancer metastasis, we showed that different signature hubs identified from different studies were highly consistent in terms of significantly sharing interaction neighbours and displaying consistent co-expression changes with their overlapping neighbours, whereas the shared interaction neighbours were significantly over-represented with known cancer genes and enriched in pathways deregulated in breast cancer pathogenesis. Then, we showed that the signature hubs identified from the two datasets were highly reproducible at the protein interaction and pathway levels in three other independent datasets.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results provide a possible biological model that different signature hubs altered in different patient cohorts could disturb the same pathways associated with cancer metastasis through their interaction neighbours.</p

Reproducibility and Concordance of Differential DNA Methylation and Gene Expression in Cancer

Background: Hundreds of genes with differential DNA methylation of promoters have been identified for various cancers. However, the reproducibility of differential DNA methylation discoveries for cancer and the relationship between DNA methylation and aberrant gene expression have not been systematically analysed. Methodology/Principal Findings: Using array data for seven types of cancers, we first evaluated the effects of experimental batches on differential DNA methylation detection. Second, we compared the directions of DNA methylation changes detected from different datasets for the same cancer. Third, we evaluated the concordance between methylation and gene expression changes. Finally, we compared DNA methylation changes in different cancers. For a given cancer, the directions of methylation and expression changes detected from different datasets, excluding potential batch effects, were highly consistent. In different cancers, DNA hypermethylation was highly inversely correlated with the down-regulation of gene expression, whereas hypomethylation was only weakly correlated with the up-regulation of genes. Finally, we found that genes commonly hypomethylated in different cancers primarily performed functions associated with chronic inflammation, such as ‘keratinization’, ‘chemotaxis ’ and ‘immune response’. Conclusions: Batch effects could greatly affect the discovery of DNA methylation biomarkers. For a particular cancer, both differential DNA methylation and gene expression can be reproducibly detected from different studies with no batc

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF WELDING RESIDUAL STRESS OF HIGH-STRENGTH SHIPBUILDING STEEL

Ships are large welded structures. Welding residual stress (WRS) significantly impacts the mechanical properties of the structure. The plate and cylinder models welded by electrode welding (EW) and submerged arc welding (SAW) were designed to measure the WRS of high-strength shipbuilding steel. The WRS was measured by instrumented indentation method. The stress value of each measure point was proposed. The stress distribution patterns of different welding processes and models were analysed. This research can provide a reference for controlling the WRS of ships and improving shipbuilding quality

Individualized analysis reveals CpG sites with methylation aberrations in almost all lung adenocarcinoma tissues

Additional file 1: Table S1. Stable and reversal CpG site pairs identified in the samples measured by two platforms

Revisiting Spatio-Angular Trade-off in Light Field Cameras and Extended Applications in Super-Resolution

Light field cameras (LFCs) have received increasing attention due to their wide-spread applications. However, current LFCs suffer from the well-known spatio-angular trade-off, which is considered an inherent and fundamental limit for LFC designs. In this paper, by doing a detailed optical analysis of the sampling process in an LFC, we show that the effective resolution is generally higher than the number of micro-lenses. This contribution makes it theoretically possible to super-resolve a light field. Further optical analysis proves the "2D predictable series" nature of the 4D light field, which provides new insights for analyzing light field using series processing techniques. To model this nature, a specifically designed epipolar plane image (EPI) based CNN-LSTM network is proposed to super-resolve a light field in the spatial and angular dimensions simultaneously. Rather than leveraging semantic information, our network focuses on extracting geometric continuity in the EPI domain. This gives our method an improved generalization ability and makes it applicable to a wide range of previously unseen scenes. Experiments on both synthetic and real light fields demonstrate the improvements over state-of-the-arts, especially in large disparity areas

The RALF1–FERONIA Complex Phosphorylates eIF4E1 to Promote Protein Synthesis and Polar Root Hair Growth

The molecular links between extracellular signals and the regulation of localized protein synthesis in plant cells are poorly understood. Here, we show that in Arabidopsis thaliana, the extracellular peptide RALF1 and its receptor, the FERONIA receptor kinase, promote root hair (RH) tip growth by modulating protein synthesis. We found that RALF1 promotes FERONIA-mediated phosphorylation of eIF4E1, a eukaryotic translation initiation factor that plays a crucial role in the control of mRNA translation rate. Phosphorylated eIF4E1 increases mRNA affinity and modulates mRNA translation and, thus, protein synthesis. The mRNAs targeted by the RALF1–FERONIA–eIF4E1 module include ROP2 and RSL4, which are important regulators of RH cell polarity and growth. RALF1 and FERONIA are expressed in a polar manner in RHs, which facilitate eIF4E1 polar localization and thus may control local ROP2 translation. Moreover, we demonstrated that high-level accumulation of RSL4 exerts negative-feedback regulation of RALF1 expression by directly binding the RALF1 gene promoter, determining the final RH size. Our study reveals that the link between RALF1–FERONIA signaling and protein synthesis constitutes a novel component regulating cell expansion in these polar growing cells.Fil: Zhu, Sirui. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Estevez, Jose Manuel. Universidad Andrés Bello; Chile. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Liao, Hongdong. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Zhu, Yonghua. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Yang, Tao. Central South University of Forestry and Technology; ChinaFil: Li, Chiyu. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Wang, Yichuan. Southern University of Science and Technology; ChinaFil: Li, Lan. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Liu, Xuanming. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Martinez Pacheco, Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Guo, Hongwei. Southern University of Science and Technology; ChinaFil: Yu, Feng. Hunan University; Chin

A kognitív készségek rendszere és fejlődése

Additional file 7: Figure S1. The KEGG pathways separately enriched with hypermethylated (a) and hypomethylated (b) genes in at least 10% of the 539 TCGA lung adenocarcinoma samples

Agriculture in the Face of Changing Markets, Institutions and Policies: Challenges and Strategies

Since the late 1980s, agriculture in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) has been under considerable adjustment pressure due to changing political, economic and institutional environments. These changes have been linked to the transition process, as well as the ongoing integration into the European Union and the world market. Reduced subsidies, increased environmental and food quality demands, as well as structural changes in the supply, processing and food retailing sector call for major structural adjustments and the improvement of farmersâ managerial abilities. Though such changes always carry significant threats to farms, they also offer new opportunities for the farms' entrepreneurial engagement. Upcoming changes in the agricultural environment and their possible consequences for farm structures across Europe are thus still timely subjects. The objective of the IAMO Forum 2006 is to contribute to the success of agriculture in the CEECs, as well as their neighboring countries, in todayâs increasingly competitive environment. Concrete questions the conference focuses on are: What are the most suitable farm organizations, cooperative arrangements and contractual forms? How to improve efficiency and productivity? Where do market niches lie and what are the new product demands? This book contains 33 invited and selected contributions. These papers will be presented at the IAMO Forum 2006 in order to offer a platform for scientists, practitioners and policy-makers to discuss challenges and potential strategies at the farm, value chain, rural society and policy levels in order to cope with the upcoming challenges. IAMO Forum 2006, as well as this book, would not have been possible without the engagement of many people and institutions. We thank the authors of the submitted abstracts and papers, as well as the referees, for their evaluation of the abstracts from which the papers were selected. In particular, we would like to express our thanks to OLIVER JUNGKLAUS, GABRIELE MEWES, KLAUS REINSBERG and ANGELA SCHOLZ, who significantly contributed to the organization of the Forum. Furthermore, our thanks goes to SILKE SCHARF for her work on the layout and editing support of this book, and to JIM CURTISS, JAMIE BULLOCH, and DÃNALL Ã MEARÃIN for their English proof-reading. As experience from previous years documents, the course of the IAMO Forum continues to profit from the support and engagement of the IAMO administration, which we gratefully acknowledge. Last but not least, we are very grateful to the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Haniel Foundation and the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO) for their respective financial support.Agribusiness, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Farm Management, Industrial Organization, International Development, Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use, Productivity Analysis,