Comparison of LEDs, Fluorescent Lamps and Incandescent Bulbs for Long-day Treatment of Forcing Strawberries as Affected by Respective Color Temperature

Long day (LD) treatment is frequently applied for horticultural crops, including strawberry, and sufficient effect similar to 4 to 6hours of day time elongation in the evening can be achieved by 1 to 3hours of night break in the mid night. Incandescent lamps (IC) have long been an important light source, but the general incandescent lamps are out of production and have been replaced with LED or florescent lamps (FL). Thus, we compared light sources and their color temperature (2,800K, warm white similar to IC; 6,500K, daylight) in different lighting programs. The effectiveness of 3 and 4cycles of alternate intermittent lighting, 30min on/30min off, were equal to and larger than 2hours of night break, respectively. Measured intensity of illumination (lux) at the canopy surface by 2,800K LED (6.9W) and FL (12W) was 1.50 and 0.95times as large as IC (54W), but leaf growth under LED and FL was similar to and less vigorous than IC, respectively. On the other hand, intensity values of illumination by 6,500K LED (6.9W) and FL (12W) were both 1.20times as large as 2,800K ones, but 6,500K light sources were much less effective compared to 2,800K ones. Daylight type LED and FL which have higher luminance efficiency but emit less red light compared to warm white ones, are not suitable as alternative light sources for IC

地域中核病院から病理解剖を依頼したALS

An 82-year-old man, who developed dysphagia several months ago, presented Tokushima University Hospital and was diagnosed of ALS in December 2019. The patient got gradually worse and became bedridden in May 2020. He was admitted into Tokushima University Hospital suffering an aspiration pneumonia in June 2020. The pneumonia rapidly improved with a treatment ; however, the patient failed to be treated at home against his wish and was transferred to Kaminaka Hospital. We accepted his wish for refusing mechanical ventilation or tube feeding. Later, we requested autopsy consent from the patient. He did not refuse our proposal ; therefore, we presearched transporters capable to deceased bodies and contacted the division of pathology in Tokushima University. 60 days later, the patient died due to a suddenly developed putamen hemorrhage. After getting the family's consent, as previously arranged, we transferred the deceased body to Tokushima University and accomplished an autopsy. Although the number of autopsies is declining, we suggest that hospital collaboration may help perform autopsies

Integrative Annotation of 21,037 Human Genes Validated by Full-Length cDNA Clones

The human genome sequence defines our inherent biological potential; the realization of the biology encoded therein requires knowledge of the function of each gene. Currently, our knowledge in this area is still limited. Several lines of investigation have been used to elucidate the structure and function of the genes in the human genome. Even so, gene prediction remains a difficult task, as the varieties of transcripts of a gene may vary to a great extent. We thus performed an exhaustive integrative characterization of 41,118 full-length cDNAs that capture the gene transcripts as complete functional cassettes, providing an unequivocal report of structural and functional diversity at the gene level. Our international collaboration has validated 21,037 human gene candidates by analysis of high-quality full-length cDNA clones through curation using unified criteria. This led to the identification of 5,155 new gene candidates. It also manifested the most reliable way to control the quality of the cDNA clones. We have developed a human gene database, called the H-Invitational Database (H-InvDB; http://www.h-invitational.jp/). It provides the following: integrative annotation of human genes, description of gene structures, details of novel alternative splicing isoforms, non-protein-coding RNAs, functional domains, subcellular localizations, metabolic pathways, predictions of protein three-dimensional structure, mapping of known single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), identification of polymorphic microsatellite repeats within human genes, and comparative results with mouse full-length cDNAs. The H-InvDB analysis has shown that up to 4% of the human genome sequence (National Center for Biotechnology Information build 34 assembly) may contain misassembled or missing regions. We found that 6.5% of the human gene candidates (1,377 loci) did not have a good protein-coding open reading frame, of which 296 loci are strong candidates for non-protein-coding RNA genes. In addition, among 72,027 uniquely mapped SNPs and insertions/deletions localized within human genes, 13,215 nonsynonymous SNPs, 315 nonsense SNPs, and 452 indels occurred in coding regions. Together with 25 polymorphic microsatellite repeats present in coding regions, they may alter protein structure, causing phenotypic effects or resulting in disease. The H-InvDB platform represents a substantial contribution to resources needed for the exploration of human biology and pathology

The whole blood transcriptional regulation landscape in 465 COVID-19 infected samples from Japan COVID-19 Task Force

「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19患者由来の血液細胞における遺伝子発現の網羅的解析 --重症度に応じた遺伝子発現の変化には、ヒトゲノム配列の個人差が影響する--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-23.Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a recently-emerged infectious disease that has caused millions of deaths, where comprehensive understanding of disease mechanisms is still unestablished. In particular, studies of gene expression dynamics and regulation landscape in COVID-19 infected individuals are limited. Here, we report on a thorough analysis of whole blood RNA-seq data from 465 genotyped samples from the Japan COVID-19 Task Force, including 359 severe and 106 non-severe COVID-19 cases. We discover 1169 putative causal expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) including 34 possible colocalizations with biobank fine-mapping results of hematopoietic traits in a Japanese population, 1549 putative causal splice QTLs (sQTLs; e.g. two independent sQTLs at TOR1AIP1), as well as biologically interpretable trans-eQTL examples (e.g., REST and STING1), all fine-mapped at single variant resolution. We perform differential gene expression analysis to elucidate 198 genes with increased expression in severe COVID-19 cases and enriched for innate immune-related functions. Finally, we evaluate the limited but non-zero effect of COVID-19 phenotype on eQTL discovery, and highlight the presence of COVID-19 severity-interaction eQTLs (ieQTLs; e.g., CLEC4C and MYBL2). Our study provides a comprehensive catalog of whole blood regulatory variants in Japanese, as well as a reference for transcriptional landscapes in response to COVID-19 infection

DOCK2 is involved in the host genetics and biology of severe COVID-19

「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19疾患感受性遺伝子DOCK2の重症化機序を解明 --アジア最大のバイオレポジトリーでCOVID-19の治療標的を発見--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-10.Identifying the host genetic factors underlying severe COVID-19 is an emerging challenge. Here we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) involving 2, 393 cases of COVID-19 in a cohort of Japanese individuals collected during the initial waves of the pandemic, with 3, 289 unaffected controls. We identified a variant on chromosome 5 at 5q35 (rs60200309-A), close to the dedicator of cytokinesis 2 gene (DOCK2), which was associated with severe COVID-19 in patients less than 65 years of age. This risk allele was prevalent in East Asian individuals but rare in Europeans, highlighting the value of genome-wide association studies in non-European populations. RNA-sequencing analysis of 473 bulk peripheral blood samples identified decreased expression of DOCK2 associated with the risk allele in these younger patients. DOCK2 expression was suppressed in patients with severe cases of COVID-19. Single-cell RNA-sequencing analysis (n = 61 individuals) identified cell-type-specific downregulation of DOCK2 and a COVID-19-specific decreasing effect of the risk allele on DOCK2 expression in non-classical monocytes. Immunohistochemistry of lung specimens from patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia showed suppressed DOCK2 expression. Moreover, inhibition of DOCK2 function with CPYPP increased the severity of pneumonia in a Syrian hamster model of SARS-CoV-2 infection, characterized by weight loss, lung oedema, enhanced viral loads, impaired macrophage recruitment and dysregulated type I interferon responses. We conclude that DOCK2 has an important role in the host immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe COVID-19, and could be further explored as a potential biomarker and/or therapeutic target

A Distributed Asynchronous Heuristic Algorithm in Generalized Mutual Assignment Problem

Generalized Mutual Assignment Problem (GMAP) is a multi-agent based distributed combinatorial optimization where the agents try to obtain the most profitable job assignment. Since it is NP-hard problem, it is challenging to achieve feasible solutions of GMAP. Existing algorithms to solve GMAP are synchronous ones, that is, the performance of the entire system would deteriorate if a certain agent takes a long time to solve her own subproblem. Furthermore, topology of communication networks strictly depends on the structure of a given instance due to the way of decomposing the problem into subproblem. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed asynchronous heuristic algorithm based on the Lagrangian decomposition formulation in order to obtain feasible solutions as good as possible. Our proposed algorithm consists of a couple of parts. One is to check the feasibility of candidate feasible solutions and the other is to solve the Lagrangian dual problem to generate a variety of candidates. Both of them are based on asynchronous gossip algorithms which are sometimes introduced for modeling rumor spreading phenomena or calculating an average value of sensors, where only two agents communicate with each other at one iteration. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method

How are multiple satellites seen from the ground? Relative apparent motion and formation stabilization

This paper answers how multiple satellites are seen from the ground. This question is inspired by space-advertising, a public exhibition in the night sky using a dot matrix of satellites that are bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. Thus, it is important for space advertisement that the specific dot matrix is seen. Moreover, the stability of the dot matrix during a visible span is very valuable. To stabilize the dot matrix, this study formulates an apparent position of a dot from a representative dot seen from the ground. The formulation, linear functions of a set of relative orbital elements, reveals the appearance of the dot matrix. The proposed relative variable in the formulation drives the instability of the dot matrix, thereby revealing an initial stable configuration of deputies from a chief. The arbitrary dot matrix designed using the configuration is stable even at low elevations without orbital control during the visible span. (Figure presented.)</p

Simple Synchronous and Asynchronous Algorithms for Distributed Minimax Optimization

Synchronous and asynchronous algorithms are presented for distributed minimax optimization. The objective here is to realize the minimization of the maximum of component functions over the standard multi-agent network, where each node of the network knows its own function and it exchanges its decision variable with its neighbors. In fact, the proposed algorithms are standard consensus and gossip based subgradient methods, while the original minimax optimization is recast as minimization of the sum of component functions by using a p-norm approximation. A scalable step size depending on the approximation ratio p is also presented in order to avoid slow convergence. Numerical examples illustrate that the algorithms with this step size work well even in the high approximation ratios

Stochastic Consensus Algorithms over General Noisy Networks

Stochastic consensus algorithms are considered for multi-agent systems over noisy unbalanced directed networks. The graph which represents a communication network of the system is assumed to contain a directed spanning tree, that is, a given digraph is weakly connected. Then two types of stochastic consensus are investigated, where one is for the agent states themselves and the other is for the time averages of the agent states. The convergence of the algorithms is investigated, which gives a stopping rule, i.e., an explicit relation between the number of iterations and the closeness of the agreement