Promoter activity analysis and transcriptional profile of Ginkgo biloba 1-Deoxy-D- Xylulose 5-Phosphate reductoisomerase gene (GbDXR) under abiotic stresses

Terpene trilactones (TTL) is a pharmacological ingredient in Ginkgo biloba and its content has become one of the key indices for medicinal value evaluation of ginkgo. 1-Deoxy-D-xylulose 5-phosphate reductoisomerase (DXR) catalyzes the first step specific for isopentenyl diphosphate production in methylerythritol phosphate pathway, which provide the basic structure required for TTLs biosynthesis. To understand the mechanism controlling the GbDXR gene expression, the GbDXR promoter sequence was isolated and subjected to transient expression with the green fluorescent protein (GFP) in tobacco plants. Characteristic analysis revealed various cis-acting elements that related to light-regulated transcription, hormone signaling (auxin, ethylene), adversity stress and defense signaling (heat/dehydration stress) in the GbDXR promoter region. In transient expression assay, deletion of different portions of the upstream GbDXR promoter identified that the promoter region -3230bp to -865bp conserve the positive regulation function, which could promote the expression of GFP in the cytoplasm of tobacco leaf epidermal cells. The regulation function of the promoter region -865bp to -262bp remained to be elucidated. EMSA analysis suggested possible interactions of GbERF10 and GbERF17 with the ERF-binding elements in the upstream of GbDXR promoter. For abiotic stresses treatment, the expression of GbDXR gene could be significantly induced by UV-B and drought stress. In general, the GbDXR gene expressed differently in different ginkgo tissues but exhibited the highest transcriptional level in the root, with the maximum TTLs content simultaneously. The positive relationship between gene expression level and TTLs content indicated that the GbDXR is responsible for TTLs biosynthesis in G. biloba

Extraction, Isolation and Identification of Antimicrobial Substances from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens CMN1308

Four separation methods of antimicrobial substances produced by CMN1308 (Bacillus amyloliquefaciens) were evaluated and selected according to number of antimicrobial substances and its activity in vitro. The results showed that extraction by acid precipitation of the fermentation supernatant of CMN1308 was the best with a diameter of inhibition zone of pathogen fungi P. expansum of 12.3 mm in a laboratory bioassay. Applying a silica thin layer chromatography (TLC), SDS-PAGE and other separation technologies we isolate antimicrobial substances, and the separated band were cut off for mass spectrometry analysis. The TLC of crude extract of CMN1308 show a topical band corresponding with the surfactin standard (Rf value =0.75), proved that the strain CMN1308 can produce this surface active compound. The mycoprotein extracted from CMN1308 was separated by Tricine-SDS-PAGE modified with the addition of urea in the separation gel. After mass spectrometric analysis and protein characterization, the isolated mycoprotein showed a maximum ion peak at M/Z of 2679 and molecular weight of 29.5 kDa, matching with protein flagellin. The extracellular antimicrobial protein of strain CMN1308 display four bands after urea-Tricine-SDS-PAGE, but after mass spectrometry analysis only two bands were identified. Band “A” with a maximum ion peak at M/Z of 1926 and molecular weight of 49.8 kDa, aligned with NCBI database, matching with DLDH (dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase enzyme). Band “D” show the maximum ion peak at M/Z of 2936 and molecular weight of 22.4 kD, matching with a chitin binding protein. Thus, the strain CMN1308 has the potential to be developed as a commercial biological control agent for chestnut common pathogenic fungi

A CASE STUDY: EVALUATING THE DIFFERENCE OF TECHNIQUE BY USING EFFICIENCY INDEX IN ELITE MALE FREESTYLE SWIMMERS

The purpose of the study was to evaluating the difference of technique by using efficiency index in elite male freestyle swimmers during their training periods. Two swimmers were selected to take a 6 x 50 m freestyle descend set in a 50 m swimming pool. The mean velocity (MV), stroke length (SL), stroke cycle (Se), efficiency index (El) and concentration of blood lactate (BL) were measured and compared to illuminate the difference of swimming technique and its impact on the performance level. According to previous and present studies, efficiency index is a useful measurement to evaluate the efficiency of the technique of swimmers. From limited number of subjects in the study, we speculated that the most effective intensity of improving efficiency of swimming technique is a little bit higher than anaerobic threshold

Numerical investigation of oblique detonation structure in hydrogen-oxygen mixtures with Ar dilution

Two combustible mixtures, H2 -O2 -Ar and H2 -O2 -N2, are widely used in detonation research, but only the latter has been employed in oblique detonation wave ODW) studies. In this study, ODWs in H2 -O2 -Ar are simulated to investigate their structural characteristics using reactive Euler equations with a detailed chemistry model. Similar to ODWs in H2 -O2 -N2 mixtures, two observed structures are dependent on incident Mach numbers. However, in mixtures of 2H2 +O2 +7Ar, the structures are sensitive to inflow static pressure P0, different from the structures in H2 -O2 -N2 mixtures. Based on flow field analysis, the ratio of induction and heat release zone lengths RL is proposed to model the difference induced by dilution gas. Generally, RL is large in N2 diluted mixtures but small in Ar diluted mixtures. Low RL indicates that induction is comparable with the heat release zone and easily changed, resulting in pressure- sensitive structures. When the dilution gas changes gradually from N2 to Ar, the ratio RL increases slowly at first and then declines rapidly to approach a constant. The variation rule of RL is analyzed and compared with results from calculations of a constant volume explosion, demonstrating how different dilution gases influence ODW structures

SPGNet: Semantic Prediction Guidance for Scene Parsing

Multi-scale context module and single-stage encoder-decoder structure are commonly employed for semantic segmentation. The multi-scale context module refers to the operations to aggregate feature responses from a large spatial extent, while the single-stage encoder-decoder structure encodes the high-level semantic information in the encoder path and recovers the boundary information in the decoder path. In contrast, multi-stage encoder-decoder networks have been widely used in human pose estimation and show superior performance than their single-stage counterpart. However, few efforts have been attempted to bring this effective design to semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose a Semantic Prediction Guidance (SPG) module which learns to re-weight the local features through the guidance from pixel-wise semantic prediction. We find that by carefully re-weighting features across stages, a two-stage encoder-decoder network coupled with our proposed SPG module can significantly outperform its one-stage counterpart with similar parameters and computations. Finally, we report experimental results on the semantic segmentation benchmark Cityscapes, in which our SPGNet attains 81.1% on the test set using only 'fine' annotations.Comment: ICCV 201