Integrative analysis of chloroplast genome, chemicals, and illustrations in Bencao literature provides insights into the medicinal value of Peucedanum huangshanense

The genus Peucedanum L. (Apiaceae) is a large group comprising more than 120 species distributed worldwide. Many plants of the genus Peucedanum have been studied and used in traditional Chinese medicine. In 2020, a new species, Peucedanum huangshanense Lu Q. Huang, H. S. Peng & S. S. Chu, was found in the Huangshan Mountains of Anhui Province, China. However, little is known about its medicinal properties. Thus, the objective of this study is to explore the potential medicinal value of P. huangshanense and its relationship with other Peucedanum species. Through textual research on illustrations of Qianhu in Bencao literature, it can be inferred that at least five species of genus Peucedanum have been used in Chinese medicine. Therefore, we chose these five species of Peucedanum and P. huangshanense together for subsequent research. We conducted morphological, chloroplast genome, and chemical analyses of six Peucedanum species, including the newly discovered P. huangshanense. The chloroplast genomes of Peucedanum showed a typical tetrad structure, and the gene structure and content were similar and conservative. There were significant differences in genome size and the expansion of the inverted repeat boundary. Through nucleotide polymorphism analysis, we screened 14 hotspot mutation regions that have the potential to be used as specific molecular markers for the taxonomy of Peucedanum. Our results showed an inversion of the trnD-trnY-trnE gene in the P. huangshanense chloroplast genome, which can be developed as a specific molecular marker for species identification. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the phylogenetic trees had high support and resolution, which strongly supports the view that Peucedanum is not a monophyletic group. P. huangshanense had the closest genetic relationship to P. ampliatum K. T. Fu, followed by P. harry-smithii Fedde ex Wolff. Furthermore, the main coumarins of P. huangshanense were most similar to those of P. japonicum Thunb. and P. harry-smithii. In summary, our research lays a foundation for the systematic classification of Peucedanum and sheds light on the medicinal value of P. huangshanense

Behavioral Responses of Apis mellifera Adult Workers to Odors from Healthy Brood and Diseased Brood

Studies of adult workers’ responses to infected brood were undertaken to isolate discrete volatile compounds that elicited honeybee hygienic behavior. Using a freeze-killed brood assay, we determined that in healthy colonies adult workers recognized and emptied infected cells with a 95% clearance rate. SPME-GC-MS results emptied >95% infected cells indicated differences in the composition and relative content of volatile compounds released by healthy and diseased brood. Additionally, we determined that the main volatile compound released from the pathogen Ascosphaera apis was phenethyl alcohol. The Y-tube olfactometer indicated that 10- to 20-day-old workers of healthy colonies, but only 15-day-old workers of diseased colonies, were significantly sensitive to differences in characteristic volatile compounds. This information could facilitate honey bee selection based on mechanisms that contribute to chalkbrood disease tolerance

Object-based attention mechanism for color calibration of UAV remote sensing images in precision agriculture.

Color calibration is a critical step for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing, especially in precision agriculture, which relies mainly on correlating color changes to specific quality attributes, e.g. plant health, disease, and pest stresses. In UAV remote sensing, the exemplar-based color transfer is popularly used for color calibration, where the automatic search for the semantic correspondences is the key to ensuring the color transfer accuracy. However, the existing attention mechanisms encounter difficulties in building the precise semantic correspondences between the reference image and the target one, in which the normalized cross correlation is often computed for feature reassembling. As a result, the color transfer accuracy is inevitably decreased by the disturbance from the semantically unrelated pixels, leading to semantic mismatch due to the absence of semantic correspondences. In this article, we proposed an unsupervised object-based attention mechanism (OBAM) to suppress the disturbance of the semantically unrelated pixels, along with a further introduced weight-adjusted Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) (WAA) method to tackle the challenges caused by the absence of semantic correspondences. By embedding the proposed modules into a photorealistic style transfer method with progressive stylization, the color transfer accuracy can be improved while better preserving the structural details. We evaluated our approach on the UAV data of different crop types including rice, beans, and cotton. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. As our approach requires no annotated labels, it can be easily embedded into the off-the-shelf color transfer approaches. Relevant codes and configurations will be available at https://github.com/huanghsheng/object-based-attention-mechanis

Comparative study of two models to simulate diffuse nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in a medium-sized watershed, southeast China

The aim of this study was to compare and assess two models to calculate diffuse nitrogen and phosphorus emissions in a selected watershed. The GIS-based empirical model and the physically-based AnnAGNPS model were evaluated for comparative purposes. The methodologies were applied for the Jiulong River watershed, covering 14,700 km(2) located in southeast China, with intensive agricultural activities. The calculated loadings by AnnAGNPS model was checked by the measured values at the watershed outlet, whereas the calculated nitrogen and phosphorus emission by GIS-based empirical model spatially provided the potential values in terms of sub-watersheds, districts/counties, and land use type. Both models gave similar levels of diffuse total nitrogen emissions, which also fit well with previous estimates made in the Jiulong River watershed. Comparatively, the GIS-based empirical model gave sound results of source apportionment of non-point source pollution (NPS) froth the available input data and critical source areas identification of diffuse nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. The AnnAGNPS model predicted reasonable nitrogen loading at the watershed outlet and simulated well for NPS management alternatives under changing land use conditions. The study indicated that the GIS-based empirical model has its advantage in extensive studies as a decisions support tool for preliminary design since it is easily applied to large watersheds with fewer data requirements, while AnnAGNPS has its advantage in detailed emission assessment and scenario development. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Acetate favors more phosphorus accumulation into aerobic granular sludge than propionate during the treatment of synthetic fermentation liquor

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is an efficient biotechnology widely applied for energy and resource recovery from organic waste and wastewater treatment. The effluent from AD or fermentation liquor containing organic substances like volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and mineral nutrients (such as N and P), however, will trigger serious environmental issues if not properly dealt with. In this study two identical sequencing batch reactors (SBRs), namely Ra and Rp were used to cultivate aerobic granules for P recovery from synthetic fermentation liquor, respectively using acetate and propionate as additional carbon source. Larger and more stable granules were achieved in Ra with higher P removal capability (9.4 mg P/g-VSS·d) and higher anaerobic P release (6.9 mg P/g-VSS·h). In addition to much higher P content (78 mg P/g-SS), bioavailable P in Ra-granules increased to 45 mg P/g-SS, approximately 2-times those of seed sludge and Rp-granules. Microbial community analysis indicated that more GAOs were accumulated in Rp-granules

The Cenozoic history of palms:Global diversification, biogeography and the decline of megathermal forests

10.1111/geb.13436GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY313425-43

Dynamics of heterotrophic dinoflagellates off the Pearl River Estuary, northern South China Sea

Variations in abundance, biomass, vertical profile and cell size of heterotrophic dinoflagellates (HDFs) between summer and winter and its controlling factors were studied in the northern South China Sea (SCS). It was found that HDF abundance and carbon biomass were 4-102 x 10(3) cells L-1 and 0.34-12.3 mg C L-1 in winter (February 2004), respectively, while they were 2-142 x 10(3) cells L-1 and 0.22-31.4 mu g C L-1 in summer (July, 2004), respectively, in the northern SCS. HDF abundance and carbon biomass decreased from the estuary to inshore and then offshore. Vertical profiles of HDF abundance were heterogeneous, which accorded well with that of chlorophyll a (Chl.a). Higher abundance of HDFs was often observed at a depth of 30-70 m offshore waters, matching well with the Chl.a maximum, while it showed high abundance at the surface in some coastal and estuary stations. Small HDFs (20 mu m) generally contributed equally in terms of carbon biomass, accounting for 47% on average. HDFs showed different variation patterns for the different study regions; in the estuarine and continental shelf regions, abundance and biomass values were higher in summer than those in winter, while it was the reverse pattern for the slope waters. Hydrological factors (e.g. water mass, river outflow, monsoon and eddies) associated with biological factors, especially the size-fractionated Chl.a, seemed to play an important role in regulating HDF distribution and variations in the northern South China Sea. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.China NSF [40730846, 40806058, 90711006]; Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2006CR400604

Detection and localization of citrus fruit based on improved You Only Look Once v5s and binocular vision in the orchard

Intelligent detection and localization of mature citrus fruits is a critical challenge in developing an automatic harvesting robot. Variable illumination conditions and different occlusion states are some of the essential issues that must be addressed for the accurate detection and localization of citrus in the orchard environment. In this paper, a novel method for the detection and localization of mature citrus using improved You Only Look Once (YOLO) v5s with binocular vision is proposed. First, a new loss function (polarity binary cross-entropy with logit loss) for YOLO v5s is designed to calculate the loss value of class probability and objectness score, so that a large penalty for false and missing detection is applied during the training process. Second, to recover the missing depth information caused by randomly overlapping background participants, Cr-Cb chromatic mapping, the Otsu thresholding algorithm, and morphological processing are successively used to extract the complete shape of the citrus, and the kriging method is applied to obtain the best linear unbiased estimator for the missing depth value. Finally, the citrus spatial position and posture information are obtained according to the camera imaging model and the geometric features of the citrus. The experimental results show that the recall rates of citrus detection under non-uniform illumination conditions, weak illumination, and well illumination are 99.55%, 98.47%, and 98.48%, respectively, approximately 2–9% higher than those of the original YOLO v5s network. The average error of the distance between the citrus fruit and the camera is 3.98 mm, and the average errors of the citrus diameters in the 3D direction are less than 2.75 mm. The average detection time per frame is 78.96 ms. The results indicate that our method can detect and localize citrus fruits in the complex environment of orchards with high accuracy and speed. Our dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/AshesBen/citrus-detection-localization

Distribution, fluxes and decadal changes of nutrients in the Jiulong River Estuary, Southwest Taiwan Strait

The Jiulong River Estuary (JRE) is a typical subtropical macro-tide estuary on the southwest coast of the Taiwan Strait (TWS), which has been greatly impacted by human activities over the past 30 years. To understand nutrient dynamics and fluxes under such a heavy background of anthropogenic perturbation, eight cruises were conducted from April 2008 to April 2011, covering both wet (May to September) and dry (October to April next year) seasons. Nutrient concentrations were very high for the freshwater end-member in the upper reach of the JRE (nitrate (NO3-N): 120-230 mu mol L-1; nitrite (NO2-N): 5-15 mu mol L-1; ammonium (NH4-N): 15-170 mu mol L-1; soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP): 1.2-3.5 mu mol L-1; dissolved silicate (DSi): 200-340 mu mol L-1). In dry seasons, concentrations of these nutrients were higher than in wet seasons. Nitrate was the dominant chemical species of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN), with percentages of 67%-96% in wet seasons and 55%-72% in dry seasons. Distributions of NO3-N and DSi against salinity were nearly constant during all cruises, and showed generally conservative mixing behaviors in the estuary (1 < Salinity < 32). The concentrations of SRP varied within a narrow range of 1.0-2.0 mu mol L-1 in low/middle salinity areas, and they were quickly diluted by relatively oligotrophic near-shore seawater in the high salinity region. Based on a temporally high-resolution water discharge dataset, riverine fluxes of DIN, SRP and DSi into the JRE were calculated at 34.3x10(3) t N a(-1), 0.63x10(3) t P a(-1) and 72.7x10(3) t Si a(-1), respectively. In comparison, estuarine export fluxes of DIN, SRP and DSi from the JRE to the TWS were estimated at 34.8x10(3) t N a(-1), 0.82x10(3) t P a(-1) and 71.6x10(3) t Si a(-1). The estuarine addition flux of SRP was independently estimated at 0.16x10(3) t P a(-1). In comparison with major world rivers, the Jiulong River shows a very high areal yield rate of NO3-N. In comparison with historical datasets from 1980s-1990s, concentrations of NO3-N and SRP increased 2-3 times in upper/middle areas of the JRE, while DSi remained at the same level. The latter is much different from decadal nutrient changes in the Mississippi River and the Yangtze River/Estuary. Such nutrient changes may fundamentally contribute to recent red tide events in the JRE and adjacent Xiamen Bay.National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [40810069004]; National Basic Research Program of China [2009CB421204]; State Oceanic Administration of China [DOMEP-MEA-01-10

An atlas of DNA methylomes in porcine adipose and muscle tissues

It is evident that epigenetic factors, especially DNA methylation, have essential roles in obesity development. Here, using pig as a model, we investigate the systematic association between DNA methylation and obesity. We sample eight variant adipose and two distinct skeletal muscle tissues from three pig breeds living within comparable environments but displaying distinct fat level. We generate 1,381 Gb of sequence data from 180 methylated DNA immunoprecipitation libraries, and provide a genome-wide DNA methylation map as well as a gene expression map for adipose and muscle studies. The analysis shows global similarity and difference among breeds, sexes and anatomic locations, and identifies the differentially methylated regions. The differentially methylated regions in promoters are highly associated with obesity development via expression repression of both known obesity-related genes and novel genes. This comprehensive map provides a solid basis for exploring epigenetic mechanisms of adipose deposition and muscle growth