Diaqua­bis­(5-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-4-carboxyl­ato-κ2 N 3,O 4)cadmium(II) 3.5-hydrate

In the title complex, [Cd(C8H9N2O4)2(H2O)2]·3.5H2O, the CdII is coordinated by two water mol­ecules and N,O-chelated by two 5-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-4-carboxyl­ate anions in a distorted octa­hedral geometry. The two imidazole rings are oriented to each other with a dihedral angle of 75.1 (2)°. Strong O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds between protonated and deprotonated carboxyl­ate groups occur in the mol­ecular structure. In the crystal structure extensive O—H⋯O and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds help to stabilize the three-dimensional supra­molecular framework. The propyl groups of anions are disordered over two sites with refined occupancies of 0.768 (6):0.232 (6) and 0.642 (8):0.358 (8)

Contrasting response of coexisting plant's water-use patterns to experimental precipitation manipulation in an alpine grassland community of Qinghai Lake watershed, China

Understanding species-specific changes in water-use patterns under recent climate scenarios is necessary to predict accurately the responses of seasonally dry ecosystems to future climate. In this study, we conducted a precipitation manipulation experiment to investigate the changes in water-use patterns of two coexisting species (Achnatherum splendens and Allium tanguticum) to alterations in soil water content (SWC) resulting from increased and decreased rainfall treatments. The results showed that the leaf water potential (Psi) of A. splendens and A. tanguticum responded to changes in shallow and middle SWC at both the control and treatment plots. However, A. splendens proportionally extracted water from the shallow soil layer (0-10cm) when it was available but shifted to absorbing deep soil water (30-60 cm) during drought. By contrast, the A. tanguticum did not differ significantly in uptake depth between treatment and control plots but entirely depended on water from shallow soil layers. The flexible water-use patterns of A. splendens may be a key factor facilitating its dominance and it better acclimates the recent climate change in the alpine grassland community around Qinghai Lake

Original Article Vitamin D analog EB1089 could repair the defective bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus

Abstract: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) involves multiple factors, which result in the breakdown of selftolerance and development of autoimmunity with organ damage. Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMMSCs) from the patients with SLE showed an impaired proliferative capacity compared with that from normal controls. In this study, we isolated BMMSCs from the patients with SLE and found that Vitamin D analog EB1089 could induce BMMSCs proliferation and mineralization deposition. Furthermore, we found that the expression of p-Smad 1/5/8 was promoted in BMMSCs with EB1089 treatment. In conclusion, our results support the notion that EB1089 promoted proliferation and osteogenic dif ferentiation of BMMSCs by Smad 1/5/8 signaling pathway

Direct Neighborhood Discriminant Analysis for Face Recognition

Face recognition is a challenging problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. Recently, many local geometrical structure-based techiniques are presented to obtain the low-dimensional representation of face images with enhanced discriminatory power. However, these methods suffer from the small simple size (SSS) problem or the high computation complexity of high-dimensional data. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel local manifold structure learning method for face recognition, named direct neighborhood discriminant analysis (DNDA), which separates the nearby samples of interclass and preserves the local within-class geometry in two steps, respectively. In addition, the PCA preprocessing to reduce dimension to a large extent is not needed in DNDA avoiding loss of discriminative information. Experiments conducted on ORL, Yale, and UMIST face databases show the effectiveness of the proposed method