A Catalogue of Oil Palm Expressed Sequence Tags (Ests) From A Floral Cdna Library and the Analysis Of Two Mads Box Genes

Flowering is a fundamental process in plant development. The transition of flowering, the first step in flower development, is triggered by a number of environmental and endogenous signals. A variety of genes combined with external and internal cues are involved in a series of biochemical and physiological changes leading to floral induction. The commercial importance of oil palm is dependent on its fruit production. Hence, flowering plays a key role in the oil palm production as the flower is an important introductory step to fruit formation. This study was conducted to isolate sufficiently large numbers of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from floral tissue in order to obtain gene expression information on a genome wide scale. In addition, EST also provides a valuable resource of candidate genes that can be selected for further study. A random EST approach may result in the isolation of clones representing highly repeated transcripts in the floral tissue whereas low abundance transcripts may be absent. Hence, a cold plaque screening technique was employed in this study to reduce the prevalence of highly abundant transcripts as well as to facilitate isolation of low abundance transcripts. In plants, many low abundance genes encode transcription factors or proteins that are involved in signal transduction. A total of 1300 clones were isolated through cold plaque screening. Ninety-six percent of the ESTs showed homology to known sequences in the database. The remaining 4% showed no matches with anything in the database, indicating that these genes are plant-specific. Sequence analysis revealed that a large proportion of the ESTs (about 26%) encoded unknown proteins with no known functional definition in the database. The remaining ESTs were further classified into 12 groups according to their encoded putative functions. MADS-box genes are known to be important for the development of flowers and fruit. Two MADS-box cDNAS, 8-3 and 9-32, were cloned from oil palm flowers. Both 8-3 and 9-32 showed high sequence similarities to API-like MADS-box protein of rice and SEP3 from Arabidopsis respectively. Clone 8-3 was expressed predominantly in the bract, spikelet primordia and the inner two whorls of the floral primordium. The second gene, 9- 32, was expressed in flower primordia and the inner three whorls of the floral primordium. The gene expression patterns suggest that these genes have a role in regulating oil palm flower development. Oil palm is a monoecius plant that produces unisexual flowers by suppression of the development of either male or female organs in a particular whorl. Clone 9-32, which is expressed in the early stage of flowering has a different expression profile in male and female flowers The onset of 9-32 expression in the male flower is much later than in the female flower, indicating that it may be involved in sex differentiation in oil palm flowers

Phylogenomic analysis of metabotrophic P2Y receptor family and its expression in zebrafish, Danio rerio

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute the largest and most divergent class of cell surface proteins. GPCRs can be activated by extracellular signals as diverse as light, peptides, proteins, lipids, odorants, tastants, nucleotides and nucleosides. Currently, all the known chemosensory receptor genes, such as odorant, taste and pheromone receptors belong to the GPCR family, with many of them being class A or class-A related genes. Metabotropic P2Y receptors belong to class A GPCRs and are activated by extracellular nucleotides. Nucleotides are released to the environment when the organism is injured and therefore serve as one of the food stimuli. As such, it would be interesting to see if P2Y receptors play any role in olfaction in zebrafish. To date, eight functional human P2Y receptors and 25 related orphan receptors have been found. I performed extensive data mining in drosophila, ascidian, jawless, cartilaginous and bony fish, frog and human genomes to delineate the P2Y family and investigate its evolutionary origin. The P2Y family originates early in the vertebrate lineage, reflected by the presence of lamprey and the absence of ascidian orthologues. Consistent with these findings, no P2Y receptor is found in invertebrates. In total, 38 subfamilies can be distinguished within the P2Y family, at least two third of which are already present in the shark genome. Two subfamilies, p2yl-3 and p2yl-4, are lost in the human lineage and only GPR 87 subfamily is lost in all teleost species. Zebrafish has 68 P2Y receptor genes, the most of any fish species, and almost double as many than mammals. The teleost P2Y genes are widely distributed in the genome as small cluster and singletons. The vast majority of P2Y genes are intronless while the remaining genes contain up to five introns. In the teleost lineage, the genomic arrangement of P2Y genes is preserved to a large extent, and some synteny is found even with the elephant shark and human genome, possibly reflecting the functional importance of these genes. Selective pressure on teleost P2Y genes generally is high, as evidenced by a preponderance of negative selection. However, a few genes exhibit positive selection at individual sites. In early development, P2Y genes are expressed in many tissues and organs, notably the central and peripheral nervous system, pharyngeal arches, otic vesicle and kidney, suggesting an important role in the development of many tissues. However, no expression is detected in larval olfactory epithelium. In contrast, olfactory epithelium of adult fish does express several P2Y genes as shown by RT-PCR. A possible explanation would be a late onset of expression in the olfactory epithelium. In situ hybridisation of adult olfactory epithelium established an ubiquitous distribution, both in the sensory and non-sensory region, which seems to argue against a role of P2Y genes in nucleotide odor detection. However, further studies will be necessary to give a definitive answer to that question

Vibration Isolation System

The Vibration Isolation System Senior Project is a collaborative group project between its sponsor, Maxar Technologies, and a team of students from Cal Poly - SLO to effectively design, manufacture, and test a structural assembly for satellites, isolating vibrations during launch and orbit conditions. After initial sponsor contact, requirements and needs were set which dictated deliverables for the senior project group. The group performed analyses to validate all design decisions, including a modified concept and design direction, selection of a prototype viscoelastic damping material, preliminary testing to validate design specifications, and detailed design and analysis toward a finalized design. Instead of moving forward with the manufacturing and testing as planned, it was necessary to create a modified scope with the necessary items due to the COVID-19 situation. This document contains screenshot from the senior project website found at https://projectexpo.calpoly.edu/2020/vibration-isolation-system/. Screenshots include the project definition, initial designs, background information, final design, analyses and an image gallery. Supplemental videos can also be found on the listed website

Analyses using genomic and transcriptomic data of mads-box genes in Elaeis guineensis

MADS-box genes encode a group of transcription factor family, well known as key regulators of plant vegetative and development processes, including flowering. Here, we aimed at analysing MADS-box genes in African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) genome, the pre-dominant source of worldwide production of vegetable oils. A total of 209 potential MADSbox genes are identified in the published 1.8 Gb E. guineensis draft genome. A de novo assembly of RNA-seq data from inflorescence tissues was constructed using Trinity software. The analysed transcriptome data has validated 36 full-length genes, inclusive of seven transcripts that were previously annotated to encode unknown proteins. Of the 36 genes discovered, 21 genes were characterised as Type I MADS-box genes and phylogenetic analysis using maximum likelihood approach further classified them into three sub-groups of Mα, Mβ and Mγ. Based on in silico analyses, we have successfully identified one gene annotated as unknown protein to contain a domain of “MADS-box transcription factor”. Its differential expression data, comparison between normal and mantled inflorescence of oil palm, suggested the involvement of the gene in the mantling related process. The findings contribute to updated oil palm genome information which may potentially lead to future understanding of the association of MADS-box genes in mantled oil palm. This may also lead to a resource for biomarker discovery

Study of the Relationship among Mobile Payment (Fintech), Creating Shared Value, and Corporate Reputation: Evidence in Korea, US, and China

Mobile Payment (Fintech), the combination of finance and technology, is creating a global boom in information technology (IT)-based financial services. In this study, two new factors including creating shared value (CSV), and corporate reputation was investigated. A large-scale survey was conducted in South Korea, the United States, and China for three months with those who have used mobile payment services, which represent the largest proportion of global fintech services. Our research findings show that “security and assurance” had an affirmative effect on user satisfaction. Fintech users’ satisfaction was found to affect positively the “economic value” and “social value” attributes of fintech CSV. The result clearly explains the importance of securing product/service competitiveness — the original mission of companie

Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-Image diffusion models have made tremendous progress over the past two years, enabling the generation of highly realistic images based on open-domain text descriptions. However, despite their success, text descriptions often struggle to adequately convey detailed controls, even when composed of long and complex texts. Moreover, recent studies have also shown that these models face challenges in understanding such complex texts and generating the corresponding images. Therefore, there is a growing need to enable more control modes beyond text description. In this paper, we introduce Uni-ControlNet, a unified framework that allows for the simultaneous utilization of different local controls (e.g., edge maps, depth map, segmentation masks) and global controls (e.g., CLIP image embeddings) in a flexible and composable manner within one single model. Unlike existing methods, Uni-ControlNet only requires the fine-tuning of two additional adapters upon frozen pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, eliminating the huge cost of training from scratch. Moreover, thanks to some dedicated adapter designs, Uni-ControlNet only necessitates a constant number (i.e., 2) of adapters, regardless of the number of local or global controls used. This not only reduces the fine-tuning costs and model size, making it more suitable for real-world deployment, but also facilitate composability of different conditions. Through both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, Uni-ControlNet demonstrates its superiority over existing methods in terms of controllability, generation quality and composability. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ShihaoZhaoZSH/Uni-ControlNet}.Comment: Camera Ready, Code is available at https://github.com/ShihaoZhaoZSH/Uni-ControlNe

Adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells markedly attenuate brain infarct size and improve neurological function in rats

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The therapeutic effect of adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADMSCs) on brain infarction area (BIA) and neurological status in a rat model of acute ischemic stroke (IS) was investigated.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Adult male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats (n = 30) were divided into IS plus intra-venous 1 mL saline (at 0, 12 and 24 h after IS induction) (control group) and IS plus intra-venous ADMSCs (2.0 × 10⁶) (treated interval as controls) (treatment group) after occlusion of distal left internal carotid artery. The rats were sacrificed and brain tissues were harvested on day 21 after the procedure.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results showed that BIA was larger in control group than in treatment group (p < 0.001). The sensorimotor functional test (Corner test) identified a higher frequency of turning movement to left in control group than in treatment group (p < 0.05). mRNA expressions of Bax, caspase 3, interleukin (IL)-18, toll-like receptor-4 and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 were higher, whereas Bcl-2 and IL-8/Gro were lower in control group than in treatment group (all p < 0.05). Western blot demonstrated a lower CXCR4 and stromal-cell derived factor-1 (SDF-1) in control group than in treatment group (all p < 0.01). Immunohistofluorescent staining showed lower expressions of CXCR4, SDF-1, von Willebran factor and doublecortin, whereas the number of apoptotic nuclei on TUNEL assay was higher in control group than in treatment group (all p < 0.001). Immunohistochemical staining showed that cellular proliferation and number of small vessels were lower but glial fibrillary acid protein was higher in control group than in treatment group (all p < 0.01).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>ADMSC therapy significantly limited BIA and improved sensorimotor dysfunction after acute IS.</p

Early combined treatment with sildenafil and adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells preserves heart function in rat dilated cardiomyopathy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>We investigated whether early combined autologous adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cell (ADMSC) and sildenafil therapy offers an additive benefit in preserving heart function in rat dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Adult Lewis rats (n = 8 per group) were divided into group 1 (normal control), group 2 (saline-treated DCM rats), group 3 [2.0 × 10⁶ADMSC implanted into left ventricular (LV) myocardium of DCM rats], group 4 (DCM rats with sildenafil 30 mg/kg/day, orally), and group 5 (DCM rats with combined ADMSC-sildenafil). Treatment was started 1 week after DCM induction and the rats were sacrificed on day 90.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results showed that mitochondrial protein expressions of connexin43 and cytochrome-C were lowest in group 2, and lower in groups 3 and 4 than in group 5 (p < 0.002). Conversely, oxidative index was highest in group 2, and also higher in groups 3 and 4 than in group 5 (p < 0.0003). The mRNA expressions of interleukin (IL)-10, Gro/IL-8, endothelial nitric oxide synthase, and Bcl-2 were lowest in group 2, and lower in groups 3 and 4 compared with group 5 (p < 0.0001). The mRNA expressions of matrix metalloproteinase-9, Bax, caspase 3, and stromal-cell derived factor-1α were highest in group 2, and higher in groups 3 and 4 than in group 5 (p < 0.0004). Apoptosis and fibrosis in LV myocardium were most prominent in group 2 and higher in groups 3 and 4 than in group 5, whereas angiogenesis and LV ejection fraction were lowest in group 2 and lower in groups 3 and 4 than in group 5 (p < 0.003).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Early combined ADMSC/sildenafil is superior to either treatment alone in preserving LV function.</p