Silencing of the Wheat Protein Phosphatase 2A Catalytic Subunit TaPP2Ac Enhances Host Resistance to the Necrotrophic Pathogen Rhizoctonia cerealis

Eukaryotic type 2A protein phosphatases (protein phosphatase 2A, PP2A) consist of a scaffold subunit A, a regulatory subunit B, and a catalytic subunit C. Little is known about the roles of PP2Ac proteins that are involved in plant responses to necrotrophic fungal pathogens. Sharp eyespot, caused by the necrotrophic fungus Rhizoctonia cerealis, is a destructive disease of wheat (Triticum aestivum), an important staple food crop. Here, we isolated TaPP2Ac-4D from wheat, which encodes a catalytic subunit of the heterotrimeric PP2A, and characterized its properties and role in plant defense response to R. cerealis. Based on the sequence alignment of TaPP2Ac-4D with the draft sequences of wheat chromosomes from the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC), it was found that TaPP2Ac-4D gene is located on the long arm of the wheat chromosome 4D and has two homologs assigned on wheat chromosomes 4A and 4B. Sequence and phylogenetic tree analyses revealed that the TaPP2Ac protein is a typical member of the PP2Ac family and belongs to the subfamily II. TaPP2Ac-4B and TaPP2Ac-4D displayed higher transcriptional levels in the R. cerealis-susceptible wheat cultivar Wenmai 6 than those seen in the resistant wheat line CI12633. The transcriptional levels of TaPP2Ac-4B and TaPP2Ac-4D were significantly elevated in wheat R. cerealis after infection and upon H2O2 treatment. Virus-induced gene silencing results revealed that the transcriptional knockdown of TaPP2Ac-4D and TaPP2Ac-4B significantly increased wheat resistance to R. cerealis infection. Meanwhile, the transcriptional levels of certain pathogenesis-related (PR) and reactive oxygen species (ROS)-scavenging enzyme encoding genes were increased in TaPP2Ac-silenced wheat plants. These results suggest that TaPP2Ac-4B and TaPP2Ac-4D negatively regulate defense response to R. cerealis infection possibly through modulation of the expression of certain PR and ROS-scavenging enzyme genes in wheat. This study reveals a novel function of the plant PP2Ac genes in plant immune responses

Regulation of autophagy by AMP-activated protein kinase/ sirtuin 1 pathway reduces spinal cord neurons damage

Objective(s): AMP-activated protein kinase/sirtuin 1 (AMPK/SIRT1) signaling pathway has been proved to be involved in the regulation of autophagy in various models. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of AMPK/SIRT1 pathway on autophagy after spinal cord injury (SCI). Materials and Methods:The SCI model was established in rats in vivo and the primary spinal cord neurons were subjected to mechanical injury (MI) in vitro. The apoptosis in spinal cord tissue and neurons was assessed by TUNEL staining and Hoechst 33342 staining, respectively. The autophagy-related proteins levels were detected by Western blot. The activation of AMPK/SIRT1 pathway was determined by Western blot and immunohistochemical staining. Results: We found that the apoptosis of spinal cord tissue and cell damage of spinal cord neurons was obvious after the trauma. The ratio of LC3II/LC3I and level of p62 were first increased significantly and then decreased after the trauma in vivo and in vitro, indicating the defect in autophagy. The levels of p-AMPK and SIRT1 were increased obviously after the trauma in vivo and in vitro. Further activation of the AMPK/SIRT1 pathway by pretreatment with resveratrol, a confirmed activator of the AMPK/SIRT1 pathway, alleviated the cell damage and promoted the autophagy flux via downregulation of p62 in spinal cord neurons at 24 hr after MI. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate that regulation of autophagy by AMPK/SIRT1 pathway can restrain spinal cord neurons damage, which may be a potential intervention of SCI

The Wall-Associated Receptor-Like Kinase TaWAK7D Is Required for Defense Responses to Rhizoctonia cerealis in Wheat

Sharp eyespot, caused by necrotrophic fungus Rhizoctonia cerealis, is a serious fungal disease in wheat (Triticum aestivum). Certain wall-associated receptor kinases (WAK) mediate resistance to diseases caused by biotrophic/hemibiotrophic pathogens in several plant species. Yet, none of wheat WAK genes with positive effect on the innate immune responses to R. cerealis has been reported. In this study, we identified a WAK gene TaWAK7D, located on chromosome 7D, and showed its positive regulatory role in the defense response to R. cerealis infection in wheat. RNA-seq and qRT-PCR analyses showed that TaWAK7D transcript abundance was elevated in wheat after R. cerealis inoculation and the induction in the stem was the highest among the tested organs. Additionally, TaWAK7D transcript levels were significantly elevated by pectin and chitin treatments. The knock-down of TaWAK7D transcript impaired resistance to R. cerealis and repressed the expression of five pathogenesis-related genes in wheat. The green fluorescent protein signal distribution assays indicated that TaWAK7D localized on the plasma membrane in wheat protoplasts. Thus, TaWAK7D, which is induced by R. cerealis, pectin and chitin stimuli, positively participates in defense responses to R. cerealis through modulating the expression of several pathogenesis-related genes in wheat

Combining Ability of Different Agronomic Traits and Yield Components in Hybrid Barley

<div><p>Selection of parents based on their combining ability is an effective approach in hybrid breeding. In this study, eight maintainer lines and nine restorer lines were used to obtain 72 crosses for analyzing the general combining ability (GCA) and special combining ability (SCA) for seven agronomic and yield characters including plant height (PH), spike length excluding awns (SL), inter-node length (IL), spikes per plant (SP), thousand kernel weight (TKW), kernel weight per plant (KWP) and dry matter weight per plant (DWP). The results showed that GCA was significantly different among parents and SCA was also significantly different among crosses. The performance of hybrid was significantly correlated with the sum of female and male GCA (TGCA), SCA and heterosis. Hu1154 A, Mian684 A, 86F098 A, 8036 R and 8041 R were excellent parents with greater general combining ability. Five crosses, Hu1154 A×8032 R, Humai10 A×8040 R, Mian684 A×8037 R, Mian684 A×8041 R and 86F098 A×8037 R, showed superior heterosis for most characters.</p></div

Correlation between the performance of hybrids and combining ability.

<p>*, ** significant at p < 0.05, 0.001 respectively.</p><p>See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0126828#pone.0126828.t002" target="_blank">Table 2</a> for trait abbreviations.</p><p>FGCA: female general combining ability; MGCA: male general combining ability; TGCA: total general combining ability, TGCA = FGCA+MGCA; SCA: special combining ability.</p><p>MP: mid-parents heterosis; OBP: over-better-parent heterosis.</p><p>Correlation between the performance of hybrids and combining ability.</p

ANOVA of combining ability for different traits (<i>F value</i>).

<p>*, ** significant at p < 0.05, 0.01 respectively.</p><p>GCA: general combining ability; SCA: special combining ability</p><p>ANOVA of combining ability for different traits (<i>F value</i>).</p

Crosses with beneficial special combining ability for the seven traits.

<p>See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0126828#pone.0126828.t002" target="_blank">Table 2</a> for trait abbreviations.</p><p>Crosses with beneficial special combining ability for the seven traits.</p

General combining ability for agronomic and yield characters.

<p>*, ** significant at p < 0.05, 0.001 respectively.</p><p>See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0126828#pone.0126828.t002" target="_blank">Table 2</a> for trait abbreviations</p><p>General combining ability for agronomic and yield characters.</p

Box plots for performances of parents and crosses for seven measured traits.

<p>P1: female parents; P2: male parents; H: hybrids. The circle ‘o’ stands for mean value. The plus sign ‘+’ stands for outliers. The upper and lower lines outside the box stand for max and min adjacent value, respectively. The line inside the box stands for median value. The upper and lower hinge of the box stand for 75% and 25% percentile, respectively.</p

A Hardware-Friendly High-Precision CNN Pruning Method and Its FPGA Implementation

To address the problems of large storage requirements, computational pressure, untimely data supply of off-chip memory, and low computational efficiency during hardware deployment due to the large number of convolutional neural network (CNN) parameters, we developed an innovative hardware-friendly CNN pruning method called KRP, which prunes the convolutional kernel on a row scale. A new retraining method based on LR tracking was used to obtain a CNN model with both a high pruning rate and accuracy. Furthermore, we designed a high-performance convolutional computation module on the FPGA platform to help deploy KRP pruning models. The results of comparative experiments on CNNs such as VGG and ResNet showed that KRP has higher accuracy than most pruning methods. At the same time, the KRP method, together with the GSNQ quantization method developed in our previous study, forms a high-precision hardware-friendly network compression framework that can achieve “lossless” CNN compression with a 27× reduction in network model storage. The results of the comparative experiments on the FPGA showed that the KRP pruning method not only requires much less storage space, but also helps to reduce the on-chip hardware resource consumption by more than half and effectively improves the parallelism of the model in FPGAs with a strong hardware-friendly feature. This study provides more ideas for the application of CNNs in the field of edge computing