Identification of clone x rootstock effects on cold hardiness and relevant dehydrins changes in Cabernet franc (Vitis vinifera L.)

Cold injury can harm grapevines and severely reduce yields in cool-climate regions. Previous studies indicate bud cold hardiness differences among Vitis vinifera cultivars, but comparatively, little attention has been given to the effect of clone and rootstock. This study investigates the bud cold hardiness of Cabernet franc with different clones and rootstock combinations throughout dormancy during the stages of cold acclimation, maximum hardiness and deacclimation. The research also looks at the protein expression of dehydrins which may impact cold hardiness. Four clone × rootstock combinations of Cabernet franc (214 × 101-14, 327 × 101-14, 327 × 3309, and 327 × Riparia Gloire) were assessed over two dormant seasons in 2018-19 and 2019-20. Buds were sampled every two to four weeks and were measured for cold hardiness by differential thermal analysis (DTA). Cold hardiness was reported as low temperature exotherms (LTE). Vine performance including phenological stages, yield components, vine balance, environmental resistance, and fruit composition including titratable acidity (TA), soluble solids, and pH were measured in 2019 and 2020. SDS-PAGE profiles and immunoblots measured dehydrins intensity during two dormant seasons in 2018-19 and 2019-20. Rootstock was found to impact cold hardiness of Cabernet franc. No significant differences were observed in bud hardiness between clones of Cabernet franc; despite significant differences in bud hardiness of clone × rootstock combinations of Cabernet franc. Dehydrin bands of five molecular weights (62 kDa, 57 kDa, 41 kDa, 30 kDa, and 23 kDa) were detected in the 2018-19 dormant season, and dehydrin bands of four molecular weights (62 kDa, 41 kDa, 30 kDa, and 23 kDa) were detected in the 2019-20 dormant season. The development of dehydrin bands varied for clones, rootstocks, and different molecular weights. No consistent correlations were observed between dehydrin intensity and LTE50 values, despite the increase of dehydrin intensity and the decrease of LTE50 values observed during acclimation. This study reveals the effect of clone and rootstock on cold hardiness, which is important for clone and rootstock selection in cool climate regions to reduce cold injury, and the complexity of the relationship between cold hardiness and dehydrins. In the future, studies should continue to focus on cold hardiness of clone and rootstock in different cultivars. Change of dehydrin levels during dormant seasons in more cultivars should also be studied to reveal the relationship between dehydrins and cold hardiness

Association of interleukin 10 rs1800896 polymorphism with susceptibility to breast cancer: a meta-analysis.

Objective: To evaluate the correlation between interleukin 10 (IL-10) -1082A/G polymorphism (rs1800896) and breast cancers by performing a meta-analysis. Methods: The Embase and Medline databases were searched through 1 September 2018 to identify qualified articles. Odds ratios (OR) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were applied to evaluate associations. Results: In total, 14 case-control studies, including 5320 cases and 5727 controls, were analyzed. We detected significant associations between the IL10 -1082 G/G genotype and risk of breast cancer (AA + AG vs. GG: OR = 0.88, 95% CI = 0.80-0.97). Subgroup analyses confirmed a significant association in Caucasian populations (OR = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.80-0.99), in population-based case-control studies (OR = 0.87, 95% CI = 0.78-0.96), and in studies with ≥500 subjects (OR = 0.88, 95% CI = 0.79-0.99) under the recessive model (AA + AG vs. GG). No associations were found in Asian populations. Conclusions: The IL10 -1082A/G polymorphism is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. The association between IL10 -1082 G/G genotype and increased risk of breast cancer is more significant in Caucasians, in population-based studies, and in larger studies

Speech analysis using very low-dimensional bottleneck features and phone-class dependent neural networks

The first part of this thesis focuses on very low-dimensional bottleneck features (BNFs), extracted from deep neural networks (DNNs) for speech analysis and recognition. Very low-dimensional BNFs are analysed in terms of their capability of representing speech and their suitability for modelling speech dynamics. Nine-dimensional BNFs obtained from a phone discrimination DNN are shown to give comparable phone recognition accuracy to 39-dimensional MFCCs, and an average of 34% higher phone recognition accuracy than formant-based features of the same dimensions. They also preserve the trajectory continuity well and thus hold promise for modelling speech dynamics. Visualisations and interpretations of the BNFs are presented, with phonetically motivated studies of the strategies that DNNs employ to create these features. The relationships between BNF representations resulting from different initialisations of DNNs are explored. The second part of this thesis considers BNFs from the perspective of feature extraction. It is motivated by the observation that different types of speech sounds lend themselves to different acoustic analysis, and that the mapping from spectra-in-context to phone posterior probabilities implemented by the DNN is a continuous approximation to a discontinuous function. This suggests that it may be advantageous to replace the single DNN with a set of phone class dependent DNNs. In this case, the appropriate mathematical structure is a manifold. It is shown that this approach leads to significant improvements in frame level phone classification accuracy

Generalized bias-variance evaluation of TREC participated systems

Recent research has shown that the improvement of mean retrieval effectiveness (e.g., MAP) may sacrifice the retrieval stability across queries, implying a tradeoff between effectiveness and stability. The evaluation of both effectiveness and stability are often based on a baseline model, which could be weak or biased. In addition, the effectiveness-stability tradeoff has not been systematically or quantitatively evaluated over TREC participated systems. The above two problems, to some extent, limit our awareness of such tradeoff and its impact on developing future IR models. In this paper, motivated by a recently proposed bias-variance based evaluation, we adopt a strong and unbiased “baseline”, which is a virtual target model constructed by the best performance (for each query) among all the participated systems in a retrieval task. We also propose generalized bias variance metrics, based on which a systematic and quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness-stability tradeoff is carried out over the participated systems in the TREC Ad-hoc Track (1993-1999) and Web Track (2010-2012). We observe a clear effectiveness-stability tradeoff, with a trend of becoming more obvious in more recent years. This implies that when we pursue more effective IR systems over years, the stability has become problematic and could have been largely overlooked

Research by Infrastructural Design: Systems thinking from the perspective of thermodynamics

Smog has contributed largely to the environmental problems of many cities in China. On the other hand, China has gone through a period of rapid infrastructure growth in the urbanisation process. People have noticed the potential of infrastructure in mega-cities as part of the built environment, and the paper presents three infrastructure-oriented proposals from a summer school project named “Design against Smog: Air through the Lens of Thermodynamic Architecture” which aims to deal with the problems in Lujiazui area of Shanghai. The proposals show their systems thinking on urban functions, use different types of infrastructure as bridges to connect the air to urban activities and give their possible strategies for purifying smog

A comparative study of short-term efficacy and safety for thyroid micropapillary carcinoma patients after microwave ablation or surgery.

Background: Although papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) has a high incidence and excellent clinical outcome, debate continues as to the therapeutic approach that would be most appropriate after confirming the diagnosis. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the medical records of 311 patients with T1aN0M0 PTMC between January 2013 and September 2018. In all, 168 underwent microwave ablation (MWA), and 143 underwent surgery. MWA was performed using extensive ablation with hydrodissection. The surgery comprised thyroid lobectomy (TL) with unilateral central lymph node dissection (CND). We examined clinical outcomes during mean follow-up periods of 824 ± 452 days for the TL group and 753 ± 520 days for the MWA group. Results: Postprocedural follow-up revealed that, in the MWA group, the tumors had completely disappeared in 34 patients, and the remainder were reduced to necrotic or carbonized tissue. The incidence of transient hypoparathyroidism was significantly lower in the MWA group than in the TL group (p \u3c .001). In addition, during the follow-up, we found no statistically significant differences between the two groups (TL vs MWA) for PTMC recurrence (1 vs 2 cases), lymph node metastasis (5 vs 5 cases), or disease-free survival [2001 days (5.5 years) vs 1702 days (4.7 years)] (p = .659, p = .795, and p = .974, respectively). Conclusions: If low-risk thyroid carcinoma (i.e., T1N0M0 PTMC) is accurately diagnosed early, MWA could be a minimally invasive alternative to surgery based on our short-term follow-up regarding recurrence and the low rates of complications and disease-free survival

Chinese Expert Consensus on Critical Care Ultrasound Applications at COVID-19 Pandemic

The spread of new coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) follows a different pattern than previous respiratory viruses, posing a serious public health risk worldwide. World Health Organization (WHO) named the disease as COVID-19 and declared it a pandemic. COVID-19 is characterized by highly contagious nature, rapid transmission, swift clinical course, profound worldwide impact, and high mortality among critically ill patients. Chest X-ray, computerized tomography (CT), and ultrasound are commonly used imaging modalities. Among them, ultrasound, due to its portability and non-invasiveness, can be easily moved to the bedside for examination at any time. In addition, with use of 4G or 5G networks, remote ultrasound consultation can also be performed, which allows ultrasound to be used in isolated medial areas. Besides, the contact surface of ultrasound probe with patients is small and easy to be disinfected. Therefore, ultrasound has gotten lots of positive feedbacks from the frontline healthcare workers, and it has played an indispensable role in the course of COVID-19 diagnosis and follow up