Lateness Gene Concerning Photosensitivity Increases Yield, by Applying Low to High Levels of Fertilization, in Rice, a Preliminary Report

Various genes controlling heading time have been reported in rice. An isogenic-line pair of late and early lines “L” and “E” were developed from progenies of the F1 of Suweon 258 × an isogenic line of IR36 carrying Ur1 gene. The lateness gene for photosensitivity that causes the difference between L and E was tentatively designated as “Ex(t)”, although it's chromosomal location is unknown. The present study was conducted to examine the effects of Ex(t) on yield and related traits in a paddy field in two years. Chemical fertilizers containing N, P2O5 and K2O were applied at the nitrogen levels of 4.00, 9.00 and 18.00 g/m2 in total, being denoted by "N4", "N9" and "N18", respectively, in 2014. L was later in 80%-heading by 18 or 19 days than E. Regarding total brown rice yield (g/m2), L and E were 635 and 577, 606 and 548, and 590 and 501, respectively, at N18, N9 and N4, indicating that Ex(t) increased this trait by 10 to 18%. Ex(t) increased yield of brown rice with thickness above 1.5mm (g/m2), by 9 to 15%. Ex(t) increased spikelet number per panicle by 16 to 22% and spikelet number per m2 by 11 to 18%. Thousand-grain weight (g) was 2 to 4% lower in L than in E. L was not significantly different from E in ripened-grain percentage. Hence, Ex(t) increased yield by increasing spikelet number per panicle. It is suggested that Ex(t) could be utilized to develop high yielding varieties for warmer districts of the temperate zone

Quality of life in purely ocular myasthenia in Japan

Background: Since there has been no conclusive evidence regarding the treatment of ocular myasthenia, treatment guidelines were recently issued by the European Federation of Neurological Societies/European Neurological Society (EFNS/ENS). However, the therapeutic outcomes concerning the quality-of-life (QOL) of patients with ocular myasthenia are not yet fully understood.Methods: We investigated the therapeutic outcomes of patients with purely ocular myasthenia in a multicenter cross-sectional survey in Japan. To evaluate the severity of ocular symptoms, we used the ocular-quantitative MG (QMG) score advocated by Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America. We used the Japanese translated version of the MG-QOL15, a self-appraised scoring system.Results: Of 607 myasthenia gravis (MG) patients with an observation-duration of illness ? 2 years, the cases of 123 patients (20%) were limited to ocular muscles (purely ocular myasthenia). During the entire clinical course, 81 patients experienced both ptosis and diplopia, 36 had ptosis alone, and six had diplopia alone. Acetyl-cholinesterase inhibitors and prednisolone were used in 98 and 52 patients, respectively. Treatment improved ocular symptoms, with the mean reduction in ocular-QMG score of 2.3 ± 1.8 points. However, 47 patients (38%) failed to gain minimal manifestation or a better status. Patients with unfavorable outcomes also self-reported severe QOL impairment. Multivariate analyses showed that the pretreatment ocular-QMG score was associated with unfavorable outcomes, but not associated with the patient\u27s QOL.Conclusion: A treatment strategy designed in accord with a patient\u27s ocular presentation must be considered in order to improve ocular symptoms and the patient\u27s QOL

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A Dwarfing Gene Sd1-d (Dee-geo-woo-gen Dwarf) on Lodging Resistance and Related Traits in Rice

A dwarfing allele at the sd1 locus on chromosome 1 in rice, sd1-d, has been playing important role for developing lodging-resistant and high-yielding indica varieties IR8 and IR36. The dominant allele SD1 for long culm at the locus is differentiated into SD1-in and SD1-ja that are harbored in indica and japonica subspecies, respectively. The sd1-d of IR36 was substituted with SD1-in or SD1-ja by 17 backcrosses with IR36, and two isogenic tall lines were developed by using an indica variety IR5867 and a japonica one ‘Koshihikari' as donors, which were denoted by “5867-36” and “Koshi-36'', respectively. The present study was conducted to examine the effect of dwarfing gene sd1-d on lodging resistance and related traits, compared with SD1-in and SD1-ja. Two isogenic lines and IR36 were cultivated in the field of the Faculty of Agriculture and Marine Science, Kochi University, Japan during 2017. Regarding index of lodging (g·cm/g × 100), genotypes were in the order: 5867-36 (97.4) > Koshi-36 (74.1) > IR36 (46.0) on the 21st-day after 80%-heading, and they were in the same order on 10th-day after 80%-heading. The 4th-panicle length (cm) was in the order: 5867-36 (118.7) > Koshi-36 (97.6) > IR36 (78.6). Similarly, the 4th-top weight (g) was in the order: 5867-36 (12.2) > Koshi-36 (10.2) > IR36 (9.6). The highest breaking strength (g) was recorded in IR36 (1649) followed by 5867-36 (1493) whereas the lowest breaking strength (g) was recorded in Koshi-36 (1360). Consequently, it is inferred that sd1-d enhances lodging resistance due to the decreases in the length and weight above the 4th-internode as well as the increase of breaking strength. The effect of SD1-in on lodging resistance is lower than that of SD1-ja