The cold responsive mechanism of the paper mulberry: decreased photosynthesis capacity and increased starch accumulation

Representative gel images of proteins from the control and treatment. 2-DE was performed using 800 μg of total protein and 11 cm immobilized dry strips with linear pH gradients from 4 to 7. Gels were stained with CBB R-250. Arrow indicates proteins significantly changing in abundance in comparison with control (ANOVA, p < 0.05). Circle indicates proteins appeared after treatment. (TIFF 4732 kb

An Approach to Mismatched Disturbance Rejection Control for Continuous-Time Uncontrollable Systems

This paper focuses on optimal mismatched disturbance rejection control for linear continuoustime uncontrollable systems. Different from previous studies, by introducing a new quadratic performance index to transform the mismatched disturbance rejection control into a linear quadratic tracking problem, the regulated state can track a reference trajectory and minimize the influence of disturbance. The necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability and the disturbance rejection controller are obtained by solving a forward-backward differential equation over a finite horizon. A sufficient condition for system stability is obtained over an infinite horizon under detectable condition. This paper details our novel approach for transforming disturbance rejection into a linear quadratic tracking problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is provided with two examples to demonstrate.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2209.0701

Core-Shell Structure in Doped Inorganic Nanoparticles: Approaches for Optimizing Luminescence Properties

Doped inorganic luminescent nanoparticles (NPs) have been widely used in both research and application fields due to their distinctive properties. However, there is an urgent demand to improve their luminescence efficiency, which is greatly reduced by surface effects. In this paper, we review recent advances in optimizing luminescence properties of doped NPs based on core-shell structure, which are basically classified into two categories: one is by use of surface coating with nonmetal materials to weaken the influence of surface effect and the other is with metal shell via metal enhanced luminescence. Different materials used to coat NPs are surveyed, and their advantages and disadvantages are both commented on. Moreover, problems in current core-shell structured luminescent NPs are pointed out and strategies furthering the optimization of luminescence properties are suggested

A Sir2-Like Protein Participates in Mycobacterial NHEJ

In eukaryotic cells, repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) by the nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway is critical for genome stability. In contrast to the complex eukaryotic repair system, bacterial NHEJ apparatus consists of only two proteins, Ku and a multifunctional DNA ligase (LigD), whose functional mechanism has not been fully clarified. We show here for the first time that Sir2 is involved in the mycobacterial NHEJ repair pathway. Here, using tandem affinity purification (TAP) screening, we have identified an NAD-dependent deacetylase in mycobacteria which is a homologue of the eukaryotic Sir2 protein and interacts directly with Ku. Results from an in vitro glutathione S-transferase (GST) pull-down assay suggest that Sir2 interacts directly with LigD. Plasmid-based end-joining assays revealed that the efficiency of DSB repair in a sir2 deletion mutant was reduced 2-fold. Moreover, the Δsir2 strain was about 10-fold more sensitive to ionizing radiation (IR) in the stationary phase than the wild-type. Our results suggest that Sir2 may function closely together with Ku and LigD in the nonhomologous end-joining pathway in mycobacteria

PCDHGB7 hypermethylation-based Cervical cancer Methylation (CerMe) detection for the triage of high-risk human papillomavirus-positive women:a prospective cohort study

BackgroundImplementation of high-risk human papillomavirus (hrHPV) screening has greatly reduced the incidence and mortality of cervical cancer. However, a triage strategy that is effective, noninvasive, and independent from the subjective interpretation of pathologists is urgently required to decrease unnecessary colposcopy referrals in hrHPV-positive women.MethodsA total of 3251 hrHPV-positive women aged 30–82 years (median = 41 years) from International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital were included in the training set (n = 2116) and the validation set (n = 1135) to establish Cervical cancer Methylation (CerMe) detection. The performance of CerMe as a triage for hrHPV-positive women was evaluated.ResultsCerMe detection efficiently distinguished cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 2 or worse (CIN2 +) from cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 or normal (CIN1 −) women with excellent sensitivity of 82.4% (95% CI = 72.6 ~ 89.8%) and specificity of 91.1% (95% CI = 89.2 ~ 92.7%). Importantly, CerMe showed improved specificity (92.1% vs. 74.9%) in other 12 hrHPV type-positive women as well as superior sensitivity (80.8% vs. 61.5%) and specificity (88.9% vs. 75.3%) in HPV16/18 type-positive women compared with cytology testing. CerMe performed well in the triage of hrHPV-positive women with ASC-US (sensitivity = 74.4%, specificity = 87.5%) or LSIL cytology (sensitivity = 84.4%, specificity = 83.9%).ConclusionsPCDHGB7 hypermethylation-based CerMe detection can be used as a triage strategy for hrHPV-positive women to reduce unnecessary over-referrals.Trial registrationChiCTR2100048972. Registered on 19 July 2021.<br/

Prediction of overall survival for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer : development of a prognostic model through a crowdsourced challenge with open clinical trial data

Background Improvements to prognostic models in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer have the potential to augment clinical trial design and guide treatment strategies. In partnership with Project Data Sphere, a not-for-profit initiative allowing data from cancer clinical trials to be shared broadly with researchers, we designed an open-data, crowdsourced, DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) challenge to not only identify a better prognostic model for prediction of survival in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer but also engage a community of international data scientists to study this disease. Methods Data from the comparator arms of four phase 3 clinical trials in first-line metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer were obtained from Project Data Sphere, comprising 476 patients treated with docetaxel and prednisone from the ASCENT2 trial, 526 patients treated with docetaxel, prednisone, and placebo in the MAINSAIL trial, 598 patients treated with docetaxel, prednisone or prednisolone, and placebo in the VENICE trial, and 470 patients treated with docetaxel and placebo in the ENTHUSE 33 trial. Datasets consisting of more than 150 clinical variables were curated centrally, including demographics, laboratory values, medical history, lesion sites, and previous treatments. Data from ASCENT2, MAINSAIL, and VENICE were released publicly to be used as training data to predict the outcome of interest-namely, overall survival. Clinical data were also released for ENTHUSE 33, but data for outcome variables (overall survival and event status) were hidden from the challenge participants so that ENTHUSE 33 could be used for independent validation. Methods were evaluated using the integrated time-dependent area under the curve (iAUC). The reference model, based on eight clinical variables and a penalised Cox proportional-hazards model, was used to compare method performance. Further validation was done using data from a fifth trial-ENTHUSE M1-in which 266 patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer were treated with placebo alone. Findings 50 independent methods were developed to predict overall survival and were evaluated through the DREAM challenge. The top performer was based on an ensemble of penalised Cox regression models (ePCR), which uniquely identified predictive interaction effects with immune biomarkers and markers of hepatic and renal function. Overall, ePCR outperformed all other methods (iAUC 0.791; Bayes factor >5) and surpassed the reference model (iAUC 0.743; Bayes factor >20). Both the ePCR model and reference models stratified patients in the ENTHUSE 33 trial into high-risk and low-risk groups with significantly different overall survival (ePCR: hazard ratio 3.32, 95% CI 2.39-4.62, p Interpretation Novel prognostic factors were delineated, and the assessment of 50 methods developed by independent international teams establishes a benchmark for development of methods in the future. The results of this effort show that data-sharing, when combined with a crowdsourced challenge, is a robust and powerful framework to develop new prognostic models in advanced prostate cancer.Peer reviewe

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Robust consensus algorithm for second-order multi-agent systems with external disturbances

This article investigates the problem of robust consensus for second-order multi-agent systems with external disturbances. Based on a non-smooth backstepping control technique, a class of novel continuous non-smooth consensus algorithms are proposed for the multi-agent network with/without communication delays. The controller design is divided into two steps. First, for the kinematic subsystem, the velocity is regarded as a virtual input and designed such that the states consensus can be achieved asymptotically. Then for the dynamic subsystem, a finite-time control law is designed such that the virtual velocity can be tracked by the real velocity in a finite time. Under the proposed control law, it is shown that if the communication topology graph contains a directed spanning tree, the states consensus can be achieved asymptotically in the absence of disturbances. In the presence of disturbances, the steady-state errors of any two agents can reach a small region around the origin. By building a relationship between control parameters and the bound of steady tracking errors, it is demonstrated that the disturbance rejection performance of the resulting closed-loop system can be enhanced by adjusting the fractional power in the non-smooth controller. Finally, an example is given to verify the efficiency of the proposed method.Haibo Du, Shihua Li and Peng Sh