Meat tenderness and water holding capacity are associated with a 959 A G mutation in the MyoG gene of Chinese indigenous cattle

Myogenin (MyoG) gene has mapped at 25 to 73 cm interval on BTA 16 where several quantitative trait loci for carcass weight and marbling are located. In this study, we determined the associations between gene-specific single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in MyoG gene, to investigate whether this polymorphism affected meat quality characteristics and to evaluate the allelic and genotypic frequencies of six native Chinese cattle breeds. The breeds were Jiaxian red (JXR), Luxi (LX), Nan-yang (NY), Qinchuan (QC), Xia-Nan (XN) and Xue long (XL). Our results suggested a transition of A → G at position 959 in exon 1 of the MyoG gene in cattle that caused the substitution (959Serine/959Cysteine). The A959G SNP was significantly associated with water holding capacity and meat tenderness (P < 0.05), while no effect of genotype on back fat thickness, rib area, loin eye height, eye muscle width and marbling was disclosed (P > 0.05). The x2-test revealed that the genotype distributions among the five cattle breeds (JXR, LX, NY, QC and XL) agreed with Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P > 0.05), although, one breed (XN) was not in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (P < 0.01). We concluded that, A959G SNP can be used as an efficacious genetic marker for meat quality traits in native Chinese cattle breeds but a much large number of animals are required for Marker assisted selection.Key words: Cattle, genotypic frequencies, myogenin (MyoG) gene, meat quality, single nucleotide polymorphism

Identity-Guided Collaborative Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Reidentification

Cloth-changing person reidentification (ReID) is a newly emerging research topic that is aimed at addressing the issues of large feature variations due to cloth-changing and pedestrian view/pose changes. Although significant progress has been achieved by introducing extra information (e.g., human contour sketching information, human body keypoints, and 3D human information), cloth-changing person ReID is still challenging due to impressionable pedestrian representations. Moreover, human semantic information and pedestrian identity information are not fully explored. To solve these issues, we propose a novel identity-guided collaborative learning scheme (IGCL) for cloth-changing person ReID, where the human semantic is fully utilized and the identity is unchangeable to guide collaborative learning. First, we design a novel clothing attention degradation stream to reasonably reduce the interference caused by clothing information where clothing attention and mid-level collaborative learning are employed. Second, we propose a human semantic attention and body jigsaw stream to highlight the human semantic information and simulate different poses of the same identity. In this way, the extraction features not only focus on human semantic information that is unrelated to the background but also are suitable for pedestrian pose variations. Moreover, a pedestrian identity enhancement stream is further proposed to enhance the identity importance and extract more favorable identity robust features. Most importantly, all these streams are jointly explored in an end-to-end unified framework, and the identity is utilized to guide the optimization. Extensive experiments on five public clothing person ReID datasets demonstrate that the proposed IGCL significantly outperforms SOTA methods and that the extracted feature is more robust, discriminative, and clothing-irrelevant

Novel polymorphism of the bovine fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) gene are related to backfat thickness and longissimus muscle area in five Chinese native cattle breeds

In this study, genetic variation of the fat mass and obesity-associated gene (FTO) was detected by PCRSSCP and DNA sequencing in 618 individuals from five Chinese indigenous cattle breeds, and their genetic effects on meat quality traits were evaluated. The results showed that a novel single nucleotide polymorphism C1071T was detected in exon 5 and the allelic frequencies for the C and T alleles of the five breeds were 0.666/0.334, 0.583/0.417, 0.631/0.369, 0.653/0.347 and 0.689/0.311, respectively. Animals with CT genotype had higher mean values for backfat thickness than those with CC or TT genotypes (P < 0.01). Individuals with CC or CT genotypes had higher longissimus muscle area than those with TT genotype (P < 0.05). The FTO gene may be a candidate gene for identifying differences in meat quality traits and therefore, could be applied to marker-assisted selection of native Chinese cattle breeds.Key words: Cattle, fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) gene, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), meat quality traits

A Semantic-aware Attention and Visual Shielding Network for Cloth-changing Person Re-identification

Cloth-changing person reidentification (ReID) is a newly emerging research topic that aims to retrieve pedestrians whose clothes are changed. Since the human appearance with different clothes exhibits large variations, it is very difficult for existing approaches to extract discriminative and robust feature representations. Current works mainly focus on body shape or contour sketches, but the human semantic information and the potential consistency of pedestrian features before and after changing clothes are not fully explored or are ignored. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel semantic-aware attention and visual shielding network for cloth-changing person ReID (abbreviated as SAVS) is proposed where the key idea is to shield clues related to the appearance of clothes and only focus on visual semantic information that is not sensitive to view/posture changes. Specifically, a visual semantic encoder is first employed to locate the human body and clothing regions based on human semantic segmentation information. Then, a human semantic attention module (HSA) is proposed to highlight the human semantic information and reweight the visual feature map. In addition, a visual clothes shielding module (VCS) is also designed to extract a more robust feature representation for the cloth-changing task by covering the clothing regions and focusing the model on the visual semantic information unrelated to the clothes. Most importantly, these two modules are jointly explored in an end-to-end unified framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods, and more robust features can be extracted for cloth-changing persons. Compared with FSAM (published in CVPR 2021), this method can achieve improvements of 32.7% (16.5%) and 14.9% (-) on the LTCC and PRCC datasets in terms of mAP (rank-1), respectively.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.0452

Rapid EST isolation from chromosome 1R of rye

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To obtain important expressed sequence tags (ESTs) located on specific chromosomes is currently difficult. Construction of single-chromosome EST library could be an efficient strategy to isolate important ESTs located on specific chromosomes. In this research we developed a method to rapidly isolate ESTs from chromosome 1R of rye by combining the techniques of chromosome microdissection with hybrid specific amplification (HSA).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Chromosome 1R was isolated by a glass needle and digested with proteinase K (PK). The DNA of chromosome 1R was amplified by two rounds of PCR using a degenerated oligonucleotide 6-MW sequence with a <it>Sau</it>3AI digestion site as the primer. The PCR product was digested with <it>Sau</it>3AI and linked with adaptor HSA1, then hybridized with the <it>Sau</it>3AI digested cDNA with adaptor HSA2 of rye leaves with and without salicylic acid (SA) treatment, respectively. The hybridized DNA fragments were recovered by the HSA method and cloned into pMD18-T vector. The cloned inserts were released by PCR using the partial sequences in HSA1 and HSA2 as the primers and then sequenced. Of the 94 ESTs obtained and analyzed, 6 were known sequences located on rye chromosome 1R or on homologous group 1 chromosomes of wheat; all of them were highly homologous with ESTs of wheat, barley and/or other plants in <it>Gramineae</it>, some of which were induced by abiotic or biotic stresses. Isolated in this research were 22 ESTs with unknown functions, probably representing some new genes on rye chromosome 1R.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We developed a new method to rapidly clone chromosome-specific ESTs from chromosome 1R of rye. The information reported here should be useful for cloning and investigating the new genes found on chromosome 1R.</p

The Chinese pine genome and methylome unveil key features of conifer evolution

Conifers dominate the world's forest ecosystems and are the most widely planted tree species. Their giant and complex genomes present great challenges for assembling a complete reference genome for evolutionary and genomic studies. We present a 25.4-Gb chromosome-level assembly of Chinese pine (Pinus tabuliformis) and revealed that its genome size is mostly attributable to huge intergenic regions and long introns with high transposable element (TE) content. Large genes with long introns exhibited higher expressions levels. Despite a lack of recent whole-genome duplication, 91.2% of genes were duplicated through dispersed duplication, and expanded gene families are mainly related to stress responses, which may underpin conifers' adaptation, particularly in cold and/or arid conditions. The reproductive regulation network is distinct compared with angiosperms. Slow removal of TEs with high-level methylation may have contributed to genomic expansion. This study provides insights into conifer evolution and resources for advancing research on conifer adaptation and development

Room-temperature correlated states in twisted bilayer MoS2_2

Moir\'e superlattices have emerged as an exciting condensed-matter quantum simulator for exploring the exotic physics of strong electronic correlations. Notable progress has been witnessed, but such correlated states are achievable usually at low temperatures. Here, we report the transport evidences of room-temperature correlated electronic states and layer-hybridized SU(4) Hubbard model simulator in AB-stacked MoS$_2$ homo-bilayer moir\'e superlattices. Correlated insulating states at moir\'e band filling factors v = 1, 2, 3 are unambiguously established in twisted bilayer MoS$_2$. Remarkably, the correlated electronic states can persist up to a record-high critical temperature of over 285 K. The realization of room-temperature correlated states in twisted bilayer MoS$_2$ can be understood as the cooperation effects of the stacking-specific atomic reconstruction and the resonantly enhanced interlayer hybridization, which largely amplify the moir\'e superlattice effects on electronic correlations. Furthermore, extreme large non-linear Hall responses up to room-temperature are uncovered near correlated insulating states, demonstrating the quantum geometry of moir\'e flat conduction band.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure