Estimates of combining ability and heterosis for growth traits in a full diallel cross of three strains of common carp, Cyprinus carpio L.

We attempted to determine the combining ability and heterosis of body weight by performing 3 × 3 complete diallel crosses derived by crossing three common carps (Cyprinus carpio var. jian, Cyprinus carpio haematopterus Temminck et Schlegel and Cyprinus carpio haematopterus). In total, 1650 fish were tagged when they were 1.5 months of age. After five months, Jian carp (♂) × Huanghe carp (♀) attained greater weight than pure and other hybrids. By crossing with Jian, Huanghe and Heilongjiang carps have improved body weight compared to their purebred. Significant principal components (PCs) were generated from growth performance data and their statistical loadings. The first principal component had the highest Eigen value of 2.81 and accounted for 70.31% of the variability in the data set. Two crosses, Jian carp (♂) × Huanghe carp (♀) and Huanghe carp (♂) × Jian carp (♀) showed high SCA with regard to body weight. Both Heilongjiang carp (♂) × Jian carp (♀) and Heilongjiang carp (♂) × Huanghe carp (♀) had higher heterosis compared to their purebreds. Significant positive phenotypic correlations were also observed between body weight and body length, thickness and height. The aforementioned results listed were identified as the foundation for common carp selective breeding programs.Keywords: Common carp, cross-breeding, heterosisAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(22), pp. 3514-352

Electroneutral quaternization and sulfosuccination of cornstarch for improving the properties of its low-temperature sizing to viscose yarns

The objective of this work is to evaluate the influences of electroneutral quaternization and sulfosuccination(electroneutral QS) on the adhesion of starch to viscose fibres and sizing properties of starch to viscose yarns at lowtemperature in order to study if the derivatization can improve the serviceability of starch applied for sizing viscose yarns atlow temperature. The quaternized and sulfosuccinylated starch (QSS) with electroneutrality has been synthesized in aqueousdispersion by a quaternization of hydrolyzed cornstarch (HS) with N-(3-chloro-2-hydroxypropyl) trimethylammoniumchloride and a further sulfosuccination is done for introducing a fixed mole ratio of 3-(trimethylammonium chloride)-2-hydroxypropyl (TACHP) substituents to sulfosuccinate (SS) substituents onto starch chains. It is found that electroneutralQS is available to ameliorate the adhesion at different temperatures. The amelioration in the adhesion depends on the levelof the modification. In addition, the modification improves the mechanical properties of the sized viscose yarns,and decreases hairiness of sized yarns, even if the temperature of the electroneutral QSS paste is lowered to 60 °C.Electroneutral QSS with a degree of substitution of 0.0438 is expected to show a potential application in sizing viscoseyarns at 60 °C

A Ligation-PCR Approach for Generating Gene Replacement Constructs in Magnaporthe grisea

The conventional approach for generating gene replacement constructs involves several sequence-specific cloning steps and is time-consuming. A ligation-PCR approach was developed to efficiently generate gene replacement constructs. Two vectors useful for this ligation-PCR approach and another vector suitable for improving the efficiency of knockout mutant screens were constructed

Unbiased and Robust: External Attention-enhanced Graph Contrastive Learning for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Cross-domain sequential recommenders (CSRs) are gaining considerable research attention as they can capture user sequential preference by leveraging side information from multiple domains. However, these works typically follow an ideal setup, i.e., different domains obey similar data distribution, which ignores the bias brought by asymmetric interaction densities (a.k.a. the inter-domain density bias). Besides, the frequently adopted mechanism (e.g., the self-attention network) in sequence encoder only focuses on the interactions within a local view, which overlooks the global correlations between different training batches. To this end, we propose an External Attention-enhanced Graph Contrastive Learning framework, namely EA-GCL. Specifically, to remove the impact of the inter-domain density bias, an auxiliary Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) task is attached to the traditional graph encoder under a multi-task learning manner. To robustly capture users' behavioral patterns, we develop an external attention-based sequence encoder that contains an MLP-based memory-sharing structure. Unlike the self-attention mechanism, such a structure can effectively alleviate the bias interference from the batch-based training scheme. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that EA-GCL outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines on CSR tasks. The source codes and relevant datasets are available at https://github.com/HoupingY/EA-GCL.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ICDM 2023 (workshop-GML4Rec

Rupture stress of eutectic composite ceramics with rod-shaped crystals

Eutectic composite ceramics has a wide range of applications in the aerospace industry due to its excellent mechanical properties. The rupture stress of the materials is a subject of considerable importance. Eutectic composite ceramics primarily consist of rod-shaped crystals, with a small amount of particles and preexisting defects dispersed throughout. Aligned nano-micron fibers are embedded within the rod-shaped crystals. Rupture stress of a eutectic composite ceramic depends on its fracture surface energy and preexisting defects. In this study, the equivalent fracture surface energy of a eutectic ceramic composite was calculated based on its additional fracture work. Next, the effects of the preexisting defects were considered. Then, a micromechanical model of the eutectic composite ceramic was established based on its microstructural characteristics. The defects were assumed to be lamellar, and the surrounding matrix was assumed to be transversely isotropic. Using this information, the rupture stress of the eutectic ceramic composite was predicted. A comparison of the theoretical and experimental results indicated that the predicted rupture stresses corresponded with the tested data