Molecular Characterization of the 14-3-3 Gene Family in Brachypodium distachyon L. Reveals High Evolutionary Conservation and Diverse Responses to Abiotic Stresses

The 14-3-3 gene family identified in all eukaryotic organisms is involved in a wide range of biological processes, particularly in resistance to various abiotic stresses. Here, we performed the first comprehensive study on the molecular characterisation, phylogenetics and responses to various abiotic stresses of the 14-3-3 gene family in Brachypodium distachyon L.. A total of seven 14-3-3 genes from B. distachyon and 120 from five main lineages among 12 species were identified, which were divided into five well-conserved subfamilies. The molecular structure analysis showed that the plant 14-3-3 gene family is highly evolutionarily conserved, although certain divergence had occurred in different subfamilies. The duplication event investigation revealed that segmental duplication seemed to be the predominant form by which the 14-3-3 gene family had expanded. Moreover, seven critical amino acids were detected, which may contribute to functional divergence. Expression profiling analysis showed that BdGF14 genes were abundantly expressed in the roots, but showed low expression in the meristems. All seven BdGF14 genes showed significant expression changes under various abiotic stresses, including heavy metal, phytohormone, osmotic, and temperature stresses, which might play important roles in responses to multiple abiotic stresses mainly through participating in ABA-dependent signalling and reactive oxygen species-mediated MAPK cascade signalling pathways. In particular, BdGF14 genes generally showed upregulated expression in response to multiple stresses of high temperature, heavy metal, abscisic acid (ABA), and salicylic acid (SA), but downregulated expression under H2O2, NaCl, and polyethylene glycol (PEG) stresses. Meanwhile, dynamic transcriptional expression analysis of BdGF14 genes under longer treatments with heavy metals (Cd2+, Cr3+, Cu2+, and Zn2+) and phytohormone (ABA) and recovery revealed two main expression trends in both roots and leaves: up-down and up-down-up expression from stress treatments to recovery. This study provides new insights into the structures and functions of plant 14-3-3 genes

An exotic fruit with high nutritional value: Kadsura coccinea fruit

This research was to determine nutritional composition, essential and toxic elemental content, and major phenolic acid with antioxidant activity in Kadsura coccinea fruit. The results indicated that Kadsura coccinea fruit exhibited the high contents of total protein, total fat, ash and essential elements such as calcium (Ca), ferrum (Fe) and phosphorus (P). The levels of four common toxic elements, i.e. cadmium (Cd), mercury (Hg), arsenic (As) and lead (Pb), were lower than legal limits. By high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis, gallic acid was identified as major phenolic acid in peel and pulp tissues. Its contents were no significant difference in both tissues. In comparison with two commercial antioxidants, the major phenolic acid extracted from Kadsura coccinea exhibited stronger 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl radical-scavenging activity and reducing power. Kadsura coccinea fruit is a good source of nutrition and natural antioxidant. It is worthwhile to popularize this exotic fruit around the world

COMPARISON OF BRAIN METABOLITE CHANGES IN MANGANESE-EXPOSED WELDERS AND SMELTERS

poster abstractExcessive manganese (Mn) exposure is known to cause cognitive, psychiatric and motor deficits. Mn overexposure occurs in different occupational settings, where the type and level of exposure may vary. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS) can be used to evaluate brain Mn accumulation and to measure Mn-induced metabolite changes non-invasively. The aim of this study was to compare metabolite changes among different brain regions of welders and smelters following occupational Mn exposure. Nine Mn-exposed smelters, 14 Mn-exposed welders and 23 male matched controls were recruited from a cohort of workers from two factories in China (mean airborne Mn level: 0.227 and 0.025 mg/m3 for smelters and welders, respectively). Short-echo-time 1H MRS spectra were acquired in each subject from four volumes of interest: the frontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and thalamus. We found that 1) in the frontal cortex, significantly decreased creatine (Cr), glutamate (Glu) and glutathione (GSH) were found in welders, whereas decreased Glu was found in smelters as compared to controls. 2) In the thalamus, reduced myo-inositol was found in both smelters and welders, while Glu and GSH were decreased in welders. These results suggest that Mn-induced brain metabolite changes may be regional in nature and more extensive in welders than in smelters. The frontal cortex seems to show a more profound change than the other brain areas tested among Mn exposed subjects. Further studies are needed to investigate the effects of exposure type and length on the mechanism of Mn neurotoxicity. (Supported by NIH/NIEHS R21 ES-017498, National Science Foundation of China Grant #81072320 and 30760210)

It\u27s a NO for Bacterial Settlement: Nitric Oxide Regulated Biofilm Formation and Protein Expression

Nitric Oxide (NO) is a diatomic signaling molecule that regulates diverse bacterial behaviors. Its effect on cell motility has been established in many microbial systems, but the molecular mechanism remains understudied. Some bacteria have an H-NOX (Heme-Nitric oxide/OXygen-binding) domain that functions as an NO sensor. It is found in the same operon with two component signaling histidine kinases or diguanylate cyclases (DGC) that synthesize and degrade cyclic di-GMP (c-di-GMP). C-di-GMP is a secondary signaling molecule that regulates bacterial motile to sessile lifestyle transition. In this dissertation, we dedicated our effort toward understanding the effect on bacterial biofilm by NO/H-NOX regulated signaling pathway. In Vibrio harveyi, NO mediates quorum sensing (QS) through the H-NOX/HqsK pathway. We show that NO regulates flagellar production and biofilm formation in a concentration dependent manner. At low nanomolar concentration of NO, repression of flagellin coincides with enhanced biofilm. As NO concentration increases (100~200nM), a global switch takes place in protein expression and results in decreased flagellar production and less promotion of biofilm. In Shewanella woodyi, H-NOX binds a bifunctional DGC (SwHaCE). Nanomolar levels of NO repress biofilm formation through c-di-GMP degradation, and enhance phosphodiesterase activity of SwHaCE, leading to c-di-GMP hydrolysis. H-NOX regulation is not limited to iv proteins in the same operon. SwH-NOX can also interact with VhHqsK homologue, SwHK (Swoo_2833). Weaker biofilm phenotype in response to NO is attenuated when SwHK gene is disrupted in S. woodyi. In summary, NO mediates biofilm formation and protein expression via binding sensor protein H-NOX in multiple systems. Since biofilm is the predominant form of bacteria in natural aquatic environment, revealing the NO signaling mechanism would facilitate further understanding of bacterial group behavior. | 128 page

Not just Birds and Cars: Generic, Scalable and Explainable Models for Professional Visual Recognition

Some visual recognition tasks are more challenging then the general ones as they require professional categories of images. The previous efforts, like fine-grained vision classification, primarily introduced models tailored to specific tasks, like identifying bird species or car brands with limited scalability and generalizability. This paper aims to design a scalable and explainable model to solve Professional Visual Recognition tasks from a generic standpoint. We introduce a biologically-inspired structure named Pro-NeXt and reveal that Pro-NeXt exhibits substantial generalizability across diverse professional fields such as fashion, medicine, and art-areas previously considered disparate. Our basic-sized Pro-NeXt-B surpasses all preceding task-specific models across 12 distinct datasets within 5 diverse domains. Furthermore, we find its good scaling property that scaling up Pro-NeXt in depth and width with increasing GFlops can consistently enhances its accuracy. Beyond scalability and adaptability, the intermediate features of Pro-NeXt achieve reliable object detection and segmentation performance without extra training, highlighting its solid explainability. We will release the code to foster further research in this area.Comment: 20 pages including reference. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.1567

Corrigendum: Relative Power Correlates With the Decoding Performance of Motor Imagery Both Across Time and Subjects

One of the most significant challenges in the application of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) is the large performance variation, which often occurs over time or across users. Recent evidence suggests that the physiological states may explain this performance variation in BCI, however, the underlying neurophysiological mechanism is unclear. In this study, we conducted a seven-session motor-imagery (MI) experiment on 20 healthy subjects to investigate the neurophysiological mechanism on the performance variation. The classification accuracy was calculated offline by common spatial pattern (CSP) and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms to measure the MI performance of each subject and session. Relative Power (RP) values from different rhythms and task stages were used to reflect the physiological states and their correlation with the BCI performance was investigated. Results showed that the alpha band RP from the supplementary motor area (SMA) within a few seconds before MI was positively correlated with performance. Besides, the changes of RP between task and pre-task stage from theta, alpha, and gamma band were also found to be correlated with performance both across time and subjects. These findings reveal a neurophysiological manifestation of the performance variations, and would further provide a way to improve the BCI performance

RoDyn-SLAM: Robust Dynamic Dense RGB-D SLAM with Neural Radiance Fields

Leveraging neural implicit representation to conduct dense RGB-D SLAM has been studied in recent years. However, this approach relies on a static environment assumption and does not work robustly within a dynamic environment due to the inconsistent observation of geometry and photometry. To address the challenges presented in dynamic environments, we propose a novel dynamic SLAM framework with neural radiance field. Specifically, we introduce a motion mask generation method to filter out the invalid sampled rays. This design effectively fuses the optical flow mask and semantic mask to enhance the precision of motion mask. To further improve the accuracy of pose estimation, we have designed a divide-and-conquer pose optimization algorithm that distinguishes between keyframes and non-keyframes. The proposed edge warp loss can effectively enhance the geometry constraints between adjacent frames. Extensive experiments are conducted on the two challenging datasets, and the results show that RoDyn-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art performance among recent neural RGB-D methods in both accuracy and robustness.Comment: IEEE RAL 202