A culture of conservation: How an ancient forest plantation turned into an old-growth forest reserve – The story of the Wamulin forest

The global expansion of forest plantations at the expense of natural forests, especially old-growth forests, raises concerns about habitat loss and a decline in ecosystem services. Natural regeneration of second-growth forests with minimal human assistance has been suggested as a cost-effective way to restore forests and increase forest ecosystem service potential. However, it is unclear whether natural regeneration will lead to the development of second-growth forests similar to natural forests because most naturally regenerated second-growth forests are still young. We present a case study of a very old second-growth forest in southeastern China in which a forest plantation established approximately six centuries ago has now developed into an old forest with extraordinary high biodiversity levels, an immense carbon pool, and a rich culture. The forest was established in the 14th century because of a charitable contribution, became protected under the Chinese cultural norm of ‘unity between humans and the nature’, and was conserved because of the belief that the prosperity of people is closely linked to the prosperity of trees. The recent designation of the forest as a nature reserve further protects it from development despite competing land-use demands related to recent economic growth. This case illustrates that, although human activity is the main cause for the disappearance and degradation of many forests, when human interests and cultural values align second-growth restoration and subsequent forest conservation can lead to the successional development of old-growth forests. Because this development takes multiple centuries, the protection of current second-growth forests within conservation easements (e.g. nature reserves) and the reformation of culture values for the linkage of forests to human well-being are key aspects of the continued conservation-aided succession of second-growth forests. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article

Non-intact zona improves development of murine preimplantation embryos transfected by an adenovirus vector

The present study explored whether embryos could be transfected by the adenovirus-vector if the zona pellucida (ZP) was not completely removed. An adenovirus vector with green fluorescent protein (pAd-GFP) was used to transfect mouse non-intact zona zygotes (following partial removal of the ZP induced by pronase), zona-free and zona-intact embryos. Non-intact zona and zona-free embryos expressed GFP (confirmed with inverted fluorescence microscopy) after 48 h of culture. The transfection rate of non-intact zona group was up to 51% and the entire zona-free group was transfected. However, none of the zona-intact embryos was transfected. Regardless of whether non-intact zona embryos were transfected by pAd-GFP, their developmental rate (74.3 ± 2.4 and 69.2 ± 3.3% for non-transfected and transfected, respectively; mean ± SEM) was higher (P<0.05) than that of zona-free embryos without and with transfection (54.5 ± 4.3 and 46.7 ± 5.5%). Developmental potential of embryos was decreased for ZP-digestion (non-intact zona 71.8 ± 1.6%; zona-free 50.6 ± 2.2%, P<0.05) or pAd-GFP expression (non-transfected 64.4 ± 1.9%; transfected 56.0 ± 2.1%, P<0.05); therefore, ZP-digestion affected more intensely embryos development than pAd-GFP expression. In summary, non-intact zona murine embryos were readily transfected by the adenovirus-vector, and had much greater development potential than zona-free embryos. Although, the susceptibility of the ZP to digestion by pronase varied among embryos, on average, approximately 3.5 to 4.0 min of digestion resulted in partial removal of the ZP and promoted both transfection and satisfactory embryonic development. It is expected that this method could be used to increase the efficiency of generating transgenic animals.Keywords: Mouse, non-intact zona embryos, adenovirus vector with green fluorescent protein (pAd-GFP), embryos developmen

A data analysis method for isochronous mass spectrometry using two time-of-flight detectors at CSRe

The concept of isochronous mass spectrometry (IMS) applying two time-of-flight (TOF) detectors originated many years ago at GSI. However, the corresponding method for data analysis has never been discussed in detail. Recently, two TOF detectors have been installed at CSRe and the new working mode of the ring is under test. In this paper, a data analysis method for this mode is introduced and tested with a series of simulations. The results show that the new IMS method can significantly improve mass resolving power via the additional velocity information of stored ions. This improvement is especially important for nuclides with Lorentz factor $\gamma$-value far away from the transition point $\gamma _t$ of the storage ring CSRe.Comment: published in Chinese Physics C Vol. 39, No. 10 (2015) 10620

Analysis of Rice Quality Characteristics of Indica Rice Varieties of China in Recent 10 Years

Based on the analysis of rice quality characteristics of indica rice varieties from regional trials in recent 10 years, we hope to provide references for quality improvement of indica rice varieties in the next stage. We analyzed 2 701 samples of early season, medium season and late season indica rice samples in 17 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government) from 2011 to 2020, and divided them into 8 groups according to maturity and regional trials group. Based on the agricultural industry standard “Cooking rice variety quality” NY/T 593, we analyzed the development trend of qualified rate and rice quality index of indica rice varieties in recent 10 years. The results showed that the quality of indica rice varieties in China presented a steady upward trend in recent 10 years, especially for late season indica rice, which improved the most significantly after 2017. The rice quality of mid-late ripe of late season indica rice and sensitive late season indica rice in south China was better than early ripe of late season indica rice; rice quality of medium season indica rice in the middle was better than that of medium season indica rice in the upper Yangtze River; the rice quality of early season indica rice in south China was better than that of other two early season indica rice varieties and has been improved steadily in recent years. Chalkiness degree, alkali spreading value and amylose content of quality indexes have been increasing steadily, gel consistency and brown rice rate keep high standard rate in recent 10 years, the variation of qualified rate in head rice rate and translucency above one level changed greatly from year to year, and there was no obvious trend of improvement. For rice quality index, in addition to keeping on reducing the amylose content and chalkiness degree of indica rice, it is also needed o strengthen the study on inter annual stability of head rice rate and transparency of indica rice. And the improvement of rice quality of medium season indica rice is the key direction for the improvement of indica rice quality in the future

Ellagic acid regulates Wnt/?-catenin signaling pathway and CDK8 in HCT 116 and HT 29 colon cancer cells

Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Wnt/?-catenin signalling pathway plays a central role in normal cellular responses, making it a potent target in cancer therapy. Study was taken to assess whether ellagic acid modulates Wnt/?-catenin pathway and CDK8 activity in colon cancer cells. Effect of ellagic acid on viability of colon cancer cell lines (HT 29 and HCT 116), were assessed by MTT assay and its influence on CDK8, ?-catenin, p-?-catenin, axin1 and 2, survivin, c-Myc and cyclin D1 expressions were determined by western blotting. The levels of survivin, c-Myc and cyclin D1 were also analysed following siCDK8 transfection. Ellagic acid caused significant decrease in viability of HT 29 and HCT 116 cells. Expression of CDK 8, ?-catenin, survivin, c-Myc and cyclin D1were markedly reduced on exposure to ellagic acid. Significant up-regulation in the expression of p-?-catenin, axin1 and 2 were observed. siCDK8 transfection resulted in marked reduction in the expression of survivin, c-Myc and cyclin D1. Ellagic acid was able to effectively reduce cell viability and modulate expressions of Wnt/?-catenin signalling cascade proteins and down regulate the activity and expression of CDK8 in HT 29 and HCT 116 cells

Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.

Structural symmetry-breaking plays a crucial role in determining the electronic band structures of two-dimensional materials. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to breaking the in-plane symmetry of graphene with electric fields on AB-stacked bilayers or stacked van der Waals heterostructures. In contrast, transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers are semiconductors with intrinsic in-plane asymmetry, leading to direct electronic bandgaps, distinctive optical properties and great potential in optoelectronics. Apart from their in-plane inversion asymmetry, an additional degree of freedom allowing spin manipulation can be induced by breaking the out-of-plane mirror symmetry with external electric fields or, as theoretically proposed, with an asymmetric out-of-plane structural configuration. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to grow Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides breaking the out-of-plane structural symmetry. In particular, based on a MoS2 monolayer, we fully replace the top-layer S with Se atoms. We confirm the Janus structure of MoSSe directly by means of scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dependent X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and prove the existence of vertical dipoles by second harmonic generation and piezoresponse force microscopy measurements

Demonstration of Universal Parametric Entangling Gates on a Multi-Qubit Lattice

We show that parametric coupling techniques can be used to generate selective entangling interactions for multi-qubit processors. By inducing coherent population exchange between adjacent qubits under frequency modulation, we implement a universal gateset for a linear array of four superconducting qubits. An average process fidelity of $\mathcal{F}=93\%$ is estimated for three two-qubit gates via quantum process tomography. We establish the suitability of these techniques for computation by preparing a four-qubit maximally entangled state and comparing the estimated state fidelity against the expected performance of the individual entangling gates. In addition, we prepare an eight-qubit register in all possible bitstring permutations and monitor the fidelity of a two-qubit gate across one pair of these qubits. Across all such permutations, an average fidelity of $\mathcal{F}=91.6\pm2.6\%$ is observed. These results thus offer a path to a scalable architecture with high selectivity and low crosstalk

Molecular Prognostic Prediction for Locally Advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma by Support Vector Machine Integrated Approach

BACKGROUND:Accurate prognostication of locally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) will benefit patients for tailored therapy. Here, we addressed this issue by developing a mathematical algorithm based on support vector machine (SVM) through integrating the expression levels of multi-biomarkers. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:Ninety-seven locally advanced NPC patients in a randomized controlled trial (RCT), consisting of 48 cases serving as training set and 49 cases as testing set of SVM models, with 5-year follow-up were studied. We designed SVM models by selecting the variables from 38 tissue molecular biomarkers, which represent 6 tumorigenesis signaling pathways, and 3 EBV-related serological biomarkers. We designed 3 SVM models to refine prognosis of NPC with 5-year follow-up. The SVM1 displayed highly predictive sensitivity (sensitivity, specificity were 88.0% and 81.9%, respectively) by integrating the expression of 7 molecular biomarkers. The SVM2 model showed highly predictive specificity (sensitivity, specificity were 84.0% and 94.5%, respectively) by grouping the expression level of 12 molecular biomarkers and 3 EBV-related serological biomarkers. The SVM3 model, constructed by combination SVM1 with SVM2, displayed a high predictive capacity (sensitivity, specificity were 88.0% and 90.3%, respectively). We found that 3 SVM models had strong power in classification of prognosis. Moreover, Cox multivariate regression analysis confirmed these 3 SVM models were all the significant independent prognostic model for overall survival in testing set and overall patients. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:Our SVM prognostic models designed in the RCT displayed strong power in refining patient prognosis for locally advanced NPC, potentially directing future target therapy against the related signaling pathways