Dynamic Studies of Scaffold-dependent Mating Pathway in Yeast

The mating pathway in \emph{Saccharomyces cerevisiae} is one of the best understood signal transduction pathways in eukaryotes. It transmits the mating signal from plasma membrane into the nucleus through the G-protein coupled receptor and the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade. According to the current understandings of the mating pathway, we construct a system of ordinary differential equations to describe the process. Our model is consistent with a wide range of experiments, indicating that it captures some main characteristics of the signal transduction along the pathway. Investigation with the model reveals that the shuttling of the scaffold protein and the dephosphorylation of kinases involved in the MAPK cascade cooperate to regulate the response upon pheromone induction and to help preserving the fidelity of the mating signaling. We explored factors affecting the dose-response curves of this pathway and found that both negative feedback and concentrations of the proteins involved in the MAPK cascade play crucial role. Contrary to some other MAPK systems where signaling sensitivity is being amplified successively along the cascade, here the mating signal is transmitted through the cascade in an almost linear fashion.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figure

Experimental Study on the Feasibility of Using Water Glass and Aluminum Sulfate to Treat Complications in High Liquid Limit Soil Subgrade

The feasibility of using water glass and aluminum sulfate to treat high liquid limit soil subgrade diseases is studied through laboratory experiments, and the following results were observed. After improving the high liquid limit clay with water glass and aluminum sulfate, the liquid limit decreases, the plastic limit increases, and the plasticity index decreases. Compared with untreated soil, the clay content of the improved soil decreases, while the silt and coarse contents increase. The absolute and relative expansion rates of the improved soil are both lower than those of the untreated soil. With the same number of dry and wet cycles, the decreased degrees of cohesion and internal friction angle of the improved soil are, respectively, one-half and one-third of those of the untreated soil. After three dry and wet cycles, the California bearing ratio (CBR) of the untreated soil does not meet the requirements of specifications. However, after being cured for seven days and being subjected to three dry and wet cycles, the CBR of the improved soil, with 4% water glass solution and 0.4% aluminum sulfate, meets the requirements of specifications

Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning with Semantic Grouping

In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning visual representations from unlabeled scene-centric data. Existing works have demonstrated the potential of utilizing the underlying complex structure within scene-centric data; still, they commonly rely on hand-crafted objectness priors or specialized pretext tasks to build a learning framework, which may harm generalizability. Instead, we propose contrastive learning from data-driven semantic slots, namely SlotCon, for joint semantic grouping and representation learning. The semantic grouping is performed by assigning pixels to a set of learnable prototypes, which can adapt to each sample by attentive pooling over the feature and form new slots. Based on the learned data-dependent slots, a contrastive objective is employed for representation learning, which enhances the discriminability of features, and conversely facilitates grouping semantically coherent pixels together. Compared with previous efforts, by simultaneously optimizing the two coupled objectives of semantic grouping and contrastive learning, our approach bypasses the disadvantages of hand-crafted priors and is able to learn object/group-level representations from scene-centric images. Experiments show our approach effectively decomposes complex scenes into semantic groups for feature learning and significantly benefits downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Code is available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SlotCon.Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 202

Charge-dependent transverse momentum and its impact on the search for the chiral magnetic wave

The chiral magnetic wave (CMW) is sought using the charge asymmetry ($A_{\rm ch}$) dependence of anisotropic flow in heavy-ion collisions. The charge dependent transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$), however, could play a role as a background. With the string fragmentation models, including PYTHIA, we demonstrate the origin of the $A_{\rm ch}-p_{\rm T}$ correlation and its connection with the local charge conservation (LCC). The impact of $A_{\rm ch}-p_{\rm T}$ and its behavior in varied kinematic windows are also discussed. This study provides more insights for the search for the CMW and comprehending the collective motion of the quark-gluon plasma.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Quantum corrections to the thermodynamics and phase transition of a black hole surrounded by a cavity in the extended phase space

In the extended phase space, we investigate the rainbow gravity-corrected thermodynamic phenomena and phase structure of the Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by a spherical cavity. The results show that rainbow gravity has a very significant effect on the thermodynamic phenomena and phase structure of the black hole. It prevents the black hole from total evaporation and leads to a remnant with a limited temperature but no mass. Additionally, we restore the $P-V$ criticality and obtaine the critical quantities of the canonical ensemble. When the temperature or pressure is smaller than the critical quantities, the system undergoes two Hawking-Page-like phase transitions and one first-order phase transition, which never occurs in the original case. Remarkably, our findings demonstrate that the thermodynamic behavior and phase transition of the rainbow SC black hole surrounded by a cavity in the extended phase space are analogous to those of the Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m anti-de Sitter black hole. Therefore, rainbow gravity activates the effect of electric charge and cutoff factor in the evolution of the black hole.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Further results on the distinctness of binary sequences derived from primitive sequences modulo square-free odd integers

This paper studies the distinctness of primitive sequences over Z/(M) modulo 2, where M is an odd integer that is composite and square-free, and Z/(M) is the integer residue ring modulo M. A new sufficient condition is given for ensuring that primitive sequences generated by a primitive polynomial f(x) over Z/(M) are pairwise distinct modulo 2. Such result improves a recent result obtained in our previous paper [27] and consequently the set of primitive sequences over Z/(M) that can be proven to be distinct modulo 2 is greatly enlarged

Decoupled Iterative Refinement Framework for Interacting Hands Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image

Reconstructing interacting hands from a single RGB image is a very challenging task. On the one hand, severe mutual occlusion and similar local appearance between two hands confuse the extraction of visual features, resulting in the misalignment of estimated hand meshes and the image. On the other hand, there are complex spatial relationship between interacting hands, which significantly increases the solution space of hand poses and increases the difficulty of network learning. In this paper, we propose a decoupled iterative refinement framework to achieve pixel-alignment hand reconstruction while efficiently modeling the spatial relationship between hands. Specifically, we define two feature spaces with different characteristics, namely 2D visual feature space and 3D joint feature space. First, we obtain joint-wise features from the visual feature map and utilize a graph convolution network and a transformer to perform intra- and inter-hand information interaction in the 3D joint feature space, respectively. Then, we project the joint features with global information back into the 2D visual feature space in an obfuscation-free manner and utilize the 2D convolution for pixel-wise enhancement. By performing multiple alternate enhancements in the two feature spaces, our method can achieve an accurate and robust reconstruction of interacting hands. Our method outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on the InterHand2.6M dataset.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2023 (Oral