Ethylene signal transduction elements involved in chilling injury in non-climacteric loquat fruit

Loquat (Eriobotrya japonica Lindl.) is a subtropical fruit, with some cultivars such as ‘Luoyangqing’ (LYQ) susceptible to chilling injury (CI), while others such as ‘Baisha’ (BS) are resistant. Although loquats are non-climacteric, modulation of ethylene has an effect on ripening-related post-harvest CI. Therefore the role of ethylene signalling in the development of CI was investigated in fruit of both the LYQ and BS cultivars. Three ethylene receptor genes, one CTR1-like gene, and one EIN3-like gene were isolated and characterized in ripening fruit. All of these genes were expressed differentially within and between fruit of the two cultivars. Transcripts either declined over fruit development (EjERS1a in both cultivars and EjEIL1 in LYQ) or showed an increase in the middle stages of fruit development before declining (EjETR1, EjERS1b, and EjCTR1 in both cultivars and EjEIL1 in BS). The main cultivar differences were in levels rather than in patterns of expression during post-harvest storage. EjETR1, EjCTR1, and EjEIL1 genes showed increased expression in response to low temperature and this was particularly notable for EjETR1, and EjEIL1 during CI development in LYQ fruit. The genes were also differentially responsive to ethylene treatment, 1-methycyclopropene (1-MCP) and low temperature conditioning, confirming a role for ethylene in regulation of CI in loquat fruit

Transcriptomic Events Involved in Melon Mature-Fruit Abscission Comprise the Sequential Induction of Cell-Wall Degrading Genes Coupled to a Stimulation of Endo and Exocytosis

Background: Mature-fruit abscission (MFA) in fleshy-fruit is a genetically controlled process with mechanisms that, contrary to immature-fruit abscission, has not been fully characterized. Here, we use pyrosequencing to characterize the transcriptomes of melon abscission zone (AZ) at three stages during AZ-cell separation in order to understand MFA control at an early stage of AZ-activation. Principal Findings: The results show that by early induction of MFA, the melon AZ exhibits major gene induction, while by late induction of MFA, melon AZ shows major gene repression. Although some genes displayed similar regulation in both early and late induction of abscission, such as EXT1-EXT4, EGase1, IAA2, ERF1, AP2D15, FLC, MADS2, ERAF17, SAP5 and SCL13 genes, the majority had different expression patterns. This implies that time-specific events occur during MFA, and emphasizes the value of characterizing multiple time-specific abscission transcriptomes. Analysis of gene-expression from these AZs reveal that a sequential induction of cell-wall-degrading genes is associated with the upregulation of genes involved in endo and exocytosis, and a shift in plant-hormone metabolism and signaling genes during MFA. This is accompanied by transcriptional activity of small-GTPases and synthaxins together with tubulins, dynamins, V-type ATPases and kinesin-like proteins potentially involved in MFA signaling. Early events are potentially controlled by down-regulation of MADS-box, AP2/ERF and Aux/IAA transcription-factors, and up-regulation of homeobox, zinc finger, bZIP, and WRKY transcription-factors, while late events may be controlled by up-regulation of MYB transcription-factors. Significance: Overall, the data provide a comprehensive view on MFA in fleshy-fruit, identifying candidate genes and pathways associated with early induction of MFA. Our comprehensive gene-expression profile will be very useful for elucidating gene regulatory networks of the MFA in fleshy-fruit

A lightweight and scalable attribute-based encryption system for smart cities

In the near future, a technological revolution will involve our cities, where a variety of smart services based on the Internet of Things will be developed to facilitate the needs of the citizens. Sensing devices are already being deployed in urban environments, and they will generate huge amounts of data. Such data is typically outsourced to some cloud service in order to lower capital and operating expenses and guarantee high availability. However, cloud services may suffer from data breaches due to software and hardware vulnerabilities, or they may have incentives to release stored data to unauthorized entities. In this work we present ABE-Cities, an encryption system for urban sensing which solves the above problems while ensuring fine-grained access control on data by means of Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE). ABE-Cities senses data from the city and stores it on the cloud in an encrypted form. Then, it provides users with keys able to decrypt only data sensed from authorized paths or zones of the city. In ABE-Cities, sensors perform only lightweight symmetric-key encryption, thus we can employ constrained sensor devices such as battery powered motes. ABE-Cities allows us to plan an expiration date for each key, as well as to revoke a given key in an unplanned fashion. We prove that ABE-Cities scales well with the number of users and the number of streets by simulating it with 30 000 users on the Beijing street network, which consists of more than 30 000 streets. In addition to the “vanilla” ABE-Cities scheme, we propose an “advanced” one that leverages the presence of IoT gateways to reduce the computational load otherwise weighing on a single Trusted Third Party. We validate this by testing the advanced scheme on the simulated Houston and Beijing street networks

FABElous: An attribute-based scheme for industrial internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological vision in which constrained or embedded devices connect together through the Internet. This enables common objects to be empowered with communication and cooperation capabilities. Industry can take an enormous advantage of IoT, leading to the so-called Industrial IoT. In these systems, integrity, confidentiality, and access control over data are key requirements. An emerging approach to reach confidentiality and access control is Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), which is a technique able to enforce cryptographically an access control over data. In this paper, we propose fABElous, an ABE scheme suitable for Industrial IoT applications which aims at minimizing the overhead of encryption on communication. fABElous ensures data integrity, confidentiality, and access control, while reducing the communication overhead of 35% with respect to using ABE techniques naively

Characterization and expression of two genes encoding ethylene receptors in peach fruit

We have isolated two peach (Prunus persica) genes, Pp-ETR1 and Pp-ERS1, homolog to the Arabidopsis ethylene receptor ETR1 and ERS1. Pp-ETR1 is identical, in terms of exons number and introns position, to At-ETR1 although the first and fifth intron are 5 and 20 times longer, respectively. In addition two putative polyadenilation sites, that may cause an incomplete splicing at the 3' terminus, are present into the fifth intron. Translation of such a truncated transcript would lead to a product missing a large portion of the receiver domain. The coding region of Pp-ERS1 is organized in five exons interrupted by four introns, but unlike Pp-ETR1 no marked differences in terms of intron length between At-ERS1 and Pp-ERS1 have been detected. Into the promoter region of Pp-ERS1 a motif of 28 nt, which shows high homology with binding ethylene-factors detected in genes up-regulated by ethylene, is present. The deduced protein of both genes contain a sensor domain and the Histidine kinase domain, in which residues, thought to be important for the normal function of ETR1 and ERS-type proteins as ethylene receptors are conserved. These results indicate that Pp-ETR1 and Pp-ERS1 could be functional ethylene receptors with the ability to bind ethylene. Expression analysis, carried out by quantitative RT-PCR, was performed during fruit ripening (cv Maria Marta). The level of Pp-ETR1 transcripts remained unchanged throughout ripening, whereas Pp-ERS1 mRNA increased in parallel with the ethylene climacteric

A Survey on Attribute-Based Encryption Schemes Suitable for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an information service paradigm based on the integration of smart objects, mobile devices, and computers via the Internet. IoT technologies are key enablers for a multitude of applications in diverse fields, such as digital health, smart city, industrial automation, and supply chain. This raises new security and privacy challenges that can be addressed by advanced cryptographic methods. One of the most prominent is Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), which allows one to encrypt data while enforcing fine-grained access control on it. ABE is advantageous in many IoT applications since it allows data to be safely stored on untrusted storage, like third-party cloud servers, hackable publish-subscribe brokers, physically accessible sensors, etc. This paper surveys the ABE literature proposing schemes and solutions that are best suited for IoT applications. To do so, it first identifies three performance indicators that are key in IoT, namely the data producer CPU efficiency, the data producer bandwidth efficiency, and the key authority bandwidth efficiency. Then, it analyzes only those schemes that are promising from the point of view of one or more indicators and, therefore, more applicable in typical IoT applications. As a further contribution, this paper selects a subset of representative schemes and assesses their efficiency by thorough simulations. Such simulations show that no scheme excels in all three performance indicators at once, but some simultaneously perform well in two indicators