Two hAT transposon genes were transferred from Brassicaceae to broomrapes and are actively expressed in some recipients

A growing body of evidence is pointing to an important role of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in the evolution of higher plants. However, reports of HGTs of transposable elements (TEs) in plants are still scarce, and only one case is known of a class II transposon horizontally transferred between grasses. To investigate possible TE transfers in dicots, we performed transcriptome screening in the obligate root parasite Phelipanche aegyptiaca (Orobanchaceae), data-mining in the draft genome assemblies of four other Orobanchaceae, gene cloning, gene annotation in species with genomic information, and a molecular phylogenetic analysis. We discovered that the broomrape genera Phelipanche and Orobanche acquired two related nuclear genes (christened BO transposase genes), a new group of the hAT superfamily of class II transposons, from Asian Sisymbrieae or a closely related tribe of Brassicaceae, by HGT. The collinearity of the flanking genes, lack of a classic border structure, and low expression levels suggest that BO transposase genes cannot transpose in Brassicaceae, whereas they are highly expressed in P. aegyptiaca

Wound Segmentation with Dynamic Illumination Correction and Dual-view Semantic Fusion

Wound image segmentation is a critical component for the clinical diagnosis and in-time treatment of wounds. Recently, deep learning has become the mainstream methodology for wound image segmentation. However, the pre-processing of the wound image, such as the illumination correction, is required before the training phase as the performance can be greatly improved. The correction procedure and the training of deep models are independent of each other, which leads to sub-optimal segmentation performance as the fixed illumination correction may not be suitable for all images. To address aforementioned issues, an end-to-end dual-view segmentation approach was proposed in this paper, by incorporating a learn-able illumination correction module into the deep segmentation models. The parameters of the module can be learned and updated during the training stage automatically, while the dual-view fusion can fully employ the features from both the raw images and the enhanced ones. To demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework, the extensive experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets. The encouraging results suggest that our framework can significantly improve the segmentation performance, compared to the state-of-the-art methods

Extremely large magnetoresistance in topologically trivial semimetal α\alpha-WP2_2

Extremely large magnetoresistance (XMR) was recently discovered in many non-magnetic materials, while its underlying mechanism remains poorly understood due to the complex electronic structure of these materials. Here, we report an investigation of the $\alpha$-phase WP$_2$, a topologically trivial semimetal with monoclinic crystal structure (C2/m), which contrasts to the recently discovered robust type-II Weyl semimetal phase in $\beta$-WP$_2$. We found that $\alpha$-WP$_2$ exhibits almost all the characteristics of XMR materials: the near-quadratic field dependence of MR, a field-induced up-turn in resistivity following by a plateau at low temperature, which can be understood by the compensation effect, and high mobility of carriers confirmed by our Hall effect measurements. It was also found that the normalized MRs under different magnetic fields has the same temperature dependence in $\alpha$-WP$_2$, the Kohler scaling law can describe the MR data in a wide temperature range, and there is no obvious change in the anisotropic parameter $\gamma$ value with temperature. The resistance polar diagram has a peanut shape when field is rotated in $\textit{ac}$ plane, which can be understood by the anisotropy of Fermi surface. These results indicate that both field-induced-gap and temperature-induced Lifshitz transition are not the origin of up-turn in resistivity in the $\alpha$-WP$_2$ semimetal. Our findings establish $\alpha$-WP$_2$ as a new reference material for exploring the XMR phenomena.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure