Potential Uses of Wild Germplasms of Grain Legumes for Crop Improvement

Challenged by population increase, climatic change, and soil deterioration, crop improvement is always a priority in securing food supplies. Although the production of grain legumes is in general lower than that of cereals, the nutritional value of grain legumes make them important components of food security. Nevertheless, limited by severe genetic bottlenecks during domestication and human selection, grain legumes, like other crops, have suffered from a loss of genetic diversity which is essential for providing genetic materials for crop improvement programs. Illustrated by whole-genome-sequencing, wild relatives of crops adapted to various environments were shown to maintain high genetic diversity. In this review, we focused on nine important grain legumes (soybean, peanut, pea, chickpea, common bean, lentil, cowpea, lupin, and pigeonpea) to discuss the potential uses of their wild relatives as genetic resources for crop breeding and improvement, and summarized the various genetic/genomic approaches adopted for these purposes.Instituto de Fisiología y Recursos Genéticos VegetalesFil: Muñoz, Nacira Belen. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Centre for Soybean Research of the Partner State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology and School of Life Sciences; China. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Instituto de Fisiología y Recursos Genéticos Vegetales; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Cátedra de Fisiología Vegetal; ArgentinaFil: Ailin, Liu. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Centre for Soybean Research of the Partner State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology and School of Life Sciences; ChinaFil: Leo, Kan. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Centre for Soybean Research of the Partner State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology and School of Life Sciences; ChinaFil: Man-Wah, Li. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Centre for Soybean Research of the Partner State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology and School of Life Sciences; ChinaFil: Hon-Ming, Lam. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Centre for Soybean Research of the Partner State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology and School of Life Sciences; Chin

Ischemic Stroke in Patients With Intracranial Dural Arteriovenous Fistulas

Background/PurposeIntracranial dural arteriovenous fistulas (DAVFs) can be complicated by ischemic stroke. This study investigated the frequency and determinants of ischemic stroke in patients with intracranial DAVF.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective study of consecutive patients with intracranial DAVF. Patients with pure hemorrhagic stroke or without available brain imaging for clarifying stroke type were excluded. DAVF was diagnosed by cerebral catheter angiography. Cognard classification and location of DAVFs were ascertained. The clinical characteristics, outcome, and radiographic findings were recorded. Factors associated with occurrence of ischemic stroke in the patients with DAVFs were determined.ResultsA total of 134 patients were enrolled. Six patients (4.5%) had ischemic stroke (mean age: 53.8 ± 13.4 years) and 128 patients were free from stroke (mean age: 55.4 ± 15.2 years). Men accounted for 83% in the ischemic stroke group and 34% in the non-stroke group. Chemosis, exophthalmos and tinnitus were more frequent in the non-stroke group, whereas seizure and mental decline were more frequent in the ischemic stroke group. DAVF was associated with highest risk of ischemic stroke at locations other than the cavernous sinus or large sinuses. Ischemic stroke also correlated with types of DAVF involving cortical venous drainage, including type IIb (18%), III (15%), and IV (100%). No patient with DAVF type I and IIa had ischemic stroke. The rate of ischemic stroke in patients with concomitant DAVF and cerebral sinus thrombosis was higher than in DAVF patients without cerebral sinus thrombosis. Venous infarct was the major subtype of ischemic stroke in five DAVF patients. Endovascular therapy was the most common choice in both groups, and fewer patients in the ischemic stroke group did not receive any treatment for DAVFs.ConclusionLocation and type of DAVF were two important factors related to the occurrence of ischemic stroke in DAVF patients

An Unexpected Cause of a Subcutaneous Nodule: A Case Report of Dirofilaria Infection

Humans are not natural hosts of Dirofilaria; however, pulmonary or subcutaneous infections may occur through mosquitoes transmission. Patients presenting with simple subcutaneous nodules may not seek early medical attention, and hence systemic involvement through hematogenous spread may occur. Definitive diagnosis of Dirofilaria infection is made by histopathological examinations of the infected tissues. We report a patient with an incidental diagnosis of Dirofilaria infection confirmed by histopathological findings of a subcutaneous nodule on the right thigh. The source of infection remains unknown

Clinical characteristics of central diabetes insipidus in Taiwanese children

Background/PurposeData on the clinical features of children with central diabetes insipidus (CDI) are lacking in Taiwan. This study investigated the clinical manifestations and etiology of CDI in Taiwanese children.MethodsFrom 1983 to 2012, 62 children with permanent diabetes insipidus were enrolled in the study. They were diagnosed at the Department of Pediatrics of National Taiwan University Hospital. Their medical records were thoroughly reviewed and their clinical symptoms and signs, laboratory data, and etiologies were analyzed.ResultsThe patients’ median age at diagnosis was 10 years and the median interval between initial manifestations and diagnosis was 0.5 years. The most common symptoms and signs were polyuria, polydipsia, nocturia, and growth retardation. Most patients had low urine osmolality and elevated plasma osmolality on diagnosis. Absence of a posterior pituitary hyperintense signal and thickening of the pituitary stalk were common findings on magnetic resonance imaging. Approximately 80% of the patients had anterior pituitary hormone deficiency and all patients had growth hormone deficiency. Approximately 60% of patients had intracranial lesions, the most common causes of which were germ cell tumor and Langerhans cell histiocytosis. Two patients were initially believed to have idiopathic CDI but intracranial lesions were detected during the follow-up period.ConclusionBecause a delayed diagnosis of CDI is common in Taiwanese children, a high index of suspicion is important. The underlying etiology of CDI in children may not initially be obvious. Long-term surveillance is therefore necessary, especially for the early detection of evolving treatable intracranial lesions

DualRing: Generic Construction of Ring Signatures with Efficient Instantiations

We introduce a novel generic ring signature construction, called DualRing, which can be built from several canonical identification schemes (such as Schnorr identification). DualRing differs from the classical ring signatures by its formation of two rings: a ring of commitments and a ring of challenges. It has a structural difference from the common ring signature approaches based on accumulators or zero-knowledge proofs of the signer index. Comparatively, DualRing has a number of unique advantages. Considering the DL-based setting by using Schnorr identification scheme, our DualRing structure allows the signature size to be compressed into logarithmic size via an argument of knowledge system such as Bulletproofs. We further improve on the Bulletproofs argument system to eliminate about half of the computation while maintaining the same proof size. We call this Sum Argument and it can be of independent interest. This DL-based construction, named DualRing-EC, using Schnorr identification with Sum Argument has the shortest ring signature size in the literature without using trusted setup. Considering the lattice-based setting, we instantiate DualRing by a canonical identification based on M-LWE and M-SIS. In practice, we achieve the shortest lattice-based ring signature, named DualRing-LB, when the ring size is between 4 and 2000. DualRing-LB is also 5x faster in signing and verification than the fastest lattice-based scheme by Esgin et al. (CRYPTO\u2719)

Whole transcriptome analysis reveals non-coding RNA's competing endogenous gene pairs as novel form of motifs in serous ovarian cancer

Publisher Copyright: © 2022The non-coding RNA (ncRNA) regulation appears to be associated to the diagnosis and targeted therapy of complex diseases. Motifs of non-coding RNAs and genes in the competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network would probably contribute to the accurate prediction of serous ovarian carcinoma (SOC). We conducted a microarray study profiling the whole transcriptomes of eight human SOCs and eight controls and constructed a ceRNA network including mRNAs, long ncRNAs, and circular RNAs (circRNAs). Novel form of motifs (mRNA-ncRNA-mRNA) were identified from the ceRNA network and defined as non-coding RNA's competing endogenous gene pairs (ceGPs), using a proposed method denoised individualized pair analysis of gene expression (deiPAGE). 18 cricRNA's ceGPs (cceGPs) were identified from multiple cohorts and were fused as an indicator (SOC index) for SOC discrimination, which carried a high predictive capacity in independent cohorts. SOC index was negatively correlated with the CD8+/CD4+ ratio in tumour-infiltration, reflecting the migration and growth of tumour cells in ovarian cancer progression. Moreover, most of the RNAs in SOC index were experimentally validated involved in ovarian cancer development. Our results elucidate the discriminative capability of SOC index and suggest that the novel competing endogenous motifs play important roles in expression regulation and could be potential target for investigating ovarian cancer mechanism or its therapy.Peer reviewe

Uncooled infrared imaging face recognition using kernel-based feature vector selection

A considerable amount of research has been recently conducted on face recognition tasks, due to increasing demands for security and authentication applications. Recent technological developments in uncooled IR imagery technology have boosted IR face recognition research applications. Our study is part of an on-going research initiated at the Naval Postgraduate School that considers an uncooled low-resolution and low-cost IR camera used for face recognition applications. This work investigates a recent approach which approximates nonlinear kernel-based methods at a significantly reduced computational cost. Our research was applied to an IR database. Results show that this scheme may perform sufficiently close to its â kernelizedâ version considered in a previous study, at a fraction of the computational cost, provided that the associated parameters are well tuned. The thesis considers a relative comparison between the two algorithms, based on identification and verification experiments and considers a statistical test to investigate whether classification performance differences may be considered statistically significant. Results show that, from a cost perspective, a low-resolution uncooled IR camera in conjunction with a low computational-cost classification scheme can be embedded in a robust face recognition system to efficiently address the issue of authentication in security-related tasks