Synthetic Hexaploid Wheat: Yesterday,Today, and Tomorrow

In recent years, wheat yield per hectare appears to have reached a plateau, leading to concerns for future food security with an increasing world population. Since its invention, synthetic hexaploid wheat (SHW) has been shown to be an effective genetic resource for transferring agronomically important genes from wild relatives to common wheat. It provides new sources for yield potential, drought tolerance, disease resistance, and nutrient-use efficiency when bred conventionally with modern wheat varieties. SHW is becoming more and more important for modern wheat breeding. Here, we review the current status of SHW generation, study, and application, with a particular focus on its contribution to wheat breeding. We also briefly introduce the most recent progress in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms for growth vigor in SHW. Advances in new technologies have made the complete wheat reference genome available, which offers a promising future for the study and applications of SHW in wheat improvement that are essential to meet global food demand.     

Research on the Feasibility of Spraying Micro/Nano Bubble Ozonated Water for Airborne Disease Prevention

This research combined micro/nano bubble techniques with ozone disinfection to determine feasibility of applying micro/nano bubble ozonated water in preventing tomato airborne disease. Results indicated that dissolving ozone in micro/nano bubbles is more efficient than using a mixing pump. In our in vitro studies, when dissolved ozone concentration was 1.6 mg/L, a 5.2 to 3.3 log reduction in Alternaria solani Sorauer conidia was observed; with concentration of 1.8 mg/L, there was a 5.0 to 3.7 log reduction in Cladosporium fulvum conidia. Furthermore, spraying ozonated water in a certain concentration range (0.6–1.8 mg/L) had no significant negative effects on tomato growth.     

Metacognition and False Recognition in Alzheimer's Disease: Further Exploration of the Distinctiveness Heuristic.

The distinctiveness heuristic is a response mode in which participants expect to remember vivid details of an experience and make recognition decisions on the basis of this metacognitive expectation. The authors examined whether the distinctiveness heuristic could be engaged to reduce false recognition in a repetition-lag paradigm in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Patients with AD were able to use the distinctiveness heuristic--though not selectively--and thus they showed reduction of both true and false recognition. The authors suggest that patients with AD can engage in decision strategies on the basis of the metacognitive expectation associated with use of the distinctiveness heuristic, but the patients' episodic memory impairment limits both the scope and effectiveness of such strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Detection of soybean rust using a multispectral image sensor

Soybean rust, caused by Phakopsora pachyrhizi, is one of the most destructive diseases for soybean production. It often causes significant yield loss and may rapidly spread from field to field through airborne urediniospores. In order to implement timely fungicide treatments for the most effective control of the disease, it is essential to detect the infection and severity of soybean rust. This research explored feasible methods for detecting soybean rust and quantifying severity. In this study, images of soybean leaves with different rust severity were collected using both a portable spectroradiometer and a multispectral CDD camera. Different forms of vegetation indices were used to investigate the possibility of detecting rust infection. Results indicated that both leaf development stage and rust infection severity changed the surface reflectance within a wide band of spectrum. In general, old leaves with most severe rust infection resulted in lowest reflectance. A difference vegetation index (DVI) showed a positive correlation with reflectance differences. However, it lacks solid evidence to identify such reflectance change was solely caused by rust. As an alternative, three parameters, i.e. ratio of infected area (RIA), lesion color index (LCI) and rust severity index (RSI), were extracted from the multispectral images and used to detect leaf infection and severity of infection. The preliminary results obtained from this laboratory-scale research demonstrated that this multispectral imaging method could quantitatively detect soybean rust. Further tests of field scale are needed to verify the effectiveness and reliability of this sensing method to detect and quantify soybean rust infection in real time field scouting.     

Insights into the structure–function relationship of disease resistance protein HCTR in maize (Zea mays L.): A computational structural biology approach

The disease resistance gene Hm1 of maize encodes a NADPH-dependent reductase enzyme, HC-toxin reductase (HCTR) that detoxifies the HC toxin secreted by the race specific fungus Cochliobolus carbonum race 1. HCTR enzyme shares 29.6% sequence identity with dihydroflavonol reductase (DFR) of grape, a key enzyme involved in flavonoid biosynthesis. Here we report the comparative modelling, molecular dynamics simulation and docking studies to explain the structure–function relationship and the mode of cofactor (NADPH) binding in HCTR enzyme at the molecular level. The nucleotide binding domain of modelled HCTR adopts a classic Rossmann fold and possesses a consensus glycine rich GxGxxG motif. Molecular simulation studies suggested that HCTR model retained stability throughout the simulation in aqueous solution. HCTR model showed considerable structural identities with the cofactor binding site of DFR, but significant difference in the catalytic site might be the reason of functional divergence between these families of proteins. Similarly electrostatic surface potential analysis of both HCTR and DFR revealed profound variations in the charge distribution over the substrate binding site, which can be correlated with the sequence variability and may suggest distinct substrate-binding patterns and differences in the catalytic mechanism. Docking results indicated Phe19, Gly21, Arg40, Thr90, Gly208, Arg218, Glu221 and Thr222 are important residues for cofactor (NADPH) binding through strong hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions. Alanine scanning and analysis of docking energies of mutant proteins suggested that Phe19, and Arg40 are two critical residues for the cofactor binding. The result from the present study is expected to pave the way for exploration of similar genes in other economically important crop varieties.     

Differential diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Diseases using Deep Learning networks

ABSTRACT

An architecture for automatic lung tissue classification method based on the Deep Learning techniques is designed in this paper. Recent works on Deep Learning techniques achieved impressive results in the field of medical image classification. So, we designed a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) for the classification of five categories of Interstitial Lung Diseases (ILD) patterns in High-Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT) images. The CNN consists of 3 Convolution layers, Leaky ReLU activation followed by Maximum pooling layer and dense layer. The last Fully Connected (FC) layer has 5 outputs equivalent to the classes considered such as Normal, Ground Glass (GG), Emphysema, Micro Nodules, and Fibrosis. The proposed CNN is trained and evaluated on the publicly available ILD database provided by the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG). Experimental results are compared with the state-of-art, which shows an outstanding performance of the proposed CNN model giving 94.67% accuracy and 94.65% F_avg .     

泵送商品混凝土冬季病害探因及防治

对某在建工业厂房混凝土结构质量进行了检测,发现混凝土强度偏低、现浇板开裂渗漏等病害,分析了泵送商品混凝土冬季施工病害产生的原因,评估了混凝土强度、裂缝和冻融深度,提出了针对性的工程防治措施,保证了后续工程建设的质量。     

人CD4分子及其治疗性抗体的研究进展

在正常情况下,人CD4分子能协助机体免疫系统进行免疫防御、免疫自稳和免疫监视;但在一定条件下,又与某些疾病的发生发展密切相关。目前,已研制出几种抗CD4治疗性抗体,并在一些疾病的临床研究中获得了成效。本文就人CD4分子的结构、功能、与疾病的关系以及抗CD4治疗性抗体的研究进展作一综述。     

多排螺旋CT导引下胸部病变穿刺活检的临床应用

目的:探讨经皮穿刺切割活检肺部病变的阳性率、病理结果以及并发症.方法:对131例CT导引下经皮穿刺切割活检的病例资料进行回顾性分析.结果:经皮穿刺切割活检组织经病理学诊断125例,其中鳞癌52例,腺癌37例,脓肿3例,间皮瘤3例,结核球10例,小细胞肺癌2例,炎性假瘤5例,纵隔恶性肿瘤6例,慢性炎症7例.穿刺切割活检阳性率为91.2％.并发症(气胸6例,出血10例)占12.8％.结论:CT导引下经皮穿刺切割活检阳性率高,并发症轻,比较安全,值得推广.