General mechanisms of drought response and their application in drought resistance improvement in plants

Plants often encounter unfavorable environmental conditions because of their sessile lifestyle. These adverse factors greatly affect the geographic distribution of plants, as well as their growth and productivity. Drought stress is one of the premier limitations to global agricultural production due to the complexity of the water-limiting environment and changing climate. Plants have evolved a series of mechanisms at the morphological, physiological, biochemical, cellular, and molecular levels to overcome water deficit or drought stress conditions. The drought resistance of plants can be divided into four basic types-drought avoidance, drought tolerance, drought escape, and drought recovery. Various drought-related traits, including root traits, leaf traits, osmotic adjustment capabilities, water potential, ABA content, and stability of the cell membrane, have been used as indicators to evaluate the drought resistance of plants. In the last decade, scientists have investigated the genetic and molecular mechanisms of drought resistance to enhance the drought resistance of various crops, and significant progress has been made with regard to drought avoidance and drought tolerance. With increasing knowledge to comprehensively decipher the complicated mechanisms of drought resistance in model plants, it still remains an enormous challenge to develop water-saving and drought-resistant crops to cope with the water shortage and increasing demand for food production in the future.     

基于成像算子优化的微震逆时定位方法

针对目前微震逆时定位成像存在的问题,提出一种优化后的成像算子,对模型数据进行抗噪性、误差速度以及检波器分布和数量进行测试,并提出采用峰度值作为定位成像结果的评价标准。结果表明,优化后的成像条件在定位能量聚焦程度和成像分辨率上都得到了提升,对含速度误差和含噪微震数据都有较好的成像结果,并且对检波器的分布和数量有较好的适应性,取得了较为理想的定位效果。     

浙西南环敕木山带畲族妇女“雄冠式”头冠解析

浙西南的环敕木山一带，是畲族迁徙到浙江省境内最早的聚居地，这里的畲族妇女传统“雄冠式”头冠，极具民族特色，整体造型呈三角形，用木、布、银等装饰材料，表现出凤凰吟啭的形态，造型精美，色彩斑斓，蕴含着对祖先图腾的崇敬。通过具体描述其头冠的制作、佩戴方法以及佩戴习俗，力求完整地再现浙西南的环敕木山一带畲族妇女“雄冠式”头冠所承载的畲族文化。     

Junctional adhesion molecule-A: functional diversity through molecular promiscuity

Cell adhesion molecules (CAMs) of the immunoglobulin superfamily (IgSF) regulate important processes such as cell proliferation, differentiation and morphogenesis. This activity is primarily due to their ability to initiate intracellular signaling cascades at cell–cell contact sites. Junctional adhesion molecule-A (JAM-A) is an IgSF-CAM with a short cytoplasmic tail that has no catalytic activity. Nevertheless, JAM-A is involved in a variety of biological processes. The functional diversity of JAM-A resides to a large part in a C-terminal PDZ domain binding motif which directly interacts with nine different PDZ domain-containing proteins. The molecular promiscuity of its PDZ domain motif allows JAM-A to recruit protein scaffolds to specific sites of cell–cell adhesion and to assemble signaling complexes at those sites. Here, we review the molecular characteristics of JAM-A, including its dimerization, its interaction with scaffolding proteins, and the phosphorylation of its cytoplasmic domain, and we describe how these characteristics translate into diverse biological activities.     

Current knowledge on exosome biogenesis and release

Exosomes are nanosized membrane vesicles released by fusion of an organelle of the endocytic pathway, the multivesicular body, with the plasma membrane. This process was discovered more than 30 years ago, and during these years, exosomes have gone from being considered as cellular waste disposal to mediate a novel mechanism of cell-to-cell communication. The exponential interest in exosomes experienced during recent years is due to their important roles in health and disease and to their potential clinical application in therapy and diagnosis. However, important aspects of the biology of exosomes remain unknown. To explore the use of exosomes in the clinic, it is essential that the basic molecular mechanisms behind the transport and function of these vesicles are better understood. We have here summarized what is presently known about how exosomes are formed and released by cells. Moreover, other cellular processes related to exosome biogenesis and release, such as autophagy and lysosomal exocytosis are presented. Finally, methodological aspects related to exosome release studies are discussed.     

Defining G protein-coupled receptor peptide ligand expressomes and signalomes in human and mouse islets

Introduction

Islets synthesise and secrete numerous peptides, some of which are known to be important regulators of islet function and glucose homeostasis. In this study, we quantified mRNAs encoding all peptide ligands of islet G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in isolated human and mouse islets and carried out in vitro islet hormone secretion studies to provide functional confirmation for the species-specific role of peptide YY (PYY) in mouse islets.

Materials and methods

GPCR peptide ligand mRNAs in human and mouse islets were quantified by quantitative real-time PCR relative to the reference genes ACTB, GAPDH, PPIA, TBP and TFRC. The pathways connecting GPCR peptide ligands with their receptors were identified by manual searches in the PubMed, IUPHAR and Ingenuity databases. Distribution of PYY protein in mouse and human islets was determined by immunohistochemistry. Insulin, glucagon and somatostatin secretion from islets was measured by radioimmunoassay.

Results

We have quantified GPCR peptide ligand mRNA expression in human and mouse islets and created specific signalomes mapping the pathways by which islet peptide ligands regulate human and mouse GPCR signalling. We also identified species-specific islet expression of several GPCR ligands. In particular, PYY mRNA levels were ~ 40,000-fold higher in mouse than human islets, suggesting a more important role of locally secreted Pyy in mouse islets. This was confirmed by IHC and functional experiments measuring insulin, glucagon and somatostatin secretion.

Discussion

The detailed human and mouse islet GPCR peptide ligand atlases will allow accurate translation of mouse islet functional studies for the identification of GPCR/peptide signalling pathways relevant for human physiology, which may lead to novel treatment modalities of diabetes and metabolic disease.

     

An Economic Model-Based Matching Approach Between Buyers and Sellers Through a Broker in an Open E-Marketplace

A broker in an open e-marketplace enables buyers and sellers to do business with each other. Although a broker plays an important role in e-marketplaces, theory and guidelines for matching between buyers and sellers in multi-attribute exchanges are limited. Therefore, a challenge for a broker’s responsibility is how to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree as its goals under the consideration of trade-off between a buyer’s buying quantity and price paid to a seller, and other attributes. To solve this challenge, this paper proposes an economic model-based matching approach between a buyer’s requirements and a seller’s offers. The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a broker can model a seller’s price policy as per a buyer’s buying quantity through communication between a broker and a seller; (ii) due to each buyer’s different quantity demand, a broker models a buyer’s satisfaction degree as per a buyer’s buying quantity based on communication between a broker and a buyer; and (iii) to carry out a broker’s matching processes, an objective function and a set of constraints are generated to help a broker to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach.     

Study on the Centralization Strategy of the Blood Allocation Among Different Departments within a Hospital

By far, the researches on how to distribute blood products among different departments in hospital have not been further studied, though the problem of blood shortage and wastage that caused by improper blood allocation is severe, which may endanger patient’s lives and impose considerable costs on hospitals. In order to solve this problem, this paper mainly studies on how to distribute the blood items among different departments within a hospital and investigates the allocation approach with the novel management method by centralizing the inventory of several different departments. By integrating the blood inventory requirements of some departments, the hospital could reduce the rate of blood shortage and wastage effectively, release the pressure of the occupancy of resources and reduce the bullwhip effect of blood products. This paper illustrates the centralization principle in hospital and formulates the mixed integer programming model to work out the optimal allocation network scheme and the optimal inventory setting for every department. And the results of the numerical example demonstrate that this centralization method could considerably reduce blood shortage and wastage in hospital by about 72% and 90% respectively. Furthermore, it could decrease the total cost by about 108,540 RMB a month on blood supply chain management in the hospital and improve the effect of some certain surgeries by transfusing the fresh blood to patients.     

Effects of Strain Rate,Temperature and Grain Size on the Mechanical Properties and Microstructure Evolutions of Polycrystalline Nickel Nanowires: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Through molecular dynamics(MD)simulation,the dependencies of temperature,grain size and strain rate on the mechanical properties were studied.The simulation results demonstrated that the strain rate from 0.05 to 2 ns~(–1 )affected the Young’s modulus of nickel nanowires slightly,whereas the yield stress increased.The Young’s modulus decreased approximately linearly;however,the yield stress firstly increased and subsequently dropped as the temperature increased.The Young’s modulus and yield stress increased as the mean grain size increased from 2.66 to6.72 nm.Moreover,certain efforts have been made in the microstructure evolution with mechanical properties association under uniaxial tension.Certain phenomena such as the formation of twin structures,which were found in nanowires with larger grain size at higher strain rate and lower temperature,as well as the movement of grain boundaries and dislocation,were detected and discussed in detail.The results demonstrated that the plastic deformation was mainly accommodated by the motion of grain boundaries for smaller grain size.However,for larger grain size,the formations of stacking faults and twins were the main mechanisms of plastic deformation in the polycrystalline nickel nanowire.