Hybrid Decay: A Transgenerational Epigenetic Decline in Vigor and Viability Triggered in Backcross Populations of Teosinte with Maize.

In the course of generating populations of maize with teosinte chromosomal introgressions, an unusual sickly plant phenotype was noted in individuals from crosses with two teosinte accessions collected near Valle de Bravo, Mexico. The plants of these Bravo teosinte accessions appear phenotypically normal themselves and the F1 plants appear similar to typical maize × teosinte F1s. However, upon backcrossing to maize, the BC1 and subsequent generations display a number of detrimental characteristics including shorter stature, reduced seed set, and abnormal floral structures. This phenomenon is observed in all BC individuals and there is no chromosomal segment linked to the sickly plant phenotype in advanced backcross generations. Once the sickly phenotype appears in a lineage, normal plants are never again recovered by continued backcrossing to the normal maize parent. Whole-genome shotgun sequencing reveals a small number of genomic sequences, some with homology to transposable elements, that have increased in copy number in the backcross populations. Transcriptome analysis of seedlings, which do not have striking phenotypic abnormalities, identified segments of 18 maize genes that exhibit increased expression in sickly plants. A de novo assembly of transcripts present in plants exhibiting the sickly phenotype identified a set of 59 upregulated novel transcripts. These transcripts include some examples with sequence similarity to transposable elements and other sequences present in the recurrent maize parent (W22) genome as well as novel sequences not present in the W22 genome. Genome-wide profiles of gene expression, DNA methylation, and small RNAs are similar between sickly plants and normal controls, although a few upregulated transcripts and transposable elements are associated with altered small RNA or methylation profiles. This study documents hybrid incompatibility and genome instability triggered by the backcrossing of Bravo teosinte with maize. We name this phenomenon "hybrid decay" and present ideas on the mechanism that may underlie it

Sparse Recovery for Holographic MIMO Channels: Leveraging the Clustered Sparsity

Envisioned as the next-generation transceiver technology, the holographic multiple-input-multiple-output (HMIMO) garners attention for its superior capabilities of fabricating electromagnetic (EM) waves. However, the densely packed antenna elements significantly increase the dimension of the HMIMO channel matrix, rendering traditional channel estimation methods inefficient. While the dimension curse can be relieved to avoid the proportional increase with the antenna density using the state-of-the-art wavenumber-domain sparse representation, the sparse recovery complexity remains tied to the order of non-zero elements in the sparse channel, which still considerably exceeds the number of scatterers. By modeling the inherent clustered sparsity using a Gaussian mixed model (GMM)-based von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution, the to-be-estimated channel characteristics can be compressed to the scatterer level. Upon the sparsity extraction, a novel wavenumber-domain expectation-maximization (WD-EM) algorithm is proposed to implement the cluster-by-cluster variational inference, thus significantly reducing the computational complexity. Simulation results verify the robustness of the proposed scheme across overheads and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).Comment: This manuscript has been submitted to IEEE journal, 5 pages, 3 figure

Exploiting Structured Sparsity in Near Field: From the Perspective of Decomposition

The structured sparsity can be leveraged in traditional far-field channels, greatly facilitating efficient sparse channel recovery by compressing the complexity of overheads to the level of the scatterer number. However, when experiencing a fundamental shift from planar-wave-based far-field modeling to spherical-wave-based near-field modeling, whether these benefits persist in the near-field regime remains an open issue. To answer this question, this article delves into structured sparsity in the near-field realm, examining its peculiarities and challenges. In particular, we present the key features of near-field structured sparsity in contrast to the far-field counterpart, drawing from both physical and mathematical perspectives. Upon unmasking the theoretical bottlenecks, we resort to bypassing them by decoupling the geometric parameters of the scatterers, termed the triple parametric decomposition (TPD) framework. It is demonstrated that our novel TPD framework can achieve robust recovery of near-field sparse channels by applying the potential structured sparsity and avoiding the curse of complexity and overhead.Comment: This aricle has been accepted for publication in IEEE Comma

RNA editing signature during myeloid leukemia cell differentiation

Adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs) are key proteins for hematopoietic stem cell self-renewal and for survival of differentiating progenitor cells. However, their specific role in myeloid cell maturation has been poorly investigated. Here we show that ADAR1 is present at basal level in the primary myeloid leukemia cells obtained from patients at diagnosis as well as in myeloid U-937 and THP1 cell lines and its expression correlates with the editing levels. Upon phorbol-myristate acetate or Vitamin D3/granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF)-driven differentiation, both ADAR1 and ADAR2 enzymes are upregulated, with a concomitant global increase of A-to-I RNA editing. ADAR1 silencing caused an editing decrease at specific ADAR1 target genes, without, however, interfering with cell differentiation or with ADAR2 activity. Remarkably, ADAR2 is absent in the undifferentiated cell stage, due to its elimination through the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway, being strongly upregulated at the end of the differentiation process. Of note, peripheral blood monocytes display editing events at the selected targets similar to those found in differentiated cell lines. Taken together, the data indicate that ADAR enzymes play important and distinct roles in myeloid cells

Trifolirhizin relieves renal injury in a diabetic nephropathy model by inducing autophagy and inhibiting oxidative stress through the regulation of PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway

Purpose: To evaluate the effects of trifolirhizin on diabetic nephropathy (DN), and the mechanism of action. Methods: Male db/db mice (8 weeks, n = 24) and age-matched control mice (n = 6) were obtained. The mice were further divided into four groups and administered increasing doses of trifolirhizin (0, 12.5, 25 and 50 mg/kg). Histological analysis of renal tissues were performed by H & E staining. Blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine were determined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Immunoblot and TUNEL assay were performed to investigate the effect of trifolirhizin on autophagy and apoptosis, while ELISA and dihydroethidium (DHE) staining were conducted to evaluate reactive oxygen species (ROS), malondialdehyde (MDA) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) levels. The effect of trifolirhizin on PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway was determined using Immunoblot assays. Results: Trifolirhizin alleviated renal injury in diabetic mice, and also activate autophagy and inhibited apoptosis in the renal tissues in diabetic mice (p < 0.001). In addition, trifolirhizin inhibited the oxidative stress response in the renal tissue in diabetic mice (p < 0.001). Trifolirhizin further inhibited PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway and therefore relieved renal injury in the diabetic nephropathy model (p < 0.001). Conclusion: Trifolirhizin alleviates renal injury in diabetic mice, activates autophagy, and inhibits apoptosis in renal tissue of diabetic mice. Therefore, trifolirhizin is a promising a promising drug for the treatment of DN

Topological Insulators-Based Magnetic Heterostructure

The combination of magnetism and topology in magnetic topological insulators (MTIs) has led to unprecedented advancements of time reversal symmetry-breaking topological quantum physics in the past decade. Compared with the uniform films, the MTI heterostructures provide a better framework to manipulate the spin-orbit coupling and spin properties. In this review, we summarize the fundamental mechanisms related to the physical orders host in (Bi,Sb)2(Te,Se)3-based hybrid systems. Besides, we provide an assessment on the general strategies to enhance the magnetic coupling and spin-orbit torque strength through different structural engineering approaches and effective interfacial interactions. Finally, we offer an outlook of MTI heterostructures-based spintronics applications, particularly in view of their feasibility to achieve room-temperature operation.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figure

Structured Memetic Automation for Online Human-like Social Behavior Learning

Meme automaton is an adaptive entity that autonomously acquires an increasing level of capability and intelligence through embedded memes evolving independently or via social interactions. This paper begins a study on memetic multiagent system (MeMAS) toward human-like social agents with memetic automaton. We introduce a potentially rich meme-inspired design and operational model, with Darwin's theory of natural selection and Dawkins' notion of a meme as the principal driving forces behind interactions among agents, whereby memes form the fundamental building blocks of the agents' mind universe. To improve the efficiency and scalability of MeMAS, we propose memetic agents with structured memes in this paper. Particularly, we focus on meme selection design where the commonly used elitist strategy is further improved by assimilating the notion of like-attracts-like in the human learning. We conduct experimental study on multiple problem domains and show the performance of the proposed MeMAS on human-like social behavior

Effects of transglutaminase pre-crosslinking on salt-induced gelation of soy protein isolate emulsion

peer-reviewedThe salt-induced gelation behavior of soy protein isolate (SPI) emulsions was markedly influenced by microbial transglutaminase (TGase) pre-crosslinking. Rheological data showed that when SPI emulsions were incubated with TGase at low concentrations (1 and 3 U/g protein) at 50 °C for 30 min prior to gelation, no change in storage modulus (G′), but enhanced resistance to deformation of the gels was observed. Extensive crosslinking by TGase (5 U/g protein) resulted in severe decreases in gel firmness and fracture properties (yielding stress and strain), likely due to the impairment of hydrophobic bonds and the formation of coarse networks. The water-holding capacity of the gels was significantly enhanced by increased concentrations of TGase. Interactive force analysis indicated that non-covalent interactions and disulfide bonds are the primary forces involved in CaSO4-induced SPI emulsion gel, but TGase treatment may limit hydrophobic interactions within the gel network. These results are of great potential value for the application of TGase in the food industry

PeP: a Point enhanced Painting method for unified point cloud tasks

Point encoder is of vital importance for point cloud recognition. As the very beginning step of whole model pipeline, adding features from diverse sources and providing stronger feature encoding mechanism would provide better input for downstream modules. In our work, we proposed a novel PeP module to tackle above issue. PeP contains two main parts, a refined point painting method and a LM-based point encoder. Experiments results on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets validate the superior performance of our PeP. The advantages leads to strong performance on both semantic segmentation and object detection, in both lidar and multi-modal settings. Notably, our PeP module is model agnostic and plug-and-play. Our code will be publicly available soon