Transgenic studies reveal the positive role of LeEIL-1 in regulating shikonin biosynthesis in Lithospermum erythrorhizon hairy roots

Time-course accumulation of shikonin in four typical hairy root lines. Value of Ei-19 or EO-13 is significantly different from that of the control line WT-1 or EV-9 at each time point from 3 to 12 days, respectively (Student’s t-test, P < 0.05). (TIF 125 kb

2,3,4-Tri-O-acetyl-β-d-xylosyl 2,4-dichloro­phenoxy­acetate

In the title compound, C19H20Cl2O10, the hexopyranosyl ring adopts a chair conformation. The four substituents are in equatorial positions. The mol­ecules arelinked via C—H⋯O contacts along the a axis

Response of cattle manure anaerobic digestion to zinc oxide nanoparticles: methane production, microbial community, and functions

The increasing use of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) as feed additives has raised huge environmental concerns in the anaerobic digestion (AD) of livestock wastes. In this study the 30-day effect of ZnO NPs on AD performance of cattle manure was investigated under optimal conditions (temperature=55 °C, initial pH=10, total solids contents=10%), which were obtained from response surface methodology. Results showed that ZnO NPs (5–100 mg/g TS) promoted the accumulation of soluble chemical oxygen demand, soluble protein and polysaccharide, but inhibited their following fermentation and methane production processes. This inhibition became stronger as ZnO NPs concentration increased, leading to the methane production declined by 84.55% (5 mg/ g TS), 92.39% (30 mg/g TS), and 93.72% (100 mg/g TS), respectively. High-throughput sequencing results demonstrated that the decrease in the abundances of functional bacteria from 72.11% to 11.24% (in families Ruminococcaceae and Lachnospiraceae), and of methanogens from 96.82% to &lt; 1% (in genus Methanothermobacter) led to poor fermentation and methanogenesis, respectively. Predictive functional analysis indicated that ZnO NPs can enhance abundances of AD-friendly functional genes instead of possible genetic expression, resulting in the low methane production. Our findings highlight a deep understanding of the role of ZnO NPs in cattle manure AD and are critical for guiding feed additive application

SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods still depend largely on a confined set of training datasets. In this work, we investigate scaling up EHPS towards the first generalist foundation model (dubbed SMPLer-X), with up to ViT-Huge as the backbone and training with up to 4.5M instances from diverse data sources. With big data and the large model, SMPLer-X exhibits strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. 1) For the data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 32 EHPS datasets, including a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. 2) For the model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turn SMPLer-X into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation model SMPLer-X consistently delivers state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA (107.2 mm NMVE), UBody (57.4 mm PVE), EgoBody (63.6 mm PVE), and EHF (62.3 mm PVE without finetuning). Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/SMPLer-X/Comment: Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/SMPLer-X

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data