A strong constitutive ethylene-response phenotype conferred on Arabidopsis plants containing null mutations in the ethylene receptors ETR1 and ERS1

Background: The ethylene receptor family of Arabidopsis consists of five members, falling into two subfamilies. Subfamily 1 is composed of ETR1 and ERS1, and subfamily 2 is composed of ETR2, ERS2, and EIN4. Although mutations have been isolated in the genes encoding all five family members, the only previous insertion allele of ERS1 (ers1-2) is a partial loss-of-function mutation based on our analysis. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of signaling mediated by subfamily-1 ethylene receptors through isolation and characterization of null mutations. Results: We isolated new T-DNA insertion alleles of subfamily 1 members ERS1 and ETR1 (ers1-3 and etr1-9, respectively), both of which are null mutations based on molecular, biochemical, and genetic analyses. Single mutants show an ethylene response similar to wild type, although both mutants are slightly hypersensitive to ethylene. Double mutants of ers1-3 with etr1-9, as well as with the previously isolated etr1-7, display a constitutive ethylene-response phenotype more pronounced than that observed with any previously characterized combination of ethylene receptor mutations. Dark-grown etr1-9;ers1-3 and etr1-7;ers1-3 seedlings display a constitutive triple-response phenotype. Light-grown etr1-9;ers1-3 and etr1-7;ers1-3 plants are dwarfed, largely sterile, exhibit premature leaf senescence, and develop novel filamentous structures at the base of the flower. A reduced level of ethylene response was still uncovered in the double mutants, indicating that subfamily 2 receptors can independently contribute to signaling, with evidence suggesting that this is due to their interaction with the Raf-like kinase CTR1. Conclusion: Our results are consistent with the ethylene receptors acting as redundant negative regulators of ethylene signaling, but with subfamily 1 receptors playing the predominant role. Loss of a single member of subfamily 1 is largely compensated for by the activity of the other member, but loss of both subfamily members results in a strong constitutive ethylene-response phenotype. The role of subfamily 1 members is greater than previously suspected and analysis of the double mutant null for both ETR1 and ERS1 uncovers novel roles for the receptors not previously characterized

The role of basic health insurance on depression: an epidemiological cohort study of a randomized community sample in Northwest China

BACKGROUND: Little research has focused on the relationship between health insurance and mental health in the community. The objective of this study is to determine how the basic health insurance system influences depression in Northwest China. METHODS: Participants were selected from 32 communities in two northwestern Chinese cities through a three-stage random sampling. Three waves of interviews were completed in April 2006, December 2006, and January 2008. The baseline survey was completed by 4,079 participants. Subsequently, 2,220 participants completed the first follow-up, and 1,888 completed the second follow-up. Depression symptoms were measured by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). RESULTS: A total of 40.0% of participants had at least one form of health insurance. The percentages of participants with severe depressive symptoms in the three waves were 21.7%, 22.0%, and 17.6%. Depressive symptoms were found to be more severe among participants without health insurance in the follow-up surveys. After adjusting for confounders, participants without health insurance were found to experience a higher risk of developing severe depressive symptoms than participants with health insurance (7 months: OR, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.09-1.82; p = 0.01; 20 months: OR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.37-2.61; p < 0.001). CONCLUSION: A lack of basic health insurance can dramatically increase the risk of depression based on northwestern Chinese community samples

A Strong Constitutive Ethylene-Response Phenotype Conferred on Arabidopsis Plants Containing Null Mutations in the Ethylene Receptors ETR1 and ERS1

The ethylene receptor family of Arabidopsis consists of five members, falling into two subfamilies. Subfamily 1 is composed of ETR1 and ERS1, and subfamily 2 is composed of ETR2, ERS2, and EIN4. Although mutations have been isolated in the genes encoding all five family members, the only previous insertion allele of ERS1 (ers1-2) is a partial loss-of-function mutation based on our analysis. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of signaling mediated by subfamily-1 ethylene receptors through isolation and characterization of null mutations

A Strong Constitutive Ethylene-Response Phenotype Conferred on Arabidopsis Plants Containing Null Mutations in the Ethylene Receptors ETR1 and ERS1

The ethylene receptor family of Arabidopsis consists of five members, falling into two subfamilies. Subfamily 1 is composed of ETR1 and ERS1, and subfamily 2 is composed of ETR2, ERS2, and EIN4. Although mutations have been isolated in the genes encoding all five family members, the only previous insertion allele of ERS1 (ers1-2) is a partial loss-of-function mutation based on our analysis. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of signaling mediated by subfamily-1 ethylene receptors through isolation and characterization of null mutations

Exploring Self- and Cross-Triplet Correlations for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a vital role in scene understanding, which aims to predict the HOI triplet in the form of <human, object, action>. Existing methods mainly extract multi-modal features (e.g., appearance, object semantics, human pose) and then fuse them together to directly predict HOI triplets. However, most of these methods focus on seeking for self-triplet aggregation, but ignore the potential cross-triplet dependencies, resulting in ambiguity of action prediction. In this work, we propose to explore Self- and Cross-Triplet Correlations (SCTC) for HOI detection. Specifically, we regard each triplet proposal as a graph where Human, Object represent nodes and Action indicates edge, to aggregate self-triplet correlation. Also, we try to explore cross-triplet dependencies by jointly considering instance-level, semantic-level, and layout-level relations. Besides, we leverage the CLIP model to assist our SCTC obtain interaction-aware feature by knowledge distillation, which provides useful action clues for HOI detection. Extensive experiments on HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed SCTC

Iterative Signal Processing for Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), with sensing and communication sharing the same wireless resources and hardware, has the advantages of high spectrum efficiency and low hardware cost, which is regarded as one of the key technologies of the fifth generation advanced (5G-A) and sixth generation (6G) mobile communication systems. ISAC has the potential to be applied in the intelligent applications requiring both communication and high accurate sensing capabilities. The fundamental challenges of ISAC system are the ISAC signal design and ISAC signal processing. However, the existing ISAC signal has low anti-noise capability. And the existing ISAC signal processing algorithms have the disadvantages of quantization errors and high complexity, resulting in large energy consumption. In this paper, phase coding is applied in ISAC signal design to improve the anti-noise performance of ISAC signal. Then, the effect of phase coding method on improving the sensing accuracy is analyzed. In order to improve the sensing accuracy with low-complexity algorithm, the iterative ISAC signal processing methods are proposed. The proposed methods improve the sensing accuracy with low computational complexity, realizing energy efficient ISAC signal processing. Taking the scenarios of short distance and long distance sensing into account, the iterative two-dimensional (2D) fast Fourier transform (FFT) and iterative cyclic cross-correlation (CC) methods are proposed, respectively, realizing high sensing accuracy and low computational complexity. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed ISAC signal processing methods are verified by simulation results

Integrated Sensing and Communication Signal Processing Based on Compressed Sensing Over Unlicensed Spectrum Bands

As a promising key technology of 6th generation (6G) mobile communication system, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology aims to make full use of spectrum resources to enable the functional integration of communication and sensing. The ISAC-enabled mobile communication system regularly operate in non-continuous spectrum bands due to crowded licensed frequency bands. However, the conventional sensing algorithms over non-continuous spectrum bands have disadvantages such as reduced peak-to-side lobe ratio (PSLR) and degraded anti-noise performance. Facing this challenge, we propose a high-precision ISAC signal processing algorithm based on compressed sensing (CS) in this paper. By integrating the resource block group (RBG) configuration information in 5th generation new radio (5G NR) and channel information matrices, we can dynamically and accurately obtain power estimation spectra. Moreover, we employ the fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA) to address the reconstruction problem and utilize K-fold cross validation (KCV) to obtain optimal parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has lower sidelobes or even zero sidelobes compared with conventional sensing algorithms. Meanwhile, compared with the improved 2D FFT algorithm and conventional 2D FFT algorithm, the proposed algorithms in this paper have a maximum improvement of 54.66 % and 84.36 % in range estimation accuracy, and 41.54 % and 97.09 % in velocity estimation accuracy, respectively.Comment: 15 pages 12 figures 7 table

Magnetic Properties of Well-Aligned ZnO Nanorod Arrays Grown by a Simple Hydrothermal Reaction

Well-aligned ZnO nanorod arrays with room temperature ferromagnetism were prepared on glass substrate through hydrothermal method. The as-prepared nanorod arrays were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), photoluminescence (PL) spectrum, and magnetization measurements. The XRD and SEM results indicated that the ZnO nanorods are with the wurtzite structure and exhibit preferential (002) orientation with c-axis perpendicular to the substrate surface. The PL results suggested that the possible defect in the as-prepared ZnO nanorod arrays might be VZn, Oi, or OZn. The first-principles calculations reveal that the room temperature ferromagnetism may result from the VZn defects present in the ZnO nanorod and the hybridization of the Zn 3d states with O 2p states is responsible for the half-metallic ferromagnetism in ZnO nanorod

Integrated Sensing and Communication Signals Toward 5G-A and 6G: A Survey

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has the advantages of efficient spectrum utilization and low hardware cost. It is promising to be implemented in the fifth-generation-advanced (5G-A) and sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication systems, having the potential to be applied in intelligent applications requiring both communication and high-accurate sensing capabilities. As the fundamental technology of ISAC, ISAC signal directly impacts the performance of sensing and communication. This article systematically reviews the literature on ISAC signals from the perspective of mobile communication systems, including ISAC signal design, ISAC signal processing algorithms and ISAC signal optimization. We first review the ISAC signal design based on 5G, 5G-A and 6G mobile communication systems. Then, radar signal processing methods are reviewed for ISAC signals, mainly including the channel information matrix method, spectrum lines estimator method and super resolution method. In terms of signal optimization, we summarize peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) optimization, interference management, and adaptive signal optimization for ISAC signals. This article may provide the guidelines for the research of ISAC signals in 5G-A and 6G mobile communication systems.Comment: 25 pages, 13 figures, 8 tables. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 202

MPprimer: a program for reliable multiplex PCR primer design

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Multiplex PCR, defined as the simultaneous amplification of multiple regions of a DNA template or multiple DNA templates using more than one primer set (comprising a forward primer and a reverse primer) in one tube, has been widely used in diagnostic applications of clinical and environmental microbiology studies. However, primer design for multiplex PCR is still a challenging problem and several factors need to be considered. These problems include mis-priming due to nonspecific binding to non-target DNA templates, primer dimerization, and the inability to separate and purify DNA amplicons with similar electrophoretic mobility.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A program named MPprimer was developed to help users for reliable multiplex PCR primer design. It employs the widely used primer design program Primer3 and the primer specificity evaluation program MFEprimer to design and evaluate the candidate primers based on genomic or transcript DNA database, followed by careful examination to avoid primer dimerization. The graph-expanding algorithm derived from the greedy algorithm was used to determine the optimal primer set combinations (PSCs) for multiplex PCR assay. In addition, MPprimer provides a virtual electrophotogram to help users choose the best PSC. The experimental validation from 2× to 5× plex PCR demonstrates the reliability of MPprimer. As another example, MPprimer is able to design the multiplex PCR primers for DMD (dystrophin gene which caused Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy), which has 79 exons, for 20×, 20×, 20×, 14×, and 5× plex PCR reactions in five tubes to detect underlying exon deletions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>MPprimer is a valuable tool for designing specific, non-dimerizing primer set combinations with constrained amplicons size for multiplex PCR assays.</p