Heavy-Quark Pair Production at Lepton Colliders at NNNLO in QCD.

We compute the total cross section and invariant mass distribution for heavy-quark pair production in e^{+}e^{-} annihilation at the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order in QCD. The obtained results are expressed as piecewise functions defined by several deeply expanded power series, facilitating a rapid numerical evaluation. Utilizing top-pair production at a collision energy of 500 GeV as a benchmark, we observe a correction of approximately 0.1% for the total cross section and around 10% for the majority of the invariant mass distribution range. These results play a crucial role in significantly reducing theoretical uncertainty: the scale dependence has been diminished to 0.06% for the total cross section and to 5% for the invariant mass distribution. This reduction of uncertainty meets the stringent requirements of future lepton colliders.

Electroweak Corrections to Double Higgs Production at the LHC.

We present the results for the complete next-to-leading order electroweak corrections to pp→HH at the Large Hadron Collider, focusing on the dominant gluon-gluon fusion process. While the corrections at the total cross-section level are approximately -4%, those near the energy of HH production threshold exceed +15%, and corrections at the high-energy region are around -10%, leading to a shape distortion for the differential distributions. Our findings substantially diminish the theoretical uncertainties associated with this pivotal process, providing valuable input for understanding the shape of the Higgs boson potential upon comparison with experimental measurements.

Comparison of conventional MRI analysis versus MRI-based radiomics to predict the circumferential margin resection involvement of rectal cancer.

BACKGROUND: To compare the application of conventional MRI analysis and MRI-based radiomics to identify the circumferential resection margin (CRM) status of rectal cancer (RC). METHODS: A cohort of 301 RC patients with 66 CRM invloved status and 235 CRM non-involved status were enrolled in this retrospective study between September 2017 and August 2022. Conventional MRI characteristics included gender, age, diameter, distance to anus, MRI-based T/N phase, CEA, and CA 19 - 9, then the relevant logistic model (Logistic-cMRI) was built. MRI-based radiomics of rectal cancer and mesorectal fascia were calculated after volume of interest segmentation, and the logistic model of rectal cancer radiomics (Logistic-rcRadio) and mesorectal fascia radiomics (Logistic-mfRadio) were constructed. And the combined nomogram (nomo-cMRI/rcRadio/mfRadio) containing conventional MRI characteristics, radiomics of rectal cancer and mesorectal fascia was developed. The receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC) was delineated and the area under curve (AUC) was calculated the efficiency of models. RESULTS: The AUC of Logistic-cMRI was 0.864 (95%CI, 0.820 to 0.901). The AUC of Logistic-rcRadio was 0.883 (95%CI, 0.832 to 0.928) in the training set and 0.725 (95%CI, 0.616 to 0.826) in the testing set. The AUCs of Logistic-mfRadio was 0.891 (95%CI, 0.838 to 0.936) in the training set and 0.820 (95%CI, 0.725 to 0.905) in the testing set. The AUCs of nomo-cMRI/rcRadio/mfRadio were the highest in both the training set of 0.942 (95%CI, 0.901 to 0.969) and the testing set of 0.909 (95%CI, 0.830 to 0.959). CONCLUSION: MRI-based radiomics of rectal cancer and mesorectal fascia showed similar efficacy in predicting the CRM status of RC. The combined nomogram performed better in assessment.

Role of DNA damage response in cyclophosphamide-induced premature ovarian failure in mice.

AIM: To investigate the DNA damage response (DDR) in a cyclophosphamide (CTX)-induced mouse model of premature ovarian failure (POF). METHODS: The POF model was established by injecting mice with CTX. The body, ovarian weights, the estrus cycle, and pathological changes of the ovaries were recorded. The serum levels of 17 ß-estradiol (E2) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) were measured. The expression of Ki67, ß-galactosidase (ß-gal), p21, p53, γH2AX, and pATM in ovarian tissues was detected by immunohistochemistry. The expression of ß-gal, γH2AX, and pATM was analyzed by immunofluorescence staining of primary cultured granulosa cells (GCs). RESULTS: The body and ovarian weights decreased, the estrus cycles were erratic, and the FSH level increased, whereas the E2 level decreased in POF mice compared to controls. The pathological consequences of POF revealed an increase in atretic follicles, corpus luteum, and primordial follicles and a decrease in the number of primary, secondary, and tertiary follicles. Ki67 expression was reduced, ß-gal, p21, p53, γH2AX, and pATM expression were elevated in the ovaries of POF mice. The expression of ß-gal, γH2AX, and pATM increased in GCs with the concentration in a time-dependent manner. CONCLUSION: In total, CTX induced POF in mice, which was mediated by the DDR pathway of ATM-P53-P21.

Fine mapping and candidate gene analysis of CaFCD1 affecting cuticle biosynthesis in Capsicum annuum L.

KEY MESSAGE: CaFCD1 gene regulates pepper cuticle biosynthesis. Pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) is an economically important vegetable crop that easily loses water after harvesting, which seriously affects the quality of its product. The cuticle is the lipid water-retaining layer on the outside of the fruit epidermis, which regulates the biological properties and reduces the rate of water-loss. However, the key genes involved in pepper fruit cuticle development are poorly understood. In this study, a pepper fruit cuticle development mutant fcd1 (fruit cuticle deficiency 1) was obtained by ethyl methanesulfonate mutagenesis. The mutant has great defects in fruit cuticle development, and the fruit water-loss rate of fcd1is significantly higher than that of the wild-type '8214' line. Genetic analysis suggested that the phenotype of the mutant fcd1 cuticle development defect was controlled by a recessive candidate gene CaFCD1 (Capsicum annuum fruit cuticle deficiency 1) on chromosome 12, which is mainly transcribed during fruit development. In fcd1, a base substitution within the CaFCD1 domain resulted in the premature termination of transcription, which affected cutin and wax biosynthesis in pepper fruit, as revealed by the GC-MS and RNA-seq analysis. Furthermore, the yeast one-hybrid and dual-luciferase reporter assays verified that the cutin synthesis protein CaCD2 was directly bound to the promoter of CaFCD1, suggesting that CaFCD1 may be a hub node in the cutin and wax biosynthetic regulatory network in pepper. This study provides a reference for candidate genes of cuticle synthesis and lays a foundation for breeding excellent pepper varieties.

Application of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy in the Studies of Colloidal Quantum Qots.

Colloidal quantum dots display remarkable optical and electrical characteristics with the potential for extensive applications in contemporary nanotechnology. As an ideal instrument for examining surface topography and local density of states (LDOS) at an atomic scale, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) has become indispensable approaches to gain better understanding of their physical properties. This article presents a comprehensive review of the research advancements in measuring the electronic orbits and corresponding energy levels of colloidal quantum dots in various systems using STM and STS. The first three sections introduce the basic principles of colloidal quantum dots synthesis and the fundamental methodology of STM research on quantum dots. The fourth section explores the latest progress in the application of STM for colloidal quantum dot studies. Finally, a summary and prospective is presented.

Circulating LPS from gut microbiota leverages stenosis-induced deep vein thrombosis in mice.

OBJECTIVE AND DESIGN: An accumulating body of evidence has shown that gut microbiota is involved in regulating inflammation; however, it remains undetermined if and how gut microbiota plays an important role in modulating deep venous thrombosis (DVT), which is an inflammation-involved thrombotic event. SUBJECTS: Mice under different treatments were used in this study. METHODS AND TREATMENT: We induced stenosis DVT in mice by partially ligating the inferior vena cava. Mice were treated with antibiotics, prebiotics, probiotics, or inflammatory reagents to modulate inflammatory states, and their effects on the levels of circulating LPS and DVT were examined. RESULTS: Antibiotic-treated mice or germ-free mice exhibited compromised DVT. Treatment of mice with either prebiotics or probiotics effectively suppressed DVT, which was accompanied with the downregulation of circulating LPS. Restoration of circulating LPS in these mice with a low dose of LPS was able to restore DVT. LPS-induced DVT was blocked by a TLR4 antagonist. By performing proteomic analysis, we identified TSP1 as one of the downstream effectors of circulating LPS in DVT. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that gut microbiota may play a nonnegligible role in modulating DVT by leveraging the levels of LPS in circulation, thus shedding light on the development of gut microbiota-based strategies for preventing and treating DVT.

Topography Mapping with Scanning Electrochemical Cell Microscopy.

High-resolution scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM), synchronously visualizing the topography and electrochemical activity, could be used to directly correlate the structure and activity of materials nanoscopically. However, its topographical measurement is largely restricted by the size and stability of the meniscus droplet formed at the end of the nanopipette. In this paper, we report a scheme that could reliably gain several tens nanometer resolution (≥65 nm) of SECCM using homemade ∼50 nm inner diameter probes. Furthermore, the topography and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) activity of ∼45 nm self-assembled Au nanoparticles monolayer were simultaneously recorded successfully. This scheme could make mapping of both topologic and chemical properties of samples in the nanometer regime with SECCM routinely, which potentially can largely expand the field of SECCM applications.

Chiral biosensing using terahertz twisted chiral metamaterial.

Subwavelength chiral metamaterials with tunable geometries and compositions are essential to advance the development of chiral biochemical samples detection. Here, we report a spatial symmetry breaking chiral terahertz (THz) metamaterial structure with stacked layers of L-shape arranged gold disks as the periodic unit cell. The chiroptical response can be adjusted on-demand by manipulating the number of stacking layers and the twisted angle of the periodic unit between adjacent array layers. We reveal that the chiroptical response originates from the optical resonances of the gold disks and the adjacent gold disks array layers via experiments and numerical simulation analysis. Furthermore, we find that this chiral metamaterial can realize label-free detection of proline in biological samples and label-free enantio-discrimination of chiral molecules. The change of the analyte concentration can also regulate the transmission circular dichroism (TCD) intensity of the chiral metamaterials. Our results not only provide new ideas into the design of functional chiral metamaterials, but also bring new strategies to develop chiroptical biosensing devices.

Determining Feynman Integrals with Only Input from Linear Algebra.

We find that all Feynman integrals (FIs), having any number of loops, can be completely determined once linear relations between FIs are provided. Therefore, FI computation is conceptually changed to a linear algebraic problem. Examples up to five loops are given to verify this observation. As a by-product, we obtain a powerful method to calculate perturbative corrections in quantum field theory.

The CT delta-radiomics based machine learning approach in evaluating multiple primary lung adenocarcinoma.

OBJECT: To evaluate the difference between multiple primary lung adenocarcinoma (MPLA) and solitary primary lung adenocarcinoma (SPLA) by delta-radiomics based machine learning algorithms in CT images. METHODS: A total of 1094 patients containing 268 MPLAs and 826 SPLAs were recruited for this retrospective study between 2014 to 2020. After the segmentation of volume of interest, the radiomic features were automatically calculated. The patients were categorized into the training set and testing set by a random proportion of 7:3. After feature selection, the relevant classifiers were constructed by the machine learning algorithms of Bayes, forest, k-nearest neighbor, logistic regression, support vector machine, and decision tree. The relative standard deviation (RSD) was calculated and the classification model with minimal RSD was chosen for delta-radiomics analysis to explore the variation of tumor during follow-up surveillance in the cohort of 225 MPLAs and 320 SPLAs. According to the different follow-up duration, it was divided into group A (3-12 months), group B (13-24 months), and group C (25-48 months). Then the corresponding delta-radiomics classifiers were developed to predict MPLAs. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUC) with 95% confidence interval (CI) was quantified to evaluate the efficiency of the model. RESULTS: To radiomics analysis, the forest classifier (FC-radio) with the minimal RSD showed the better stability with AUCs of 0.840 (95%CI, 0.810-0.867) and 0.670 (95%CI, 0.611-0.724) in the training and testing set. The AUCs of the forest classifier based on delta-radiomics (FC-delta) were higher than those of FC-radio. In addition, with the extension of follow-up duration, the performance of FC-delta in Group C were the best with AUCs of 0.998 (95%CI, 0.993-1.000) in the training set and 0.853 (95%CI, 0.752-0.940) in the testing set. CONCLUSIONS: The machine-learning approach based on radiomics and delta-radiomics helped to differentiate SPLAs from MPLAs. The FC-delta with a longer follow-up duration could better distinguish between SPLAs and MPLAs.

The CT-based intratumoral and peritumoral machine learning radiomics analysis in predicting lymph node metastasis in rectal carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: To construct clinical and machine learning nomogram for predicting the lymph node metastasis (LNM) status of rectal carcinoma (RC) based on radiomics and clinical characteristics. METHODS: 788 RC patients were enrolled from January 2015 to January 2021, including 303 RCs with LNM and 485 RCs without LNM. The radiomics features were calculated and selected with the methods of variance, correlation analysis, and gradient boosting decision tree. After feature selection, the machine learning algorithms of Bayes, k-nearest neighbor (KNN), logistic regression (LR), support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree (DT) were used to construct prediction models. The clinical characteristics combined with intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics was taken to develop a radiomics and machine learning nomogram. The relative standard deviation (RSD) was used to predict the stability of machine learning algorithms. The area under curves (AUCs) with 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated to evaluate the predictive efficacy of all models. RESULTS: To intratumoral radiomics analysis, the RSD of Bayes was minimal compared with other four machine learning algorithms. The AUCs of arterial-phase based intratumoral Bayes model (0.626 and 0.627) were higher than these of unenhanced-phase and venous-phase ones in both the training and validation group.The AUCs of intratumoral and peritumoral Bayes model were 0.656 in the training group and were 0.638 in the validation group, and the relevant Bayes-score was quantified. The clinical-Bayes nomogram containing significant clinical variables of diameter, PNI, EMVI, CEA, and CA19-9, and Bayes-score was constructed. The AUC (95%CI), specificity, and sensitivity of this nomogram was 0.828 (95%CI, 0.800-0.854), 74.85%, and 77.23%. CONCLUSION: Intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics can help predict the LNM status of RCs. The machine learning algorithm of Bayes in arterial-phase conducted better in consideration of terms of RSD and AUC. The clinical-Bayes nomogram achieved a better performance in predicting the LNM status of RCs.

The comparison of biomechanical effects of the conventional and bone-borne palatal expanders on late adolescence with unilateral cleft palate: a 3-dimensional finite element analysis.

BACKGROUND: Patients with unilateral cleft lip and palate were associated with different nasomaxillary complex from the normal population. Although the biomechanical effects of conventional rapid palatal expansion (Hyrax expansion) and bone-borne rapid palatal expansion (micro-implant-assisted expansion) in non-cleft patients have been identified by multiple studies, little is known in patients with unilateral cleft lip and palate. The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the biomechanical effects of the conventional and bone-borne palatal expanders in a late adolescence with unilateral cleft lip and palate. METHODS: A cone beam CT scan of a late adolescence with unilateral cleft lip and palate was selected to construct the three-dimensional finite element models of teeth and craniofacial structures. The models of conventional and born-borne palatal expanders were established to simulate the clinical maxillary expansion. The geometric nonlinear theory was applied to evaluate the Von Mises stress distribution and displacements in craniofacial structures and teeth. RESULTS: Bone-borne palatal expander achieved more transverse movement than conventional palatal expander in the whole mount of craniofacial regions, and the maximum amount of expansion was occurred anteriorly along the alveolar ridge on cleft-side. The expanding force from born-borne palatal expander resulted in more advancement in nasomaxillary complex than it in conventional palatal expander, especially in the anterior area of the minor segment of maxilla. Stresses from the both expanders distributed in similar patterns, but larger magnitudes and ranges were generated using the bone-borne expander around the maxillary buttresses and pterygoid plates of sphenoid bone. The maximum expanding stresses from born-borne palatal expander were concentrated on palatal slope supporting minscrews, whereas those from conventional palatal expander were concentrated on the anchoring molars. In addition, the buccal tipping effect of teeth generated using the bone-borne expander was less than it using the conventional palatal expander. CONCLUSION: Bone-borne expander generated enhanced skeletal expansion at the levels of alveolar and palate in transversal direction, where the miniscrews contributed increased expanding forces to maxillary buttresses and decreased forces to buccal alveolar. Bone-borne expanders presented a superiority in correcting the asymmetric maxilla without surgical assistant in late adolescence with unilateral cleft lip and palate.

ß3-Endonexin interacts with ninein in vascular endothelial cells to promote angiogenesis.

Anti-angiogenesis serves as an effective tumor therapy approach. In a previous study, we found that ß3-endonexin expressed in vascular endothelial cells was involved in promoting proliferation and angiogenesis partially by facilitating VEGF expression. However, it still remains unclear if ß3-endonexin in vascular endothelial cells also employs other mechanisms in regulating angiogenesis. In this study, we utilized a ß3-endonexin mutant (M2) carrying a defective nuclear localization sequence to disrupt its nuclear localization and evaluated its ability to promote HUVEC proliferation and formation of tube-like vascular structures. In addition, we performed yeast 2-hybrid assay to identify potential functional effectors of ß3-endonexin. We found that both wild type ß3-endonexin and the M2 mutant could localize to centrosomes in HUVECs and both were able to promote HUVEC proliferation and formation of vascular structures. However, the M2 mutant failed to promote VEGF expression in HUVECs. Further, we found that both wild type ß3-endonexin and the M2 mutant were capable of binding to ninein, a centrosomal protein with a proangiogenic effect. Knockdown of ninein in HUVECs impeded centrosome localization of wild type ß3-endonexin and the M2 mutant and inhibited HUVEC proliferation and formation of vascular structures. Taken together, these findings suggest that ß3-endonexin interacts with centrosome ninein and contributes to HUVEC proliferation and formation of vascular structures.

Extraction of Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Order Parton Distribution Functions from Lattice QCD Calculations.

We present for the first time complete next-to-next-to-leading-order coefficient functions to match flavor nonsinglet quark correlation functions in position space, which are calculable in lattice QCD, to parton distribution functions (PDFs). Using PDFs extracted from experimental data and our calculated matching coefficients, we predict valence-quark correlation functions that can be confronted by lattice QCD calculations. The uncertainty of our predictions is greatly reduced with higher order matching coefficients. By performing Fourier transformation, we also obtain matching coefficients for corresponding quasi-PDFs and pseudo-PDFs. Our method of calculations can be readily generalized to evaluate the matching coefficients for sea-quark and gluon correlation functions, making the program to extract partonic structure of hadrons from lattice QCD calculations comparable with and complementary to that from experimental measurements.

Multiple Regulation Effects of Ammonium Acetate on ZnO Growth Process in Chemical Bath Deposition.

Chemical bath deposition method has been used to synthesize a variety of ZnO morphology structures. However, the specificity and interaction of acetate and ammonium ions with ZnO crystal during the growth process remain elusive. This study contributes to understand the roles of ammonium acetate on the growth mechanism of ZnO in Zn(NO3 )2 -HMTA system. The growth process indicates that the nucleation experienced Zn2+ -layered basic zinc salts (LBZs)-ZnO process, while the self-assembled unit changed from urchin-shaped, rod-shaped to a fully coupled twin-shaped structure with increasing ammonium acetate concentration. Ammonium acetate dominates the growth process by combing the ligand-ligand interaction of acetate ions binding to the same Zn-rich (0001) polar surface and ammonium ions regulating hexamethylenetetramine (HMTA) hydrolysis. Relatively regular hexagonal wurtzite structure and a dissolve-renucleation-regrowth process which retains the twin-shaped template and renucleates at the same position are observed at ∼10 mM ammonium acetate. Photoelectrochemistry (PEC) measurements show that the uniform hexagonal ZnO rods (Y-10, the sample named as Y-x (x represents x mM ammonium acetate, herein, x is 10 mM)) have a maximum photocurrent density of 1.54 mA cm-2 at 1.23 V (vs. RHE), much higher than that of the dumbbell-shaped ZnO rods (Y-50, 0.20 mA cm-2 ) at the same voltage. These results provide a further explanation of morphology regulation mechanisms on ZnO synthesis processes and pave the road for more practical applications.

Circular RNA profiling facilitates the diagnosis and prognostic monitoring of breast cancer: A pair-wise meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: As circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been found to significantly involve in the onset and progression of multiple malignant tumors including breast cancer (BC), this study aims at evaluating the diagnostic and prognostic values of circRNAs in this malady. METHODS: Available databases were thoroughly searched to collect studies on the diagnosis and/or prognosis of BC using circRNA profiling. The updated Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies 2 (QUADAS-2) tool and the Newcastle Ottawa Scale (NOS) were used to assess the underlying bias of included studies. Clinical characteristics of the studies were merged by the quantitative-weighted integral method to obtain the combined effects. RESULTS: Sixteen studies were included, comprising 2438 BC cases and 271 noncancerous controls. The expression signature covered 24 circRNAs (down-regulated: circ-VRK1, hsa_circ_0068033, hsa_circ_103110, hsa_circ_104689, and hsa_circ_104821; up-regulated: circAGFG1, hsa_circ_0001785, hsa_circ_0108942, hsa_circ_0001785, hsa_circ_006054, hsa_circ_100219, hsa_circ_406697, circEPSTI1, circANKS1B, circGFRA1, circ_0103552, CDR1-AS, has_circ_001569, hsa_circ_001783, circFBXL5, circ_0005230, circAGFG1, circ-UBAP2, and circ_0006528). The sensitivity and specificity of circRNAs in distinguishing BC patients from noncancerous controls were 0.65 and 0.68, and the corresponding area under the curve was 0.66. Survival analysis revealed that patients showing highly expressed oncogenic circRNAs were associated with increased mortality risks of BC in overall survival (univariate analysis: hazard ratio [HR] = 3.30, P = .000; multivariate analysis: HR = 3.07, P = .000), and disease-free survival (HR = 8.26, P = .000). Stratified analysis based on circRNA expression status and control type also showed robust results. CONCLUSIONS: Circular RNA profiling presents prominent diagnostic and prognostic values in BC, and can be rated as a promising tool facilitating its early diagnosis and survival.

Full-length mRNA sequencing and gene expression profiling reveal broad involvement of natural antisense transcript gene pairs in pepper development and response to stresses.

Pepper is an important vegetable with great economic value and unique biological features. In the past few years, significant development has been made toward understanding the huge complex pepper genome; however, pepper functional genomics has not been well studied. To better understand the pepper gene structure and pepper gene regulation, we conducted full-length mRNA sequencing by PacBio sequencing and obtained 57 862 high-quality full-length mRNA sequences derived from 18 362 previously annotated and 5769 newly detected genes. New gene models were built that combined the full-length mRNA sequences and corrected approximately 500 fragmented gene models from previous annotations. Based on the full-length mRNA, we identified 4114 and 5880 pepper genes forming natural antisense transcript (NAT) genes in-cis and in-trans, respectively. Most of these genes accumulate small RNAs in their overlapping regions. By analyzing these NAT gene expression patterns in our transcriptome data, we identified many NAT pairs responsive to a variety of biological processes in pepper. Pepper formate dehydrogenase 1 (FDH1), which is required for R-gene-mediated disease resistance, may be regulated by nat-siRNAs and participate in a positive feedback loop in salicylic acid biosynthesis during resistance responses. Several cis-NAT pairs and subgroups of trans-NAT genes were responsive to pepper pericarp and placenta development, which may play roles in capsanthin and capsaicin biosynthesis. Using a comparative genomics approach, the evolutionary mechanisms of cis-NATs were investigated, and we found that an increase in intergenic sequences accounted for the loss of most cis-NATs, while transposon insertion contributed to the formation of most new cis-NATs. OPEN RESEARCH BADGES: This article has earned an Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally-shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at http://bigd.big.ac.cn/gsa Accession number, CRA001412.

A novel single-base mutation in CaBRI1 confers dwarf phenotype and brassinosteroid accumulation in pepper.

Dwarfing is the development trend of pepper breeding. It is of great practical and scientific value to generate new dwarf germplasms, and identify new genes or alleles conferring dwarf traits in pepper. In our previous study, a weakly BR-insensitive dwarf mutant, E29, was obtained by EMS mutagenesis of the pepper inbred line 6421. It can be used as a good parent material for breeding new dwarf varieties. Here, we found that this dwarf phenotype was controlled by a single recessive gene. Whole-genome resequencing, dCAPs analysis, and VIGs validation revealed that this mutation was caused by a nonsynonymous single-nucleotide mutation (C to T) in CaBRI1. An enzyme activity assay, transcriptome sequencing, and BL content determination further revealed that an amino-acid change (Pro1157Ser) in the serine/threonine protein kinase and catalytic (S_TKc) domain of CaBRI1 impaired its kinase activity and caused the transcript levels of two important genes (CaDWF4 and CaROT3) participating in BR biosynthesis to increase dramatically in the E29 mutant, accompanied by significantly increased accumulation of brassinolide (BL). Therefore, we concluded that the novel single-base mutation in CaBRI1 conferred the dwarf phenotype and resulted in brassinosteroid (BR) accumulation in pepper. This study provides a new allelic variant of the height-regulating gene CaBRI1 that has theoretical and practical values for the breeding of the plants suitable for the facility cultivation and mechanized harvesting of pepper varieties.

Integrative Transcriptome and Proteome Analysis Identifies Major Metabolic Pathways Involved in Pepper Fruit Development.

Pepper ( Capsicum annuum L.) fruit development is a complex and genetically programmed process. In this study, we conducted integrative analysis of transcriptome and proteome profiles during pepper fruit development. A total of 23 349 transcripts and 5455 protein groups were identified in four fruit developmental stages of two pepper varieties. The numbers of transcripts and proteins identified were decreased gradually across fruit development, and the most significant changes in transcript and protein levels happened from the mature green (MG) to breaker (Br) stages. Poor correlation between differentially expressed transcript and differentially expressed protein profiles was observed during pepper fruit development. We then analyzed expression profiles of transcripts and proteins involved in cell wall metabolism, and capsanthin, tocopherol, and ascorbate biosynthetic pathways during fruit development, and identified key regulatory proteins in these pathways. We presented a dynamic picture of pepper fruit development via comprehensive analysis of transcriptome and proteome profiles at different fruit developmental stages and in different varieties, revealing the temporal specificity of key protein expression. Our report provides insight into the transcription and translation dynamics of pepper fruit development and a reference for other nonclimacteric species.