Spray Pyrolysis Regulated FeCo Alloy Anchoring on Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Hollow Spheres Boost the Performance of Zinc-Air Batteries.

Low-cost and high-efficiency non-precious metal-based oxygen reduction reaction (ORR)/oxygen evolution reaction (OER) bifunctional catalysts are the key to promoting the commercial application of metal-air batteries. Herein, a highly efficient catalyst of Fe0.18Co0.82 alloy anchoring on the nitrogen-doped porous carbon hollow sphere (FexCo1-x/N-C) is intelligently designed by spray pyrolysis (SP). The zinc in the SP-derived metal oxides and metal-organic framework volatilize at high temperature to construct a hierarchical porous structure with abundant defects and fully exposes the FeCo nanoparticles which uniformly anchor on the carbon substrate. In this structure, the coexistence of Fe0.18Co0.82 alloy and binary metal active sites (Fe-Nx/Co-Nx) guarantees the Fe0.2Co0.8/N-C catalyst exhibiting an excellent half-wave potential (E1/2 ═ 0.84 V) superior to 20% Pt/C for ORR and a suppressed overpotential (280 mV) than RuO2 for OER. Assembled rechargeable Zn-air battery (RZAB) demonstrates a promising specific capacity of 807.02 mAh g-1, peak power density of 159.08 mW cm-2 and durability without electrolyte circulation (550 h). This work proposes the design concept of utilizing an oxide core to in situ consume the porous carbon shell for anchoring metal active sites and construct defects, which benefits from spray pyrolysis in achieving precise control of the alloy structure and mass preparation.

Breaking the Solubility Limit of LiNO3 in Carbonate Electrolyte Assisted by BF3 to Construct a Stable SEI Film for Dendrite-Free Lithium Metal Batteries.

Lithium (Li) metal is regarded as a potential candidate for the next generation of lithium secondary batteries, but it has poor cycling stability with the broadly used carbonate-based electrolytes due to the uncontrollable dendritic growth and low Coulombic efficiency (CE). LiNO3 is an effective additive and its limited solubility (<800 ppm) in carbonate-based electrolytes is still a challenge, as reported. Herein, using BF3 (Lewis acid) is proposed to enhance the solubility of LiNO3 in carbonate-based electrolytes. The dissolved NO3 - can be involved in the first solvation shell of Li+, reducing the coordination number of PF6 - and EC (ethylene carbonate). In addition, the NO3 - is proved to be preferentially reduced on Li metal by differential electrochemical mass spectrometry so that the decomposition of PF6 - and EC is suppressed. Therefore, a SEI layer containing Li3N can be obtained, which exhibits high lithium-ion conductivity, achieving even and dense Li deposits. Consequently, the CE of Li||Cu cell with BF3/LiNO3 can be increased to 98.07%. Moreover, the capacity retention of Li||LiFePO4 with a low N/P ratio (3:1) is as high as 90% after 300 cycles (≈1500 h). This work paved a new way for incorporating LiNO3 into carbonate-based electrolytes and high-performance lithium metal batteries.

High-resolution spiral real-time cardiac cine imaging with deep learning-based rapid image reconstruction and quantification.

The objective of the current study was to develop and evaluate a DEep learning-based rapid Spiral Image REconstruction (DESIRE) and deep learning (DL)-based segmentation approach to quantify the left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) for high-resolution spiral real-time cine imaging, including 2D balanced steady-state free precession imaging at 1.5 T and gradient echo (GRE) imaging at 1.5 and 3 T. A 3D U-Net-based image reconstruction network and 2D U-Net-based image segmentation network were proposed and evaluated. Low-rank plus sparse (L+S) served as the reference for the image reconstruction network and manual contouring of the left ventricle was the reference of the segmentation network. To assess the image reconstruction quality, structural similarity index, peak signal-to-noise ratio, normalized root-mean-square error, and blind grading by two experienced cardiologists (5: excellent; 1: poor) were performed. To assess the segmentation performance, quantification of the LVEF on GRE imaging at 3 T was compared with the quantification from manual contouring. Excellent performance was demonstrated by the proposed technique. In terms of image quality, there was no difference between L+S and the proposed DESIRE technique. For quantification analysis, the proposed DL method was not different to the manual segmentation method (p > 0.05) in terms of quantification of LVEF. The reconstruction time for DESIRE was ~32 s (including nonuniform fast Fourier transform [NUFFT]) per dynamic series (40 frames), while the reconstruction time of L+S with GPU acceleration was approximately 3 min. The DL segmentation takes less than 5 s. In conclusion, the proposed DL-based image reconstruction and quantification techniques enabled 1-min image reconstruction for the whole heart and quantification with automatic reconstruction and quantification of the left ventricle function for high-resolution spiral real-time cine imaging with excellent performance.

Uncovering the Redox Shuttle Degradation Mechanism of Ether Electrolytes in Sodium-Ion Batteries and its Inhibition Strategy.

Ether-based electrolytes exhibit excellent performance when applied in different anode materials of sodium ion batteries (SIBs), but their exploration on cathode material is deficient and the degradation mechanism is still undiscovered. Herein, various battery systems with different operation voltage ranges are designed to explore the electrochemical performance of ether electrolyte. It is found for the first time that the deterioration mechanism of ether electrolyte is closely related to the "redox shuttle" between cathode and low-potential anode. The "shuttle" is discovered to occur when the potential of anodes is below 0.57 V, and the gas products coming from "shuttle" intermediates are revealed by differential electrochemical mass spectrometry (DEMS). Moreover, effective inhibition strategies by protecting low-potential anodes are proposed and verified; ethylene carbonate (EC) is found to be very effective as an additive by forming an inorganics-rich solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) on low-potential anodes, thereby suppressing the deterioration of ether electrolytes. This work reveals the failure mechanism of ether-based electrolytes applied in SIBs and proposes effective strategies to suppress the "shuttle," which provides a valuable guidance for advancing the application of ether-based electrolytes in SIBs.

Effects of stacking breeding on the methylome and transcriptome profile of transgenic rice with glyphosate tolerance.

MAIN CONCLUSION: Transcriptomics and methylomics were used to identify the potential effects resulting from GM rice breeding stacks, which provided scientific data for the safety assessment strategy of stacked GM crops in China. Gene interaction is one of the main concerns for stacked genetically modified crop safety. With the development of technology, the combination of omics and bioinformatics has become a useful tool to evaluate the unintended effects of genetically modified crops. In this study, transcriptomics and methylomics were used as molecular profiling techniques to identify the potential effects of stack through breeding. Stacked transgenic rice En-12 × Ec-26 was used as material, which was obtained through hybridization using parents En-12 and Ec-26, in which the foreign protein can form functional EPSPS protein by intein-mediated trans-splitting. Differentially methylated region (DMR) analysis showed that the effect of stacking breeding on methylation was less than that of genetic transformation at the methylome level. Differentially expressed gene (DEG) analysis showed that the DEGs between En-12 × Ec-26 and its parents were far fewer than those between transgenic rice and Zhonghua 11 (ZH11), and no unintended new genes were found in En-12 × Ec-26. Statistical analysis of gene expression and methylation involved in shikimic acid metabolism showed that there was no difference in gene expression, although there were 16 and 10 DMR genes between En-12 × Ec-26 and its parents (En and Ec) in methylation, respectively. The results indicated that the effect of stacking breeding on gene expression and DNA methylation was less than the effect of genetic transformation. This study provides scientific data supporting safety assessments of stacked GM crops in China.

Concomitant magnetic-field compensation for 2D spiral-ring turbo spin-echo imaging at 0.55T and 1.5T.

PURPOSE: To develop 2D turbo spin-echo (TSE) imaging using annular spiral rings (abbreviated "SPRING-RIO TSE") with compensation of concomitant gradient fields and B0 inhomogeneity at both 0.55T and 1.5T for fast T2 -weighted imaging. METHODS: Strategies of gradient waveform modifications were implemented in SPRING-RIO TSE for compensation of self-squared concomitant gradient terms at the TE and across echo spacings, along with reconstruction-based corrections to simultaneously compensate for the residual concomitant gradient and B0 field induced phase accruals along the readout. The signal pathway disturbance caused by time-varying and spatially dependent concomitant fields was simulated, and echo-to-echo phase variations before and after sequence-based compensation were compared. Images from SPRING-RIO TSE with no compensation, with compensation, and Cartesian TSE were also compared via phantom and in vivo acquisitions. RESULTS: Simulation showed how concomitant fields affected the signal evolution with no compensation, and both simulation and phantom studies demonstrated the performance of the proposed sequence modifications, as well as the readout off-resonance corrections. Volunteer data showed that after full correction, the SPRING-RIO TSE sequence achieved high image quality with improved SNR efficiency (15%-20% increase), and reduced RF SAR (˜50% reduction), compared to the standard Cartesian TSE, presenting potential benefits, especially in regaining SNR at low-field (0.55T). CONCLUSION: Implementation of SPRING-RIO TSE with concomitant field compensation was tested at 0.55T and 1.5T. The compensation principles can be extended to correct for other trajectory types that are time-varying along the echo train and temporally asymmetric in TSE-based imaging.

Role of the Nitrogen Metabolism Regulator TAM1 in Regulation of Cellulase Gene Expression in Trichoderma reesei.

The filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei is one of the most prolific cellulase producers and has been established as a model microorganism for investigating mechanisms modulating eukaryotic gene expression. Identification and functional characterization of transcriptional regulators involved in complex and stringent regulation of cellulase genes are, however, not yet complete. Here, a Zn(II)2Cys6-type transcriptional factor TAM1 that is homologous to Aspergillus nidulans TamA involved in nitrogen metabolism, was found not only to regulate ammonium utilization but also to control cellulase gene expression in T. reesei. Whereas Δtam1 cultivated with peptone as a nitrogen source did not exhibit a growth defect that was observed on ammonium, it was still significantly compromised in cellulase biosynthesis. The absence of TAM1 almost fully abrogated the rapid cellulase gene induction in a resting-cell-inducing system. Overexpression of gdh1 encoding the key ammonium assimilatory enzyme in Δtam1 rescued the growth defect on ammonium but not the defect in cellulase gene expression. Of note, mutation of the Zn(II)2Cys6 DNA-binding motif of TAM1 hardly affected cellulase gene expression, while a truncated ARE1 mutant lacking the C-terminal 12 amino acids that are required for the interaction with TAM1 interfered with cellulase biosynthesis. The defect in cellulase induction of Δtam1 was rescued by overexpression of the key transactivator for cellulase gene, XYR1. Our results thus identify a nitrogen metabolism regulator as a new modulator participating in the regulation of induced cellulase gene expression. IMPORTANCE Transcriptional regulators are able to integrate extracellular nutrient signals and exert a combinatorial control over various metabolic genes. A plethora of such factors therefore constitute a complex regulatory network ensuring rapid and accurate cellular response to acquire and utilize nutrients. Despite the in-depth mechanistic studies of functions of the Zn(II)2Cys6-type transcriptional regulator TamA and its orthologues in nitrogen utilization, their involvement in additional physiological processes remains unknown. In this study, we demonstrated that TAM1 exerts a dual regulatory role in mediating ammonium utilization and induced cellulase production in the well known cellulolytic fungus Trichoderma reesei, suggesting a potentially converged regulatory node between nitrogen utilization and cellulase biosynthesis. This study not only contributes to unveiling the intricate regulatory network underlying cellulase gene expression in cellulolytic fungus but also helps expand our knowledge of fungal strategies to achieve efficient and coordinated nutrient acquisition for rapid propagation.

Dynamic cardiac MRI with high spatiotemporal resolution using accelerated spiral-out and spiral-in/out bSSFP pulse sequences at 1.5 T.

OBJECTIVE: To develop two spiral-based bSSFP pulse sequences combined with L + S reconstruction for accelerated ungated, free-breathing dynamic cardiac imaging at 1.5 T. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Tiny golden angle rotated spiral-out and spiral-in/out bSSFP sequences combined with view-sharing (VS), compressed sensing (CS), and low-rank plus sparse (L + S) reconstruction were evaluated and compared via simulation and in vivo dynamic cardiac imaging studies. The proposed methods were then validated against the standard cine, in terms of quantitative image assessment and qualitative quality rating. RESULTS: The L + S method yielded the least residual artifacts and the best image sharpness among the three methods. Both spiral cine techniques showed clinically diagnostic images (score > 3). Compared to standard cine, there were significant differences in global image quality and edge sharpness for spiral cine techniques, while there was significant difference in image contrast for the spiral-out cine but no significant difference for the spiral-in/out cine. There was good agreement in left ventricular ejection fraction for both the spiral-out cine (- 1.6 [Formula: see text] 3.1%) and spiral-in/out cine (- 1.5 [Formula: see text] 2.8%) against standard cine. DISCUSSION: Compared to the time-consuming standard cine (~ 5 min) which requires ECG-gating and breath-holds, the proposed spiral bSSFP sequences achieved ungated, free-breathing cardiac movies at a similar spatial (1.5 × 1.5 × 8 mm3) and temporal resolution (36 ms) per slice for whole heart coverage (10-15 slices) within 45 s, suggesting the clinical potential for improved patient comfort or for imaging patients with arrhythmias or who cannot hold their breath.

Concomitant field compensation of spiral turbo spin-echo at 0.55 T.

OBJECTIVE: Diagnostic-quality neuroimaging methods are vital for widespread clinical adoption of low field MRI. Spiral imaging is an efficient acquisition method that can mitigate the reduced signal-to-noise ratio at lower field strengths. As concomitant field artifacts are worse at lower field, we propose a generalizable quadratic gradient-field nulling as an echo-to-echo compensation and apply it to spiral TSE at 0.55 T. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A spiral in-out TSE acquisition was developed with a compensation for concomitant field variation between spiral interleaves, by adding bipolar gradients around each readout to minimize phase differences at each refocusing pulse. Simulations were performed to characterize concomitant field compensation approaches. We demonstrate our proposed compensation method in phantoms and (n = 8) healthy volunteers at 0.55 T. RESULTS: Spiral read-outs with integrated spoiling demonstrated strong concomitant field artifacts but were mitigated using the echo-to-echo compensation. Simulations predicted a decrease of concomitant field phase RMSE between echoes of 42% using the proposed compensation. Spiral TSE improved SNR by 17.2 ± 2.3% compared to reference Cartesian acquisition. DISCUSSION: We demonstrated a generalizable approach to mitigate concomitant field artifacts for spiral TSE acquisitions via the addition of quadratic-nulling gradients, which can potentially improve neuroimaging at low-field through increased acquisition efficiency.

SPRING-RIO TSE: 2D T2 -Weighted Turbo Spin-Echo brain imaging using SPiral RINGs with retraced in/out trajectories.

PURPOSE: To develop a new approach to 2D turbo spin -echo (TSE) imaging using annular spiral rings with a retraced in/out trajectory, dubbed "SPRING-RIO TSE", for fast T2 -weighted brain imaging at 3T. METHODS: A long spiral trajectory was split into annular segmentations that were then incorporated into a 2D TSE acquisition module to fully exploit the sampling efficiency of spiral rings. A retraced in/out trajectory strategy coupled with spiral-ring TSE was introduced to increase SNR, mitigate T2 -decay induced artifacts, and self-correct moderate off-resonance while maintaining the target TE and causing no scan time penalty. Model-based k-space estimation and semiautomatic off-resonance correction algorithms were implemented to minimize effects of k-space trajectory infidelity and B0 inhomogeneity, respectively. The resulting SPRING-RIO TSE method was compared to the original spiral-ring (abbreviated "SPRING") TSE and Cartesian TSE using simulations, and phantom and in vivo acquisitions. RESULTS: Simulation and phantom studies demonstrated the performance of the proposed SPRING-RIO TSE pulses sequence, as well as that of trajectory correction and off-resonance correction. Volunteer data showed that the proposed method achieves high-quality 2D T2 -weighted brain imaging with a higher scan efficiency (0:45 min/14 slices versus 1:31 min/14 slices), improved image contrast, and reduced specific absorption rate compared to conventional 2D Cartesian TSE. CONCLUSION: 2D T2 -weighted brain imaging using spiral-ring TSE was implemented and tested, providing several potential advantages over conventional 2D Cartesian TSE imaging.

Optimized multi-axis spiral projection MR fingerprinting with subspace reconstruction for rapid whole-brain high-isotropic-resolution quantitative imaging.

PURPOSE: To improve image quality and accelerate the acquisition of 3D MR fingerprinting (MRF). METHODS: Building on the multi-axis spiral-projection MRF technique, a subspace reconstruction with locally low-rank constraint and a modified spiral-projection spatiotemporal encoding scheme called tiny golden-angle shuffling were implemented for rapid whole-brain high-resolution quantitative mapping. Reconstruction parameters such as the locally low-rank regularization parameter and the subspace rank were tuned using retrospective in vivo data and simulated examinations. B0 inhomogeneity correction using multifrequency interpolation was incorporated into the subspace reconstruction to further improve the image quality by mitigating blurring caused by off-resonance effect. RESULTS: The proposed MRF acquisition and reconstruction framework yields high-quality 1-mm isotropic whole-brain quantitative maps in 2 min at better quality compared with 6-min acquisitions of prior approaches. The proposed method was validated to not induce bias in T1 and T2 mapping. High-quality whole-brain MRF data were also obtained at 0.66-mm isotropic resolution in 4 min using the proposed technique, where the increased resolution was shown to improve visualization of subtle brain structures. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed tiny golden-angle shuffling, MRF with optimized spiral-projection trajectory and subspace reconstruction enables high-resolution quantitative mapping in ultrafast acquisition time.

MEMe: A Mutually Enhanced Modeling Method for Efficient and Effective Human Pose Estimation.

In this paper, a mutually enhanced modeling method (MEMe) is presented for human pose estimation, which focuses on enhancing lightweight model performance, but with low complexity. To obtain higher accuracy, a traditional model scale is largely expanded with heavy deployment difficulties. However, for a more lightweight model, there is a large performance gap compared to the former; thus, an urgent need for a way to fill it. Therefore, we propose a MEMe to reconstruct a lightweight baseline model, EffBase transferred intuitively from EfficientDet, into the efficient and effective pose (EEffPose) net, which contains three mutually enhanced modules: the Enhanced EffNet (EEffNet) backbone, the total fusion neck (TFNeck), and the final attention head (FAHead). Extensive experiments on COCO and MPII benchmarks show that our MEMe-based models reach state-of-the-art performances, with limited parameters. Specifically, in the same conditions, our EEffPose-P0 with 256 × 192 can use only 8.98 M parameters to achieve 75.4 AP on the COCO val set, which outperforms HRNet-W48, but with only 14% of its parameters.

Filter Pruning via Measuring Feature Map Information.

Neural network pruning, an important method to reduce the computational complexity of deep models, can be well applied to devices with limited resources. However, most current methods focus on some kind of information about the filter itself to prune the network, rarely exploring the relationship between the feature maps and the filters. In this paper, two novel pruning methods are proposed. First, a new pruning method is proposed, which reflects the importance of filters by exploring the information in the feature maps. Based on the premise that the more information there is, more important the feature map is, the information entropy of feature maps is used to measure information, which is used to evaluate the importance of each filter in the current layer. Further, normalization is used to realize cross layer comparison. As a result, based on the method mentioned above, the network structure is efficiently pruned while its performance is well reserved. Second, we proposed a parallel pruning method using the combination of our pruning method above and slimming pruning method which has better results in terms of computational cost. Our methods perform better in terms of accuracy, parameters, and FLOPs compared to most advanced methods. On ImageNet, it is achieved 72.02% top1 accuracy for ResNet50 with merely 11.41M parameters and 1.12B FLOPs.For DenseNet40, it is obtained 94.04% accuracy with only 0.38M parameters and 110.72M FLOPs on CIFAR10, and our parallel pruning method makes the parameters and FLOPs are just 0.37M and 100.12M, respectively, with little loss of accuracy.

Glioma-derived endothelial cells promote glioma cells migration via extracellular vesicles-mediated transfer of MYO1C.

Extracellular vesicles (EV), as the intercellular information transfer molecules which can regulate the tumor microenvironment, promote migration and tumor progression. Previous studies reported that EV from endothelial cells was used to guide the fate and survival of gliomas, but many researches focus on normal human endothelial cells (NhEC) rather than tumor-derived endothelial cells. Our laboratory isolated human endothelial cells from glioma issue (GhEC). We have previously demonstrated that EV from GhEC and NhEC, which both can promote glioma stem cells (GSC) proliferation and tumorsphere formation in vitro and tumourigenicity in vivo by the transfer of CD9. However, NhEC-EV or GhEC-EV could suppress glioma cells (GC) proliferation in vitro. It demonstrates the undifferentiated impact of EV. Here, we first compared GhEC-EV proteins with NhEC-EV (Screening criteria: GhEC-EV/NhEC-EV, FC > 1.5), and obtained 70 differential expression proteins, most of which were associated with invasion and migration. We found that GhEC or GhEC-EV preferred promoting GC migration than treating with NhEC or NhEC-EV. In terms of mechanism, we further revealed that EV-mediated transfer of MYO1C induced glioma cell LN229 migration. Knockdown of MYO1C in GhEC or GhEC-EV suppressed this effect. Overexpression of MYO1C promoted migration on the contrary. MYO1C was also detected in glioma cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which is more suitable as a liquid biopsy biomarker and contributes to early diagnosis and monitoring in glioma. Our findings provide a new protein-MYO1C in EV to target tumor blood vessels, and bring a new point-cut to the treatment of gliomablastoma (GBM).

The application of gene splitting technique for controlling transgene flow in rice.

Controlling transgene flow in China is important, as this country is part of the center of origin of rice. A gene-splitting technique based on intein-mediated trans-splicing represents a new strategy for controlling transgene flow via biological measures. In this study, the G2-aroA gene which provides glyphosate tolerance was split into an N-terminal and a C-terminal region, which were then fused to intein N and intein C of the Ssp DnaE intein, ultimately forming EPSPSn:In and Ic:EPSPSc fusion genes, respectively. These fusion genes were subsequently transformed into the rice cultivar Zhonghua 11 via the Agrobacterium-mediated method. The two split gene fragments were then introduced into the same rice genome by genetic crossings. Glyphosate tolerance analysis revealed that the functional target protein was reconstituted by Ssp DnaE intein-mediated trans-splicing and that the resultant hybrid rice was glyphosate tolerant. The reassembly efficiency of the split gene fragments ranged from 67 to 91% at the molecular level, and 100% of the hybrid F1 progeny were glyphosate tolerant. Transgene flow experiments showed that when the split gene fragments are inserted into homologous chromosomes, the gene-splitting technique can completely avoid the escape of the target trait to the environment. This report is the first on the reassembly efficiency and effectiveness of transgene flow containment via gene splitting in rice. This study provides not only a new biological strategy for controlling rice transgene flow but also a new method for cultivating hybrid transgenic rice.

Advances in nanostructures fabricated via spray pyrolysis and their applications in energy storage and conversion.

Functional nanostructured materials have attracted great attention over the past several decades owing to their unique physical and chemical properties, while their applications have been proven to be advantageous not only in fundamental scientific areas, but also in many technological fields. Spray pyrolysis (SP), which is particularly facile, effective, highly scalable and suitable for on-line continuous production, offers significant potential for the rational design and synthesis of various functional nanostructured materials with tailorable composition and morphology. In this review, we summarize the recent progress in various functional nanostructured materials synthesized by SP and their potential applications in energy storage and conversion. After a brief introduction to the equipment, components, and working principles of the SP technique, we thoroughly describe the guidelines and strategies for designing particles with controlled morphology, composition, and interior architecture, including hollow structures, dense spheres, yolk-shell structures, core-shell structures, nanoplates, nanorods, nanowires, thin films, and various nanocomposites. Thereafter, we demonstrate their suitability for a wide range of energy storage and conversion applications, including electrode materials for rechargeable batteries, supercapacitors, highly active catalysts for hydrogen production, carbon dioxide reduction and fuel cells, and photoelectric materials for solar cells. Finally, the potential advantages and challenges of SP for the preparation of nanostructured materials are particularly emphasized and discussed, and several perspectives on future research and development directions of SP are highlighted. We expect that this continuous, one-pot, and controllable synthetic technology can serve as a reference for preparing various advanced functional materials for broader applications.

Effect on transcriptome and metabolome of stacked transgenic maize containing insecticidal cry and glyphosate tolerance epsps genes.

Gene stacking is a developing trend in agricultural biotechnology. Unintended effects in stacked transgenic plants are safety issues considered by the public and researchers. Omics techniques provide useful tools to assess unintended effects. In this paper, stacked transgenic maize 12-5×IE034 that contained insecticidal cry and glyphosate tolerance G10-epsps genes was obtained by crossing of transgenic maize varieties 12-5 and IE034. Transcriptome and metabolome analyses were performed for different maize varieties, including 12-5×IE034, 12-5, IE034, and conventional varieties collected from different provinces in China. The transcriptome results were as follows. The nine maize varieties had obvious differences in gene expression. There were 3561-5538 differentially expressed genes between 12-5×IE034 and its parents and transgenic receptor, which were far fewer than the number of differentially expressed genes in different traditional maize varieties. Cluster analysis indicated that there were close relationships between 12-5×IE034 and its parents. The metabolome results were as follows. For the nine detected maize varieties, the number of different metabolites ranged from 0 to 240. Compared with its parents, 12-5 and IE034, the hybrid variety 12-5×IE034 had 15 and 112 different metabolites, respectively. Hierarchical cluster analysis with Pearson's correlation analysis showed that the differences between 12-5×IE034 and its parents were fewer than those between other maize varieties. Shikimate pathway-related genes and metabolites analysis results showed that the effects of hybrid stacking are less than those from transformation and differing genotypes. Thus, the differences due to breeding stack were fewer than those due to natural variation among maize varieties. This paper provides scientific data for assessing unintended effects in stacked transgenic plants.

Long noncoding RNA HOXD-AS2 regulates cell cycle to promote glioma progression.

Now, numerous exciting findings have been found that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a vital role in cancer malignant progression. However, their potential involvement in glioma is not well understood. Here, we performed a high-throughput microarray to detect the lncRNA expression profiles between glioma cell lines and normal astrocyte cell lines. HOXD-AS2 was increased in glioma cells and it was associated with glioma grade and poor prognosis. Loss of HOXD-AS2 can inhibit glioma cell growth by inducing cell-cycle G1 arrest in vitro. The proliferation of glioma was inhibited followed by knocking down the expression of HOXD-AS2 not only in subcutaneous injection model but also in orthotopic implantation model. These findings indicate that HOXD-AS2 promotes the glioma progression and may serve as a potential target for glioma diagnosis and therapy.

Genetic variation assessment of stacked-trait transgenic maize via conventional breeding.

BACKGROUND: The safety assessment and control of stacked transgenic crops is increasingly important due to continuous crop development and is urgently needed in China. The genetic stability of foreign genes and unintended effects are the primary problems encountered in safety assessment. Omics techniques are useful for addressing these problems. The stacked transgenic maize variety 12-5 × IE034, which has insect-resistant and glyphosate-tolerant traits, was developed via a breeding stack using 12-5 and IE034 as parents. Using 12-5 × IE034, its parents (12-5 and IE034), and different maize varieties as materials, we performed proteomic profiling, molecular characterization and a genetic stability analysis. RESULTS: Our results showed that the copy number of foreign genes in 12-5 × IE034 is identical to that of its parents 12-5 and IE034. Foreign genes can be stably inherited over different generations. Proteomic profiling analysis found no newly expressed proteins in 12-5 × IE034, and the differences in protein expression between 12 and 5 × IE034 and its parents were within the range of variation of conventional maize varieties. The expression levels of key enzymes participating in the shikimic acid pathway which is related to glyphosate tolerance of 12-5 × IE034 were not significantly different from those of its parents or five conventional maize varieties, which indicated that without selective pressure by glyphosate, the introduced EPSPS synthase is not has a pronounced impact on the synthesis of aromatic amino acids in maize. CONCLUSIONS: Stacked-trait development via conventional breeding did not have an impact on the genetic stability of T-DNA, and the impact of stacked breeding on the maize proteome was less significant than that of genotypic differences. The results of this study provide a theoretical basis for the development of a safety assessment approach for stacked-trait transgenic crops in China.

Structural and Functional Analysis of a Bidirectional Promoter from Gossypium hirsutum in Arabidopsis.

Stacked traits have become an important trend in the current development of genomically modified crops. The bidirectional promoter can not only prevent the co-suppression of multigene expression, but also increase the efficiency of the cultivation of transgenic plants with multigenes. In Gossypium hirsutum, Ghrack1 and Ghuhrf1 are head-to-head gene pairs located on chromosome D09. We cloned the 1429-bp intergenic region between the Ghrack1 and Ghuhrf1 genes from Gossypium hirsutum. The cloned DNA fragment GhZU had the characteristics of a bidirectional promoter, with 38.7% G+C content, three CpG islands and no TATA-box. Using gfp and gus as reporter genes, a series of expression vectors were constructed into young leaves of tobacco. The histochemical GUS (Beta-glucuronidase) assay and GFP (green fluorescence protein) detection results indicated that GhZU could drive the expression of the reporter genes gus and gfp simultaneously in both orientations. Furthermore, we transformed the expression vectors into Arabidopsis and found that GUS was concentrated at vigorous growth sites, such as the leaf tip, the base of the leaves and pod, and the stigma. GFP was also mainly expressed in the epidermis of young leaves. In summary, we determined that the intergenic region GhZU was an orientation-dependent bidirectional promoter, and this is the first report on the bidirectional promoter from Gossypium hirsutum. Our findings in this study are likely to enhance understanding on the regulatory mechanisms of plant bidirectional promoters.