Modeling analysis of COVID-19 based on morbidity data in Anhui, China.

Since the first case of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan Hubei, China, was reported in December 2019, COVID-19 has spread rapidly across the country and overseas. The first case in Anhui, a province of China, was reported on January 10, 2020. In the field of infectious diseases, modeling, evaluating and predicting the rate of disease transmission is very important for epidemic prevention and control. Different intervention measures have been implemented starting from different time nodes in the country and Anhui, the epidemic may be divided into three stages for January 10 to February 11, 2020, namely. We adopted interrupted time series method and develop an SEI/QR model to analyse the data. Our results displayed that the lockdown of Wuhan implemented on January 23, 2020 reduced the contact rate of epidemic transmission in Anhui province by 48.37%, and centralized quarantine management policy for close contacts in Anhui reduced the contact rate by an additional 36.97%. At the same time, the estimated basic reproduction number gradually decreased from the initial 2.9764 to 0.8667 and then to 0.5725. We conclude that the Wuhan lockdown and the centralized quarantine management policy in Anhui played a crucial role in the timely and effective mitigation of the epidemic in Anhui. One merit of this work is the adoption of morbidity data which may reflect the epidemic more accurately and promptly. Our estimated parameters are largely in line with the World Health Organization estimates and previous studies.

Increasing fluorescence lifetime for resolution improvement in stimulated emission depletion nanoscopy.

Super-resolution microscopy (SRM) has had a substantial impact on the biological sciences due to its ability to observe tiny objects less than 200 nm in size. Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy represents a major category of these SRM techniques that can achieve diffraction-unlimited resolution based on a purely optical modulation of fluorescence behaviors. Here, we investigated how the laser beams affect fluorescence lifetime in both confocal and STED imaging modes. The results showed that with increasing illumination time, the fluorescence lifetime in two kinds of fluorescent microspheres had an obvious change in STED imaging mode, compared with that in confocal imaging mode. As a result, the reduction of saturation intensity induced by the increase of fluorescence lifetime can improve the STED imaging resolution at the same depletion power. The phenomenon was also observed in Star635P-labeled human Nup153 in fixed HeLa cells, which can be treated as a reference for the synthesis of fluorescent labels with the sensitivity to the surrounding environment for resolution improvement in STED nanoscopy.

[Ghd7, a pleiotropic gene controlling flag leaf area in rice].

Photosynthesis is the unique source of energy for plant. Flag leaf contributed the majority of photosynthate after rice flowering. Ghd7 is a pleiotropic gene, which can significantly increase rice production. In order to study the genetic effects of Ghd7 on the flag leaf morphology, we made quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis for flag leaf length (FLL), flag leaf width (FLW), and flag leaf area (FLA) using a Ghd7-BC2F2 population of 190 plants. In the BC2F2 population, the frequency distribution of FLL, FLW, and FLA were bimodal and in agreement with single Mendelian segregation ratio (3:1). FLL, FLW, and FLA were positively correlated with grains per panicle in the population. One QTL was mapped to the in-terval between markers RM3859 and C39 on chromosome 7, which explained 73.3%, 62.3%, and 71.8% of the variations for FLL, FLW, and FLA, and co-segregated with Ghd7. Two near-isogenic lines of NIL (mh7) and NIL (tq7) were devel-oped using Zhenshan 97 as the recurrent parent and Minghui 63 and Teqing as the donor parent, respectively. Both NILs significantly increased the phenotypic values of FLL, FLW, and FLA as compared with Zhenshan 97. FLL, The values of FLW and FLA for Ghd7 over-expression transgenic plants were 8.9 cm, 0.5 cm, and 17.8 cm2 larger than its recipient Heji-ang 19. These results demonstrated that Ghd7 plays an important role in controlling the flag leaf area in rice.