Effects of different ecological restoration methods on the soil physicochemical properties and vegetation community characteristics of the Baotou light rare earth tailings pond in Inner Mongolia, China.

This study investigated the soil physicochemical properties and vegetation community characteristics of the Baotou light rare earth tailings pond after 10 years of aggregate spray seeding ecological restoration (S1) and ordinary soil spray seeding ecological restoration (S2), and the naturally restored dam slope area without human intervention (S3). The results showed that the vegetation community of S1 was dominated by Caragana korshinskii Kom, and its importance and abundance values were 0.40 and 38.4, respectively, while the vegetation communities of S2 and S3 mainly comprised herbaceous plants. Additionally, the vegetation biomass of S1 was significantly higher than that of S2 and S3 by 215.20% and 1345.76%, respectively, and the vegetation diversity index of S1 was the highest among the three treatment groups. The soil porosity (SP), water content (W), electrical conductivity (EC), and available K were significantly improved in S1, while soil bulk density (BD) was significantly reduced compared with that of S2 and S3. In addition, redundancy analysis revealed that SP, EC, W, and K positively correlate with the biomass, Shannon, Pielou, Simpson, and Marglef indices. Principal component analysis further showed that the comprehensive score of S1 (0.983) was higher than that of S2 (- 0.261) and S3 (- 0.648). Collectively, these findings indicate that appropriate ecological restoration can improve soil structure and vegetation community characteristics, thereby accelerating vegetation restoration, ultimately increasing the stability of the ecosystem.

Structural Basis for the Enzymatic Activity of the HACE1 HECT-Type E3 Ligase Through N-Terminal Helix Dimerization.

HACE1 is an ankyrin repeat (AKR) containing HECT-type E3 ubiquitin ligase that interacts with and ubiquitinates multiple substrates. While HACE1 is a well-known tumor suppressor, its structure and mode of ubiquitination are not understood. The authors present the cryo-EM structures of human HACE1 along with in vitro functional studies that provide insights into how the enzymatic activity of HACE1 is regulated. HACE1 comprises of an N-terminal AKR domain, a middle (MID) domain, and a C-terminal HECT domain. Its unique G-shaped architecture interacts as a homodimer, with monomers arranged in an antiparallel manner. In this dimeric arrangement, HACE1 ubiquitination activity is hampered, as the N-terminal helix of one monomer restricts access to the C-terminal domain of the other. The in vitro ubiquitination assays, hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) analysis, mutagenesis, and in silico modeling suggest that the HACE1 MID domain plays a crucial role along with the AKRs in RAC1 substrate recognition.

Infrared and Visible Image Fusion through Details Preservation.

In many actual applications, fused image is essential to contain high-quality details for achieving a comprehensive representation of the real scene. However, existing image fusion methods suffer from loss of details because of the error accumulations of sequential tasks. This paper proposes a novel fusion method to preserve details of infrared and visible images by combining new decomposition, feature extraction, and fusion scheme. For decomposition, different from the most decomposition methods by guided filter, the guidance image contains only the strong edge of the source image but no other interference information so that rich tiny details can be decomposed into the detailed part. Then, according to the different characteristics of infrared and visible detail parts, a rough convolutional neural network (CNN) and a sophisticated CNN are designed so that various features can be fully extracted. To integrate the extracted features, we also present a multi-layer features fusion strategy through discrete cosine transform (DCT), which not only highlights significant features but also enhances details. Moreover, the base parts are fused by weighting method. Finally, the fused image is obtained by adding the fused detail and base part. Different from the general image fusion methods, our method not only retains the target region of source image but also enhances background in the fused image. In addition, compared with state-of-the-art fusion methods, our proposed fusion method has many advantages, including (i) better visual quality of fused-image subjective evaluation, and (ii) better objective assessment for those images.