During Sep. 2011, forty-four Leymus chinensis culms with stroma development were collected from Inner Mongolia. Stromata surrounded the flag leaf sheathes, white, at the final stage of development. Perithecium but not asci were observed under microscope. Nine epichloid endophyte strains were obtained from Tongliao subdivision, and sixteen from Horqin. Morphological and phylogenetic properties of these strains were investigated. Morphological properties of these strains were similar among these 27 strains. Colonies could grow to 28.5~41.1 mm/21d at 25℃; phialides 24.1~26.4 μm long, 2.1~2.5 μm at base, tapering to less than 1.0 μm at tip; conidia reniform to elliptical, 4.7~5.5×2.8~3.5 μm, indicating typical properties of Epichloë endophytes. Based on the sequences of tefA and tubB gene fragments, strains isolated from Inner Mongolia formed a distinct subclade in E. bromolica/ E. yangzii clade, with a bootstrap value of 66% and 64% respectively. Considering morphological and phylogenetic properties, we tend to determine strains isolated from Leymus chinensis as a new taxon. The detailed taxonomic position of this taxon needs further investigations on hybridization or genomic sequence.
Adversarial learning-based image defogging methods have been extensively studied in computer vision due to their remarkable performance. However, most existing methods have limited defogging capabilities for real cases because they are trained on the paired clear and synthesized foggy images of the same scenes. In addition, they have limitations in preserving vivid color and rich textual details in defogging. To address these issues, we develop a novel generative adversarial network, called quad-path cycle consistent adversarial network (QPC-Net), for single image defogging. QPC-Net consists of a Fog2Fogfree block and a Fogfree2Fog block. In each block, there are three learning-based modules, namely, fog removal, color-texture recovery, and fog synthetic, which sequentially compose dual-path that constrain each other to generate high quality images. Specifically, the color-texture recovery model is designed to exploit the self-similarity of texture and structure information by learning the holistic channel-spatial feature correlations between the foggy image with its several derived images. Moreover, in the fog synthetic module, we utilize the atmospheric scattering model to guide it to improve the generative quality by focusing on an atmospheric light optimization with a novel sky segmentation network. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that QPC-Net outperforms state-of-the-art defogging methods in terms of quantitative accuracy and subjective visual quality.
Objectives: Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) is an emergency disease with undefined pathogenesis in the otolaryngology department. In our previous study, we found patients with SSNHL had lower serum concentration of Matrix metalloprotease 9 (MMP-9) than healthy controls, and the result was accordant with auto-immune diseases. This study aimed to reveal the correlation between changes in serum MMP-9 concentration following treatment with the outcomes of patients and to provide further evidence that immune disorder was the main pathogenesis of SSNHL. Design, setting, and participants: Fifty-two patients with SSNHL, hospitalized in The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University from March 2019 to August 2019, were enrolled. The serum concentration of MMP-9 was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Main outcome measure: The mean concentration of MMP-9 before treatment was compared with the post-treatment concentration by the Mann-Whitney U test. The correlations between favorable outcomes of patients and clinical characteristics were measured with the Chi-squared test and binary multiple logistic regression analysis. Results: In treatment responders, mean serum concentration was elevated from 106.85±41.40ng/ml to 144.03±37.65 ng/ml following treatment (P＜0.001), while in non-responders it decreased from 132.09±59.21 ng/ml to 106.82±49.93 ng/ml (P=0.142). Changes in MMP-9 concentration was the only factor associated with favorable outcomes (P=0.008, OR=5.13, 95% CI: 1.53-17.28). Conclusions: Elevated MMP-9 concentration is a potential prognosis biomarker in patients with SSNHL. These findings are in line with auto-immune diseases and indicate immune disorder is mainly pathogenesis in SSNHL. Keywords Sudden sensorineural hearing loss; Matrix metalloprotease 9; Immune disorder; prognosis; Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay
Background: A cooperative robot is a robot requested to co-work with humans efficiently and safely in an environment with flexible arrangements. Safe path planning is a crucial issue which must be resolved during human-robot cooperation. In this paper, we present a safe path planning system that could plan the manipulation path in real-time based on the environmental changes and guarantees safety when the robot interacts with the environment and humans. Methods: In this system, we first build a real-time obstacle Octomap from the environment RGB-D (red green blue-depth) images, which can effectively differentiate the robot from other obstacles in the environment and eliminate the robots influence during the map building. And then, we adopt the rapidly exploring random trees-Connect method to plan the safe path in the Octomap. When the planning path is obstructed by the dynamic objects, the system will re-plan the new safe path based on the changed Octomap. Results: The experimental results show that our system can effectively avoid obstacles in a dynamic environment and safely reach the manipulation destination. Conclusions: We propose a real-time safe path planning system for cooperative robots, which can guarantee the safety of manipulation.
Radiation induced cancer risks are driven by genetic instability. It is not well understood how different radiation sources induce genetic instability in cells with different genetic background. Here we report our studies on genetic instability, particularly chromosome instability using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), in human primary lymphocytes, normal human fibroblasts, and transformed human mammary epithelial cells in a temporal manner after exposure to high energy protons and Fe ions. The chromosome spread was prepared 48 hours, 1 week, 2 week, and 1 month after radiation exposure. Chromosome aberrations were analyzed with whole chromosome specific probes (chr. 3 and chr. 6). After exposure to protons and Fe ions of similar cumulative energy (??), Fe ions induced more chromosomal aberrations at early time point (48 hours) in all three types of cells. Over time (after 1 month), more chromosome aberrations were observed in cells exposed to Fe ions than in the same type of cells exposed to protons. While the mammary epithelial cells have higher intrinsic genetic instability and higher rate of initial chromosome aberrations than the fibroblasts, the fibroblasts retained more chromosomal aberration after long term cell culture (1 month) in comparison to their initial frequency of chromosome aberration. In lymphocytes, the chromosome aberration frequency at 1 month after exposure to Fe ions was close to unexposed background, and the chromosome aberration frequency at 1 month after exposure to proton was much higher. In addition to human cells, mouse bone marrow cells isolated from strains CBA/CaH and C57BL/6 were irradiated with proton or Fe ions and were analyzed for chromosome aberration at different time points. Cells from CBA mice showed similar frequency of chromosome aberration at early and late time points, while cells from C57 mice showed very different chromosome aberration rate at early and late time points. Our results suggest that relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of radiation are different for different radiation sources, for different cell types, and for the same cell type with different genetic background at different times after radiation exposure. Caution must be taken in using RBE value to estimate biological effects from radiation exposure.
Soil salinization has a serious influence on rice yield and quality. How to enhance salt tolerance in rice is a topical issue. In this study, 120 recombinant inbred line populations were generated through nonstop multi-generation selfing using a male indica rice variety Huazhan ( Oryza sativa L. subsp. indica cv. ‘HZ’) and a female variety of Nekken2 ( Oryza sativa L. subsp. japonica cv. ‘Nekken2’) as the parents. Germination under 80 mM NaCl conditions was measured and analyzed, and quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping was completed using a genetic map. A total of 16 salt-tolerance QTL ranges were detected at bud stage in rice, which were situated on chromosomes 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. The maximum limit of detection was 4.69. Moreover, the qST12.3 was narrowed to a 192 kb region on chromosome 12 using map-based cloning strategy. Statistical analysis of the expression levels of these candidate genes under different NaCl concentrations by qRT-PCR revealed that qST12.3 ( LOC_Os12g25200 ) was significantly down-regulated with increasing NaCl concentration, and the expression level of the chlorine-transporter-encoding gene LOC_Os12g25200 in HZ was significantly higher than that of Nekken2 under 0 mM NaCl. Sequencing analysis of LOC_Os12g25200 promoter region indicated that the gene expression difference between parents may be due to eight base differences in the promoter region. Through QTL mining and analysis, a plurality of candidate genes related to salt tolerance in rice was obtained, and the results showed that LOC_Os12g25200 might negatively regulate salt tolerance in rice. The results provide the basis for further screening and cultivation of salt-tolerant rice varieties and have laid the foundation for elucidating further molecular regulation mechanisms of salt tolerance in rice.
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