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The omega-3 fatty acid desaturase enzyme gene FAD3 is responsible for converting linoleic acid to linolenic acid in plant fatty acid synthesis. Despite limited knowledge of its role in cotton growth, our study focused on GhFAD3-4, a gene within the FAD3 family, which was found to promote fiber elongation and cell wall thickness in cotton. GhFAD3-4 was predominantly expressed in elongating fibers, and its suppression led to shorter fibers with reduced cell wall thickness and phosphoinositide (PI) and inositol triphosphate (IP3) levels. Transcriptome analysis of GhFAD3-4 knock-out mutants revealed significant impacts on genes involved in the phosphoinositol signaling pathway. Experimental evidence demonstrated that GhFAD3-4 positively regulated the expression of the GhBoGH3B and GhPIS genes, influencing cotton fiber development through the inositol signaling pathway. The application of PI and IP6 externally increased fiber length in GhFAD3-4 knock-out plants, while inhibiting PI led to a reduced fiber length in GhFAD3-4 overexpressing plants. These findings suggest that GhFAD3-4 plays a crucial role in enhancing fiber development by promoting PI and IP3 biosynthesis, offering the potential for breeding cotton varieties with superior fiber quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rejoining of bone sticks holds significant importance in studying the historical and cultural aspects of the Han Dynasty. Currently, the rejoining work of bone inscriptions heavily relies on manual efforts by experts, demanding a considerable amount of time and energy. This paper introduces a multi-scale feature fusion Siamese network guided by edge contour (MFS-GC) model. Constructing a Siamese network framework, it first uses a residual network to extract features of bone sticks, which is followed by computing the L2 distance for similarity measurement. During the extraction of feature vectors using the residual network, the BN layer tends to lose contour detail information, resulting in less conspicuous feature extraction, especially along fractured edges. To address this issue, the Spatially Adaptive DEnormalization (SPADE) model is employed to guide the normalization of contour images of bone sticks. This ensures that the network can learn multi-scale boundary contour features at each layer. Finally, the extracted multi-scale fused features undergo similarity measurement for local matching of bone stick fragment images. Additionally, a Conjugable Bone Stick Dataset (CBSD) is constructed. In the experimental validation phase, the MFS-GC algorithm is compared with classical similarity calculation methods in terms of precision, recall, and miss detection rate. The experiments demonstrate that the MFS-GC algorithm achieves an average accuracy of 95.5% in the Top-15 on the CBSD. The findings of this research can contribute to solving the rejoining issues of bone sticks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Damaged edges of bone tag images contain external factors such as impurities and damage, which affect the stitching process and lead to repair errors. Therefore, this paper proposes a stitching method based on image edge position feature matching. The objective is to improve the accuracy of image stitching by matching feature points based on the position of the image edge pixel so as to solve the accurate stitching of broken edge contour. In the first step of this method, the image containing the broken edge is preprocessed by edge detection, and the location of the broken edge pixel is proposed. Secondly, the feature descriptors were calculated to extract the shape and texture information of the feature points on the fracture edge. Finally, the feature points are optimized by minimum correction and image mosaic is carried out. In terms of image stitching, pre-registration is performed by finding the feature descriptors that are most similar to the edge of the optimum fracture surface profile. The matching operator is added to the overlapping region to obtain the corrected image, and the panoramic image mosaic of the image fracture surface is performed. The experimental results show that feature descriptor matching can ensure the integrity of the fracture, improve the matching accuracy, optimize the uneven deformation of the fracture, ensure the quality of image stitching, and reduce the degree of image distortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ginsenoside Rg1, a traditional Chinese medicine monomer, has been shown to have antidepressant effects. We previously found that Rg1 exerts antidepressant effects by improving the gap junction channels (GJCs) dysfunction; however, the downstream mechanisms through which Rg1 ameliorates GJC dysfunction remain unclear. Since hemichannels directly release glutamate, GJC dysfunction decreases the expression levels of glutamate transporters in astrocytes, and glutamatergic system dysfunction plays an essential role in the pathogenesis of depression. The glutamatergic system may be a potential downstream target of Rg1 that exerts antidepressant effects. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to determine the downstream mechanisms by which Rg1 ameliorated GJC dysfunction and exerted its antidepressant effects. Corticosterone (CORT) is used to mimic high glucocorticoid levels in patients with depression in vitro. Primary cortical astrocytes were isolated and phosphorylation of connexin43 (Cx43) as well as the functions of hemichannels, GJCs, and the glutamatergic system were evaluated after drug treatment. Rg1 pretreatment reversed the anomalous activation of Cx43 phosphorylation as well as the dysfunction of hemichannels, GJCs, and the glutamatergic system induced by CORT. These results suggest that Rg1 can ameliorate CORT-induced dysfunction of the glutamatergic system in astrocytes by potentially reducing Cx43 phosphorylation and inhibiting opening of hemichannels, thereby improving GJC dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone sticks are composed of thin slices of animal bones created by ancient people, which mainly served the functions of fixing books, writing scripts, and divination. The bone stick script is an essential material for studying the history of Chinese Western Han script. Using a neural network for text recognition can quickly interpret ancient text, while extracting deeper semantic information, neural networks will also lose superficial image details. After multi-layer convolution and pooling of bone sticks, the continuous loss of superficial details affects classification accuracy. At the same time, the unbalanced distribution of bone stick quantity leads to a low recognition rate with small samples of bone sticks. Aiming to solve the above problems, a bone stick recognition method based on multi-scale features and focal loss function is proposed. Firstly, based on the residual network ResNet, the output features of the first layer and four Conv_x layers are pooled globally to reduce the feature dimension of each channel, and the channel splicing method is used to add different depths of base information to the original high-level features, which improves the detail feature extraction ability of the model. Secondly, in view of the unbalanced distribution of the bone stick data, the original cross-entropy loss function is replaced by the focus loss function, which increases the penalty for classification errors and improves the recognition rate of classes with few training samples. Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method on the bone stick data set is up to 90.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to improve the accuracy of signal recovery after transmitting over atmospheric turbulence channel, a deep-learning-based signal detection method is proposed for a faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) hybrid modulated optical wireless communication (OWC) system. It takes advantage of the long short-term memory (LSTM) network in the recurrent neural network (RNN) to alleviate the interdependence problem of adjacent symbols. Moreover, an LSTM attention decoder is constructed by employing the attention mechanism, which can alleviate the shortcomings in conventional LSTM. The simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed LSTM attention neural network is 1 dB better than that of the back propagation (BP) neural network and outperforms by 2.5 dB when compared with the maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) detection method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspergillus flavus and Aflatoxins in grain crops give rise to a serious threat to food security and cause huge economic losses. In particular, aflatoxin B1 has been identified as a Class I carcinogen to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Compared with conventional methods, Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) has paved the way for the detection of Aspergillus flavus and Aflatoxins in grain crops as it is a rapid, nondestructive, and sensitive analytical method. In this work, the rapid detection of Aspergillus flavus and quantification of Aflatoxin B1 in grain crops were performed by using a portable Raman spectrometer combined with colloidal Au nanoparticles (AuNPs). With the increase of the concentration of Aspergillus flavus spore suspension in the range of 102–108 CFU/mL, the better the combination of Aspergillus flavus spores and AuNPs, the better the enhancement effect of AuNPs solution on the Aspergillus flavus. A series of different concentrations of aflatoxin B1 methanol solution combined with AuNPs were determined based on SERS and their spectra were similar to that of solid powder. Moreover, the characteristic peak increased gradually with the increase of concentration in the range of 0.0005–0.01 mg/L and the determination limit was 0.0005 mg/L, which was verified by HPLC in ppM concentration. This rapid detection method can greatly shorten the detection time from several hours or even tens of hours to a few minutes, which can help to take effective measures to avoid causing large economic losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to develop a simple, sensitive, low-cost, environmentally friendly and flexible surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) platform, combined with a portable Raman spectrometer, for the rapid and on-site SERS detection of bacteria. Commercial tobacco packaging paper (TPP) with little background interference was used as a loading medium that effectively adsorbed Au nanoparticles and provided sufficient "hot spots". This Au-tobacco packaging paper (Au-TPP) substrate used as a flexible SERS platform can maximize sample collection by wiping irregular surfaces, and was successfully applied to the on-site and rapid detection of pathogenic bacteria. Raman fingerprints of pathogenic bacteria can be obtained by SERS detection of spiked pork using wipeable Au-TPP, which verifies its value in practical applications. The results collected by SERS were further verified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) results. It showed several advantages in on-site SERS detection, including accurate discrimination, simple preparation, easy operation, good sensitivity, accuracy and reproducibility. This study indicates that the established flexible SERS platform has good practical applications in pathogenic bacterial identification and other rapid detections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, rapid urbanization in China has led to land transformation and unequal social and economic development among rural collective land in different regions. Although there has been considerable research on land development in China, there is a lack of studies on the socioeconomic impacts of unequal collective land development on rural elders. This research investigates collective land support, family support, and social support among the elderly in three types of villages—urban, suburban, and remote—in China's Pearl River Delta. The findings show that land support retains an important factor for supporting the rural elderly, while family support is in steep decline, and social elderly support offers low coverage. However, land support differs greatly with location, and only urban villages in central locations with high land values are found to provide adequate land support for the rural elderly. The key influential factor of land income has shifted from land quantity to land location, and there now appears to be a need to adjust relevant land, fiscal, and taxation policies for collective land in different locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been revealed that numerous nanoparticles are formed during the boiling preparation of traditional Chinese medical decoctions and culinary soups. They may possess physiological effects different from those of constituent components and are worth paying attention to but are barely noticed and investigated as of yet. In this study, six groups of nanoparticles, whose size ranged from 57 to 300 nm, were successfully isolated from the decoction of Isatis indigotica Fort. root, according to their particle size by the means of size-exclusive chromatography. All of the obtained nanoparticles have a high content of polysaccharides, which distinguishes them from the disclosed BLG protein nanoparticles. They also have high similarities in other compositions, surface charge, and stimuli responses. However, four out of these six nanoparticles (F2, F3, F4, and F5) exhibited significant antiviral activity against influenza virus H1N1, and their antiviral activities and cytotoxicity towards MDCK cells varied with their sizes. It suggested that the antiviral efficacy of BLG decoction could also be from its nanoparticles besides its well-known antiviral phytochemicals. It also implied that the biological effects of these polysaccharide nanoparticles, including cytotoxicity and antiviral activity, may be correlative with the physicochemical properties, especially the particle size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exosomes contain different functional bimolecular characteristics related to physiological or pathological processes and are now recognized as new biomarkers in different human cancers. Rapid detection and classification of cancer-related exosomes might be helpful in the rapid screening of patients that may have cancer. Here, we report a surface enhanced Raman scattering technology for rapid and label-free exosomal detection (Exo-SERS) to aid in the discrimination of different cancer cells based on specific Raman phenotypes and multivariate statistical analysis. The results demonstrated that exosomes derived from both tumor cells and normal cells exhibit special, unique Raman phenotypes. Using the Exo-SERS method, the cancer cells were accurately discriminated from normal cells, and subtle molecular changes between the different cell types could be detected with high sensitive. This research provides a rapid, label-free and non-destructive manner for detecting and discriminating between cancer types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cystosepiment-like cobalt nanoparticles@N-doped carbon composite named Co-NPs@NC with highly efficient electrocatalytic performance for oxygen evolution reaction was prepared from carbonization of N-doped Co-MOFs. The optimized Co-NPs@NC-600 shows overpotentials of 315 mV to afford a current density of 10 mA·cm−2. Meanwhile, the electrocatalys presents excellent long-term durability. The outstanding electrocatalytic performance can be attributed to the unique cystosepiment-like architecture with high specific surface area (214 m2/g), high conductivity of N-doped carbon and well-distributed active sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ginsenoside Rg1, a traditional Chinese medicine monomer, has been shown to have antidepressant effects. We previously found that Rg1 exerts antidepressant effects by improving the gap junction channels (GJCs) dysfunction; however, the downstream mechanisms through which Rg1 ameliorates GJC dysfunction remain unclear. Since hemichannels directly release glutamate, GJC dysfunction decreases the expression levels of glutamate transporters in astrocytes, and glutamatergic system dysfunction plays an essential role in the pathogenesis of depression. The glutamatergic system may be a potential downstream target of Rg1 that exerts antidepressant effects. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to determine the downstream mechanisms by which Rg1 ameliorated GJC dysfunction and exerted its antidepressant effects. Corticosterone (CORT) is used to mimic high glucocorticoid levels in patients with depression in vitro. Primary cortical astrocytes were isolated and phosphorylation of connexin43 (Cx43) as well as the functions of hemichannels, GJCs, and the glutamatergic system were evaluated after drug treatment. Rg1 pretreatment reversed the anomalous activation of Cx43 phosphorylation as well as the dysfunction of hemichannels, GJCs, and the glutamatergic system induced by CORT. These results suggest that Rg1 can ameliorate CORT-induced dysfunction of the glutamatergic system in astrocytes by potentially reducing Cx43 phosphorylation and inhibiting opening of hemichannels, thereby improving GJC dysfunction.