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To explore corrosion characteristics of TP91, C22 alloy and C22 laser coatings in reducing environment caused by low-nitrogen combustion at 500 °C–600 °C, a synthetic corrosive medium containing 0.2 vol% H _2 S-0.1 vol% O _2 –N _2 were selected. Results showed that the order of corrosion resistance is: C22 laser coatings>C22 alloy>TP91. 550 °C was the limit corrosion temperature for C22 alloy and C22 laser coatings. The reason for the strong corrosion resistance of C22 alloy and C22 laser coatings is that a dense layer of Cr-rich corrosion products due to the is produced in the inner layer, thus protecting the matrix from direct corrosion by corrosive gas. Finer grains before corrosion tests and the formation of dense Cr _2 O _3 inner layers in much speedier process were the main reasons for the best corrosion resistance of C22 laser coatings.

Abstract Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are used as polymorphic molecular markers in many species. They contribute very important functional variations in a range of complex traits; however, little is known about the variation of most SSRs in pig populations. Here, using genome resequencing data, we identified ~0.63 million polymorphic SSR loci from more than 100 individuals. Through intensive analysis of this dataset, we found that the SSR motif composition, motif length, total length of alleles and distribution of alleles all contribute to SSR variability. Furthermore, we found that CG-containing SSRs displayed significantly lower polymorphism and higher cross-species conservation. With a rigorous filter procedure, we provided a catalogue of 16,527 high-quality polymorphic SSRs, which displayed reliable results for the analysis of phylogenetic relationships and provided valuable summary statistics for 30 individuals equally selected from eight local Chinese pig breeds, six commercial lean pig breeds and Chinese wild boars. In addition, from the high-quality polymorphic SSR catalogue, we identified four loci with potential loss-of-function alleles. Overall, these analyses provide a valuable catalogue of polymorphic SSRs to the existing pig genetic variation database, and we believe this catalogue could be used for future genome-wide genetic analysis.

Bilateral cerebral palsy (BCP) is a common movement disorder in children, which often results in lifelong motor disability. One main symptom of BCP is the limitation of hand function in everyday activities. However, the neuroanatomical basis of this prominent hand impairment is yet to discover. Recent advances mainly focus on the lesions of BCP, but the views on the atypical development of cortical parcellations are extremely lacking. Here, in our study, neuroimaging with network analysis was employed to evaluate the changes of structural covariance networks (SCNs) in BCP children. We aimed to elucidate the alteration of SCNs based on cortical thickness (CT), and to reveal the relationship of CT and hand function in the participants with BCP. SCNs were constructed using covariance between regional CT, which was acquired from T1-weighted images of 19 children with BCP and 19 demographically matched healthy controls (HCs). Compared with HCs, BCP children showed increased CT in several regions involving the bilateral areas (lateral occipital, lingual, and fusiform) and right areas (cuneus, pericalcarine, inferior temporal, middle temporal, superior temporal, and insula). Decreased CT was found in the left superior temporal and right superior parietal cortices. Global network analyses revealed significantly decreased normalized clustering and small-worldness in the BCP network. The area under the curve (AUC) of global network measures varied slightly between the BCP and HC networks. The resistance of the both SCNs to the target and random attack showed no significant difference. Also, the BCP foci (right superior temporal and subtemporal cortex) showed a significantly negative correlation between the CT and manual ability. In this work, we identified the CT-based SCNs changes in children with BCP. The abnormal topological organization of SCNs was revealed, indicating abnormal CT, incongruous development of structural wiring, destructive nodal profiles of betweenness, and moved hub distribution in BCP children. This may provide a neuroanatomical hallmark of BCP in the developing brain. Therefore, our results may not only reflect neurodevelopmental aberrations but also compensatory mechanisms.

Background: Rapid corrosion rates are a major impediment to the use of magnesium alloys in bone tissue engineering despite their good mechanical properties and biodegradability. Zinc is a promising alloy element, and it is an effective grain refiner for magnesium. β-Ca 3 (PO 4 ) 2 (β-TCP) is widely used for bone regeneration because of its good biocompatibility, and it also has a similar chemical and crystal structure to human bone. Methods: In this research, the magnesium alloy was reinforced by adding 3%Zn (wt.%) and 5%β-TCP (wt.%) particles in order to improve the corrosion resistance and biocompatibility. Furthermore, the biomaterial was prepared through powder metallurgy technology using NH 4 HCO 3 as space-holding particles to construct porous Mg–3%Zn/5%β-TCP scaffolds. Results: The results revealed that the magnesium-zinc phase and calcium phosphate phase were uniformly distributed in the α-magnesium matrix. Mechanical and corrosion tests indicated that the scaffolds had mechanical strengths similar to that of human bone, and their corrosion resistance decreased with an increase in the porosity. The scaffolds had cytotoxicity grades of 0–1 against MG63 cells, SaoS2 cells, and HK-2 cells, which suggested that they were appropriate for cellular applications. In addition, the scaffolds demonstrated excellent biocompatibility when tested in rabbits. Conclusions: These results indicate that porous Mg–3%Zn/5%β-TCP scaffolds are promising biodegradable implants for bone tissue engineering.

As a high-throughput data analysis technique, photon time stretching (PTS) is widely used in the monitoring of rare events such as cancer cells, rough waves, and the study of electronic and optical transient dynamics. The PTS technology relies on high-speed data collection, and the large amount of data generated poses a challenge to data storage and real-time processing. Therefore, how to use compatible optical methods to filter and process data in advance is particularly important. The time-lens proposed, based on the duality of time and space as an important data processing method derived from PTS, achieves imaging of time signals by controlling the phase information of the timing signals. In this paper, an optical neural network based on the time-lens (TL-ONN) is proposed, which applies the time-lens to the layer algorithm of the neural network to realize the forward transmission of one-dimensional data. The recognition function of this optical neural network for speech information is verified by simulation, and the test recognition accuracy reaches 95.35%. This architecture can be applied to feature extraction and classification, and is expected to be a breakthrough in detecting rare events such as cancer cell identification and screening.

Rechargeable aqueous Zn-ion batteries (ZIBs) have gained great attention due to their high safety and the natural abundance of Zn. Unfortunately, the Zn metal anode suffers from dendrite growth due to nonuniform deposition during the plating/stripping process, leading to a sudden failure of the batteries. Herein, Cu coated Zn (Cu–Zn) was prepared by a facile pretreatment method using CuSO4 aqueous solution. The Cu coating transformed into an alloy interfacial layer with a high affinity for Zn, which acted as a nucleation site to guide the uniform Zn nucleation and plating. As a result, Cu–Zn demonstrated a cycling life of up to 1600 h in the symmetric cells and endowed a stable cycling performance with a capacity of 207 mAh g−1 even after 1000 cycles in the full cells coupled with a V2O5-based cathode. This work provides a simple and effective strategy to enable uniform Zn deposition for improved ZIBs.

Deep neural networks have enabled the reconstruction of optical soliton molecules with more complex structures using the real-time spectral interferences obtained by photonic time-stretch dispersive Fourier transformation (TS-DFT) technology. In this paper, we propose to use three kinds of deep convolution networks (DCNs), including VGG, ResNets, and DenseNets, for revealing internal dynamics evolution of soliton molecules based on the real-time spectral interferences. When analyzing soliton molecules with equidistant composite structures, all three models are effective. The DenseNets with layers of 48 perform the best for extracting the dynamic information of complex five-soliton molecules from TS-DFT data. The mean Pearson correlation coefficient (MPCC) between the predicted results and the real results is about 0.9975. Further, the ResNets in which the MPCC achieves 0.9906 also has the better ability of phase extraction than VGG which the MPCC is about 0.9739. The general applicability is demonstrated for extracting internal information from complex soliton molecule structures with high accuracy. The presented DCNs-based techniques can be employed to explore undiscovered mechanisms underlying the distribution and evolution of large numbers of solitons in dissipative systems in experimental research.

Chlorophyll (Chl) is an important photosynthetic pigment to the plant, largely determining photosynthetic capacity and hence plant growth. However, this concept has not been verified in natural forests, especially at a large scale. Furthermore, how Chl varies in natural forests remains unclear. In this study, the leaves of 823 plant species were collected from nine typical forest communities, extending from cold-temperate to tropical zones in China, to determine the main factors influencing leaf chlorophyll content in different regions and at different scales. We measured chlorophyll a (Chl a), chlorophyll b (Chl b), Chl (Chl a+Chl b), and the ratio of Chl a and Chl b (Chl a/b). The results showed that Chl a, Chl b, and Chl a/b values were in the range of 0.87–15.92 mg g−1 (mean: 4.18 mg g−1), 0.32–6.42 mg g−1 (mean 1.72 mg g−1), and 1.43–7.07 (mean: 2.47). The values of these three Chl parameters significantly differed among plant functional groups (trees < shrubs < herbs, coniferous trees < broadleaved trees, and evergreens < deciduous trees). Unexpectedly, Chl a, Chl b, and Chl a+b increased slightly with increasing latitude. Climate, soil, and phylogeny exert only a small effect on the spatial variation of Chl in natural forests, with large variation in the Chl of coexisting species masking the spatial patterns. This study is the first to report variations in Chl among different types of natural forests at a large scale, demonstrating that the fuzzy regulation of Chl makes it very difficult to take Chl as the main input parameter to the models of natural forests.

Background WRKY proteins, which comprise one of the largest transcription factor (TF) families in the plant kingdom, play crucial roles in plant development and stress responses. Despite several studies on WRKYs in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), functional annotation information about wheat WRKYs is limited. Results Here, 171 TaWRKY TFs were identified from the whole wheat genome and compared with proteins from 19 other species representing nine major plant lineages. A phylogenetic analysis, coupled with gene structure analysis and motif determination, divided these TaWRKYs into seven subgroups (Group I, IIa–e, and III). Chromosomal location showed that most TaWRKY genes were enriched on four chromosomes, especially on chromosome 3B. In addition, 85 (49.7%) genes were either tandem (5) or segmental duplication (80), which suggested that though tandem duplication has contributed to the expansion of TaWRKY family, segmental duplication probably played a more pivotal role. Analysis of cis-acting elements revealed putative functions of WRKYs in wheat during development as well as under numerous biotic and abiotic stresses. Finally, the expression of TaWRKY genes in flag leaves, glumes, and lemmas under water-deficit condition were analyzed. Results showed that different TaWRKY genes preferentially express in specific tissue during the grain-filling stage. Conclusion Our results provide a more extensive insight on WRKY gene family in wheat, and also contribute to the screening of more candidate genes for further investigation on function characterization of WRKYs under various stresses.

Sorbus pohuashanensis is a native tree species of northern China that is used for a variety of ecological purposes. The species is often grown as an ornamental landscape tree because of its beautiful form, silver flowers in early summer, attractive pinnate leaves in summer, and red leaves and fruits in autumn. However, development and further utilization of the species are hindered by the lack of comprehensive genetic information, which impedes research into its genetics and molecular biology. Recent advances in de novo transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) technology have provided an effective means to obtain genomic information from non-model species. Here, we applied RNA-seq for sequencing S. pohuashanensis leaves and obtained a total of 137,506 clean reads. After assembly, 96,213 unigenes with an average length of 770 bp were obtained. We found that 64.5% of the unigenes could be annotated using bioinformatics tools to analyze gene function and alignment with the NCBI database. Overall, 59,089 unigenes were annotated using the Nr database(non-redundant protein database), 35,225 unigenes were annotated using the GO (Gene Ontology categories) database, and 33,168 unigenes were annotated using COG (Cluster of Orthologous Groups). Analysis of the unigenes using the KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) database indicated that 13,953 unigenes were involved in 322 metabolic pathways. Finally, simple sequence repeat (SSR) site detection identified 6,604 unigenes that included EST-SSRs and a total of 7,473 EST-SSRs in the unigene sequences. Fifteen polymorphic SSRs were screened and found to be of use for future genetic research. These unigene sequences will provide important genetic resources for genetic improvement and investigation of biochemical processes in S. pohuashanensis.

Immunoglobulin A vasculitis (IgAV) is the most common vasculitis in children. Previously, we demonstrated that patients with IgAV show abnormal proliferation of cluster of differentiation (CD)4+C-X-C chemokine receptor type (CXCR)5+ follicular helper T (Tfh) cells. Here, we explored the status of Tfh cell subsets and plasma cytokine levels in patients with IgAV.CD4+CXCR5+CD45RA-, CD45RA-CXCR3+CCR6-, CD45RA-CXCR3-CCR6-, CD45RA-CXCR3-CCR6+, and CD45RA-CXCR3+CCR6+ Tfh cell fractions and plasma concentrations of interferon-γ, interleukin (IL)-4, and IL-17A were evaluated by flow cytometry and a flow cytometric bead array, respectively, in 30 patients with IgAV and 15 healthy controls (HCs).Tfh2 and Tfh17 cell fractions were larger and the Tfh2+Tfh17/Tfh1 ratio and plasmaIL-4 and -17A levels were higher in patients with IgAV than in the HCs. Only Tfh1 cell counts were reduced in the abdominal subtype. The elevations in Tfh2 and Tfh17 cell counts and plasma IL-4 levels were abrogated by treatment. Tfh2 cell number was positively correlated with serum IgA and plasma IL-4 levels, but negatively correlated with the serum C4 concentration, while Tfh17 cell number was positively correlated with the serum IgA level and Tfh2 cell counts.Abnormally high numbers of Tfh2 and Tfh17 cells are linked to the occurrence and development of IgAV, but are not specific to the abdominal type. Only Tfh1 cells play a critical role in abdominal-type IgAV.

After committing an error, participants tend to perform more slowly. This phenomenon is called post-error slowing (PES). Although previous studies have explored the PES effect in the context of observed errors, the issue as to whether the slowing effect generalizes across tasksets remains unclear. Further, the generation mechanisms of PES following observed errors must be examined. To address the above issues, we employed an observation-execution task in three experiments. During each trial, participants were required to mentally observe the outcomes of their partners in the observation task and then to perform their own key-press according to the mapping rules in the execution task. In Experiment 1, the same tasksets were utilized in the observation task and the execution task, and three error rate conditions (20%, 50% and 80%) were established in the observation task. The results revealed that the PES effect after observed errors was obtained in all three error rate conditions, replicating and extending previous studies. In Experiment 2, distinct stimuli and response rules were utilized in the observation task and the execution task. The result pattern was the same as that in Experiment 1, suggesting that the PES effect after observed errors was a generic adjustment process. In Experiment 3, the response deadline was shortened in the execution task to rule out the ceiling effect, and two error rate conditions (50% and 80%) were established in the observation task. The PES effect after observed errors was still obtained in the 50% and 80% error rate conditions. However, the accuracy in the post-observed error trials was comparable to that in the post-observed correct trials, suggesting that the slowing effect and improved accuracy did not rely on the same underlying mechanism. Current findings indicate that the occurrence of PES after observed errors is not dependent on the probability of observed errors, consistent with the assumption of cognitive control account. Moreover, the PES effect appears across tasksets with distinct stimuli and response rules in the context of observed errors, reflecting a generic process. Additionally, the slowing effect and improved accuracy in the post-observed error trial do not occur together, suggesting that they are independent behavioral adjustments in the context of observed errors.

The Stroop effect is one of the most robust and well-studied phenomena in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. However, little is known about the relationship between intrinsic brain activity and the individual differences of this effect. In the present study, we explored this issue by examining whether resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) signals could predict individual differences in the Stroop effect of healthy individuals. A partial correlation analysis was calculated to examine the relationship between regional homogeneity (ReHo) and Stroop effect size, while controlling for age, sex, and framewise displacement (FD). The results showed positive correlations in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), the left insula, the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), and the medial frontal gyrus (MFG), and negative correlation in the left precentral gyrus (LPG). These results indicate the possible influences of the LIFG, the left insula, and the LPG on the efficiency of cognitive control, and demonstrate that the key nodes of default mode network (DMN) may be important in goal-directed behavior and/or mental effort during cognitive control tasks.

In mathematics, to a large extent, control theory addresses the stability of solutions of differential equations, which can describe the behavior of dynamic systems. In this paper, a class of fractional-order nonautonomous systems with multiple time delays modeled by differential equations is considered. A sufficient condition is established for the existence and uniqueness of solutions for such systems involving Caputo fractional derivative, and the uniform stability of solution is studied. At last, two examples are given to demonstrate the applicability of our results.