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Summary: Cell fate determination and primordium initiation on the placental surface are two key events for ovule formation in seed plants, which directly affect ovule density and seed yield. Despite ovules form in the marginal meristematic tissues of the carpels, angiosperm carpels evolved after the ovules. It is not clear how the development of the ovules and carpels is coordinated in angiosperms. In this study, we identify the S. lycopersicum CRABS CLAW (CRC) homologue SlCRCa as an essential determinant of ovule fate. We find that SlCRCa is not only expressed in the placental surface and ovule primordia but also functions as a D‐class gene to block carpel fate and promote ovule fate in the placental surface. Loss of function of SlCRCa causes homeotic transformation of the ovules to carpels. In addition, we find low levels of the S. lycopersicum AINTEGUMENTA (ANT) homologue (SlANT2) favour the ovule initiation, whereas high levels of SlANT2 promote placental carpelization. SlCRCa forms heterodimer with tomato INNER NO OUTER (INO) and AGAMOUS (AG) orthologues, SlINO and TOMATO AGAMOUS1 (TAG1), to repress SlANT2 expression during the ovule initiation. Our study confirms that angiosperm basal ovule cells indeed retain certain carpel properties and provides mechanistic insights into the ovule initiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fashion image retrieval with text feedback aims to find the target image according to the reference image and the modification from the user. This is a challenging task, as it requires not only the synergistic understanding of both visual and textual modalities but also the ability to model a wide variety of styles that fashion images contain. Hence, the crucial aspect of addressing this problem lies in exploiting the abundant semantic information inherent in fashion images and correlating it with the textual description of style. Recognizing that style is generally situated at the local level, we explicitly define style as the commonalities and differences between local areas of fashion images. Building upon this, we propose a Style-guided Patch InteRaction approach for fashion Image retrieval with Text feedback (SPIRIT), which focuses on the decisive influence of local details of fashion images on their style. Three corresponding networks are designed pertinently. The Patch-level Style Commonality network is introduced to fully leverage the semantic information among patches and compute their average as the style commonality. Subsequently, the Patch-level Style Difference network employs a graph reasoning network to model the patch-level difference and filter out insignificant patches. By considering the above two networks, mutual information about style is obtained from the interaction between patches. Finally, the Visual Textual Fusion network is utilized to integrate visual features with rich semantic information and textual features. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed SPIRIT achieves state-of-the-art performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/SPIRIT_TOMM2024. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The parallel reservoirs in the upper reach of the Hanjiang River are key projects for watershed management, development, and protection. The optimal operation of parallel reservoirs is a multiple-stage, multiple-objective, and multiple-decision attributes complex decision problem. Taking Jiaoyan–Shimen parallel reservoirs as an example, a method of multi-objective optimal operation decision of parallel reservoirs (MOODPR) was proposed. The multi-objective optimal operation model (MOOM) was constructed. The new algorithm coupling NSGA-II, TOPSIS, and GCA was used to solve the MOODPR problem. The method of MOODPR was formed by coupling problem identification, model construction, an optimization solution, and scheme evaluation. The results show that (1) combining the Euclidean distance with the grey correlation degree to construct a new hybrid closeness degree makes the multi-attribute decision making method more scientific and feasible. (2) The NSGA-II-TOPSIS-GCA algorithm is applied to obtain decision schemes, which provide decision support for management. (3) It can be seen from the Pareto chart that for the Jiaoyan–Shimen parallel reservoirs, the comprehensive water supply was negatively related to ecology. (4) The comprehensive water supply and ecological AAPFD value in the extraordinarily dry year was 4.212 × 108 m3 and 4.953. The number of maximum continuous water shortage periods was 4 and 6. The maximum ten-day water shortage was 4.46 × 107 m3 and 2.3 × 106 m3. The research results provide technical support and reference value to multi-objective optimal operation decisions for parallel reservoirs in the upper reach of the Hanjiang River. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring electrocatalysts with high-efficiency oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is significant for practical applications of fuel cells and metal–air batteries. In this work, a twisted core@shell material has been prepared with helical polypyrrole nanotubes (HPPys) as the core and coordination polymers (CPs) as the shell. After the pyrolysis process, a dense twisted carbon layer was formed by the reaction of CP and HPPy at its interface under Ar. The derived twisted carbonaceous nanotube exhibits good performance in both electrocatalytic ORR and OER. When used as the air-electrode in a flexible Zn–air battery, the battery shows good performance and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that phospholipase C (PLC) enzymatic degumming can hydrolyze phospholipids into diacylglycerol (DAG), which improves the efficiency of oil processing. However, it is unclear whether the presence of DAG and the use of enzymes affect the performance of the oil. This paper evaluated the frying performance of PLC-degummed refined soybean oil. Following the chicken wings and potato chips frying trials, results revealed that after 30 cycles of frying, free fatty acid (FFA) levels were 0.22% and 0.21%, with total polar compounds (TPC) at 23.75% and 24.00%, and peroxide value (PV) levels were 5.90 meq/kg and 6.45 meq/kg, respectively. Overall, PLC-degummed refined soybean oil showed almost the same frying properties as traditional water-degummed refined oil in terms of FFA, PV, TPC, polymer content, viscosity, color, foaming of frying oils, and appearance of foods. Moreover, FFA, TPC, polymer content, foaming, and color showed significant positive correlations with each other (p < 0.05) in soybean oil intermittent frying processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]