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To what extent plants thermoregulate their canopy temperature (Tc) in response to environmental variability is a fundamental question in ecology, and influences accurate projections of plants' metabolic response and resilience to climate change. However, debate remains, with opinions ranging from no to moderate plant thermoregulation capacities. Traditionally, it has been hypothesized that if plant thermoregulation occurs (i.e. ‘limited homeothermy’ hypothesis holds): 1) Tc will change more slowly than Ta over time, leading the Tcvs. Ta regression slope < 1; 2) Tc is cooler than Ta when Ta exceeds some threshold, typically during high net radiation conditions (e.g. at midday). Here, with global datasets of Tc, air temperature (Ta), and other environmental and biotic variables from FLUXNET and satellites, we tested the ‘limited homeothermy’ hypothesis across global extratropics, including temporal and spatial dimensions. Our results demonstrate that across daily to monthly timescales, over 80% of sites/ecosystems have Tcvs. Ta regression slopes≥1 or Tc>Ta around midday, which rejects the ‘limited homeothermy’ hypothesis. For those sites unsupporting the hypothesis, their Tc-Ta difference (ΔT) still exhibits considerable seasonality that is negatively, partially correlated with their canopy structure seasonality (as indicated by leaf area index), implying a certain degree of thermoregulation capability. Across global sites, both site-mean ΔT and slope indicator exhibit considerable spatial variability, with ΔT having greater variability than the slope indicator. Furthermore, this large spatial ΔT variation (0-6°C) can be mainly explained by environmental variables (38%) and, to a lesser extent, by biological factors (15%). Our results suggested that plant thermoregulation patterns are diverse across global extratropics, with most ecosystems rejecting the ‘limited homeothermy’ hypothesis, but their thermoregulation still occurs, implying that slope

Spring phenology of temperate ecosystems displays high sensitivity to the recent climate change, and has generated various impacts on plant growth, biotic interactions, ecosystem productivity, and local environmental conditions. Although various prognostic models relying on environmental variables, mainly including temperature and photoperiod, have been developed for spring phenology, comprehensive ecosystem-scale evaluations over large geographical extents and long-time periods remain lacking. Further, environmental variables other than temperature and photoperiod might also importantly constrain spring phenology modelling but remain under-investigation. To address these issues, we leveraged 20-years datasets of environmental variables (Daymet) and the spring phenology metric (i.e., the greenup date) respectively derived from MODIS and PhenoCams across 108 sites in the Northern and Eastern United States. We firstly cross-compared MODIS-derived greenup date with PhenoCams with high accuracy (R2=0.75). Then, we evaluated the three prognostic models (e.g., Growing Degree Date (GDD), Sequential (SEQ) and optimality-based (OPT)) with MODIS-derived spring phenology, assessed the model residuals and their associations with soil moisture, rainfall, and solar radiation, and improved and re-evaluated the models by including the variable contributing to high model residuals. We found that 1) all models demonstrated good capability in characterizing spring phenology, with OPT performing the best (RMSE=8.04±5.05 days), followed by SEQ (RMSE=10.57±7.77 days) and GDD (RMSE=10.84±8.42 days), 2) all models displayed high model residuals showing tight correlation with solar radiation (r=0.45-0.75), and 3) the revised models that included solar radiation significantly performed better with an RMSE reduction by 22.08%. Such results are likely because solar radiation better constrains early growing season plant photosynthesis than photoperiod, supporting the hypothesis of spring phenology as an adaptive strategy to maximize photosynthetic carbon gain (approximated by solar radiation) while minimizing frost damage risk (captured by temperature). Collectively, our study reveals the underappreciated importance of solar radiation in constraining spring phenology of temperate ecosystems, and suggests ways to improve spring phenology modelling and other phenology-related ecological processes.

Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins are a large family in land plants that play a role in organellular RNA processing, editing, and splicing. Here, we identify an Arabidopsis thaliana mutant, gend1-1, which exhibits a short root phenotype with reduced meristem size and cell numbers. Positional cloning of GEND1 revealed that it encodes a PPR protein, and functional analysis showed that GEND1 can bind and edit mitochondrial ccmFn-1 mRNA, causing gend1 mutants to have decreased levels of cytochrome C. GEND1 was up-regulated by high temperature conditions, to which gend1 mutants were hypersensitive. Analysis of a set of PPR mutants under high temperature showed that mutants with defects in cytochrome C had comparable temperature sensitivity to gend1. Collectively, these results suggest that cytochrome C plays an important role in root development and high temperature response in Arabidopsis.

In temperate forests, autumn leaf phenology signals the end of leaf growing season and shows large variability across tree-crowns, which importantly mediates photosynthetic seasonality, hydrological regulation, and nutrient cycling of forest ecosystems. However, critical challenges remain with the monitoring of autumn leaf phenology at the tree-crown scale due to the lack of spatially explicit information for individual tree-crowns and high (spatial and temporal) resolution observations with nadir view. Recent availability of the PlanetScope constellation with a 3 m spatial resolution and near-daily nadir view coverage might help address these observational challenges, but remains underexplored. Here we developed an integration of PlanetScope with drone observations for improved monitoring of crown-scale autumn leaf phenology in a temperate forest in Northeast China. This integration includes: 1) visual identification of individual tree-crowns (and species) from drone observations; 2) extraction of time series of PlanetScope vegetation indices (VIs) for each identified tree-crown; 3) derivation of three metrics of autumn leaf phenology from the extracted VI time series, including the start of fall (SOF), middle of fall (MOF), and end of fall (EOF); and 4) accuracy assessments of the PlanetScope-derived phenology metrics with reference from local phenocams. Our results show that (1) the PlanetScope-drone integration captures large inter-crown phenological variations, with a range of 28 days, 25 days, and 30 days for SOF, MOF, and EOF, respectively, (2) the extracted crown-level phenology metrics strongly agree with those derived from local phenocams, with a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 4.1 days, 3.0 days and 5.4 days for SOF, MOF, and EOF, respectively, and (3) PlanetScope maps large variations in autumn leaf phenology over the entire forest landscape with spatially explicit information. These results demonstrate the ability of our proposed method in monitoring the large spatial heterogeneity of crown-scale autumn leaf phenology in the temperate forest, suggesting the potential of using high-resolution satellites to advance crown-scale phenology studies over large geographical areas.

Direct numerical simulations were performed to investigate crossflow transition control by the three-dimensional steady upstream flow deformation technique under the influence of low-frequency fluc...

Hippo/YAP pathway plays an essential role in cell proliferation, tissue regeneration, and tumorigenesis. The emerging evidence shows that hyperactivation of the Hippo/YAP pathway induces metastasis, chemoresistance, and the attribute of cancer stem cells. Dysregulated Hippo/YAP pathway can be a dominant driver of mesothelioma, meningioma, and schwannoma. It has been reported that Hippo/YAP oncogenic activation in mesothelioma is driven by NF2 loss function. In addition, it contributes to 10% of all cancers, including lung, gastric, colon, cervical, ovarian, breast, melanoma, hepatocellular, and squamous cell carcinoma. Despite the urgent need to develop a therapeutic strategy to curb the dysregulated pathway, YAP/TAZ is difficult to be directly targeted with small molecule inhibitors because of the lack of a catalytic niche. TEADs require auto-palmitoylation to become functional. Therefore, small molecules that target palmitoylation of TEAD have been explored and VT3989 (NCT04665206) and IK-930 (NCT05228015) have success to enter the clinical trials. To target cancers with dysregulated Hippo/Yap pathway, we have discovered and are developing TY-0584, which is a potent and orally available YAP/TEAD inhibitor in the IND enabling stage. The results of PK and toxicity studies of TY-0584 showed a favorable safety profile. TY-0584 had excellent efficacy in the malignant mesothelioma H226 CDX mouse model, which is driven by NF2 deletion mutation. TY-0584 treatment also demonstrated good efficacy in the head and neck cancer PDX tumor mouse model. In previous studies, Hippo/Yap signaling promotes drug resistance to EGFR-targeted therapies in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). To relax the YAP resistance mechanism in EGFR treatment, we asked if combined YAP inhibition grants an extension of responses to EGFR therapy. To this end, we treated EGFR-driven NSCLC cell models with TY-0584 and TY-9591. TY-9591 is a third-generation EGFR inhibitor developed by TYK Medicines and is currently under a pivotal Phase III clinical investigation in China (NCT05382728). The results show that the combination treatment not only offers synergistic effects, but also enhances apoptosis, compared to single drug treatment. Our in vivo data further underscores this exciting finding. Our studies showed that TY-9591 had excellent efficacy in the PC9 CDX mouse model, but tumors gradually recurred as many targeted cancer therapies did. In line with the results of the in-vitro experiments, another YAP/TEAD inhibitor TY-0536 in combination with TY-9591 significantly delay the tumor regrowth in the PC9 CDX mouse model. In summary, we identified a potent and orally available YAP/TEAD inhibitor TY-0584 which is a promising candidate for further clinical validation. [Shengli Dong and Apeng Liang contributed equally to this work. Jun Li, Shengli Dong, and Apeng Liang are the corresponding authors.] Citation Format: Apeng Liang, Shengli Dong, Guangbin Liu, Zhengfei Guo, Meihua Li, Shuaibo Han, Yundi Cao, Yian Tu, Chao Zhou, Yu Yu, Linglin Xiao, Wei Huang, Xinlong Yang, Lian Fang, Haoyun Li, Chengshan Niu, Mingyu Jiang, Feng Xing, Shaoqing Chen, Jun Li, Yusheng Wu. TY-0584: A potent, orally available small molecule YAP/TEAD inhibitor, exhibits anti-tumor effects in vitro and in vivo. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 4491.

In this study direct numerical simulations are employed to investigate the effects of various parameters on the laminar-flow-control capabilities of narrowly spaced streaks in a supersonic boundary layer at Mach$2.0$. Previous work by Sharmaet al.(J. Fluid Mech., vol. 873, 2019, pp. 1072–1089) has found these streak modes, excited by a spanwise blowing-and-suction strip, to be highly effective at delaying pure oblique-type breakdown. In the present work it is shown that spectrum-enriching subharmonic modes, relevant with increasing running-length Reynolds number, do not destroy the controlling mechanism, and also a complex breakdown scenario, triggered by a multi-frequency point source, is found to be effectively controlled. Moreover, the control-streak excitation by roughness elements is compared in detail with the blowing-and-suction method, revealing relevant differing features.

The fundamental mechanisms of a hitherto unstudied approach to control the crossflow-induced transition in a three-dimensional boundary layer employing unsteady control vortices are investigated by means of direct numerical simulations. Using a spanwise row of blowing/suction or volume-force actuators, subcritical travelling crossflow vortex modes are excited to impose a stabilizing (upstream) flow deformation (UFD). Volume forcing mimics the effects of alternating current plasma actuators driven by a low-frequency sinusoidal signal. In this case the axes of the actuators are aligned with the wave crests of the desired travelling mode to maximize receptivity and abate the influence of other unwanted, misaligned modes. The resulting travelling crossflow vortices generate a beneficial mean-flow distortion reducing the amplification rate of naturally occurring steady or unsteady crossflow modes without invoking significant secondary instabilities. It is found that the stabilizing effect achieved by travelling control modes is somewhat weaker than that achieved by the steady modes in the classical UFD method. However, the energy requirements for unsteady-UFD plasma actuators would be significantly lower than for steady UFD because the approach makes full use of the inherent unsteadiness of the plasma-induced volume force with alternating-current-driven actuators. Also, the input control amplitude can be lower since unsteady crossflow vortex modes grow stronger in the flow.

Leaf trait relationships are widely used to predict ecosystem function in terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs), in which leaf maximum carboxylation capacity (Vc,max ), an important trait for modelling photosynthesis, can be inferred from other easier-to-measure traits. However, whether trait-Vc,max relationships are robust across different forest types remains unclear. Here we used measurements of leaf traits, including one morphological trait (leaf mass per area), three biochemical traits (leaf water content, area-based leaf nitrogen content, and leaf chlorophyll content), one physiological trait (Vc,max ), as well as leaf reflectance spectra, and explored their relationships within and across three contrasting forest types in China. We found weak and forest type-specific relationships between Vc,max and the four morphological and biochemical traits (R2 ≤ 0.15), indicated by significantly changing slopes and intercepts across forest types. By contrast, reflectance spectroscopy effectively collapsed the differences in the trait-Vc,max relationships across three forest biomes into a single robust model for Vc,max (R2 = 0.77), and also accurately estimated the four traits (R2 = 0.75-0.94). These findings challenge the traditional use of the empirical trait-Vc,max relationships in TBMs for estimating terrestrial plant photosynthesis, but also highlight spectroscopy as an efficient alternative for characterising Vc,max and multitrait variability, with critical insights into ecosystem modelling and functional trait ecology.

Industrialization is criticized for posing environmental concerns despite its contribution to local economic growth and modern urbanization. Accurately mapping industrial zones is a necessity for the strategic planning of modern industrialization. Unfortunately, industrial zones mapping by remotely sensed imagery over large areas remains methodologically challenging, as the spectral and texture features of industrial zones resemble those of other man-made surfaces. To fill the gap, this paper presents the first attempt at industrial zones mapping through identifying the ‘blue steel tile’-roofed buildings (BSTBs). Specifically, we develop a BSTB index (BSTBI) for extracting the BSTBs in Landsat images. The new index combines the BSTB feature of ‘V-shaped valley’ over visible-near infrared reflection (NIR) span and the most separable band of Landsat sensors (shortwave infrared-2 band). Through the experiments conducted in Linyi city, China, the new index is demonstrated a good performance in detecti...

PlanetScope satellite data with a 3-m resolution and near-daily global coverage have been increasingly used for land surface monitoring, ranging from land cover change detection to vegetative biophysics characterization and ecological assessments. Similar to other satellite data, effective screening of clouds and cloud shadows in PlanetScope images is a prerequisite for these applications, yet remains challenging as PlanetScope has 1) fewer spectral bands than other satellites hindering the use of traditional methods, and 2) inconsistent radiometric calibration across satellite sensors making the cloud/shadow detection using fixed thresholds unrealistic. To address these challenges, we developed a SpatioTemporal Integration approach for Automatic Cloud and Shadow Screening (‘STI-ACSS’), including two steps: (1) generating initial masks of clouds/shadows by integrating both spatial (i.e. cloud/shadow indices of an individual PlanetScope image) and temporal (i.e. reflectance outliers in PlanetScope image time series) information with an adaptive threshold approach; (2) a two-step fine-tuning on these initial masks to derive final masks by integrating morphological processing with an object-based cloud and cloud shadow matching. We tested STI-ACSS at six tropical sites representative of different land cover types (e.g. forest, urban, cropland, savannah, and shrubland). For each site, we evaluated the performance of STI-ACSS with reference to the manual masks of clouds/shadows, and compared it with four state-of-the-art methods, namely Function of mask (Fmask), Automatic Time-Series Analysis (ATSA), Iterative Haze Optimized Transformation (IHOT) and the default PlanetScope quality control layer. Our results show that, across all sites, STI-ACSS 1) has the highest average overall accuracy (98.03%), 2) generates an average producer accuracy of 95.53% for clouds and 89.48% for cloud shadows, and 3) is robust across sites and seasons. These results suggest the effectiveness of using STI-ACSS for cloud/shadow detection for PlanetScope satellites in the tropics, with potential to be extended to other satellite sensors with limited spectral bands.

Salt stress is a main abiotic stress that limits agricultural productivity in many parts of the world. To investigate whether poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) can alleviate the negative effects of salt stress on wheat, a foliar application of 400 mg/L γ-PGA was applied to wheat seedlings, which were then subjected to 150 mM NaCl. Our results showed that after application of γ-PGA, the plant height, the plant weight, and the antioxidant enzymes including superoxide dismutase, peroxidase, and catalase were significantly increased compared with the treatment of 150 mM NaCl alone. Meanwhile, γ-PGA application also resulted in high accumulation of K+ and decreased storage of Na+ in wheat leaves. These results suggest that γ-PGA treatment may improve salt tolerance of wheat by diminishing ionic imbalances and enhancing antioxidant capacity. Our results indicate that exogenous γ-PGA could alleviate the damage caused by salt stress.

It has been shown recently by direct numerical simulations that plasma actuators can be used to delay laminar-turbulent transition caused by steady crossflow vortices (CFVs) in three-dimensional boundary layers on swept aerodynamic surfaces. In the current work the applicability of such actuators to control transition caused by traveling CFVs is explored by two techniques. In the first technique, named upstream flow deformation, the actuators are used to excite steady CFV control modes. The resulting narrow spaced control CFVs induce a beneficial mean-flow distortion and weaken the primary crossflow instability, yielding delayed transition. In the second technique, the direct attenuation of nonlinear traveling CFVs, the actuators are positioned more downstream, where the traveling CFVs have already established. The localized unsteady forcing against the direction of the crossflow is then aimed at attenuating the amplitude of the traveling CFVs by directly tackling the three-dimensional nonlinear disturbance state. With both techniques transition can be delayed, however with a significantly higher efficiency for the method of upstream flow deformation.

Most vegetation indices (VIs) of remote sensing were designed based on the concept of soil-line, which represents a linear correlation between bare soil reflectance at the red and near-infrared (NIR) bands. Unfortunately, the soil-line can only suppress brightness variation, not color differences of bare soil. Consequently, soil variation has a considerable impact on vegetation indices, although significant efforts have been devoted to this issue. In this study, a new soil-line is established in a new feature space of the NIR band and a virtual band that combines the red and shortwave-infrared (SWIR) bands (0.74ρred+0.26ρswir). Then, plus versions of vegetation indices (VI+), i.e., normalized difference vegetation index plus (NDVI+), enhanced vegetation index plus (EVI+), soil-adjusted vegetation index plus (SAVI+), and modified soil-adjusted vegetation index plus (MSAVI+), are proposed based on the new soil-line, which replaces the red band with the red-SWIR band in the vegetation indices. Soil spectral data from several spectral libraries confirm that bare soil has much less variation for VI+ than the original VI. Simulation experiments show that VI+ correlates better with fractional vegetation coverage (FVC) and leaf area index (LAI) than original VI. Ground measured LAI data collected from BigFoot, VALERI, and other previous references also confirm that VI+ derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data correlates better with ground measured LAI than original VI. These data analyses suggest that replacing the red band with the red-SWIR band can reduce the sensitivity of VIs to soil background. We recommend employing the proposed NDVI+, EVI+, SAVI+, and MSAVI+ in applications of large area, sparse vegetation, or when soil color variation cannot be neglected, although sensitivity to soil moisture and clay content might cause slight side effects for the proposed VI+s.

Root hairs are plastic in response to nutrient supply, but relatively little is known about their development under low ammonium (NH4(+)) conditions. This study showed that reducing NH4(+) for 3 days in wild-type Arabidopsis seedlings resulted in drastic elongation of root hairs. To investigate the possible mediation of ethylene and auxin in this process, seedlings were treated with 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid (TIBA, auxin transport inhibitor), 1-naphthylphthalamic acid (NPA, auxin transport inhibitor), p-chlorophenoxy isobutyric acid (PCIB, auxin action inhibitor), aminoethoxyvinylglycine (AVG, chemical inhibitor of ethylene biosynthesis), or silver ions (Ag(+), ethylene perception antagonist) under low NH4(+) conditions. Our results showed that TIBA, NPA and PCIB did not inhibit root hair elongation under low NH4(+) conditions, while AVG and Ag(+) completely inhibited low NH4(+)-induced root hair elongation. This suggested that low NH4(+)-induced root hair elongation was dependent on the ethylene pathway, but not the auxin pathway. Further genetic studies revealed that root hair elongation in auxin-insensitive mutants was sensitive to low NH4(+) treatment, but elongation was less sensitive in ethylene-insensitive mutants than wild-type plants. In addition, low NH4(+)-induced root hair elongation was accompanied by reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation. Diphenylene iodonium (DPI, NADPH oxidase inhibitor) and dimethylthiourea (DMTU, ROS scavenger) inhibited low NH4(+)-induced root hair elongation, suggesting that ROS were involved in this process. Moreover, ethylene acted together with ROS to modulate root hair elongation under low NH4(+) conditions. These results demonstrate that a signaling pathway involving ethylene and ROS participates in regulation of root hair elongation when Arabidopsis seedlings are subjected to low NH4(+) conditions.

Lamina joint inclination or leaf angle (the angle between the leaf blade and vertical culm) is a major trait of rice plant architecture. The plant hormone brassinosteroid (BR) is the main regulator of this trait, while other plant hormones, including ethylene, gibberellin, and auxin, also influence leaf angle. In this study, we found that methyl jasmonate (MeJA) also participates in regulating lamina joint inclination. MeJA decreased lamina joint inclination and inhibited the BR-induced increase in lamina joint inclination. Furthermore, addition of a BR synthesis inhibitor increased the extent of change in lamina joint inclination in response to treatment with a low concentration of MeJA (0.05 or 0.5mgL(-1)), but it did not alter the lamina joint inclination of plants treated with a high concentration of MeJA (5mgL(-1)). Further studies showed that MeJA treatment significantly repressed the expression of BR biosynthesis-related genes and decreased endogenous BRs levels. In addition, the lamina joint inclination in the OsBRI1 mutant d61-1 was less sensitive to MeJA compared with its wild type counterpart, and lithium chloride-induced inactivation of GSK3-like kinase, a negative regulator of BR signaling, partly rescued the MeJA-induced reduction in lamina joint inclination. Further studies showed that MeJA treatment reduced the mRNA levels of BR signaling and target genes. These results indicate that MeJA-inhibition of lamina joint inclination may depend on BR biosynthesis and the BR signaling pathway.

Multiple surface envelope proteins are involved in the human herpes simplex virus type 1 entry and fusion. Among them, glycoprotein D (gD) has an important role by binding to the host receptors such as herpes virus entry mediator and nectin-1. Although the complex structure of gD with herpes virus entry mediator has been established, the binding mode of gD with the nectin-1 is elusive. Nectin-1 is a member of the immunoglobulin (Ig)-like (three Ig-like domains) cell adhesion molecules and is believed to form a homodimer to exert its functions. Here we report the complex structure of gD and nectin-1 (three Ig domains), revealing that gD binds the first Ig domain of nectin-1 in a similar mode to the nectin-1 homodimer interaction. The key amino acids responsible for nectin-1 dimerization are also used for gD/nectin-1 binding. This result indicates that binding of gD to nectin-1 would preclude the nectin-1 dimerization, consequently abolishing its cell adhesion function.