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Protists, as integral constituents of the plant microbiome, are posited to confer substantial benefits to plant health and performance. Despite their significance, protists have received considerably less attention compared to other constituents of the plant microbiome, such as bacteria and fungi. To investigate the diversity and community structure of protists in sorghum leaves and roots, we employed amplicon sequencing of the eukaryotic 18S rRNA gene in 563 leaf and root samples collected from 57 locations across China. We found significant differences in the diversity and community structure of protists in sorghum leaves and roots. The leaf was taxonomically dominated by Evosea, Cercozoa and Ciliophora, while the root was dominated by Endomyxa, Cercozoa and Oomycota. The functional taxa of protists exhibited notable differences between leaves and roots, with the former being predominantly occupied by consumers and the latter by parasites. The community composition of protists in the leaf was predominantly influenced by mean annual precipitation, whereas soil pH played a more significant role in the root. The present study identified the most abundant and distributed protists in sorghum leaves and roots and elucidated the underlying factors that govern their community structure. The present study offers a novel perspective on the factors that shape plant‐associated protist communities and their potential roles in enhancing the functionality of plant ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Password‐authenticated key exchange (PAKE) is a cryptographic primitive that can establish secure remote communications between the client and the server, especially with the advantage of amplifying memorable passwords into strong session keys. However, the arrival of the quantum computing era has brought new challenges to traditional PAKE protocols. Thus, designing an efficient post‐quantum PAKE scheme becomes an open research question. In this paper, the authors construct a quantum‐safe PAKE protocol, which is a horizontal extension of the password‐authenticated key (PAK) protocol in the field of module lattices. Subsequently, the authors accompany the proposed protocol with a rigorous security proof in the random oracle model with two adaptions: applying the CDF‐Zipf model to characterise the ability of the adversary and using the pairing with errors assumption to simplify the proof. Taking the flexibility of the module learning with errors (MLWE) problem, the authors elaborately select three parameter sets to meet different application scenarios. Specifically, the authors' Recommended‐PAKE implementation achieves 177‐bit post‐quantum security with a generous margin to cope with later improvement in cryptanalysis. The performance results indicate that the authors' MLWE‐PAKE is quite practical: compared with the latest Yang‐PAK, the authors' Recommended‐PAK reduces the communication cost and the running time by 36.8% and 13.8%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]