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Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is one of the most important oil and food legume crops worldwide. ASR (abscisic acid, stress, ripening) plays extremely important roles in plant growth and development, fruit ripening, pollen development, and stress. Here, six ASR genes were identified in peanut. Structural and conserved motif analyses were performed to identify common ABA/WDS structural domains. The vast majority of ASR genes encoded acidic proteins, all of which are hydrophilic proteins and localized on mitochondria and nucleus, respectively. The cis-element analysis revealed that some cis-regulatory elements were related to peanut growth and development, hormone, and stress response. Under normal growth conditions, AhASR4 and AhASR5 were expressed in all tissues of peanut plants. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) results indicated that peanut ASR genes exhibited complex expression patterns in response to abiotic stress. Notably, under drought and cadmium (Cd) stress, the expression levels of AhASR4 and AhASR5 were significantly upregulated, suggesting that these genes may play a crucial role in the peanut plant's resistance to such stressors. These results provide a theoretical basis for studying the evolution, expression, and function of the peanut ASR gene family and will provide valuable information in the identification and screening of genes for peanut stress tolerance breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances are achieved in the design and development of efficient organic photosensitizers (PSs), especially with fluorescence imaging navigation in the second near‐infrared (NIR‐II, 1000–1700 nm) region. However, there are simply a handful of NIR‐II emissive organic PSs with efficient oxygen‐independent capability due to the scarcity of high‐performance NIR‐responsive organic materials and targeted delivery. Herein, a NIR‐II‐emissive organic nanomedicine with biomimetic engineering for high‐performance NIR‐II imaging and targeted multiple phototherapies of pancreatic tumors is reported. An A‐D‐A‐type conjugated small‐molecule TPC is designed and used to prepare water‐dispersive nanoparticles, which demonstrated high efficiency for type I and type II photodynamic performances, good photothermal conversion of 57%, and bright NIR‐II emission with a quantum yield of 9.8% under 808 nm light irradiation. With pancreatic cancer cell membrane camouflage, the biomimetic TPC nanomedicine achieved high‐resolution and targeted bioimaging of whole‐body blood vessels and tumors. Antitumor experiments demonstrated the high efficiency of the biomimetic TPC nanomedicine for pancreatic tumor elimination and good biosafety with 808 nm light irradiation. This work demonstrated a NIR‐II‐emissive versatile nanomedicine with enhanced tumor‐targeting for high‐resolution NIR‐II bioimaging and superior phototheranostics, providing a feasible idea for the evolution of targeted and high‐performance theranostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cadmium (Cd) is a toxic heavy metal that accumulates in plants, negatively affecting their physiological processes, growth, and development, and poses a threat to human health through the food chain. 6-phosphogluconolactonase (PGL) is a key enzyme in the Oxidative Pentose Phosphate Pathway(OPPP) in plant cells, essential for cellular metabolism. The OPPP pathway provides energy and raw materials for organisms and is involved in antioxidant reactions, lipid metabolism, and DNA synthesis. This study describes the Cd responsive gene AetPGL from Aegilops tauschii. Overexpression of AetPGL under Cd stress increased main root length and germination rate in Arabidopsis. Transgenic lines showed higher antioxidant enzyme activities and lower malondialdehyde (MDA) content compared to the wild type. The transgenic Arabidopsis accumulated more Cd in the aboveground part but not in the underground part. Expression levels of AtHMA3, AtNRAMP5, and AtZIP1 in the roots of transgenic plants increased under Cd stress, suggesting AetPGL may enhance Cd transport from root to shoot. Transcriptome analysis revealed enrichment of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the plant hormone signal transduction pathway in AetPGL-overexpressing plants. Brassinosteroids (BR), Gibbenellin acid (GA), and Jasmonic acid (JA) contents significantly increased after Cd treatment. These results indicate that AetPGL may enhance Arabidopsis' tolerance to Cd by modulating plant hormone content. In conclusion, AetPGL plays a critical role in improving cadmium tolerance and accumulation and mitigating oxidative stress by regulating plant hormones, providing insights into the molecular mechanisms of plant Cd tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polyploids are essential in plant evolution and species formation, providing a rich genetic reservoir and increasing species diversity. Complex polyploids with higher ploidy levels often have a dosage effect on the phenotype, which can be highly detrimental to gametes, making them rare. In this study, offspring plants resulting from an autoallotetraploid (RRRC) derived from the interspecific hybridization between allotetraploid Raphanobrassica (RRCC, 2n = 36) and diploid radish (RR, 2n = 18) were obtained. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) using C-genome-specific repeats as probes revealed two main genome configurations in these offspring plants: RRRCC (2n = 43, 44, 45) and RRRRCC (2n = 54, 55), showing more complex genome configurations and higher ploidy levels compared to the parental plants. These offspring plants exhibited extensive variation in phenotypic characteristics, including leaf type and flower type and color, as well as seed and pollen fertility. Analysis of chromosome behavior showed that homoeologous chromosome pairing events are widely observed at the diakinesis stage in the pollen mother cells (PMCs) of these allopolyploids, with a range of 58.73% to 78.33%. Moreover, the unreduced C subgenome at meiosis anaphase II in PMCs was observed, which provides compelling evidence for the formation of complex allopolyploid offspring. These complex allopolyploids serve as valuable genetic resources for further analysis and contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the formation of complex allopolyploids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maize (Zea mays L.) is an important food crop with a wide range of uses in both industry and agriculture. Drought stress during its growth cycle can greatly reduce maize crop yield and quality. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying maize responses to drought stress remain unclear. In this work, a WRKY transcription factor‐encoding gene, ZmWRKY30, from drought‐treated maize leaves was screened out and characterized. ZmWRKY30 gene expression was induced by dehydration treatments. The ZmWRKY30 protein localized to the nucleus and displayed transactivation activity in yeast. Compared with wild‐type (WT) plants, Arabidopsis lines overexpressing ZmWRKY30 exhibited a significantly enhanced drought stress tolerance, as evidenced by the improved survival rate, increased antioxidant enzyme activity by superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), and catalase (CAT), elevated proline content, and reduced lipid peroxidation recorded after drought stress treatment. In contrast, the mutator (Mu)‐interrupted ZmWRKY30 homozygous mutant (zmwrky30) was more sensitive to drought stress than its null segregant (NS), characterized by the decreased survival rate, reduced antioxidant enzyme activity (SOD, POD, and CAT) and proline content, as well as increased malondialdehyde accumulation. RNA‐Seq analysis further revealed that, under drought conditions, the knockout of the ZmWRKY30 gene in maize affected the expression of genes involved in reactive oxygen species (ROS), proline, and myo‐inositol metabolism. Meanwhile, the zmwrky30 mutant exhibited significant downregulation of myo‐inositol content in leaves under drought stress. Combined, our results suggest that ZmWRKY30 positively regulates maize responses to water scarcity. This work provides potential target genes for the breeding of drought‐tolerant maize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wafer defect pattern recognition can help engineers improve the production process of semiconductor chips. In real industrial scenarios, the recognition of mixed-type wafer defects is difficult and the production scale of semiconductor wafers is large, which requires high accuracy and speed in wafer defect pattern recognition. This study proposes a light-weight neural network model to efficiently recognize mixed-type wafer defects. The proposed model is constructed via inverted residual convolution blocks with attention mechanisms and large kernel convolution downsampling layers. The inference speed of the inverted residual convolution block is fast, and the attention mechanism can enhance feature extraction capabilities. Large kernel convolutions help the network retain more important feature information during downsampling operations. The experimental results on the real Mixed-type WM38 dataset show that the proposed model achieves a recognition accuracy of 98.69% with only 1.01 M parameters. Compared with some popular high-performance models and light-weight models, our model has advantages in both recognition accuracy and inference speed. Finally, we deploy the model as a TensorRT engine, which significantly improves the inference speed of the model, enabling it to process more than 1300 wafer maps per second. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]