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A new deaminase, TadA8e, was recently evolved in the laboratory. TadA8e catalyzes DNA deamination over 1,000 times faster than the widely used ABE7.10. Here, we took advantage of this speed to develop a high-efficiency adenine base editor, rABE8e (rice ABE8e), which combines monomeric TadA8e, bis-bpNLS and codon optimization. rABE8e had substantially increased editing efficiencies at both NG-protospacer adjacent motif (PAM) and NGG-PAM target sequences compared with ABEmax. For most targets, rABE8e exhibited close to 100% editing efficiency and high homozygous substitution rates in the specific editing window, especially at positions A5 and A6. The ability to rapidly generate plant materials with homozygous base substitutions will benefit gene function research and precision molecular breeding. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Using viscometer, densitometer, magnetic susceptibility device, DSC and X-ray diffractometer for high temperature (XRD), the Pb melt has been investigated between 800–1200 K. Anomalous changes in the physical properties were found near the same temperature. X-ray diffraction shows that the size of clusters in the low temperature zone is much larger than that in the high temperature zone. It is presumed that some solid-like structure occurred at the anomalous point of the physical properties during the cooling process.

We investigated the upper critical fields of Ca10(Pt4As8)(Fe2–xPtxAs2)5 superconducting whiskers. The whiskers consist of several wire-like grains with diameter of around 200 nm, joined by grain boundaries whose misorientation angles are less than 5∘. The upper critical fields along c-axis and in ab-plane were observed as 49 T at 12 K and 50 T at 22 K, respectively, which can be extrapolated to ∼81 and ∼133 T at 0 K. The whisker demonstrated weak anisotropic factor and almost constant value of ∼2 below 15 K. The impressive transport properties of the whisker may find applications in fields like superconducting micro- and meso-structure systems.