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By utilizing stochastic computing (SC), the hardware consumption of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be decreased significantly. However, long stream length is required to produce acceptable results, which leads to extended computation time. As a result, the inherent random fluctuation error and long latency of processing random bitstreams have made previous SC-CNN implementations inefficient compared with conventional binary designs. To address these issues, in this brief, an efficient convolution architecture based on fast FIR algorithm (FFA) is proposed by employing FFA to reduce the computational complexity. Further, the combination of two-line SC and Sobol sequences is applied to decrease the processing cycles. The functional simulation targeting LeNet-5 with MNIST dataset and RTL synthesis results show that the proposed design yields higher area efficiency than previous SC-based ones and achieves 64%, 11% higher efficiency in area and energy compared to the 5-bit fixed-point design while maintaining comparable accuracy.

Saprolegnia is one of the most potent fish pathogens and causes significant economic losses to the aquaculture industry annually. Thus far, almost all control methods have been ineffective or have caused environmental and fish-health-related problems. Vaccination of fish increases immunity against Saprolegniasis and provides an alternative to these control methods. We attempted to identify suitable vaccines for controlling these Saprolegniasis. Similar to plant-pathogenic oomycetes, Saprolegnia parasitica secretes effector proteins that translocate to host cells and manipulate the host cell functions. Forty-seven Ricin B-like lectins were detected and exhibited expansion in S. parasitica compared to that in other Phytophthora species, and most of the corresponding proteins exhibited hydrolase activity. The C-terminal sequences in these proteins were cysteine-rich, and the residues formed two to six disulfide bridges. Real-time PCR results indicated that these genes exhibited differential expression patterns at different growth stages . Ricin B-like lectins, similar to galactose-binding lectins, might be potential candidates for future vaccination trials.

Photinia (Photinia × fraseri Dress) is a well-known green plant that has high ornamental value and is widely distributed around the world. An outbreak of typical bud blight disease was observed between May and August in photinia in 2017 in Qingdao, China. The causal agent for this blight was subsequently isolated from symptomatic samples and identified as Nothophoma quercina based on morphological characterization and molecular analyses (ITS, LSU, RPB2, and TUB2). Results of pathogenicity tests on isolated fungi also supported the conclusion that N. quercina is the pathogen responsible for this condition. To our knowledge, this is the first report of bud blight on P. fraseri caused by N. quercina in China.

Gaillardia pulchella Foug., belonging to the family Asteraceae, is an annual herb commonly seen in tropical America and China. It is often used as ornamental flowers because of its bright color, long flowering period and simple cultivation and management. In June 2021, leaf spot on G. pulchella with ∼40% disease incidence was observed in Laoshan scenic spot of Qingdao, Shandong Province, China. Initial symptoms on leaves appeared as light yellow to brown round or oval spots with dark brown borders, and the lesion area gradually expanded and the color deepened with the development of the disease. Small tissue samples collected from the infected lesions were surface-sterilized with 70% ethanol for 30 s, then rinsed with 2% sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) for 60 s, and finally rinsed with sterilized water three times. All the samples were transferred to potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium and incubated at 25℃ in the dark for 5 days (Zhu et al. 2013). A total of 9 isolates were obtained from the 11 selected tissues of symptomatic leaves. Afterward, all the single spore isolates were transferred onto potato carrot agar (PCA) plates (Mirkova 2003). After 7 to 10 days of incubation on PCA at 25℃ in the dark, colonies had a cottony mycelium with round margins, colored in white to gray. To test pathogenicity, six healthy G. pulchella plants were inoculated with mycelial plugs of the above pure cultures from a 7-day-old culture grown on PCA, while six germfree PCA plugs were served as negative controls. All the inoculated plants were set in greenhouse incubator at 25℃ and 80% relative humidity. Following 5 days incubation, brown spots began to appear on the sites of all inoculated leaves with mycelial plugs, while all the negative controls inoculated with sterile PCA plugs remained healthy. Infected lesions were separated and cultured as the same as those isolated in the field, and the same isolate was again microscopically identified, fulfilling Koch's postulates. 5 isolates were characterized, the colony margins of single spore isolate were round with gray or black aerial mycelia. Conidia were clustered and unbranched with 1 to 4 septa, colored in light or dark brown, shaped in obclavate or ellipsoid with short conical beak at the tip, dimensions varied from 14 to 51 μm (length) × 4.5 to 11 μm (width). The described morphological characteristics were consistent with Alternaria alternata (Simmons 2007). For further identification of molecular characterization, the genes of Chitin synthase (CHSD), RNA polymerase II second largest subunit (PRB2), Tsr1 ribosome biogenesis protein (Tsr1) and glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) were obtained by PCR amplification with the primer pairs CHSDF1/CHSDR1, PRB2DF/PRB2DR, Tsr1F/Tsr1R and GAPDHF1/GAPDHR1 (Damn et al. 2019; Lawrence et al. 2013), respectively. The sequenced genes (GenBank accession nos. ON660874, ON660875, ON660876 and ON660877) had more than 99% nucleotide identity with the corresponding genes (GenBank accession nos. KY996470.1, MN304718.1, KY996472.1 and MN158133.1) of the reference strains of A. alternata in GenBank, and the re-inoculated and re-isolated strains have the same results which were repeated three times. The causal agent occurred on G. pulchella was identified as A. alternata based on the morphological and molecular characteristics. To our knowledge, this is the first record causing leaf spot on G. pulchella by A. alternata in China.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (M-MIMO) brings better robustness and spectral efficiency but higher computational challenges compared to small-scale MIMO. One of the key challenges is the large-scale matrix inversion, as widely employed in channel estimation and detection. Traditionally, to address the issue, several low-complexity matrix inversion methods have been proposed, including the tri-diagonal matrix approximation (TMA) and the Neumann-series approximation (NSA). Although the previous methods effectively alleviate the computational cost, they all fail to exploit the typical properties of channel matrices, leading to unsatisfactory error-rate performance in some non-ideal scenarios. To solve the issue, in this paper, a two-level and block diagonal based improved Neumann series approximation (TL-BD-INSA) algorithm is proposed, which is suitable for both ideal uncorrelated channels and the correlated channels with multiple-antenna user equipment (MAUE) system. First, a two-level block diagonal iteration based on matrix partition is employed, which exhibits performance comparable to the exact method while having a lower computational load. An improved normalization factor is then introduced to accelerate convergence. Numerical results show that, for $128\times 32$ MIMO with MAUE non-ideal channel, the proposed algorithm performs only 0.25 dB away from the exact matrix inversion when bit error rate (BER) $ = 10^{-3}$ . The implementation on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and ASIC with TSMC 45 nm shows that the proposed detector can achieve 1731 bps/slices and 0.463 Gbps/mm $^2$ hardware efficiency, respectively, demonstrating that the proposed system can achieve a well trade-off between error performance and implementation efficiency.

Bellis perennis L., commonly known as the daisy or sun chrysanthemum, belonging to the family Asteraceae, is a perennial herb and is usually used as an ornamental plant worldwide for its vibrant flowers. Simultaneously, B. perennis has been proved to have therapeutic effects used on common colds, wound healing, anti-tumor, anxiolytic and antioxidant (Karakas et al. 2017). In July 2021, typical leaf spot was observed on B. perennis with about 50% disease incidence in Ruyue lake wetland park of Zibo (36.71°N, 118.01°E), Shandong Province, China. We surveyed more than 1000 square meters of planting area, and the diseased leaves were mostly concentrated in the lower location of plants, where the humidity was higher under the forest. Symptoms on the initially diseased leaves appeared as light yellow, round or oval lesions with light or brown borders. With the development of the disease, the area of the lesion gradually expands, the color deepens, and the shape is becoming irregular. To identify the causal pathogen, small pieces of 15 tissues collected from the infected leaves were sterilized with 75% ethanol for 30 s and then 2% sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) for 60 s, finally rinsed with sterile water three times. All the tissues were placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 25 ℃ in the dark for 5 days (Zhu et al. 2013). A total of 13 isolates were obtained from the above diseased leaves. The cultures were initially grayish white, then a light green halo appeared in the middle of the medium after 5 days, with numerous gray aerial hyphae. For molecular identification, the RNA polymerase II beta subunit (PRB2), Tsr ribosome biogenesis protein, partial coding sequences of chitin synthase, glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) and major allergen Alt a 1 were amplified from genomic DNA extracted from four representative single isolates using the primers PRB2DF/PRB2DR, Tsr1F/Tsr1R, CHSDF1/CHSDR1, GDF1/GDR1, and AltF/AltR (Damn et al. 2019; Lawrence et al. 2013), respectively, and sequenced (GenBank accession nos. OL416000, OL416001, OL416002, OL416003, and OL416004). These genes had more than 99.9% nucleotide identity with the corresponding sequences (KY131957.1, KY131958.1, KY996470.1, MN657411.1, and KY923227.1) of the reference strains of Alternaria alternata in GenBank. For pathogenicity tests, five healthy B. perennis plants each with three living leaves were inoculated with mycelial plugs of A. alternata from a 5-day-old culture grown on PDA. After inoculation, the plants were placed in a greenhouse with 85% relative humidity at 25 ℃ and monitored daily for symptom development. After 3 days, all inoculated leaves with mycelial plugs of A. alternata appeared symptoms similar to those observed in the field previously, while no symptoms appeared on negative controls which were inoculated with sterile PDA plugs. Cultures re-isolated from diseased leaves had the same morphological and molecular results as those isolated in the field, confirming Koch's postulates. The causal agent on B. perennis was confirmed as A. alternata on the basis of morphological and molecular results (Simmons 2007). To our knowledge, this is the first report on the presence of A. alternata affecting B. perennis plants in China. The discovery of this new disease is beneficial to the application and protection of B. perennis, which is a popular landscape and medicinal plant.

Polar codes are one of the most favorable capacity-achieving codes owing to their simple structures and low decoding complexity. Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoders with large list sizes achieve performances very close to those of maximum-likelihood (ML) decoders. However, hardware cost is a severe problem because an SCL decoder with list size L consists of L copies of a successive cancellation (SC) decoder. To address this issue, a stochastic SCL (SSCL) polar decoder is proposed. Although stochastic computing can achieve a good hardware reduction compared with the deterministic one, its straightforward application to an SCL decoder is not well-suited owing to the precision loss and severe latency. Therefore, a doubling probability approach and adaptive distributed sorting (DS) are introduced. A corresponding hardware architecture is also developed. Field programmable gate array (FPGA) results demonstrate that the proposed stochastic SCL polar decoder can achieve a good performance and complexity tradeoff.

Physostegia virginiana Benth. (false dragon head flower), belonging to the family Lamiaceae, is a perennial plant and is usually used as landscape plant in parks and wetlands in China. It is also widely used as an ornamental plant for cut-flower all over the world (Cardin et al. 2007). In June 2019, leaf spot symptoms were observed on P. virginiana in Zibo botanical garden of Shandong Province, China (36.79°N, 118.02°E). We surveyed about 200 square meters of planting area, and most of the infected plants were close to the water or wet places, with ~20% disease incidence which were concentrated in the lower leaves of plants. The symptoms appeared on leaves were mostly round or oval spots, light to dark brown in color, and 3 to 8 mm in diameter. Severe leaf lesions were linked together, causing early fall of leaves. Small pieces of 15 infected leaves were collected to confirm the causal pathogen. The samples were sterilized by 70% ethanol for 30 s, 5% NaClO for 1 min, then rinsed in sterile water three times, plated on potato dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 25℃ in the dark for 7 days (Zhu et al. 2013), and 7 isolates were obtained from 10 diseased samples. The stroma of fungal mycelium was initially white, gradually turning dark green to black, while the margin of colony was regular, with concentric rings which were black sporodochia aggregates. Conidiophore hyaline, produce 2-3 order complex branches, arising as 3-4 conidiogenous cells from the tip of the branches, conidiogenous cells ampulliform to cylindrical. Conidia were aseptate, unicellular, hyaline, cylindrical, and their dimensions varied from 4.8 to 8.2 × 1.7 to 2.4 μm with rounded tips. The morphological characteristics of the isolates matched features described for Paramyrothecium roridum (Tode) L. Lombard & Crous, comb. nov. (Lombard et al. 2016). For molecular identification, genomic DNA was extracted from five representative single spore isolates. The partial coding genes of internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and calmodulin (cmdA) from the original isolates were amplified with primers ITS1/ITS4 and CALDF1/CALDR1 (White et al. 1990; Lawrence et al. 2013), respectively. The sequenced genes (GenBank accession no. MT318535, and MT454826) exhibited 98.71%, and 100.00% homology with type specimen of P. roridum strain CBS372.50 (GenBank accession no. MH856665.1, and KU846271.1), respectively, confirming the morphological identification. Pathogenicity of the fungus was tested indoor by inoculating 5 living, healthy P. virginiana plants with 3 leaves, which were inoculated with 10 µl of conidial suspension (2 × 105 conidia/ml) from a 10-day-old cultures on PDA, while 5 other inoculated plants with 10 µl of sterile water were served as controls. Treated plants with the inoculated leaves were covered by plastic bags in the greenhouse of 14 h light/10 h dark with ~80% relative humidity at 25℃. As time went by (about 3-7 days), the leaves inoculated with conidial suspension appeared similar symptoms as described above, whereas negative controls were still healthy. The same pathogens were isolated from the diseased leaves and repeated three times with same results as those that were obtained previously from the outdoor plants, including morphological and molecular results which confirm Koch's postulates. To our knowledge, this is the first record of P. roridum causing leaf spot on P. virginiana in China. The finding is beneficial to the better application of P. virginiana, a very common ornamental plant.

Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) with millimeter-wave (mmWave) techniques is favored by next-generation communication systems for its higher data rates, and higher spectral energy efficiency. Considering the dual-wideband effect existing in the large-scale antenna arrays, a new architecture for uplink (UL) channel estimation based on path-division multiple access (PDMA) is proposed in this paper. To be specific, we focus our attention on a new method based on successive dichotomy to reduce the searching complexity and achieve better performance than the traditional algorithm, where a selection for quantization is given to save resource overhead. Furthermore, a low-cost VLSI architecture for PDMA, which is easy to implement on hardware, is first proposed.

Celtis sinensis Pers. (Chinese hackberry), belonging to the family Ulmaceae, is widely used as a street tree or landscape plant because of its longevity and aesthetic growth habit. Additionally, C. sinensis is of economic importance due to its medicinal properties. Roots and bark of the plant can be used in natural medicine for the treatment of lumbago, measles, tumor, etc (Zhang et al. 2016). In July 2019, symptoms of leaf spot were observed on C. sinensis in Yuanshan national forest park of Zibo, Shandong Province, China (36.48°N, 117.84°E). We surveyed more than 500 square meters of forest area, and more than 80% of the acreage was affected with the leafspot disease. Symptoms on infected leaves appeared as regular round or oval spots, colored in yellow with brown borders, which coalesced into larger spots as the disease progressed. To investigate the cause, 20 leaves of infected tissues were cut into ~2 mm pieces and surface disinfected with 75% ethanol for 30 s, rinsed three times with sterile deionized water. These were air dried and placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 25℃ for 5 to 7 days. A minimum of 15 isolates were obtained and cultures were initially white, gradually becoming gray green to dark after 1 week, producing copious amounts of gray aerial mycelium. Three representative single isolates were used for molecular identification, which were verified based on the amplification of DNA sequences of internal transcribed spacer region, translation elongation factor 1 alpha and beta-tubulin genes, using the primers ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990), EF1-728F/EF1-986R (Carbone and Kohn 1999), and BT-2a/BT-2b (Glass and Donaldson 1995), respectively. The sequenced genes (GenBank accession no. MT367874, MT385087, MT374083) exhibited 99.63% (Identity=545/547), 99.00% (Identity=297/300), and 100.00% (Identity=451/451) homology with the corresponding genes of type specimen of Botryosphaeria dothidea strain CBS110302 (GenBank accession no. AY259092, AY573218, EU673106), respectively. Morphological and molecular results showed that the isolates were B. dothidea (Slippers et al. 2014; Zhai et al. 2014). Pathogenicity was confirmed using five living, healthy C. sinensis plants with three leaves were wound inoculated with mycelial plugs (about 4 mm in diameter) of B. dothidea from a 7-day-old culture grown on PDA, while inoculated with sterile PDA plugs on the same leaves were served as negative controls. All the plants were covered by plastic sheeting and keep high relative humidity by adding water in time. Seven days later, all inoculated leaves appeared as round dark brown spots, which were larger than observed in the field. The pathogenicity test was repeated three times. No symptoms were observed on negative controls. Fungi re-isolated from inoculated leaves were confirmed as B. dothidea on the basis morphology and molecular characterization as described above. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the presence of B. dothidea affecting C. sinensis plants in China. This discovery is important to ensure the sustainable production of C. sinensis, an important landscaping and medicinal tree.

A novel imidazolium-embedded iodoacetamide-functionalized silica-based stationary phase has been prepared by surface radical chain-transfer polymerization. The stationary phase was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectrometry, thermogravimetric analysis, and element analysis. Fast and efficient separations of polar analytes, such as nucleosides and nucleic acid bases, water-soluble vitamins and saponins, were well achieved in hydrophilic interaction chromatography mode. Additionally, a mixed mode of hydrophilic interaction and reversed-phase could be also obtained in the analysis of polar and nonpolar compounds, including weak acidic phenols, basic anilines and positional isomers, with high resolution and molecular-planarity selectivity, outperforming the commercially available amino column. Moreover, simultaneous separation of polar and nonpolar compounds was also achieved. In conclusion, the multimodal retention capabilities of the imidazolium-embedded iodoacetamide-functionalized silica-based column could offer a wide range of retention behavior and flexible selectivity toward hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds.

Hedera helix L. (common ivy) grows worldwide and is an evergreen root-climbing liana commonly used in parks, green belts (Metcalfe 2005), indoors as an ornamental, and as a traditional medicinal plant in China. In July 2019, a leaf wilt was observed on H. helix in Xiaofuhe wetland of Zibo, Shandong Province, China (36.79°N, 117.98°E). More than 100 m² of planting area was investigated, and the disease incidence reached about 30%. The place where the disease was found was a wetland park, mainly in a watery and humid environment. Initial symptoms on leaves appeared as small water-soaked lesions, yellow or brown in color and round or oval in shape. As the disease progressed, the area of the lesions gradually increased, forming round or irregular brown necrotic spots surrounded by a yellow halo, which eventually resulted in a wilt and death. To determine the causal pathogen, small pieces of the diseased tissue were collected and surface sterilized by 75% ethanol for 30 s followed by 5% NaClO for 1 min and then rinsed three times with sterile water. The treated samples were plated on potato dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 25°C for 2 days, and nine fungal isolates were obtained from 10 diseased leaves. The colonies were initially white, gradually turning gray-green to dark gray after 7 days, and the margin of the colony was regular, with abundant gray aerial mycelium. To verify identity, the partial coding genes of the internal transcribed spacer region, beta-tubulin, and translation elongation factor 1 alpha genes from the original isolate were amplified with primers ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990), BT-2a/BT-2b (Glass et al. 1995), and EF1-728F/EF1-986R (Carbone et al. 1999), respectively. The sequenced genes (GenBank accession nos. MN633360, MN642587, and MN642588) exhibited 99.46, 100.00, and 99.00% homology with type specimen of Botryosphaeria dothidea CBS115476 (GenBank accession nos. KF293866, EU673106, and AY573218), respectively. The isolates were confirmed as B. dothidea on the basis of morphological and molecular results (Zhai et al. 2014). To assess pathogenicity, five healthy leaves from each of three 6-month-old healthy H. helix plants were wound inoculated with a sterilized needle. Mycelial plugs (about 5 mm in diameter) of B. dothidea from a 7-day-old culture on PDA were placed on the wounds, and five other sterile PDA plugs served as negative controls on the same leaves. All treated leaves and the whole plants were covered by sterilized plastic film and sprayed with water as needed. Ten days later, all inoculated plants developed similar symptoms to those previously observed outdoors, and the reisolated pathogen was identified as B. dothidea based on morphological and molecular results, whereas no symptoms appeared and no pathogen was isolated on negative controls. The pathogenicity test was repeated three times and showed similar results, confirming Koch’s postulates. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the presence of B. dothidea affecting H. helix plants in China. The discovery of this new disease is beneficial to the application and protection of H. helix, a common landscape and medicinal plant.

Deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) usually require a large number of iterative convolution operations, which would consume significant amounts of hardware resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient convolution architecture based on Winograd algorithm for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), by employing stochastic computing (SC). For the first step, a fast convolution algorithm, Winograd fast convolution algorithm (WFCA), which can lower the complexity by reducing multiplications is proposed. Although stochastic computing (SC) can achieve significant reduction in hardware complexity compared with the deterministic design, its straightforward application to fast convolution is not well-suited due to the precision loss. Therefore, based on two-line SC, this paper proposes a non-scaled stochastic adder which has higher computation accuracy than the conventional stochastic adder. Numerical results have proved the advantages of the proposed design in both complexity and precision. Although preliminary, it is expected that this design can be the first step of combining neural network and stochastic computing, which are both analog, belief-based and fault-tolerant, thereby unlocking the potentiality for the widespread application of stochastic Winograd algorithm in neural network systems.

In the multi-label classification task (Automatic Tagging of Zhihu Questions), we present a classification system which includes five processes. Firstly, we use a preprocessing step to solve the problem that there is too much noise in the training dataset. Secondly, we choose several neural network models which proved effective in text classification task. Then we introduce k-max pooling structure to these models to fit this task. Thirdly, in order to obtain a better performance in ensemble process, we use an experiment-designing process to obtain classification results that are not similar to each other and all achieve relatively high scores. Fourthly, we use an ensemble process. Finally, we propose a method to estimate how many labels should be chosen. With these processes, our F1 score achieves 0.5194, which ranked No. 3.

MaoC-like hydratase (MaoC) is a recently identified enzyme involved in the biosynthetic pathway of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), which are completely biodegradable polymers used to produce green plastics. The inactive mutant D194N-MaoC was crystallized in the presence of the substrate crotonyl-CoA. Crystals were grown in a number of conditions, but only those produced using 20%(v/v) ethylene glycol were suitable for structural studies. Data were collected to 2.10 Å resolution using X-radiation and the crystal belonged to the orthorhombic space group P2(1)2(1)2(1), with unit-cell parameters a = 81.40, b = 82.58, c = 123.99 Å.

Background and Purpose— Stroke system of care plays key roles both in providing effective therapies and in improving the overall outcome of patients with stroke. Our purpose was to develop and evaluate the system in Chinese rural areas. Methods— A stroke system of care was developed from November 2009 to November 2010 in 3 townships in Ganyu County. An additional 3 matched townships were invited as controls. We first investigated stroke management in these townships and then implemented stroke system of care and an education campaign in the 3 intervention townships. The effectiveness of the system was then evaluated. Results— There were 1036 patients with new stroke among 344 345 subjects in the 6 rural communities. The incidence of stroke in the rural areas was 301/100 000, and the mortality rate was 55/100 000. The proportions significantly increased in the intervention communities after the implementation of the stroke system of care and education campaign when compared with the control communities, including patients presenting at rural hospitals within 3 hours of symptom onset (13.6% versus 8.7%; P =0.017), diagnosed by computed tomographic scanning within 24 hours of admission (65.3% versus 58.5%; P =0.034), and received thrombolytic treatment (3.9% versus 1.7%; P =0.038). During the 1-year follow-up, 32 (6.5%) patients with stroke in the intervention communities and 48 (10.1%) in the control communities died. The disability rate of stroke was significantly reduced in the intervention communities at postintervention (38.4% versus 48.1%; P =0.001). Conclusions— A stroke system of care would be reliable and practical in Chinese rural areas. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.chictr.org . Unique identifier: ChiCTR-RCH-13003408.

A new monoamine oxidase type C-like dehydratase gene (MaoC) supplying (R)-3-hydroxyacyl-CoA from the fatty acid oxidation pathway to polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) biosynthetic pathways was identified from Phytophthora capsici. MaoC was over-expressed in Escherichia coli and the recombinant MaoC was purified. The purified tagged MaoC shows the enoyl-CoA hydratase activity of 58 U/mg towards crotonyl-CoA. MaoC may not fold properly above 40°C which was revealed by circular dichroism analysis. Crystal of MaoC diffracts to 2.9 A in space group P212121, with unit-cell parameters a = 81.5 A, b = 82.6 A, c = 124.2 A, α = β = γ = 90°.

MaoC-like dehydratase (MaoC) plays an important role in supplying (R)-3-hydroxyacyl-CoA from the fatty-acid oxidation pathway to polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) biosynthetic pathways. PHAs have been attracting much attention as they can be used in the biosynthesis of synthetic plastics. Crystals of MaoC from Phytophora capsici were grown by the hanging-drop vapour-diffusion method at 289 K in a number of screening conditions. An MaoC crystal diffracted to 1.93 A resolution using X-ray radiation and belonged to the orthorhombic space group P2(1)2(1)2(1), with unit-cell parameters a = 81.458, b = 82.614, c = 124.228 A, alpha = beta = gamma = 90 degrees.

We evaluated the incidence, age, gender, and anatomical distribution of gastric cancers in 65,284 cases of upper GI endoscopies. A total of 5253 gastric cancer cases were identified. Cancers of the cardia, fundus, body and antrum account for 33.6%, 2.7%, 23.6% and 34.0% of all cases, respectively. The mean age for gastric cancers was 56.9+/-10.2 years and 69.7% of the cancer cases were found in the 50-69 year age group. Subjects with cardia cancer were slightly older than subjects with non-cardia cancer. Over the 12-year period, the incidence of the gastric antrum cancer had significantly declined, whereas the incidence of the gastric cancer in the cardia and body had risen steadily. Thus, there was a rising trend of cardia cancers and a decreasing trend of most non-cardia cancers.

A switched mode power supply (SMPS) with full digital control has many advantages over analog or mixed-signal implementation. This paper presents a digital controlled SMPS consisting of an AC-DC power factor correction converter and a phase-shifted full-bridge DC-DC converter. Digital algorithm of PFC control, system design of digital PFC and PSFB (phase shifted full bridge) part, PWM strategy for phase-shifted control are discussed. A 500 W prototype has been built and tested under different conditions

Background Pectate lyases (PELs) play an important role in the infection process of plant pathogens and also have a commercial significance in industrial applications. Most of the PELs were expressed as soluble recombinant proteins, while a few recombinant proteins were insoluble. The production of a large-scale soluble recombinant PEL would allow not only a more detailed structural and functional characterization of this enzyme but also may have important applications in the food industry. Results We cloned a new pectate lyase gene (Pcpel2) from Phytophthora capsici. Pcpel2 was constructed by pET system and pMAL system, and both constructs were used to express the PCPEL2 in Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3) pLysS. The expressed products were purified using affinity chromatography and gel filtration chromatography. The purity, specific activity and pathogenicity of the purified PCPEL2 expressed by the pMAL system were higher than the purified PCPEL2 expressed by the pET system. In addition, some other characteristics of the purified PCPEL2 differed from the two systems, such as crystallographic features. Purified PCPEL2 expressed by the pMAL system was crystallized by the hanging-drop vapour-diffusion method at 289 K, and initial crystals were grown. Conclusion The two different methods and comparison presented here would be highly valuable in obtaining an ideal enzyme for the downstream experiments, and supply an useful alternative to purify some insoluble recombinant proteins.