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Wheat stripe rust and powdery mildew are important worldwide diseases of wheat (Triticum aestivum). The wheat cultivar Xingmin318 (XM318) is resistant to both wheat stripe rust and powdery mildew, which are caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst) and Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici (Bgt), respectively. To explore the difference between wheat defense response against Pst and Bgt, quantitative proteomic analyses of XM318 inoculated with either Pst or Bgt were performed using tandem mass tags technology. A total of 741 proteins were identified as differentially accumulated proteins (DAPs). Bioinformatics analyses indicated that some functional categories, including antioxidant activity and immune system process, exhibited obvious differences between Pst and Bgt infections. Intriguingly, only 42 DAPs responded to both Pst and Bgt infections. Twelve DAPs were randomly selected for reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) analysis, and the mRNA expression levels of 11 were consistent with their protein expression. Furthermore, gene silencing using the virus-induced gene silencing system indicated that glutathione S-transferase (TaGSTU6) has an important role in resistance to Bgt but not to Pst. TaGSTU6 interacted with the cystathionine beta-synthase (CBS) domain-containing protein (TaCBSX3) in both Pst and Bgt infections. Knockdown of TaCBSX3 expression only reduced wheat resistance to Bgt infection. Overexpression of TaGSTU6 and TaCBSX3 in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) promoted plant resistance to Pseudomonas syringae pv. Tomato DC3000. Our results indicate that TaGSTU6 interaction with TaCBSX3 only confers wheat resistance to Bgt, suggesting that wheat has different response mechanisms to Pst and Bgt stress.

Multi-functional copolymers based on NIPAM and thienoviologens with different numbers of thiophene units (n = 1, 2 and 3) were synthesized and their absorption/emission properties were systematically studied. The thienoviologens exhibited significantly decreased energy band gaps (2.21–2.80 eV) compared with methyl viologen (3.70 eV) as well as intense fluorescence emission with up to 92% quantum yield. Different numbers of thiophene units effectively changed the electrochromic and electrofluorochromic behavior of the devices because of the varied conjugation degree. The PNIPAM chains contribute to the thermo-responsive properties which could be observed simultaneously with electrochromic and electrofluorochromic behavior when the temperature varied below and above the LCST (32 °C). By combining the thermo-responsive, electrochromic and electrofluorochromic properties of poly(NIPAM-co-TV), multi-responsive smart windows were developed. The thienoviologen units also demonstrate photodynamic antimicrobial activities due to their ability to generate singlet oxygen species upon photo irradiation. With the contribution of thermo-responsive PNIPAM fragments, poly(NIPAM-co-terthienoviologen) is endowed with thermo-controlled antimicrobial activity (CFU reduction = 99.6% for T > LCST and CFU reduction = 63.0% for T < LCST). This discovery successfully integrated thermo-responsive, electrochromic, electrofluorochromic and photodynamic antimicrobial properties into one system and will be greatly beneficial to expand the potential applications of viologen derivatives.

A series of water-soluble cationic thienoviologen derivative photosensitizers (nTPy-Rs) for photodynamic therapy (PDT) is reported. Cationic pyridine groups were introduced into the thiophene framework to enhance solubility and bacteria-binding ability, which effectively improved bacteriological imaging and antibacterial activity. The optoelectronic properties of nTPy-Rs were regulated by adjusting the number of thiophene groups, and the differences in antibacterial activity due to the functional scaffolds were compared. The results showed that nTPy-Rs could generate reactive oxygen species (ROS, including macroscopic free radicals), efficiently inhibit bacterial growth, and achieve the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) to the ng mL

Wheat powdery mildew (Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici [Bgt]) is a widespread disease that causes significant economic losses to common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) crops worldwide. To identify effective resistance genes, we evaluated 120 common wheat accessions mainly from different wheat producing regions in China for responses to different Bgt isolates in the seedling stage and to natural infection in three field trials and genotyped them with a wheat 55K iSelect single-nucleotide polymorphism array for a genome-wide association study. A total of 26 loci were identified, which explained 6.6 to 26.2% of the phenotypic variation depending on individual locus. Of the 26 loci, 10 were detected in the A genomes, 10 in the B genomes, and only 6 in the D genome. Sixteen loci overlapped with known powdery mildew resistance genes or quantitative trait loci, and the remaining 10 loci were potentially novel. This study improves the understanding of the genetic structure of wheat powdery mildew resistance and provides germplasms and information on genes and markers for breeding new wheat cultivars with effective resistance to powdery mildew.

Fast in-memory key value stores are the keys to building large-scale Internet services. The state-of-the-art solutions mainly focus on optimizing the performance for read-intensive workloads. Nevertheless, a wide range of applications demonstrate a significant amount of updates and range queries, which scale poorly with the current implementations. In this paper, we present BiloKey, a highly scalable in-memory key value store on multi-core machines, significantly outperforming Redis and Memcached for a variety of mixed read and write workloads. To achieve this, BiloKey leverages a fast bi-index comprised by a Hash Table index and a SkipList index, where the former supports feature rich operations including GET, UPDATE and DELETE with $O$O(1) complexity, while the latter supports SCAN with $O$O(log$N$N) complexity. Furthermore, to make the bi-index design scale well, BiloKey adopts three techniques: lazy synchronization for reducing the overhead of maintaining index consistency, lock-free data structure for supporting multi-writers, and locality-aware data parallel processing for preserving the data locality of requests. Compared with two popular in-memory KV stores (i.e., Redis and Memcached), experimental results show that: (1) for write-intensive workloads, BiloKey outperforms Redis and Memcached by 7.8x and 3.7x on average (up to 11.5x and 4.8x), respectively; (2) for scan-intensive workloads, BiloKey achieves an average speedup of 2.3x against Redis; (3) for read-intensive workloads, BiloKey also outperforms Redis and Memcached by 1.2x and 1.8x on average.

The chemical structures and topologies of the crosslinks in supramolecular networks play a crucial role in their properties and functions. Herein, the preparation of a type of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAAM)-based supramolecular networks crosslinked by emissive hexagonal metallacycles is presented. The topological connections in these networks greatly affect their properties, as evidenced by their differences in absorption, emission, lower critical solution temperature, and modulus along with the variation of crosslinking densities. The integration of PNIPAAM and metallacycles in the networks benefits them improved bioavailability, making them serve as reagents for bacterial imaging and killing. This study provides a strategy to prepare cavity-crosslinked polymer networks for antibacterial applications.

Cardiovascular disease has become a major disease affecting health in the whole world. Gene therapy, delivering foreign normal genes into target cells to repair damages caused by defects and abnormal genes, shows broad prospects in treating different kinds of cardiovascular diseases. China has achieved great progress of basic gene therapy researches and pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases in recent years. This review will summarize the latest research about gene therapy of proteins, epigenetics, including noncoding RNAs and genome-editing technology in myocardial infarction, cardiac ischemia–reperfusion injury, atherosclerosis, muscle atrophy, and so on in China. We wish to highlight some important findings about the essential roles of basic gene therapy in this field, which might be helpful for searching potential therapeutic targets for cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become one of the major diseases affecting human health worldwide. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) refer to a class of RNAs with a length of more than 200 nucleotides and a low coding potential. LncRNAs are involved in a variety of physiological and pathological processes and are reported to play an essential role in cell proliferation, differentiation, development, senescence, and apoptosis, closely related to various diseases such as tumors, endocrine diseases, and nervous system diseases. In the cardiovascular system, lncRNAs also have an important regulatory role in cardiovascular development and diseases, including pathological cardiac hypertrophy, myocardial infarction, cardiac ischemia-reperfusion injury, atherosclerosis, heart failure, etc. In this chapter, we will briefly summarize the classification and characteristics of lncRNAs and focus on the latest knowledge of lncRNAs in cardiovascular development and diseases. In addition, we will discuss the molecular mechanism underlying lncRNA regulation of cardiovascular diseases and highlight the potential application of lncRNAs.

Graphene oxide–poly(urea–formaldehyde) (GUF) composites were prepared by anchoring a prepolymer of urea–formaldehyde resin onto graphene oxide (GO) sheets through in–situ polycondensation. Five GUF composites with 2.6, 4.3, 8.6, 20.8, and 34.6 wt.% GO sheets were synthesized and added into epoxy resin by ball milling. Results of sedimentation test, transmission electron microscopy, and cross–sectional microstructural analysis showed that GUF/EP coatings with 8.6 wt.% GO sheets were compatible with the polymer matrix. Electrochemical impedance spectra further revealed the optimal corrosion protection of GUF composites with 8.6 wt.% GO sheets.

Four kinds of graphite derivatives in different exfoliation degrees were synthesized via modified Hummers’ method by controlling the mass ration of graphite and KMnO4 . The modified graphite derivatives (GUF) were synthesized through chemical modification with the prepolymer of urea–formaldehyde. Results of Raman spectroscopy (Raman) and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed that the layer exfoliation was affected by oxidation degree during the preparation of graphene oxide (GO). The highly exfoliated GO was fully modified by UF resin and presented excellent compatibility with epoxy resin. The data of electrochemical impedance spectra (EIS) verified the optimal corrosion resistance of GUF/EP composite coating with the highly exfoliated GO sheets. The data of localized electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (LEIS) demonstrated that the highly exfoliated modified GO exhibited slight galvanic corrosion in the defective coatings.

A series of water-soluble cationic chalcogenoviologen-based photosensitizers for photodynamic antimicrobial therapy (PDAT) is reported. The Se-containing derivatives (SeMV2+ ) 5 b and 6 b showed good antimicrobial activities due to the presence of chalcogen atoms and a cationic scaffold. The former efficiently enhanced the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and the latter facilitated the ROS delivery to bacteria, resulting in their death. Interestingly, alkyl-modified photosensitizers showed higher antimicrobial activities than commonly reported photosensitizers with quaternary ammonium (QA) groups. In particular, the SeMV2+ (6 b) with excellent antibacterial activities efficiently promoted the healing of infected wounds in mice. Simple yet novel, nontoxic and biocompatible chalcogenoviologens provided a promising strategy to develop new efficient photosensitizers for photodynamic antimicrobial therapy and skin regeneration.

Highly-available datastores are widely deployed for Internet-based applications. However, many Internet-based applications are not contented with the simple data access interface provided by highly-available datastores. Distributed transaction support is demanded by applications such as massive online payment used by Alipay, Paypal or Baidu Wallet. Current solutions to distributed transaction can spend more than half of the whole transaction processing time in distributed commit. The culprits are the multiple write-ahead logging steps and communication roundtrips in the commit process. This paper presents the HACommit protocol, a logless one-phase commit protocol for highly-available datastores. HACommit has transaction participants vote for a commit before the client decides to commit or abort the transaction; in comparison, the state-of-the-art practice for distributed commit is to have the client decide before participants vote. The change enables the removal of both the participant’s write-ahead logging and the coordinator’s write-ahead logging steps in the distributed commit process; it also makes possible that, after the client initiates the transaction commit, the transaction data is visible to other transactions within one communication roundtrip time (i.e., one phase). In the evaluation with extensive experiments, HACommit outperforms recent atomic commit solutions for highly-available datastores under different workloads. In the best case, HACommit can commit in one fifth of the time the widely-used two-phase commit (2PC) does.

An ever increasing number of configuration parameters are provided to system users. But many users have used one configuration setting across different workloads, leaving untapped the performance potential of systems. A good configuration setting can greatly improve the performance of a deployed system under certain workloads. But with tens or hundreds of parameters, it becomes a highly costly task to decide which configuration setting leads to the best performance. While such task requires the strong expertise in both the system and the application, users commonly lack such expertise. To help users tap the performance potential of systems, we present Best Config, a system for automatically finding a best configuration setting within a resource limit for a deployed system under a given application workload. BestConfig is designed with an extensible architecture to automate the configuration tuning for general systems. To tune system configurations within a resource limit, we propose the divide-and-diverge sampling method and the recursive bound-and-search algorithm. BestConfig can improve the throughput of Tomcat by 75%, that of Cassandra by 63%, that of MySQL by 430%, and reduce the running time of Hive join job by about 50% and that of Spark join job by about 80%, solely by configuration adjustment.

To support the variety of Big Data use cases, many Big Data related systems expose a large number of user-specifiable configuration parameters. Highlighted in our experiments, a MySQL deployment with well-tuned configuration parameters achieves a peak throughput as 12 times much as one with the default setting. However, finding the best setting for the tens or hundreds of configuration parameters is mission impossible for ordinary users. Worse still, many Big Data applications require the support of multiple systems co-deployed in the same cluster. As these co-deployed systems can interact to affect the overall performance, they must be tuned together. Automatic configuration tuning with scalability guarantees (ACTS) is in need to help system users. Solutions to ACTS must scale to various systems, workloads, deployments, parameters and resource limits. Proposing and implementing an ACTS solution, we demonstrate that ACTS can benefit users not only in improving system performance and resource utilization, but also in saving costs and enabling fairer benchmarking.