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SETDB2 is a H3K9 histone methyltransferase required for accurate chromosome segregation. Its H3K9 histone methyltransferase activity was reported to be associated with chromosomes during metaphase. Here, we confirm that SETDB2 is required for mitosis and accurate chromosome segregation. However, these functions are independent of its histone methyltransferase activity. Further analysis showed that SETDB2 can interact with BUBR1, and is required for CDC20 binding to BUBR1 and APC/C complex and CYCLIN B1 degradation. The ability of SETDB2 to regulate the binding of CDC20 to BUBR1 or APC/C complex, and stabilization of CYCLIN B1 are also independent of its histone methyltransferase activity. These results suggest that SETDB2 interacts with BUBR1 to promote binding of CDC20 to BUBR1 and APC3, then degrades CYCLIN B1 to ensure accurate chromosome segregation and mitosis, independently of its histone methyltransferase activity.

Abstract Background To compare the clinical efficacy of vacuum sealing drainage, eggshell-like debridement combined with antibiotic calcium sulphate implantation and conventional debridement combined with antibiotic calcium sulphate implantation in the treatment of calcaneal osteomyelitis. Methods Sixty-six patients with calcaneal osteomyelitis who were treated in our department between January 2017 and August 2021 were included in this study. Thirty-one patients underwent VSD and eggshell-like debridement combined with antibiotic calcium sulphate implantation. Thirty-five patients underwent conventional debridement combined with antibiotic calcium sulphate implantation. The inflammatory markers, operation time, wound healing time, hospital stay, full weight bearing time after operation, recurrence rate of infection, complications, and American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS) scores were compared between the two groups. Results The operation time and full weight bearing time after operation of observation group were longer than that of control group. Compared with preoperative results, WBC, ESR, CRP and PCT in both groups were significantly decreased at 14 days after operation, and there was no statistical significance between the two groups. The wound healing time and hospital stay in the observation group were shorter than those in the control group (P

PurposeInvestigating the association between red cell distribution width (RDW) and all-cause mortality in patients with breast cancer, to evaluate the potential clinical prognostic value of RDW.MethodsBased on the RDW index, patients with breast cancer in the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-IV) database were categorized into quartiles. The primary outcomes included in-hospital mortality from all causes during the first six months, the first year, and the first three years. Cox hazards regression and restricted cubic spline (RCS) models were developed to investigate the effects of RDW on primary outcomes.ResultsThe study included 939 patients (female). The 6-month, 1-year, and 3-year mortality rates were 14.0%, 21.4%, and 28.4%, respectively. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards analyses demonstrated that RDW exhibited an autonomous association with an increased risk of all-cause mortality. After adjusting for confounders, higher RDW quartiles were significantly associated with 6-month mortality (adjusted hazard ratio (HR), 3.197; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.745-5.762; P < 0.001), 1-year mortality (adjusted HR, 2.978; 95% CI, 1.867-4.748; P < 0.001), and 3-year mortality (adjusted HR, 2.526; 95% CI, 1.701-3.750; P < 0.001). The RCS curves demonstrated that high RDW (> 14.6) was associated with a greater risk of all-cause mortality. Subgroup analyses revealed no statistically significant differences in the interactions between the subgroups.ConclusionThe study revealed a highly pronounced relationship between RDW and overall mortality, indicating its potential as an autonomous prognostic factor for increased mortality among patients with breast cancer.

Breast cancer is the females' most common cancer. Targeting the immune microenvironment is a new and promising treatment method for breast cancer. Nevertheless, only a small section of patients can profit by immunotherapy, and improving the ability to accurately predict the potential for immunotherapy response is still awaiting further exploration. In this study, we found that the key factors of glutamine metabolism, glutaminase 1 (GLS) and mitochondrial aspartate transaminase (GOT2), showed opposite expression patterns in breast cancer samples. Based on the expression level of GLS and GOT2, we divided the breast cancer samples into two clusters: Cluster 2 showed GLS expressed higher and GOT2 expressed lower, whereas Cluster 1 showed GOT2 expressed higher and GLS expressed lower. GSEA showed that the clusters were related to pathways of immunity. Further analysis showed that Cluster 2 was positively associated with immunity infiltration. Through WGCNA, we identified a module strongly correlated with glutamine metabolism and immunity and identified 11 dendritic cell-associated genes involved in dendritic cell development, maturation, activation and other functions. In addition, Cluster 2 also showed higher immune checkpoint gene expression, which suggest the Cluster 2 had even better response to immunotherapy. The validation dataset could also be clustered into two groups. Cluster 2 (GLS expressed higher and GOT2 expressed lower) of the validation dataset was also positively associated with dendritic cells and a better immunotherapy response. Thus, these data indicate that GLS and GOT2 are prognostic biomarkers which closely related to dendritic cells and better reacted to immunotherapy in breast cancer.

Background: Intellectual disability (ID) is defined by cognitive and social adaptation defects. Variants in the SYNGAP1 gene, which encodes the brain-specific cytoplasmic protein SYNGAP1, are commonly associated with ID. The aim of this study was to identify novel SYNGAP1 gene variants in Chinese individuals with ID and evaluate the pathogenicity of the detected variants.Methods: Whole exome sequencing (WES) was performed on 113 patients diagnosed with ID. In the study, two de novo variants in SYNGAP1 were identified. Sanger sequencing was used to confirm these variants. Minigene assays were used to verify whether the de novo intronic variant in SYNGAP1 influenced the normal splicing of mRNA.Results: Two de novo heterozygous pathogenic variants in SYNGAP1, c.333del and c.664-2A>G, were identified in two ID patients separately. The c.333del variant has been reported previously as a de novo finding in a child with ID, while the c.664-2A>G variant was novel de novo intronic variant, which has not been reported in the literature. Functional studies showed that c.664-2A>G could cause aberrant splicing, resulting in exon 7 skipping and a 16bp deletion within exon 7.Conclusion: We identified two de novo pathogenic heterozygous variants in SYNGAP1 in two patients with ID, among which the c.664-2A>G variant was a novel de novo pathogenic variant. Our findings further enrich the variant spectrum of the SYNGAP1 gene and provide a research basis for the genetic diagnosis of ID.

This study investigates the effects of moisture content control on the characteristics, properties, and in vitro starch digestion of roasted rice powder made from natural high-resistant starch (RS) rice varieties. The results demonstrate that adjusting the moisture content before roasting significantly affects the RS content of the roasted rice powder. Among various moisture levels tested, the addition of 15% water (rice-to-water ratio of 85:15) before roasting resulted in the highest RS content, reaching 22.61%. Several key parameters of the rice samples before and after optimal moisture control were analyzed, including thermal stability, chain length distribution, volatile flavor composition, and scanning electron microscopy. Additionally, in vitro digestion properties were measured. The findings revealed that the volatile flavor compounds in the high-RS roasted rice significantly increased compared to non-roasted rice. Moreover, the thermal stability of the rice samples improved, and the chain length distribution exhibited significant changes. The water absorption and expansion properties were significantly lower in the high-RS roasted rice. Furthermore, the in vitro starch digestion of the roasted flour made from high-RS rice showed a significantly lower digestion rate compared to common rice, indicating a lower starch hydrolysis index in high-RS rice with the sbe-rs genotype. Overall, the roasting process of natural high-RS rice modifies its characteristics, increases the RS content, enhances the flavor, and results in a lower starch digestion rate compared to common rice. This study provides valuable data for the food industry to promote the application of high-RS rice varieties with mutations in the SBEIIb gene, such as Youtangdao2 (YTD2).

BackgroundDystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (DEB) is an incurable and inherited skin disorder mainly caused by mutations in the gene encoding type VII collagen (COL7A1). The purpose of this study was to identify the causative genetic variants and further perform genetic diagnosis in a Chinese family affected by DEB.MethodsHigh-throughput sequencing was performed to analyze the genetic skin disorder-related genes of parents of the proband, and the variants were further confirmed in the other members by Sanger sequencing. Sanger sequencing, karyotype analysis, and chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA) were used together for prenatal diagnosis after the second pregnancy. The phenotype of the fetus was tracked after the diagnosis and induction of labor. Moreover, skin and muscle pathological examination and whole-exome sequencing (WES) of the skin and muscle tissue of the induced fetus were performed.ResultsHere, we determined two heterozygous variants of the COL7A1 gene that contributed to the autosomal recessive DEB (RDEB) in the family, i.e., a novel pathogenic variant (c.8335G > T, p.E2779*) and a likely pathogenic variant (c.7957G > A, p.G2653R). Sanger sequencing of amniotic fluid cells showed that the fetus carried the above two compound heterozygous variants, and the karyotype analysis and CMA results showed no abnormality. The clinical phenotype and pathological results of the induced fetus were consistent with the characteristics of DEB. Further, WES analysis also confirmed a novel compound heterozygous variation in COL7A1, consisting of two variants, namely, c.8335G > T and c.7957G > A in the fetus.ConclusionThis study expands the spectrum of disease-causing variants of COL7A1 and provides a theoretical basis for diagnosis, genetic counseling, and prognosis of families affected by RDEB

In this paper, we construct all the indecomposable modules of a class of non-pointed Hopf algebras, which are quotient Hopf algebras of a class of prime Hopf algebras of GK-dimension one. Then the decomposition formulas of the tensor product of any two indecomposable modules are established. Based on these results, the representation ring of the Hopf algebras is characterized by generators and some relations.

Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) is one of the indicators of organic pollution in water bodies. The rapid and accurate detection of COD is of great significance to environmental protection. To address the problem of COD retrieval errors in the absorption spectrum method for fluorescent organic matter solutions, a rapid synchronous COD retrieval method for the absorption–fluorescence spectrum is proposed. Based on a one-dimensional convolutional neural network and 2D Gabor transform, an absorption–fluorescence spectrum fusion neural network algorithm is developed to improve the accuracy of water COD retrieval. Results show that the RRMSEP of the absorption–fluorescence COD retrieval method is 0.32% in amino acid aqueous solution, which is 84% lower than that of the single absorption spectrum method. The accuracy of COD retrieval is 98%, which is 15.3% higher than that of the single absorption spectrum method. The test results on the actual sampled water spectral dataset demonstrate that the fusion network outperformed the absorption spectrum CNN network in measuring COD accuracy, with the RRMSEP improving from 5.09% to 1.15%.

In this study, Xiushui 134Bt, a highly insect-resistant rice transgenic material with stable expression of CryIAc1 gene in rice plants and no significant changes in main agronomic traits, was obtained by means of Agrobacterium-mediated transformation method using japonica rice Xiushui 134 as receptor material. Biosecurity of the transgenic rice Xiushui 134Bt was assessed by rat feeding experiments. Wistar rats were fed a nutritionally balanced diet supplemented with 35% Genetically Modified (LGM) or 70% Genetically Modified (HGM) Xiushui 134Bt, respectively, for 90 days. Compared with the wild-type group (Xiushui 134), there were no significant differences in body weight, total food intake, food conversion rate, relative organ weight, blood routine, blood physiological or biochemical parameters, or histopathological examination between LGM and HGM Bt groups (p > 0.05). These results indicate that the transgenic rice Xiushui 134Bt is non-toxic in laboratory animals and provide guidance for the future commercial release of the transgenic rice Xiushui 134Bt in China.

The emergence of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) constitutes a major challenge to TB control programmes. There is an urgent need to develop effective anti-TB drugs with novel mechanisms of action. Aspartate-semialdehyde dehydrogenase (ASADH) is the second enzyme in the aspartate metabolic pathway. The absence of the pathway in humans and the absolute requirement of aspartate in bacteria make ASADH a highly attractive drug target. In this study, we used ASADH coupled with Escherichia coli type III aspartate kinase (LysC) to establish a high-throughput screening method to find new anti-TB inhibitors. IMB-XMA0038 was identified as an inhibitor of MtASADH with an IC50 value of 0.59 μg/mL through screening. The interaction between IMB-XMA0038 and MtASADH was confirmed by surface plasmon resonance (SPR) assay and molecular docking analysis. Furthermore, IMB-XMA0038 was found to inhibit various drug-resistant MTB strains potently with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of 0.25–0.5 μg/mL. The conditional mutant strain MTB::asadh cultured with different concentrations of inducer (10−5 or 10−1 μg/mL pristinamycin) resulted in a maximal 16 times difference in MICs. At the same time, IMB-XMA0038 showed low cytotoxicity in vitro and vivo. In mouse model, it encouragingly declined the MTB colony forming units (CFU) in lung by 1.67 log10 dosed at 25 mg/kg for 15 days. In conclusion, our data demonstrate that IMB-XMA0038 is a promising lead compound against drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Pollutants in water seriously threaten the health of human beings and will lead to potential ecological risks to the aquatic environment. Researchers use many chemical, physiological and morphological methods to detect the comprehensive toxicity in water. Among them, the photosynthetic inhibition method is considered a powerful method to detect the comprehensive toxicity in water, takes the chlorophyll fluorescence in the body as a natural probe, and determines the toxicity effect of pollutants by measuring the variation of photosynthetic fluorescence parameters. It has the advantages of fast and convenient measurement and real-time online detection. The widely used photosynthetic fluorescence parameters are the maximal quantum yield of photosystem II (Fv/Fm) and performance index PIABS. There are the problems that the sensitivity is not high enough, and the substances that can be detected are limited when researchers use Fv/Fm and PIABS as indicators to detect the comprehensive toxicity in water. So, in this paper, we proposed a construction method of Performance Index of Comprehensive Toxicity Effect (PICTE) using multi-parameter fusion based on the chlorophyll a fluorescence rise kinetics curve (OJIP) of algae. The fluorescence information of point J and point I in the curve was integrated. The area surrounded by the curve and the time corresponding to point J and point I were weighted for data items to construct PICTE. On this basis, Chlorella vulgaris was used as the tested algae species to compare the performance differences of Fv/Fm, PICTE, PIABS in the detection of toxic substances under the stress of five common water pollutants: Diuron (DCMU, 3-(3,4-dichlorophenol)-1,1-dimethylurea), Dibromothymoquinone (DBMIB, 2,5-dibromo-3-methyl-6-isopropyl-benzoquinone), Methyl viologen (MV, 1,1ꞌ-dimethyl-4,4ꞌ-bipyridinium-dichloride), Malathion, Carbofuran. The performance differences of Fv/Fm, PICTE, PIABS in detecting toxic substances, including lowest detection limit, highest response concentration, stability, and reproducibility, were studied. The results show that: in terms of toxicity detection, the constructed PICTE was sensitive to all five toxic substances and could detect more kinds of pollutants than Fv/Fm. The lowest detection limit of PICTE for five toxic substances compared with PIABS was reduced by 74.43%, 77.01%, 67.30%, 60.69%, and 50.81%, respectively. At the same time, it has a stronger ability to detect toxic substances with high concentration. The stability and reproducibility of PICTE for detecting the toxicity of DCMU, DBMIB, Malathion, and Carbofuran were all excellent, and all of the relative standard deviation (RSD) was

ABSTRACT Interest in host-directed therapies as alternatives/adjuncts to antibiotic treatment has resurged with the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis (TB). Immunotherapies that reinvigorate immune responses by targeting immune checkpoints like PD-1/PD-L1 have proved successful in cancer therapy. Immune cell inhibitory receptors that trigger Mycobacterium tuberculosis-specific immunosuppression, however, are unknown. Here, we show that the levels of CD84, a SLAM family receptor, increase in T and B cells in lung tissues from M. tuberculosis-infected C57BL/6 mice and in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from pulmonary TB patients. M. tuberculosis challenge experiments using CD84-deficient C57BL/6 mice suggest that CD84 expression likely leads to T and B cell immunosuppression during M. tuberculosis pathogenesis and also plays an inhibitory role in B cell activation. Importantly, CD84-deficient mice showed improved M. tuberculosis clearance and longer survival than M. tuberculosis-infected wild-type (WT) mice. That CD84 is a putative M. tuberculosis infection-specific inhibitory receptor suggests it may be a suitable target for the development of TB-specific checkpoint immunotherapies. IMPORTANCE Immune checkpoint therapies, such as targeting checkpoints like PD-1/PD-L1, have proved successful in cancer therapy and can reinvigorate immune responses. The potential of this approach for treating chronic infectious diseases like TB has been recognized, but a lack of suitable immunotherapeutic targets, i.e., immune cell inhibitory receptors that trigger immunosuppression specifically during Mycobacterium tuberculosis pathogenesis, has limited the application of this strategy in the development of new TB therapies. Our focus in this study was to address this gap and search for an M. tuberculosis-specific checkpoint target. Our results suggest that CD84 is a putative inhibitory receptor that may be a suitable target for the development of TB-specific checkpoint immunotherapies.

In this paper, a semantic analysis approach to children’s emotional disorder intervention and education is thoroughly analyzed and discussed, and a corresponding educational system is designed for application in real life. This paper acquires video data by deploying a common camera acquisition and transforms, annotates, frames, and processes the data with the help of feature engineering methods. In addition, this paper proposes a fine-grained action decomposition strategy to solve the problem of extreme imbalance in the dataset to improve the performance of the model and proposes an iterative sampling data fusion strategy, which aims to integrate and fuse data from multiple sources to make them more effective and further improve the robustness and generalization ability of the model. Since it is difficult for families to improve the emotional management skills of migrant children, and it is also difficult to obtain professional help and support from the community or schools, it is important to take advantage of the professional strengths of social work to provide professional support for migrant children and their families. From the perspective of theoretical research, most of the existing studies focus on individual migrant children and cannot give global guidance from the perspective of the family system. The comparison results show that T-SVR trained using data from all subjects outperforms the inductive method based on individual training of trainees, validating the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive emotion recognition model. Therefore, from the perspective of system integration, it is important to explore social work interventions to improve the emotional management skills of migrant children. The system network structure design is determined according to the actual situation; then from the system requirements, the system is abstracted with the help of UML entity-relationship diagram, and the database table design is completed; so far, the overall system can be divided into independent functional modules, and the boundaries of each module and the participating roles are gradually clarified, and the detailed design within each functional module is illustrated by UML timing diagram and class diagram to clarify the classes used. Finally, the system is tested end-to-end to verify whether the results of the view layer meet the design guidelines, whether the system modules work together properly, and whether the functional development meets the requirements.

Background and Objective: This study was performed to investigate the association of peripheral T lymphocyte subsets with disseminated infection (DI) by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) in HIV-negative patients. Methods and Materials: The study included 587 HIV-negative tuberculosis (TB) patients. Results: In TB patients with DI, the proportion of CD4+ T cells decreased, the proportion of CD8+ T cells increased, and the ratio of CD4+/CD8+ T cells decreased. According to univariate analysis, smoking, alcohol consumption, rifampicin-resistance, retreatment, and high sputum bacterial load were linked to lower likelihood of developing MTB dissemination. Multivariate analysis indicated that after adjustment for alcohol use, smoking, retreatment, smear, culture, rifampicin-resistance, and CD4+/CD8+, the proportion of CD8+ T cells (but not CD4+ T cells) was independently and positively associated with the prevalence of DI in HIV-negative pulmonary TB (PTB) patients. Conclusions: Examining T lymphocyte subsets is of great value for evaluating the immune function of HIV-negative TB patients, and an increase in the CD8+ T cell proportion may be a critical clue regarding the cause of DI in such patients.

Ultraviolet-visible absorption spectroscopy is widely used to monitor water quality, and rapid optical signal detection is a key technology in the process of spectrum measurement. In this paper, an ultrafast spectrophotometer system that can achieve spectrum data acquisition in a single flash of the xenon lamp (within 200 ns) is introduced, and a real-time denoising method for the spectrum is implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to work cooperatively with the nanosecond spectrum acquisition system, in order to guarantee the quality of the spectrum signals without losing running speed. The hardware of the data acquisition and processing system are constructed on a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA chip and its peripheral circuit, including an analog to digital converter and a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor transistor (CMOS) sensor’s diver circuit. An oversampling method that is suitable for the CMOS sensor’s output is proposed, which works on the CMOS sensor’s dark current noise and readout noise. Another moving-average filter method is designed adaptively, which works on the low-frequency component to filter out the residual spectrum noise of the spectrum signal. The implementation of the filter on the FPGA has been optimized by using a pipelined structure and dual high-speed random-access memory (RAM). As a result, the CMOS linear image sensor successfully captured the spectrum of xenon flash light at the readout clock frequency of 500 kHz and the processing manipulation to the full UV-Vis spectrum data was accomplished at a sub-microsecond speed performance. After the digital filter and oversampling technology were implemented, the coefficient of variation of the measurements reduced from 9.57% to 1.74%, while the signal noise ratio (SNR) of the absorption spectrum increased nine times, compared to the raw data of the CMOS sensor’s output. The tests towards different analyte samples were conducted, and the system shows good performance on distinguishing different concentrations of different analyte solutions on both ultra-violet and visible spectrum bands. The present work showcases the potential of the CMOS sensor’s technique for the fast detection of contaminated water containing nitrate and organic compounds.

Drought has become one of the environmental threats to agriculture and food security. Applications of melatonin (MT) serve as an effective way to alleviate drought stress, but the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Here, we found that foliar spray of 100-µM MT greatly mitigated the severe drought stress-induced damages in rice seedlings, including improved survival rates, enhanced antioxidant system, and adjusted osmotic balance. However, mutation of the suppressor of the G2 allele of skp1 (OsSGT1) and ABSCISIC ACID INSENSITIVE 5 (OsABI5) abolished the effects of MT. Furthermore, the upregulated expression of OsABI5 was detected in wild type (WT) under drought stress, irrespective of MT treatment, whereas OsABI5 was significantly downregulated in sgt1 and sgt1abi5 mutants. In contrast, no change of the OsSGT1 expression level was detected in abi5. Moreover, mutation of OsSGT1 and OsABI5 significantly suppressed the expression of genes associated with the antioxidant system. These results suggested that the functions of OsSGT1 in the MT-mediated alleviation of drought stress were associated with the ABI5-mediated signals. Collectively, we demonstrated that OsSGT1 was involved in the drought response of rice and that melatonin promoted SGT1-involved signals to ameliorate drought stress adaption.

The establishment and development of a set of methods of oil accurate recognition in a different environment are of great significance to the effective management of oil spill pollution. In this work, the concentration-emission matrix (CEM) is formed by introducing the concentration dimension. The principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to extract the spectral feature. The classification methods, such as Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) and Genic Algorithm optimization Support Vector Machine (SVM) parameters (GA-SVM), are used for oil identification and the recognition accuracies of the two classification methods are compared. The results show that the GA-SVM combined with PCA has the highest recognition accuracy for different oils. The proposed approach has great potential in rapid and accurate oil source identification.

Developing fast and accurate fluorescence detection technology of oil spill is significant for quantitative analysis in unexpected oil spill events. As the oil sample concentration increases, the fluorescence spectrum produces red-shift behavior, which seriously affects the quantitative detection of concentration. In this work, a three-dimensional concentration-emission matrix (CEM) was constructed by using a series of emission spectra with different levels of concentration at the excitation wavelength of 266 nm. The database is the interpolated CEM of six samples using bicubic interpolation in the concentration dimension. With matrix similarity matching, the database was used to achieve quantification of the concentration of oil samples. The recovery rates of prediction for test samples and weathering samples of six oil samples were between 86.8% and 116.11%, with relative errors of predictions ranging from 2.09% to 15.2%. The results show that this method can provide accurate quantitative determination of the concentration of different oil samples.

Albedo/reflectance is of great importance for glaciers’ mass balance and energy budget. Elevation could be a major factor of influence for glacier reflectance, and therefore when studying glacier reflectance, the altitude ranges should be considered. However, due to the limitations of traditional earth observation systems, conventional analyses usually consider the spatial and temporal patterns of the reflectance average, which is severely restricted. The launch of Landsat-8 gives us the opportunity to study the seasonal glacier reflectance–elevation relationship. We have obtained the monthly near-nadir reflectance per 100 m for twelve glaciers in western China based on 372 scenes of Landsat 8 images acquired from April 2013 to December 2015. Variations of monthly broadband reflectance, reflectance–elevation relationships and reflectance gradients are analyzed and discussed. The results show that the linear trend of the reflectance–elevation relationship (when the altitude is less than 6100 m) is very significant; elevation has greater influence than location on seasonal reflectance variations; and the level of glacier reflectance gradient may relate with its climate. This may be the first work that has used remote-sensing data to analyze seasonal glacier reflectance–elevation patterns.

Foods high in resistant starch (RS) are beneficial to prevent various diseases including diabetes, colon cancers, diarrhea and chronic renal or hepatic diseases. Elevated RS in rice is important for public health since rice is a staple food for half of the world population. A japonica mutant 'Jiangtangdao 1' (RS = 11.67%) was crossed with an indica cultivar 'Miyang 23' (RS = 0.41%). The mutant sbe3-rs that explained 60.4% of RS variation was mapped between RM6611 and RM13366 on chromosome 2 (LOD = 36) using 178 F(2) plants genotyped with 106 genome-wide polymorphic SSR markers. Using 656 plants from four F(3:4) families, sbe3-rs was fine mapped to a 573.3 Kb region between InDel 2 and InDel 6 using one STS, five SSRs and seven InDel markers. SBE3 which codes for starch branching enzyme was identified as a candidate gene within the putative region. Nine pairs of primers covering 22 exons were designed to sequence genomic DNA of the wild type for SBE3 and the mutant for sbe3-rs comparatively. Sequence analysis identified a missense mutation site where Leu-599 of the wild was changed to Pro-599 of the mutant in the SBE3 coding region. Because the point mutation resulted in the loss of a restriction enzyme site, sbe3-rs was not digested by a CAPS marker for SpeI site while SBE3 was. Co-segregation of the digestion pattern with RS content among 178 F(2) plants further supported sbe3-rs responsible for RS in rice. As a result, the CAPS marker could be used in marker-assisted breeding to develop rice cultivars with elevated RS which is otherwise difficult to accurately assess in crops. Transgenic technology should be employed for a definitive conclusion of the sbe3-rs.