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Abstract Background Cotton serves as a primary source of natural fibers crucial for the textile industry. However, environmental elements such as drought have posed challenges to cotton cultivation, resulting in adverse impacts on both production and fiber quality. Improving cotton’s resilience to drought could mitigate yield losses and foster the expansion of cotton farming. Rab7 protein, widely present in organisms, controls the degradation and recycling of cargo, and has a potential role in biotic and abiotic tolerance. However, comprehensive exploration of the Rab7 gene family in Gossypium remains scarce. Results Herein, we identified a total of 10, 10, 20, and 20 Rab7 genes through genome-wide analysis in Gossypium arboreum, Gossypium raimondii, Gossypium hirsutum, and Gossypium barbadense, respectively. Collinearity analysis unveiled the pivotal role of whole genome or segmental duplication events in the expansion of GhRab7s. Study of gene architecture, conserved protein motifs, and domains suggested the conservation of structure and function throughout evolution. Exploration of cis-regulatory elements revealed the responsiveness of GhRab7 genes to abiotic stress, corroborated by transcriptome analysis under diverse environmental stresses. Notably, the greatly induced expression of GhRab7B3-A under drought treatment prompted us to investigate its function through virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) assays. Silencing GhRab7B3-A led to exacerbated dehydration and wilting compared with the control. Additionally, inhibition of stomatal closure, antioxidant enzyme activities and expression patterns of genes responsive to abiotic stress were observed in GhRab7B3-A silenced plants. Conclusions This study sheds light on Rab7 members in cotton, identifies a gene linked to drought stress, and paves the way for additional investigation of Rab7 genes associated with drought stress tolerance.

Biochar has the potential to become a more promising carbon source with a broad range of applications in soil agroecosystems. The depletion of soil minerals is a big problem due to soil erosion and leaching of nutrients. Biochar is a soil conditioner used in crop production to improve soil profile, increase fertilizer use efficiency, plant growth and development, carbon sequestration, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is persistent in the environment and retains water, nutrients, and contaminants. It can also be applied in environmental rehabilitation for remediating contaminated soil. Applied biochar significantly enhanced the nutrients in the rhizospheric soil and reduced the bioavailability and uptake of heavy metals. The enhancement of soil nutrient values was the major functional mechanism for enhancing plant protection and production. Overall, the results of this mini-review are significant because they provide the strategies and technological direction for using biochar in sustainable agricultural systems.

The design of secure mechanisms and failure recovery mechanisms for inter-satellite routing has become pivotal in maintaining dependable communication within the LEO satellite network.To address the potential security threats faced by satellite networks, the impact of different routing attack behaviors on a typical inter-satellite routing protocol was analyzed and differentiated packet security authentication mechanisms and link failure recovery mechanisms were designed.Additionally, a satellite network emulation platform based on virtualization technology was constructed, enabled the verification of the effectiveness of the designed inter-satellite routing security mechanisms through the emulation of various routing attack scenarios.Furthermore, performance metrics such as CPU utilization and packet processing time were also evaluated before and after the introduction of security mechanisms.Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed inter-satellite routing security mechanism effectively mitigated multiple security threats in the space network environment while reduced communication latency caused by sudden link failures, thereby ensured secure and reliable communication within the LEO satellite network.

In rice, there is a lack of comprehensive research on the functional aspects of the members of the serine hydroxymethyltransferase (SHMT) gene family. This study provides a comprehensive investigation of the SHMT gene family, covering phylogeny, gene structure, promoter analysis, expression analysis, subcellular localization, and protein interaction. Remarkably, we discovered a specific gene loss event occurred in the chloroplast-localized group IIa SHMTs in monocotyledons. However, OsSHMT3, which originally classified within cytoplasmic-localized group Ib, was found to be situated within chloroplasts in rice protoplasts. All five OsSHMTs are capable of forming homodimers, with OsSHMT3 being the only one able to form dimers with other OsSHMTs, except for OsSHMT1. It is proposed that OsSHMT3 functions as a mobile protein, collaborating with other OsSHMT proteins. Furthermore, the results of cis-acting element prediction and expression analysis suggested that members of the OsSHMT family could be involved in diverse stress responses and hormone regulation. Our study aims to provide novel insights for the future exploration of SHMTs.

Storage proteins are essential for seed germination and seedling growth, as they provide an indispensable nitrogen source and energy. Our previous report highlighted the defective endosperm development in the serine hydroxymethyltransferase 4 (OsSHMT4) gene mutant, floury endosperm20-1 (flo20-1). However, the alterations in storage protein content and distribution within the flo20-1 endosperm remained unclear. Here, the immunocytochemistry analyses revealed a deficiency in storage protein accumulation in flo20-1. Electron microscopic observation uncovered abnormal morphological structures in protein bodies (PBI and PBII) in flo20-1. Immunofluorescence labeling demonstrated that aberrant prolamin composition could lead to the subsequent formation and deposition of atypical structures in protein body I (PBI), and decreased levels of glutelins and globulin resulted in protein body II (PBII) malformation. Further RNA-seq data combined with qRT-PCR results indicated that altered transcription levels of storage protein structural genes were responsible for the abnormal synthesis and accumulation of storage protein, which further led to non-concentric ring structural PBIs and amorphous PBIIs. Collectively, our findings further underscored that OsSHMT4 is required for the synthesis and accumulation of storage proteins and storage organelle formation in endosperm cells.

ALK fusion genes are diverse. Approximately 30 different ALK fusion protein partners have been described previously, and some of these fusion proteins have been reported to be effective against ALK-tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI). ALK rearrangements often occur at a common breakpoint in exon 20 of the genome. SLC8A1-ALK, a novel fusion protein partner, comes from exon 2 of the SLC8A1 gene rearranged with exon 20 of the ALK gene. Here, we reported a patient with advanced lung adenocarcinoma harboring a SLC8A1-ALK fusion who benefited from first-line treatment with alectinib. After 2 months of taking alectinib, the targeted lung lesions and intrahepatic metastases regressed significantly. To date, the patient has achieved nearly 1 year of progression-free survival while taking the drug. Given the diversity of ALK fusion genes and the different efficacy of ALK-TKIs, we believe that this case report has an important clinical reference.

A series of E-ring lactone-opened camptothecin (CPT) derivatives bearing with terminal aza-heterocyclic groups were synthesized, and their antitumor activity was evaluated both in vitro and in vivo. Hydroxyl-amide analogues with morpholin-4-yl displayed excellent antitumor activity in vitro and efficient inhibition on tumor xenograph model in nude mice. Ester-amide compounds acted less active in vitro cytotoxicity and lower inhibition activity in vivo. Substitutions at 7- and 10- positions favored the antitumor activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flotation of diasporic bauxite is to separate diaspore (valuable mineral) from aluminosilicate minerals (gangue minerals, mainly including kaolinite, illite and pyrophyllite), and the microscopic interaction force between the two types of minerals and air bubbles determines the separation efficiency. In this paper, based on the extended Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO) theory, the van der Waals, electrostatic and hydrophobic interaction between particles of the four minerals mentioned above and air bubbles in collectorless solution were calculated first, and then diaspore and kaolinite were taken as examples to analyze the influence of various factors such as electrolyte concentration, mineral particle size, air bubble size, collector type (dodecylamine hydrochloride (DAH) and sodium oleate (NaOL)) and concentration, and pulp pH on the interactions between the particles of valuable mineral and gangue minerals and air bubbles. The results showed that the total extended DLVO interactions between the four minerals and air bubbles were repulsive in most cases in collectorless solution. The increase in electrolyte concentration reduced the interaction force or even changed the direction of the force under certain circumstances. The addition of DAH and NaOL can reduce the adhesion energy barrier of kaolinite-bubble and diaspore-bubble respectively. Each type of minerals exhibited a specific interface interaction response with air bubbles in each collector with different pH values. The research results have theoretical guiding significance for the optimization and directional control of diasporic bauxite flotation conditions.

Drought is the abiotic factor that adversely affects plant growth, development survival, and crop productivity, posing a substantial threat to sustainable agriculture worldwide, especially in warm and dry areas. However, the extent of damage depends upon the crop growth stage, severity and frequency of the stress. In general, the reproductive growth phase is more sensitive to stresses causing a substantial loss in crop productivity. Saccharum spontaneum (L.) is the most variable wild relative of sugarcane with potential for use in sugarcane crop improvement programs. In the present study addresses the transcriptomic analysis of drought stress imposed by polyethylene glycol-6000 (PED-6000; w/v- 25%) on the root tip tissues of S. spontaneum GX83-10. The analysis of microarrays of drought-stressed roots was performed at 0 (CK), 2 (T2), 4 (T4), 8 (T8) and 24 h (T24). The analyzed data were compared with the gene function annotations of four major databases, such as Nr, KOG/COG, Swiss-Prot, and KEGG, and a total of 62,988 single-gene information was obtained. The differently expressed genes of 56237 (T4), 59319 (T8), and 58583 (T24), among which CK obtained the most significant number of expressed genes (35920) as compared to T24, with a total of 53683 trend genes. Gene ontology (GO) and KEGG analysis were performed on the 6 important trends, and a total of 598 significant GO IDs and 42 significantly enriched metabolic pathways. Furthermore, these findings also aid in the selection of novel genes and promoters that can be used to potentially produce crop plants with enhanced stress resistance efficiency for sustainable agriculture.

An in-band network telemetry-based system was built based on VPP, a high-performance virtual network forwarding architecture/device, via reorganizing the data plane pipeline processing modules.Moreover, a network-wide telemetry mechanism was further developed via embedding source routing into the probe packet header for specifying the route of probe packets.Finally, a virtual network topology was built with performance evaluation conducted.The evaluation shows that the telemetry system can monitor the network in a high precision of every 0.13 ms, detecting link congestion in real time with minor performance overhead.Given virtual network devices have been widely deployed in data centers, the proposed scheme is expected to improve the reliability of multi-tenancy and network function virtualization in data centers via high-precision, network-wide virtual link telemetry coverage.

Sugarcane is a cash crop that plays an integral part in the sugar industry. The Sustainable Sugarcane Initiative (SSI) has been adopted globally, ensuring enough and aiming for more yield, helping increase disease-free sugarcane cultivation. Single-bud seeds could be the best approach for sugarcane cultivation. Indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) is a rooting agent utilized significantly in seedling propagation. Greenhouse experiment results discovered the significant growth promotion in sugarcane seedlings and accumulation of plant hormones at 100 ppm IBA. Next, we performed transcriptomic analysis of sugarcane buds using RNA sequencing and compared their gene expression during root development due to affect of IBA (100 ppm). A total of 113,475 unigenes were annotated with an average length of 836 bp (N50 = 1,536). The comparative RNA-seq study between the control (CK) and IBA-treated (T) buds showed significant differentially expressed unigenes (494 upregulated and 2086 downregulated). The IBA influenced major biological processes including metabolic process, the cellular process, and single-organism process. For cellular component category, cell, cell part, organelle, membrane, and organelle part were mainly affected. In addition, catalytic activity and binding were primarily affected in the molecular function categories. Furthermore, the expression of genes related to plant hormones and signaling pathways was analyzed by qRT-PCR, which was consistent with the RNA-seq expression profile. This study provides new insights into the IBA response to the bud sprouting in sugarcane based on RNA sequencing, and generated information could help further research on breeding improvement of sugarcane.

Malignant pleural effusion(MPE) is a common complication of advanced tumors. Lung cancer and malignant pleural mesothelioma(MPM) are the most common causes of MPE. The principle of MPE treatment is to treat the thoracic cavity locally on the basis of etiological systemic treatment. Vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF) plays a key role in the formation of MPE. Bevacizumab can inhibit the activity of VEGF, reduce the formation of MPE and improve the prognosis. This article systematically reviews the research progress of bevacizumab and other anti-angiogenic drugs on MPE caused by NSCLC and MPM, and illustrates the clinical efficacy and safety of different anti-angiogenic drugs on MPE.

Data centers need low-latency fabrics. Several flow scheduling schemes have been proposed to minimize the Flow Completion Time (FCT) based on Shortest Job First (SJF) heuristic. However, to mimic SJF, previous proposals sacrifice the generality (e.g., pFabric requires special hardware) or sacrifice the performance to guarantee the generality (e.g., PIAS loses some of pFabric's performance). Especially, in multi-tenant data centers, traffic patterns from different applications are mixed together and vary over time, thereby creating even more challenges. In this paper, we investigated that the performance of information-agnostic scheme could be further improved by leveraging the unique characteristics of different traffic types. Based on this investigation, we present Traffic Prediction based Flow Scheduling (TPFS), aiming at achieving near-optimal performance and good generality in multi-tenant data centers with the mix-traffic pattern. To achieve near-optimal performance, we design a two-stage machine learning algorithm to first automatically cluster flows with the similar flow size distribution and then predict the priorities of flows based on the clustering results. Besides, we implement TPFS in virtual switches, which exerts fine-grained flow scheduling over the arbitrary network stacks of tenants. Testbed evaluation and simulations show that TPFS outperforms the previous information-agnostic flow scheduling scheme PIAS and greatly reduces the tail latency of the network.

Recently, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) has been leveraged by DCTCP and its successive protocols to reduce the latency in datacenters. However, we find that DCTCP may induce the queue underflow and high latency in multi-queue scenarios and even single-queue environments. Our analysis concludes that the problem is caused by improper ECN marking thresholds of DCTCP. In this paper, an Adaptive ECN (A-ECN) marking scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of the ECN marking scheme of DCTCP.A-ECN is designed to minimize queue length as well as keeping high link utilization. More importantly, A-ECN can adaptively adjust ECN marking thresholds in different scenarios to achieve good generality. Therefore, network operators can directly deploy A-ECN in various environments regardless of underlying bandwidth, packet schedulers and the number of concurrent flows. At last, the testbed evaluation results show that A-ECN can minimize queue length and maintain high throughput. The flow completion times (FCT) for short flows could be reduced by up to 40% compared to the ECN marking scheme of DCTCP.

Abstract Background As the major storage protein in rice seeds, glutelins are synthesized at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) as proglutelins and transported to protein storage vacuoles (PSVs) called PBIIs (Protein body IIs), where they are cleaved into mature forms by the vacuolar processing enzymes. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying glutelin trafficking are largely unknown. Results In this study, we report a rice mutant, named glutelin precursor accumulation6 (gpa6), which abnormally accumulates massive proglutelins. Cytological analyses revealed that in gpa6 endosperm cells, proglutelins were mis-sorted, leading to the presence of dense vesicles (DVs) and the formation paramural bodies (PMBs) at the apoplast, consequently, smaller PBII were observed. Mutated gene in gpa6 was found to encode a Na+/H+ antiporter, OsNHX5. OsNHX5 is expressed in all tissues analyzed, and its expression level is much higher than its closest paralog OsNHX6. The OsNHX5 protein colocalizes to the Golgi, the trans-Golgi network (TGN) and the pre-vacuolar compartment (PVC) in tobacco leaf epidermal cells. In vivo pH measurements indicated that the lumens of Golgi, TGN and PVC became more acidic in gpa6. Conclusions Our results demonstrated an important role of OsNHX5 in regulating endomembrane luminal pH, which is essential for seed storage protein trafficking in rice.

With the rapid development of information technology, the name ambiguity problem has become one of the primary issues in the fields of information retrieval, data mining, and scientific measurement. Name disambiguation is used to promote computer technology and big data information, which maps virtual relational networks to real social networks to solve the problem that the same name points to multiple entities. At present many literature search platforms launched their respective scholar system, name ambiguity problem will inevitably affect the precision of other information calculations, reduce the credibility of the system, and affect the information quality and content quality. Most work deals with this issue by using graph theory and clustering. However, the name disambiguation problem is still not well resolved. In this paper, we propose a multi-level name disambiguation algorithm. This algorithm is mainly based on the unsupervised algorithm, which combines hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) and graph theory for disambiguating. The experimental results show that the proposed solution achieves clearly better performance (+17 ~ 25% in terms of F1-Measure) than several methods, including HAC and Graph.