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Preconditioning nerve injury drives pro-regenerative perineuronal macrophage activation in dorsal root ganglia (DRG). The present study reports that oncomodulin (ONCM) is produced from the regeneration-associated macrophages (RAMs) and strongly influences regeneration of DRG sensory axons. Preconditioning injury upregulated ONCM in DRG macrophages in a CCR2 dependent manner. ONCM in macrophages was necessary to produce RAMs in the in vitro model of neuron-macrophage interaction and played an essential role in for preconditioning or CCL2-induced neurite outgrowth. ONCM potently increased neurite outgrowth in cultured DRG neurons by activating a distinct gene set, particularly neuropeptide-related genes. Increasing extracellularly secreted ONCM in DRGs sufficiently enhanced capacity of neurite outgrowth. To achieve sustained ONCM activity in vivo, recombinant ONCM was encapsulated by a reducible epsilon-poly(L-lysine)-nanogel (REPL-NG) system based on electrostatic interaction. Localized injection of REPL-NG/ONCM complex into DRGs achieved a remarkable long-range axonal regeneration beyond spinal cord lesion, surpassing the extent of the preconditioning effects.

The world’s major countries use Free Trade Agreements and protectionism to politicize non-tariff barriers along with tariffs that benefit their own industries. When it comes to world trade, there are a total of 79 legally mandatory certification systems in Korea. As part of the non-tariff barrier policy, electrical and electronic products are subject to pre-evaluation of the “Broadcasting and Communication Equipment Conformity Assessment” system. In this paper, we design Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Cloud Computing platforms to improve existing document evaluation. It analyzes big data in the form of electric and electronic products, and judges whether the pre-evaluation for the suitability of KC Electromagnetic waves intended to be sold in Korea is valid through AI machine learning. In addition, if it is not suitable, we intend to design an AI deep learning system that provides a complementary measure and provide it in the form of a Cloud Computing platform. We intend to develop a semi-automatic AI connection system that can perform KC conformity assessment for electric and electronic products to be sold in Korea.

Although photoreceptors are expressed throughout all plant organs, most studies have focused on their function in aerial parts with laboratory-grown plants. Photoreceptor function in naturally dark-grown roots of plants in their native habitats is lacking. We characterized patterns of photoreceptor expression in field- and glasshouse-grown Nicotiana attenuata plants, silenced the expression of PhyB1/B2/A/Cry2 whose root transcripts levels were greater/equal to those of shoots, and by micrografting combined empty vector transformed shoots onto photoreceptor-silenced roots, creating chimeric plants with "blind" roots but "sighted" shoots. Micrografting procedure was robust in both field and glasshouse, as demonstrated by transcript accumulation patterns, and a spatially-explicit lignin visual reporter chimeric line. Field- and glasshouse-grown plants with PhyB1B2, but not PhyA or Cry2, -blind roots, were delayed in stalk elongation compared with control plants, robustly for two field seasons. Wild-type plants with roots directly exposed to FR phenocopied the growth of irPhyB1B2-blind root grafts. Additionally, root-expressed PhyB1B2 was required to activate the positive photomorphogenic regulator, HY5, in response to aboveground light. We conclude that roots of plants growing deep into the soil in nature sense aboveground light, and possibly soil temperature, via PhyB1B2 to control key traits, such as stalk elongation.

Phytochromes mainly function in photoautotrophic organisms to adjust growth in response to fluctuating light signals. The different isoforms of plant phytochromes often display both conserved and divergent roles, presumably to fine-tune plant responses to environmental signals and optimize fitness. Here we describe the distinct, yet partially redundant, roles of phytochromes NaPHYA, NaPHYB1 and NaPHYB2 in a wild tobacco species, Nicotiana attenuata using RNAi-silenced phytochrome lines. Consistent with results reported from other species, silencing the expression of NaPHYA or NaPHYB2 in N. attenuata had mild or no influence on plant development as long as NaPHYB1 was functional; whereas silencing the expression of NaPHYB1 alone strongly altered flowering time and leaf morphology. The contribution of NaPHYB2 became significant only in the absence of NaPHYB1; plants silenced for both NaPHYB1 and NaPHYB2 largely skipped the rosette-stage of growth to rapidly produce long, slender stalks that bore flowers early: hallmarks of the shade-avoidance responses. The phenotyping of phytochrome-silenced lines, combined with sequence and transcript accumulation analysis, suggest the independent functional diversification of the phytochromes, and a dominant role of NaPHYB1 and NaPHYB2 in N. attenuata's vegetative and reproductive development.

Plant volatiles (PVs) mediate interactions between plants and arthropods, microbes and other plants, and are involved in responses to abiotic stress. PV emissions are therefore influenced by many environmental factors, including herbivore damage, microbial invasion, and cues from neighboring plants, and also light regime, temperature, humidity and nutrient availability. Thus, an understanding of the physiological and ecological functions of PVs must be based on measurements reflecting PV emissions under natural conditions. However, PVs are usually sampled in the artificial environments of laboratories or climate chambers. Sampling of PVs in natural environments is difficult, being limited by the need to transport, maintain and provide power to instruments, or use expensive sorbent devices in replicate. Ideally, PVs should be measured in natural settings with high replication, spatio-temporal resolution and sensitivity, and modest costs. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a sorbent commonly used for PV sampling, is available as silicone tubing for as little as 0.60 € m(-1) (versus 100-550 € each for standard PDMS sorbent devices). Small pieces of silicone tubing (STs) of various lengths from millimeters to centimeters may be added to any experimental setting and used for headspace sampling, with little manipulation of the organism or headspace. STs have sufficiently fast absorption kinetics and large capacity to sample plant headspaces over a timescale of minutes to hours, and thus can produce biologically meaningful 'snapshots' of PV blends. When combined with thermal desorption coupled to GC-MS (a 40-year-old widely available technology), use of STs yields reproducible, sensitive, spatio-temporally resolved quantitative data from headspace samples taken in natural environments.

Light affects not only the development and physiology of the shoots (stems, leaves, and flowers) of plants but also the underground root system. Light triggers shoot cells to release signals that travel to the root and affect the development and physiology of the root system. Like shoot cells, root cells also have photoreceptors that can be activated by light, leading Lee et al . to investigate if light actually reaches these underground parts of the plant. Exposing Arabidopsis thaliana shoots to light while protecting the roots from light activated the photoreceptor phyB in the roots. In the root, phyB activated Hy5, a transcription factor that mediates cellular responses to light and was important for growth of the primary root and for root gravitropism, the proper downward orientation of roots. Arabidopsis stems efficiently conducted only certain wavelengths of light to the root tissues, and these conducted wavelengths activated phyB directly in the roots. These findings demonstrate that roots not only receive information about light conditions through signaling molecules that travel from the shoot to the root in response to light but also directly perceive light that is conducted through the plant tissues.

Plants recruit microbial communities from the soil in which they germinate. Our understanding of the recruitment process and the factors affecting it is still limited for most microbial taxa. We analysed several factors potentially affecting root microbiome structure - the importance of geographic location of natural populations, the microbiome of native seeds as putative source of colonization and the effect of a plant's response to UVB exposure on root colonization of highly abundant species. The microbiome of Nicotiana attenuata seeds was determined by a culture-dependent and culture-independent approach, and the root microbiome of natural N. attenuata populations from five different locations was analysed using 454-pyrosequencing. To specifically address the influence of UVB light on root colonization by Deinococcus, a genus abundant and consistently present in N. attenuata roots, transgenic lines impaired in UVB perception (irUVR8) and response (irCHAL) were investigated in a microcosm experiment with/without UVB supplementation using a synthetic bacterial community. The seed microbiome analysis indicated that N. attenuata seeds are sterile. Alpha and beta diversities of native root bacterial communities differed significantly between soil and root, while location had only a significant effect on the fungal but not the bacterial root communities. With UVB supplementation, root colonization of Deinococcus increased in wild type, but decreased in irUVR8 and irCHAL plants compared to nontreated plants. Our results suggest that N. attenuata recruits a core root microbiome exclusively from soil, with fungal root colonization being less selective than bacterial colonization. Root colonization by Deinococcus depends on the plant's response to UVB.

Phytochromes mainly function in photoautotrophic organisms to adjust growth in response to fluctuating light signals. The different isoforms of plant phytochromes often display both conserved and divergent roles, presumably to fine-tune plant responses to environmental signals and optimize fitness. Here we describe the distinct, yet partially redundant, roles of phytochromes NaPHYA, NaPHYB1 and NaPHYB2 in a wild tobacco species, Nicotiana attenuata using RNAi-silenced phytochrome lines. Consistent with results reported from other species, silencing the expression of NaPHYA or NaPHYB2 in N. attenuata had mild or no influence on plant development as long as NaPHYB1 was functional; whereas silencing the expression of NaPHYB1 alone strongly altered flowering time and leaf morphology. The contribution of NaPHYB2 became significant only in the absence of NaPHYB1; plants silenced for both NaPHYB1 and NaPHYB2 largely skipped the rosette-stage of growth to rapidly produce long, slender stalks that bore flowers early: hallmarks of the shade-avoidance responses. The phenotyping of phytochrome-silenced lines, combined with sequence and transcript accumulation analysis, suggest the independent functional diversification of the phytochromes, and a dominant role of NaPHYB1 and NaPHYB2 in N. attenuata's vegetative and reproductive development.

R2R3-MYB transcription factors (TFs) are involved in diverse aspects of plant biology. Recently an R2R3-MYB was identified in Petunia x hybrida line P720 to have a role in the transcriptional regulation of floral volatile production. We propose a more foundational role for the R2R3-MYB TF EMISSION OF BENZENOIDS II (EOBII). The homolog of EOBII was isolated and characterized from P. x hybrida ‘Mitchell Diploid’ (MD) and Nicotiana attenuata. For both MD and N. attenuata, EOBII transcript accumulates to high levels in floral tissue with maximum accumulation at flower opening. When EOBII transcript levels are severely reduced using a stable RNAi (ir) approach in MD and N. attenuata, ir-EOBII flowers fail to enter anthesis and prematurely senesce. Transcript accumulation analysis demonstrated core phenylpropanoid pathway transcripts and cell wall modifier transcript levels are altered in ir-EOBII flowers. These flowers can be partially complemented by feeding with a sucrose, t-cinnamic acid, and gibberellic acid solution; presumably restoring cellular aspects sufficient for flower opening. Additionally, if ethylene sensitivity is blocked in either MD or N. attenuata, ir-EOBII flowers enter anthesis. These experiments demonstrate one R2R3-MYB TF can control a highly dynamic process fundamental to sexual reproduction in angiosperms: the opening of flowers.

Plants maintain microbial associations whose functions remain largely unknown. For the past 15 y, we have planted the annual postfire tobacco Nicotiana attenuata into an experimental field plot in the plant's native habitat, and for the last 8 y the number of plants dying from a sudden wilt disease has increased, leading to crop failure. Inadvertently we had recapitulated the common agricultural dilemma of pathogen buildup associated with continuous cropping for this native plant. Plants suffered sudden tissue collapse and black roots, symptoms similar to a Fusarium-Alternaria disease complex, recently characterized in a nearby native population and developed into an in vitro pathosystem for N. attenuata. With this in vitro disease system, different protection strategies (fungicide and inoculations with native root-associated bacterial and fungal isolates), together with a biochar soil amendment, were tested further in the field. A field trial with more than 900 plants in two field plots revealed that inoculation with a mixture of native bacterial isolates significantly reduced disease incidence and mortality in the infected field plot without influencing growth, herbivore resistance, or 32 defense and signaling metabolites known to mediate resistance against native herbivores. Tests in a subsequent year revealed that a core consortium of five bacteria was essential for disease reduction. This consortium, but not individual members of the root-associated bacteria community which this plant normally recruits during germination from native seed banks, provides enduring resistance against fungal diseases, demonstrating that native plants develop opportunistic mutualisms with prokaryotes that solve context-dependent ecological problems.

About 26 kinds of simple and complex binary eutectics were frozen directionally under the condition of electromagnetic stirring. It was found that anomalous eutectics including most metals/non-metals and some metal/intermetallic eutectics, can be separated on macroscopic scale by flow caused by electromagnetic stirring. Moreover, the eutectics in which one of their component phases possess an entropy of solution over 23 J mol-1K-1 showed notable separation. In addition, process factors also affect the formation of a separated eutectic. © 1998 Chapman & Hall

Psychosocial maturity, gender, intellectual ability, and parenting practices were examined with a group of 344 Korean and 214 American adolescents. American adolescents reported greater self-reliance, work-orientation, and self-identity than did Korean adolescents. In addition, American girls described themselves as more mature in work orientation than did American boys, a trend reversed in the Korean culture. Intellectual ability was associated with adolescents' psychosocial maturity. Differences in parenting style were predictive of psychosocial maturity regardless of ethnic group membership. Authoritative parenting, compared to all other styles, was related to significantly higher means in adolescent maturity. Authoritarian and neglectful styles were almost always associated with lower psychosocial maturity, whereas permissive and mixed parenting styles were more advantageous than either authoritarian or neglectful parenting. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Background To survive herbivore attack, plants have evolved potent mechanisms of mechanical or chemical defense that are either constitutively present or inducible after herbivore attack. Due to the costs of defense deployment, plants often regulate their biosynthesis using various transcription factors (TFs). MYC2 regulators belong to the bHLH family of transcription factors that are involved in many aspects of plant defense and development. In this study, we identified a novel MYC2 TF from N. attenuata and characterized its regulatory function using a combination of molecular, analytic and ecological methods. Results The transcript and targeted metabolite analyses demonstrated that NaMYC2 is mainly involved in the regulation of the biosynthesis of nicotine and phenolamides in N. attenuata. In addition, using broadly-targeted metabolite analysis, we identified a number of other metabolite features that were regulated by NaMYC2, which, after full annotation, are expected to broaden our understanding of plant defense regulation. Unlike previous reports, the biosynthesis of jasmonates and some JA-/NaCOI1-dependent metabolites (e.g. HGL-DTGs) were not strongly regulated by NaMYC2, suggesting the involvement of other independent regulators. No significant differences were observed in the performance of M. sexta on MYC2-silenced plants, consistent with the well-known ability of this specialist insect to tolerate nicotine. Conclusion By regulating the biosynthesis of nicotine, NaMYC2 is likely to enhance plant resistance against non-adapted herbivores and contribute to plant fitness; however, multiple JA/NaCOI1-dependent mechanisms (perhaps involving other MYCs) that regulate separate defense responses are likely to exist in N. attenuata. The considerable variation observed amongst different plant families in the responses regulated by jasmonate signaling highlights the sophistication with which plants craft highly specific and fine-tuned responses against the herbivores that attack them.

The role of the alternative respiratory pathway in the protection of plants against biotic stress was examined in transgenic tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) plants (irAOX) silenced in the expression of ALTERNATIVE OXIDASE (AOX) gene. Wild-type and irAOX plants were independently challenged with (1) chewing herbivores (Manduca sexta), (2) piercing-sucking insects (Empoasca spp.), and (3) bacterial pathogens (Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000), showing that all these treatments can strongly elicit accumulation of AOX gene transcripts in wild-type plants. When N. attenuata chemical defenses and resistance were examined, irAOX plants showed wild-type levels of defense-related phytohormones, secondary metabolites, and resistance to M. sexta. In contrast, piercing-sucking leafhoppers (Empoasca spp.) caused more leaf damage and induced significantly higher salicylic acid levels in irAOX compared with wild-type plants in the field and/or glasshouse. Subsequently, irAOX plants accumulated lower levels of defense metabolites, 17-hydroxygeranyllinalool diterpene glycosides, caffeoylputrescine, and nicotine compared with wild-type plants under prolonged attack of Empoasca spp. in the glasshouse. Finally, an accelerated cell death phenotype was observed in irAOX plants infected with P. syringae, which correlated with higher levels of salicylic acid and hydrogen peroxide levels in pathogen-infected irAOX compared with wild-type leaves. Overall, the AOX-associated changes in phytohormone and/or redox levels appear to support the resistance of N. attenuata plants against cell piercing-sucking insects and modulate the progression of cell death in pathogen-infected tissues but are not effective against rapidly feeding specialist herbivore M. sexta.

The JASMONATE ZIM DOMAIN (JAZ) proteins function as negative regulators of jasmonic acid signaling in plants. We cloned 12 JAZ genes from native tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata), including nine novel JAZs in tobacco, and examined their expression in plants that had leaves elicited by wounding or simulated herbivory. Most JAZ genes showed strong expression in the elicited leaves, but NaJAZg was mainly expressed in roots. Another novel herbivory-elicited gene, NaJAZh, was analyzed in detail. RNA interference suppression of this gene in inverted-repeat (ir)JAZh plants deregulated a specific branch of jasmonic acid-dependent direct and indirect defenses: irJAZh plants showed greater trypsin protease inhibitor activity, 17-hydroxygeranyllinalool diterpene glycosides accumulation, and emission of volatile organic compounds from leaves. Silencing of NaJAZh also revealed a novel cross talk in JAZ-regulated secondary metabolism, as irJAZh plants had significantly reduced nicotine levels. In addition, irJAZh spontaneously developed leaf necrosis during the transition to flowering. Because the lesions closely correlated with the elevated expression of programmed cell death genes and the accumulations of salicylic acid and hydrogen peroxide in the leaves, we propose a novel role of the NaJAZh protein as a repressor of necrosis and/or programmed cell death during plant development.