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We present an improved protocol for highly efficient production of doubled haploid loose-curd cauliflower plants ( Brassica oleracea var. botrytis) via microspore culture. Our experiment explored factors such as donor plant treatment, flower bud pretreatment, embryo germination medium, and ploidy characterization of regenerated plants. Our technique efficiently produced embryos from both tight- and loose-curd donor plants, although the embryo yields were genotype dependent. We achieved a germination rate of around 30 % by employing a hormone combination of zeatin, indole-3-acetic acid, and 6-benzylaminopurine pretreatment culture. We also used 1–4 days of cold pretreatment of the flower buds, which were submerged into NLN-13 medium, to induce microspore embryogenesis. Analysis using an FCM Ploidy Analyzer showed that more than 50 % of regenerated plants were spontaneously doubled haploids, more than 25 % were tetraploids, and fewer than 7 % were haploid. Visual examination of plants in the field revealed that they had distinct phenotypic characteristics relating to their ploidy level. The efficient production of double haploids using our improved microspore culture technique is a promising approach that can be applied in loose-curd cauliflower breeding programmes and genetic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an improved protocol for highly efficient production of doubled haploid loose-curd cauliflower plants ( Brassica oleracea var. botrytis) via microspore culture. Our experiment explored factors such as donor plant treatment, flower bud pretreatment, embryo germination medium, and ploidy characterization of regenerated plants. Our technique efficiently produced embryos from both tight- and loose-curd donor plants, although the embryo yields were genotype dependent. We achieved a germination rate of around 30 % by employing a hormone combination of zeatin, indole-3-acetic acid, and 6-benzylaminopurine pretreatment culture. We also used 1–4 days of cold pretreatment of the flower buds, which were submerged into NLN-13 medium, to induce microspore embryogenesis. Analysis using an FCM Ploidy Analyzer showed that more than 50 % of regenerated plants were spontaneously doubled haploids, more than 25 % were tetraploids, and fewer than 7 % were haploid. Visual examination of plants in the field revealed that they had distinct phenotypic characteristics relating to their ploidy level. The efficient production of double haploids using our improved microspore culture technique is a promising approach that can be applied in loose-curd cauliflower breeding programmes and genetic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chart images, such as bar charts, pie charts, and line charts, are explosively produced due to the wide usage of data visualizations. Accordingly, knowledge mining from chart images is becoming increasingly important, which can benefit downstream tasks like chart retrieval and knowledge graph completion. However, existing methods for chart knowledge mining mainly focus on converting chart images into raw data and often ignore their visual encodings and semantic meanings, which can result in information loss for many downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose ChartKG, a novel knowledge graph (KG) based representation for chart images, which can model the visual elements in a chart image and semantic relations among them including visual encodings and visual insights in a unified manner.Further, we develop a general framework to convert chart images to the proposed KG-based representation. It integrates a series of image processing techniques to identify visual elements and relations, e.g., CNNs to classify charts, yolov5 and optical character recognition to parse charts, and rule-based methods to construct graphs. We present four cases to illustrate how our knowledge-graph-based representation can model the detailed visual elements and semantic relations in charts, and further demonstrate how our approach can benefit downstream applications such as semantic-aware chart retrieval and chart question answering. We also conduct quantitative evaluations to assess the two fundamental building blocks of our chart-to-KG framework, i.e., object recognition and optical character recognition. The results provide support for the usefulness and effectiveness of ChartKG.

We aimed to investigate the effects of Xylaria nigripes (XN) extracts on the rapid eye movement sleep deprivation (REMSD)-induced memory impairment, and explore related mechanism. Male Sprague Dawley rats were randomly divided into 6 groups: cage control (CC)-NaCl group; tank control (TC)-NaCl group; sleep deprivation (SD)-NaCl group; CC-XN group; TC-XN group and SD-XN group. The rats were administered with intragastric XN and 0.9% of sodium chloride. SD group rats were deprived of REM sleep for 72 h. Morris water maze (MWM) was used to assess the effects of XN on spatial learning and memory. The expression of cAMP-response element binding protein (CREB) and p-CREB were also investigated in all groups. Result showed rats in SD-NaCl group had significantly longer mean escape latencies in finding the platform as compared to the control rats (p<0.05) in MWM test. The SD-NaCl group spent significantly less time in goal quadrant compared with the SD-XN group. REMSD and XN did not alter CREB expression in the hippocampus, while sleep deprivation resulted in reduced phosphorylation of CREB in the hippocampus, which was reversed by XN. XN mitigates spatial memory impairment induced by REMSD in rat. Phosphorylation of CREB in hippocampus might be one of the mechanisms.