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Nature Communications Sep 2022Increased occurrence of heatwaves across different parts of the world is one of the characteristic signatures of anthropogenic warming. With a 1.3 billion population,...
Increased occurrence of heatwaves across different parts of the world is one of the characteristic signatures of anthropogenic warming. With a 1.3 billion population, India is one of the hot spots that experience deadly heatwaves during May-June - yet the large-scale physical mechanism and teleconnection patterns driving such events remain poorly understood. Here using observations and controlled climate model experiments, we demonstrate a significant footprint of the far-reaching Pacific Meridional Mode (PMM) on the heatwave intensity (and duration) across North Central India (NCI) - the high risk region prone to heatwaves. A strong positive phase of PMM leads to a significant increase in heatwave intensity and duration over NCI (0.8-2 °C and 3-6 days; p < 0.05) and vice-versa. The current generation (CMIP6) climate models that adequately capture the PMM and their responses to NCI heatwaves, project significantly higher intensities of future heatwaves (0.5-1 °C; p < 0.05) compared to all model ensembles. These differences in the intensities of heatwaves could significantly increase the mortality (by ≈150%) and therefore can have substantial implications on designing the mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Topics: Acclimatization; India; Infrared Rays; Pacific Ocean; Seasons
PubMed: 36097265
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32942-5 -
International Journal of Molecular... Sep 2022Salinity tolerance-associated phenotypes of 35 EMS mutagenized wheat lines originating from BARI Gom-25 were compared. Vegetative growth was measured using...
Salinity tolerance-associated phenotypes of 35 EMS mutagenized wheat lines originating from BARI Gom-25 were compared. Vegetative growth was measured using non-destructive image-based phenotyping. Five different NaCl concentrations (0 to 160 mM) were applied to plants 19 days after planting (DAP 19), and plants were imaged daily until DAP 38. Plant growth, water use, leaf Na, K and Cl content, and thousand kernel weight (TKW) were measured, and six lines were selected for further analysis. In saline conditions, leaf Na, K and Cl content variation on a dry weight basis within these six lines were ~9.3, 1.4, and 2.4-fold, respectively. Relative to BARI Gom-25, two (OA6, OA62) lines had greater K accumulation, three (OA6, OA10, OA62) had 50-75% lower Na:K ratios, and OA62 had ~30% greater water-use index (WUI). OA23 had ~2.2-fold greater leaf Na and maintained TKW relative to BARI Gom-25. Two lines (OA25, OA52) had greater TKW than BARI Gom-25 when grown in 120 mM NaCl but similar Na:K, WUI, and biomass accumulation. OA6 had relatively high TKW, high leaf K and WUI, and low leaf Na and Cl. Phenotypic variation revealed differing associations between the parameters measured in the lines. Future identification of the genetic basis of these differences, and crossing of lines with phenotypes of interest, is expected to enable the assessment of which combinations of parameters deliver the greatest improvement in salinity tolerance.
Topics: Ions; Plant Leaves; Salinity; Salt Tolerance; Sodium; Sodium Chloride; Triticum; Water
PubMed: 36232687
DOI: 10.3390/ijms231911386 -
The New Phytologist Feb 2021While Arabidopsis seed coat epidermal cells have become an excellent genetic system to study the biosynthesis and structural roles of various cell wall polymers, the...
While Arabidopsis seed coat epidermal cells have become an excellent genetic system to study the biosynthesis and structural roles of various cell wall polymers, the physiological function of the secreted mucilaginous polysaccharides remains ambiguous. Seed mucilage is shaped by two distinct classes of highly substituted hemicelluloses along with cellulose and structural proteins, but their interplay has not been explored. We deciphered the functions of four distinct classes of cell wall polymers by generating a series of double mutants with defects in heteromannan, xylan, cellulose, or the arabinogalactan protein SALT-OVERLY SENSITIVE 5 (SOS5), and evaluating their impact on mucilage architecture and seed germination during salt stress. We discovered that muci10 seeds, lacking heteromannan branches, had elevated tolerance to salt stress, while heteromannan elongation mutants exhibited reduced germination in calcium chloride (CaCl ). By contrast, xylan made by MUCILAGE-RELATED21 (MUCI21) was found to be required for the adherence of mucilage pectin to microfibrils made by CELLULOSE SYNTHASE5 (CESA5) as well as to a SOS5-mediated network. Our results indicate that the substitution of xylan and glucomannan in seeds can fine-tune mucilage adherence and salt tolerance, respectively. The study of germinating seeds can thus provide insights into the synthesis, modification and function of complex glycans.
Topics: Arabidopsis Proteins; Cell Wall; Polysaccharides; Salt Tolerance; Seeds
PubMed: 33128402
DOI: 10.1111/nph.17056 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Aug 2022Silent speech interfaces (SSIs) convert non-audio bio-signals, such as articulatory movement, to speech. This technology has the potential to recover the speech ability...
Silent speech interfaces (SSIs) convert non-audio bio-signals, such as articulatory movement, to speech. This technology has the potential to recover the speech ability of individuals who have lost their voice but can still articulate (e.g., laryngectomees). Articulation-to-speech (ATS) synthesis is an algorithm design of SSI that has the advantages of easy-implementation and low-latency, and therefore is becoming more popular. Current ATS studies focus on speaker-dependent (SD) models to avoid large variations of articulatory patterns and acoustic features across speakers. However, these designs are limited by the small data size from individual speakers. Speaker adaptation designs that include multiple speakers' data have the potential to address the issue of limited data size from single speakers; however, few prior studies have investigated their performance in ATS. In this paper, we investigated speaker adaptation on both the input articulation and the output acoustic signals (with or without direct inclusion of data from test speakers) using the publicly available electromagnetic articulatory (EMA) dataset. We used Procrustes matching and voice conversion for articulation and voice adaptation, respectively. The performance of the ATS models was measured objectively by the mel-cepstral distortions (MCDs). The synthetic speech samples were generated and are provided in the supplementary material. The results demonstrated the improvement brought by both Procrustes matching and voice conversion on speaker-independent ATS. With the direct inclusion of target speaker data in the training process, the speaker-adaptive ATS achieved a comparable performance to speaker-dependent ATS. To our knowledge, this is the first study that has demonstrated that speaker-adaptive ATS can achieve a non-statistically different performance to speaker-dependent ATS.
Topics: Acoustics; Humans; Speech; Speech Acoustics; Speech Perception; Voice
PubMed: 36015817
DOI: 10.3390/s22166056 -
Molecules and Cells Aug 2023Orange carotenoid protein (OCP) of photosynthetic cyanobacteria binds to ketocarotenoids noncovalently and absorbs excess light to protect the host organism from...
Orange carotenoid protein (OCP) of photosynthetic cyanobacteria binds to ketocarotenoids noncovalently and absorbs excess light to protect the host organism from light-induced oxidative damage. Herein, we found that mutating valine 40 in the α3 helix of sp. PCC 7513 (GOCP1) resulted in blue- or red-shifts of 6-20 nm in the absorption maxima of the lit forms. We analyzed the origins of absorption maxima shifts by integrating X-ray crystallography, homology modeling, molecular dynamics simulations, and hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics calculations. Our analysis suggested that the single residue mutations alter the polar environment surrounding the bound canthaxanthin, thereby modulating the degree of charge transfer in the photoexcited state of the chromophore. Our integrated investigations reveal the mechanism of color adaptation specific to OCPs and suggest a design principle for color-specific photoswitches.
Topics: Carotenoids; Canthaxanthin; Valine; Acclimatization; Bacterial Proteins
PubMed: 37587751
DOI: 10.14348/molcells.2023.2186 -
PLoS Genetics Jan 2021The environmental conditions of microorganisms' habitats may fluctuate in unpredictable ways, such as changes in temperature, carbon source, pH, and salinity to name a...
The environmental conditions of microorganisms' habitats may fluctuate in unpredictable ways, such as changes in temperature, carbon source, pH, and salinity to name a few. Environmental heterogeneity presents a challenge to microorganisms, as they have to adapt not only to be fit under a specific condition, but they must also be robust across many conditions and be able to deal with the switch between conditions itself. While experimental evolution has been used to gain insight into the adaptive process, this has largely been in either unvarying or consistently varying conditions. In cases where changing environments have been investigated, relatively little is known about how such environments influence the dynamics of the adaptive process itself, as well as the genetic and phenotypic outcomes. We designed a systematic series of evolution experiments where we used two growth conditions that have differing timescales of adaptation and varied the rate of switching between them. We used lineage tracking to follow adaptation, and whole genome sequenced adaptive clones from each of the experiments. We find that both the switch rate and the order of the conditions influences adaptation. We also find different adaptive outcomes, at both the genetic and phenotypic levels, even when populations spent the same amount of total time in the two different conditions, but the order and/or switch rate differed. Thus, in a variable environment adaptation depends not only on the nature of the conditions and phenotypes under selection, but also on the complexity of the manner in which those conditions are combined to result in a given dynamic environment.
Topics: Acclimatization; Adaptation, Physiological; Biological Evolution; Cluster Analysis; DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic; Genetic Variation; Genome, Fungal; Glycerol; Phenotype; Principal Component Analysis; Saccharomyces cerevisiae; Selection, Genetic
PubMed: 33493203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009314 -
Scientific Reports Aug 2023Epigenetic variation in plant populations is an important factor in determining phenotype and adaptation to the environment. However, while advances have been made in...
Epigenetic variation in plant populations is an important factor in determining phenotype and adaptation to the environment. However, while advances have been made in the molecular and computational methods to analyze the methylation status of a given sample of DNA, tools to profile and compare the methylomes of multiple individual plants or groups of plants at high resolution and low cost are lacking. Here, we describe a computational approach and R package (sounDMR) that leverages the benefits of long read nanopore sequencing to enable robust identification of differential methylation from complex experimental designs, as well as assess the variability within treatment groups and identify individual plants of interest. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by profiling a population of Arabidopsis thaliana exposed to a demethylating agent and identify genomic regions of high epigenetic variability between individuals. Given the low cost of nanopore sequencing devices and the ease of sample preparation, these results show that high resolution epigenetic profiling of plant populations can be made more broadly accessible in plant breeding and biotechnology.
Topics: Epigenomics; Plant Breeding; Genomics; Acclimatization; Arabidopsis
PubMed: 37591855
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-38356-7 -
Development of an Intelligent Data-Driven System to Recommend Personalized Fashion Design Solutions.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2021In the context of fashion/textile innovations towards Industry 4.0, a variety of digital technologies, such as 3D garment CAD, have been proposed to automate, optimize...
In the context of fashion/textile innovations towards Industry 4.0, a variety of digital technologies, such as 3D garment CAD, have been proposed to automate, optimize design and manufacturing processes in the organizations of involved enterprises and supply chains as well as services such as marketing and sales. However, the current digital solutions rarely deal with key elements used in the fashion industry, including professional knowledge, as well as fashion and functional requirements of the customer and their relations with product technical parameters. Especially, product design plays an essential role in the whole fashion supply chain and should be paid more attention to in the process of digitalization and intelligentization of fashion companies. In this context, we originally developed an interactive fashion and garment design system by systematically integrating a number of data-driven services of garment design recommendation, 3D virtual garment fitting visualization, design knowledge base, and design parameters adjustment. This system enables close interactions between the designer, consumer, and manufacturer around the virtual product corresponding to each design solution. In this way, the complexity of the product design process can drastically be reduced by directly integrating the consumer's perception and professional designer's knowledge into the garment computer-aided design (CAD) environment. Furthermore, for a specific consumer profile, the related computations (design solution recommendation and design parameters adjustment) are performed by using a number of intelligent algorithms (BIRCH, adaptive Random Forest algorithms, and association mining) and matching with a formalized design knowledge base. The proposed interactive design system has been implemented and then exposed through the REST API, for designing garments meeting the consumer's personalized fashion requirements by repeatedly running the cycle of design recommendation-virtual garment fitting-online evaluation of designer and consumer-design parameters adjustment-design knowledge base creation, and updating. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been validated through a business case of personalized men's shirt design.
Topics: Algorithms; Computer-Aided Design; Humans; Male; Textiles
PubMed: 34205598
DOI: 10.3390/s21124239 -
Early Childhood Education Journal 2021At institutions striving to maintain face-to-face field placements and instruction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, circumstances changed daily in response to new...
At institutions striving to maintain face-to-face field placements and instruction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, circumstances changed daily in response to new developments at the university, local school districts, and personal circumstances. This mixed-methods study explored and evaluated the adaptations made to early childhood teacher preparation courses in an undergraduate program in order to provide relevant training through a variety of instructional modalities including face-to-face, virtual, hypothetical, and mixed reality. Focused on maintaining professional standards through adapted coursework designed to meet student learning outcomes, instructors reflected on multiple instructional modalities and analysis of demonstrable learning outcomes for students in a four-year bachelor's degree program resulting in state teacher certification. Data were collected from students from three different cohorts (n = 26) through course assignments, reflections, and instructor- and self-assessments. Results highlight several areas where students found success in meeting professional standards in new ways including: knowledge of development, relevant and responsive curriculum, collaborative engagement, cultural and familial knowledge, inclusive and individualized design, and flexibility and adaptability. Students were prepared to teach in the following ways: designing curriculum, implementation, and reflective practice. Students felt unprepared to teach citing needing more practice and continued skills development. These findings highlight the need for flexibility in the face of the pandemic and underscore the importance of using the new knowledge and practices generated about student learning to reinvent early childhood teacher education programs when faced with post-pandemic realities.
PubMed: 34177245
DOI: 10.1007/s10643-021-01227-9 -
Current Biology : CB Jan 2023In many plants, flowering time is influenced by daylength as an adaptive response. In soybean (Glycine max) cultivars, however, photoperiodic flowering reduces crop...
In many plants, flowering time is influenced by daylength as an adaptive response. In soybean (Glycine max) cultivars, however, photoperiodic flowering reduces crop yield and quality in high-latitude regions. Understanding the genetic basis of wild soybean (Glycine soja) adaptation to high latitudes could aid breeding of improved cultivars. Here, we identify the Tof4 (Time of flowering 4) locus, which encodes by an E1-like protein, E1La, that represses flowering and enhances adaptation to high latitudes in wild soybean. Moreover, we found that Tof4 physically associates with the promoters of two important FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT2a and FT5a) and with Tof5 to inhibit their transcription under long photoperiods. The effect of Tof4 on flowering and maturity is mediated by FT2a and FT5a proteins. Intriguingly, Tof4 and the key flowering repressor E1 independently but additively regulate flowering time, maturity, and grain yield in soybean. We determined that weak alleles of Tof4 have undergone natural selection, facilitating adaptation to high latitudes in wild soybean. Notably, over 71.5% of wild soybean accessions harbor the mutated alleles of Tof4 or a previously reported gain-of-function allele Tof5, suggesting that these two loci are the genetic basis of wild soybean adaptation to high latitudes. Almost no cultivated soybean carries the mutated tof4 allele. Introgression of the tof4-1 and Tof5 alleles into modern soybean or editing E1 family genes thus represents promising avenues to obtain early-maturity soybean, thereby improving productivity in high latitudes.
Topics: Glycine max; Plant Proteins; Plant Breeding; Adaptation, Physiological; Acclimatization; Photoperiod; Flowers; Gene Expression Regulation, Plant
PubMed: 36538932
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.061