Application of nitrogen loaded biochar in purifying agricultural wastewater and as a nitrogen releaser for rice production

Herein a new approach to the application of agricultural eutrophic wastewater for rice plant cultivation is described.Biochar was used as a medium for the sorption of ammonia from simulated wastewater and subsequently as a nitrogen(N)releaser in the cultivation of rice plants.The main goals of this approach were to isolate ammonia from simulated wastewater and transfer it into rice cultivation,and or explore how exogenous N promoted the growth of rice.The results demonstrate that according to X-ray diffraction phase analysis,most of the properties of biochar were retained before and after loading NH_(4)^(+)-N.Compared with biochar,the crystal peak of AlOOH in N-loaded biochar(NLB)disappeared and the intensity of the crystal peak of CuCaSe_(2)decreased,which was the important mechanism allowing it to adsorb 30.8%of the N present in simulated low N-concentration agricultural wastewater.The soil N content in NLB treatments was higher than in Non-NLB treatments during the critical tillering and reproductive growth stages.Moreover,the N adsorption-desorption process of NLB matched the N requirements of the rice plant,and thus greatly increased the tiller number by 11.9%and rice yield by 7.5%.These results indicated that the indirect use of ammonia derived from wastewater using biochar as a sorption and releasing medium for rice plant cultivation was promising.This is the first time that biochar was used for possibly indirect reuse of agricultural eutrophic wastewater and enhancement of rice plant growth.

Indiscriminate ssDNA cleavage activity of CRISPR-Cas12a induces no detectable off-target effects in mouse embryos

Dear Editor,Newly discovered characteristics like"collateral effect"or trans-cleavage in CRISPR-Cas13 and CRISPR-Cas12 systems have enabled their usage in nucleic acid detection(Gootenberg et al.2017,2018;Chen et al.2018).The collateral RNA cleavage of Cas13a has been reported to be harmful for cell development(Wang et al.2019;Buchman et al.2020).As a representative gene editor of CRISPR-Cas12 system,CRISPR-Cas12a(Cpf1)holds great potential for therapeutic applications in the future(Zetsche et al.2015;Koo et al.2018;Campa et al.2019).

Kinase-substrate Edge Biomarkers Provide a More Accurate Prognostic Prediction in ER-negative Breast Cancer

The estrogen receptor(ER)-negative breast cancer subtype is aggressive with few treatment options available.To identify specific prognostic factors for ER-negative breast cancer,this study included 705,729 and 1034 breast invasive cancer patients from the Surveillance,Epidemiology,and End Results(SEER)and The Cancer Genome Atlas(TCGA)databases,respectively.To identify key differential kinase-substrate node and edge biomarkers between ER-negative and ERpositive breast cancer patients,we adopted a network-based method using correlation coefficients between molecular pairs in the kinase regulatory network.Integrated analysis of the clinical and molecular data revealed the significant prognostic power of kinase-substrate node and edge features for both subtypes of breast cancer.Two promising kinase-substrate edge features,CSNK1A1-NFATC3 and SRC-OCLN,were identified for more accurate prognostic prediction in ERnegative breast cancer patients.

Highly efficient base editing in human tripronuclear zygotes

There are hundreds of disease-causing single-gene mutations, mainly caused by single-nucleotide substitutions or point mutations rather than small insertions/deletions （in- dels）, and often there are no cures for these diseases.

Base editing technology

The largest class of known human pathogenic mutations is point mutation,also known as single nucleotide polymorphism(SNP)[1].Precise and efficient editing of these SNPs has been of great interest for the treatment of genetic disorders.Base editing is a genome editing method which can precisely induce point mutations on DNA or RNA at the target loci without generating double strand breaks[2–5].