The RLCK-VND6 module coordinates secondary cell wall formation and adaptive growth in rice

The orderly deposition of secondary cell wall(SCW)in plants is implicated in various biological programs and is precisely controlled.Although many positive and negative regulators of SCW have been documented,the molecular mechanisms underlying SCW formation coordinated with distinct cellular physiological processes during plant adaptive growth remain largely unclear.Here,we report the identification of Cellulose Synthase co-expressed Kinase1(CSK1),which encodes a receptor-like cytoplasmic kinase,as a negative regulator of SCW formation and its signaling cascade in rice.Transcriptome deep sequencing of developing internodes and genome-wide co-expression assays revealed that CSK1 is co-expressed with cellulose synthase genes and is responsive to various stress stimuli.The increased SCW thickness and vigorous vessel transport in csk1 indicate that CSK1 functions as a negative regulator of SCW biosynthesis.Through observation of green fluorescent protein-tagged CSK1 in rice protoplasts and stable transgenic plants,we found that CSK1 is localized in the nucleus and cytoplasm adjacent to the plasma membrane.Biochemical and molecular assays demonstrated that CSK1 phosphorylates VASCULAR-RELATED NAC-DOMAIN 6(VND6),a master SCW-associated transcription factor,in the nucleus,which reduces the transcription of a suite of SCW-related genes,thereby attenuating SCW accumulation.Consistently,genetic analyses show that CSK1 functions upstream of VND6 in regulating SCW formation.Interestingly,our physiological analyses revealed that CSK1 and VND6 are involved in abscisic acid-mediated regulation of cell growth and SCW deposition.Taken together,these results indicate that the CSK1-VND6 module is an important component of the SCW biosynthesis machinery,which coordinates SCW accumulation and adaptive growth in rice.Our study not only identifies a new regulator of SCW biosynthesis but also reveals a fine-tuned mechanism for precise control of SCW deposition,offering tools for rationally tailoring agronomic traits.

Phase transition regulation and caloric effect

Solid state refrigeration based on caloric effect is regarded as a potential candidate for replacing vapor-compression refrigeration.Numerous methods have been proposed to optimize the refrigeration properties of caloric materials,of which single field tuning as a relatively simple way has been systemically studied.However,single field tuning with few tunable parameters usually obtains an excellent performance in one specific aspect at the cost of worsening the performance in other aspects,like attaining a large caloric effect with narrowing the transition temperature range and introducing hysteresis.Because of the shortcomings of the caloric effect driven by a single field,multifield tuning on multicaloric materials that have a coupling between different ferro-orders came into view.This review mainly focuses on recent studies that apply this method to improve the cooling performance of materials,consisting of enlarging caloric effects,reducing hysteresis losses,adjusting transition temperatures,and widening transition temperature spans,which indicate that further progress can be made in the application of this method.Furthermore,research on the sign of lattice and spin contributions to the magnetocaloric effect found new phonon evolution mechanisms,calling for more attention on multicaloric effects.Other progress including improving cyclability of FeRh alloys by introducing second phases and realizing a large reversible barocaloric effect by hybridizing carbon chains and inorganic groups is described in brief.

The plant cell wall: Biosynthesis, construction, and functions

The plant cell wall is composed of multiple biopolymers, representing one of the most complex structural networks in nature. Hundreds of genes are involved in building such a natural masterpiece. However, the plant cell wall is the least understood cellular structure in plants. Due to great progress in plant functional genomics,manyachievementshavebeenmadein uncovering cell wall biosynthesis, assembly, and architecture, as well as cell wall regulation and signaling. Such information has significantly advanced our understanding of the roles of the cell wall in many biological and physiological processes and has enhanced our utilization of cell wall materials. The use of cutting-edge technologies such as single-molecule imaging,nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and atomic force microscopy has provided much insight into the plant cell wall as an intricate nanoscale network, opening up unprecedented possibilities for cell wall research. In this review,we summarize the major advances made in understanding the cell wall in this era of functional genomics, including the latest findings on the biosynthesis, construction, and functions of the cell wall.

StreamTune： dynamic resource scheduling approach for workload skew in video data center

Video surveillance applications need video data center to provide elastic virtual machine （VM） provisioning. However, the workloads of the VMs are hardly to be predicted for online video surveillance service. The unknown arrival workloads easily lead to workload skew among VMs. In this paper, we study how to balance the workload skew on online video surveillance system. First, we design the system framework for online surveillance service which con- sists of video capturing and analysis tasks. Second, we propose StreamTune, an online resource scheduling approach for workload balancing, to deal with irregular video analysis workload with the minimum number of VMs. We aim at timely balancing the workload skew on video analyzers without depending on any workload prediction method. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using a traffic surveillance application. The experimental results show that our approach is well adaptive to the variation of workload and achieves workload balance with less VMs.