Increasing Fusarium verticillioides resistance in maize by genomicsassisted breeding:Methods,progress,and prospects

Maize(Zea mays L.)is an indispensable crop worldwide for food,feed,and bioenergy production.Fusarium verticillioides(F.verticillioides)is a widely distributed phytopathogen and incites multiple destructive diseases in maize:seedling blight,stalk rot,ear rot,and seed rot.As a soil-,seed-,and airborne pathogen,F.verticillioides can survive in soil or plant residue and systemically infect maize via roots,contaminated seed,silks,or external wounds,posing a severe threat to maize production and quality.Infection triggers complex immune responses:induction of defense-response genes,changes in reactive oxygen species,plant hormone levels and oxylipins,and alterations in secondary metabolites such as flavonoids,phenylpropanoids,phenolic compounds,and benzoxazinoid defense compounds.Breeding resistant maize cultivars is the preferred approach to reducing F.verticillioides infection and mycotoxin contamination.Reliable phenotyping systems are prerequisites for elucidating the genetic structure and molecular mechanism of maize resistance to F.verticillioides.Although many F.verticillioides resistance genes have been identified by genome-wide association study,linkage analysis,bulkedsegregant analysis,and various omics technologies,few have been functionally validated and applied in molecular breeding.This review summarizes research progress on the infection cycle of F.verticillioides in maize,phenotyping evaluation systems for F.verticillioides resistance,quantitative trait loci and genes associated with F.verticillioides resistance,and molecular mechanisms underlying maize defense against F.verticillioides,and discusses potential avenues for molecular design breeding to improve maize resistance to F.verticillioides.

Classifying Galaxy Morphologies with Few-shot Learning

The taxonomy of galaxy morphology is critical in astrophysics as the morphological properties are powerful tracers of galaxy evolution.With the upcoming Large-scale Imaging Surveys,billions of galaxy images challenge astronomers to accomplish the classification task by applying traditional methods or human inspection.Consequently,machine learning,in particular supervised deep learning,has been widely employed to classify galaxy morphologies recently due to its exceptional automation,efficiency,and accuracy.However,supervised deep learning requires extensive training sets,which causes considerable workloads;also,the results are strongly dependent on the characteristics of training sets,which leads to biased outcomes potentially.In this study,we attempt Few-shot Learning to bypass the two issues.Our research adopts the data set from the Galaxy Zoo Challenge Project on Kaggle,and we divide it into five categories according to the corresponding truth table.By classifying the above data set utilizing few-shot learning based on Siamese Networks and supervised deep learning based on AlexNet,VGG_16,and ResNet_50 trained with different volumes of training sets separately,we find that few-shot learning achieves the highest accuracy in most cases,and the most significant improvement is 21%compared to AlexNet when the training sets contain 1000 images.In addition,to guarantee the accuracy is no less than 90%,few-shot learning needs~6300 images for training,while ResNet_50 requires~13,000 images.Considering the advantages stated above,foreseeably,few-shot learning is suitable for the taxonomy of galaxy morphology and even for identifying rare astrophysical objects,despite limited training sets consisting of observational data only.

北京棒杆菌天冬氨酸激酶突变体Q316P的酶学性质

【目的】对北京棒杆菌(Corynebacterium pekinense)天冬氨酸激酶(Aspartate kinase,AK)进行改造,期望获得具有较高酶活力且酶活性质改善的高产天冬氨酸族氨基酸的优良突变株,并削弱甚至解除Thr对AK的反馈抑制作用。【方法】利用定点突变技术对Gln(Q)316位点进行突变,高通量筛选获得活力提高明显的突变体,并将其在大肠杆菌BL21中高效表达,对野生型(Wild type,WT)和突变体Q316P AK用镍柱纯化,进行酶动力学及酶学性质研究。【结果】获得突变体Q316P,并在大肠杆菌BL21中成功表达。与野生型相比,突变体Q316P的V_(max)提高8.53倍,n值由2.15降低为1.29,正协同性减弱;最适温度由25°C升高至30°C;最适p H由8.0降低至7.5,半衰期由3.8 h延长至5.0 h;且在实验范围浓度内,底物抑制剂苏氨酸对突变体Q316P表现出激活作用;Q316P AK对金属离子K+和有机溶剂甲醇表现出良好抗性。【结论】获得酶活力提高、酶学性质改善的突变体,并一定程度上解除苏氨酸对AK的反馈抑制,为构建高产天冬氨酸族氨基酸工程菌提供参考。