Quantitative design of yield components to simulate yield formation for maize in China

Maize(Zea mays L.) stands prominently as one of the major cereal crops in China as well as in the rest of the world.Therefore,predicting the growth and yield of maize for large areas through yield components under high-yielding environments will help in understanding the process of yield formation and yield potential under different environmental conditions.This accurate early assessment of yield requires accuracy in the formation process of yield components as well.In order to formulate the quantitative design for high yields of maize in China,yield performance parameters of quantitative design for high grain yields were evaluated in this study,by utilizing the yield performance equation with normalization of planting density.Planting density was evaluated by parameters including the maximum leaf area index and the maximum leaf area per plant.Results showed that the variation of the maximum leaf area per plant with varying plant density conformed to the Reciprocal Model,which proved to have excellent prediction with root mean square error(RMSE) value of 5.95%.Yield model estimation depicted that the best optimal maximum leaf area per plant was 0.63 times the potential maximum leaf area per plant of hybrids.Yield performance parameters for different yield levels were quantitatively designed based on the yield performance equation.Through validation of the yield performance model by simulating high yields of spring maize in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Jilin Province,China,and summer maize in Shandong Province,the yield performance equation showed excellent prediction with the satisfactory mean RMSE value(7.72%) of all the parameters.The present study provides theoretical support for the formulation of quantitative design for sustainable high yield of maize in China,through consideration of planting density normalization in the yield prediction process,providing there is no water and nutrient limitation.

Cis-acting regulatory elements： from random screening to quantitative design

The cis-acting regulatory elements, e.g., promoters and ribosome binding sites （RBSs） with various desired properties, are building blocks widely used in synthetic biology for fine tuning gene expression. In the last decade, acquisition of a controllable regulatory element from a random library has been established and applied to control the protein expression and metabolic flux in different chassis cells. However, more rational strategies are still urgently needed to improve the efficiency and reduce the laborious screening and multifaceted characterizations. Building precise computational models that can predict the activity of regulatory elements and quantitatively design elements with desired strength have been demonstrated tremendous potentiality. Here, recent progress on construction of cis- acting regulatory element library and the quantitative predicting models for design of such elements are reviewed and discussed in detail.

Analytical solutions for inflation of pre-stretched elastomeric circular membranes under uniform pressure

Elastomeric membranes are frequently used in several emerging fields such as soft robotics and flexible electronics.For convenience of the structural design,it is very attractive to find simple analytical solutions to well describe their elastic deformations in response to external loadings.However,both the material/geometrical nonlinearity and the deformation inhomogeneity due to boundary constraints make it much challenging to get an exact analytical solution.In this paper,we focus on the inflation of a prestretched elastomeric circular membrane under uniform pressure,and derive an approximate analytical solution of the pressure-volume curve based upon a reasonable assumption on the shape of the inflated membrane.Such an explicit expression enables us to quantitatively design the material and geometrical parameters of the pre-stretched membrane to generate a target pressure-volume curve with prescribed peak point and initial slope.This work would be of help in the simplified mechanical design of structures involving elastomeric membranes.