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To overcome spectrum congestion, a promising approach is to integrate sensing and communication (ISAC) functions in one hardware platform. Recently, metamaterial antennas, whose tunable radiation elements are arranged more densely than those of traditional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) arrays, have been developed to enhance the sensing and communication performance by offering a finer controllability of the antenna beampattern. In this paper, we propose a holographic beamforming scheme, which is enabled by metamaterial antennas with tunable radiated amplitudes, that jointly performs sensing and communication. However, it is challenging to design the beamformer for ISAC functions by taking into account the unique amplitude-controlled structure of holographic beamforming. To address this challenge, we formulate an integrated sensing and communication problem to optimize the beamformer, and design a holographic beamforming optimization algorithm to efficiently solve the formulated problem. A lower bound for the maximum beampattern gain is provided through theoretical analysis, which reveals the potential performance enhancement gain that is obtained by densely deploying several elements in a metamaterial antenna. Simulation results substantiate the theoretical analysis and show that the maximum beamforming gain of a metamaterial antenna that utilizes the proposed holographic beamforming scheme can be increased by at least 50% compared with that of a traditional MIMO array of the same size. In addition, the cost of the proposed scheme is lower than that of a traditional MIMO scheme while providing the same ISAC performance.

A genome-wide association study of Han Chinese subjects was conducted to identify genetic susceptibility loci for nonobstructive azoospermia (NOA). In the discovery stage, 802 azoospermia cases and 1,863 controls were screened for genetic variants in the genome. Promising SNPs were subsequently confirmed in two independent sets of subjects: 818 azoospermia cases and 1,755 controls from northern China, and 606 azoospermia cases and 958 controls from central and southern China. We detected variants at human leukocyte antigen (HLA) regions that were independently associated with NOA (HLA-DRA, rs3129878, p(combine) = 3.70 × 10(-16), odds ratio [OR] = 1.37; C6orf10 and BTNL2, rs498422, p(combine) = 2.43 × 10(-12), OR = 1.42). These findings provide additional insight into the pathogenesis of NOA.

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