No abstract

A high-resolution record of Holocene environmental and climatic change in the Balikun area was reconstructed from a sediment core from the Lake Balikun. Multiproxy data show that the climate was extremely arid during the early Holocene (before 8.6 cal. ka BP). Moisture began to increase after 8.6 cal. ka BP and the climate was humid between 7.9 and 4.3 cal. ka BP. A significant dry event occurred around 4.3–3.8 cal. ka BP. The climate became generally wet during the late Holocene (after 3.8 cal. ka BP). The Holocene pollen and geophysical records do not indicate a wet early Holocene, making it evident that there was no early-Holocene humid period associated with peak Asian monsoon strength. Regional comparisons indicate that this region has a different pattern of Holocene environmental and climatic change from the Asian monsoonal area and south Siberia.

Photosynthesis in non-foliar organs plays an important role in crop growth and productivity, and it has received considerable research attention in recent years. However, compared with the capability of photosynthetic CO fixation in leaves, the distinct attributes of photosynthesis in the non-foliar organs of wheat (a C species) are unclear. This review presents a comprehensive examination of the photosynthetic characteristics of non-foliar organs in wheat. Compared with leaves, non-foliar organs had a higher capacity to refix respired CO , higher tolerance to environmental stresses and slower terminal senescence after anthesis. Additionally, whether C photosynthetic metabolism exists in the non-foliar organs of wheat is discussed, as is the advantage of photosynthesis in non-foliar organs during times of abiotic stress. Introducing the photosynthesis-related genes of C plants into wheat, which are specifically expressed in non-foliar organs, can be a promising approach for improving wheat productivity.

Prunus mume is the only fragrant flowering species of Prunus. According to the previous studies, benzyl acetate and eugenol dominate its floral scent. However, the diversity of its floral scents remains to be elucidated. In this work, the floral volatiles emitted from eight intraspecific cultivars of P. mume with white, pink and red flowers, were collected and analyzed using headspace solid-phase microextraction combined with gas chromatograms-mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC-MS). In total, 31 volatile compounds were identified, in which phenylpropanoids/benzenoids accounted for over 95% of the total emission amounts. Surprisingly, except for benzyl acetate and eugenol, several novel components, such as benzyl alcohol, cinnamyl acohol, cinnamy acetate, and benzyl benzoate were found in some cultivars. The composition of floral volatiles in cultivars with white flowers was similar, in which benzyl acetate was dominant, while within pink flowers, there were differences of floral volatile compositions. Principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the emissions of benzyl alcohol, cinnamyl alcohol, benzyl acetate, eugenol, cinnamyl acetate, and benzyl benzoate could make these intraspecific cultivars distinguishable from each other. Further, hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that cultivars with similar a category and amount of floral compounds were grouped together. Our findings lay a theoretical basis for fragrant plant breeding in P. mume.

Non-invasive, real-time imaging and deep focus into tissue are in high demand in biomedical research. However, the aberration that is introduced by the refractive index inhomogeneity of biological tissue hinders the way forward. A rapid focusing with sensorless aberration corrections, based on machine learning, is demonstrated in this paper. The proposed method applies the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which can rapidly calculate the low-order aberrations from the point spread function images with Zernike modes after training. The results show that approximately 90 percent correction accuracy can be achieved. The average mean square error of each Zernike coefficient in 200 repetitions is 0.06. Furthermore, the aberration induced by 1-mm-thick phantom samples and 300-µm-thick mouse brain slices can be efficiently compensated through loading a compensation phase on an adaptive element placed at the back-pupil plane. The phase reconstruction requires less than 0.2 s. Therefore, this method offers great potential for in vivo real-time imaging in biological science.