Medicinal plants have been of great importance to human health care since the advent of medicine. A huge array of molecules has been obtained from these phytopharmaceutical-yielding species that have influenced human lives since the beginning of plant-based life-saving medicines. Some of these molecules have taken the form of taxol, aspirin, and artemisinin. With the flourishing era of highthroughput next generation sequencing technologies, a hot pursuit for sequencing the genomes and transcriptomes of these life-saving plants is underway. Although few genomes have been sequenced or are currently being addressed, the number of transcriptomes sequenced has sky-rocketed in the last couple of years and continues to surge forward with immense pace, covering all important genera of medicinal plants. I have attempted to provide the current status, progress, opportunities, and challenges of these sequencing endeavors in this comprehensive and updated review. It is my hope that this information will provide both specialists and non-specialists with the current trends and future directions of this interesting category of plants.

Epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a well conserved process by which polarized, immotile epithelial cells transition into motile mesenchymal cells. EMT plays an important role during normal biological processes such as embryogenesis and wound healing. More recently, EMT has been studied for its role in cancer progression and metastasis. Understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate EMT are key to developing novel therapeutic interventions for cancer. Dysregulated or uncontrolled activation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway promotes tumor progression and metastasis. The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is one of the signaling pathways that has been implicated in EMT. In this review, major Wnt target genes that promote EMT as well as the various antagonists and microRNAs that regulate the Wnt/β-catenin pathway to influence EMT during cancer progression will be discussed.

Recovering energy from waste is gaining growing interest worldwide. The tremendous amount of residential waste, e.g. wastewater and food waste, spurs researchers to develop appropriate waste management methods and energy recovery technologies. Wastewater source heat pump (WWSHP) and solid-state anaerobic digestion (SS-AD) are well established methods for treating wastewater and organic waste. This study proposes a novel combination of these two technologies to handle residential wastewater and solid waste. In the proposed integrated system, WWSHP recovers heat from residential wastewater and then supply heat to SS-AD so that keeps the digesters at a desired operation temperature. The digester uses residential solid waste as feedstock to produce biogas, which is a renewable energy carrier. A case study taking a 1000-resident community as an example showed that the total electricity generated from this system can supply 8% of the community and also provides 1.53×10 12 J useful heat per year which can greatly reduce building energy consumption.

Study of biological processes is mostly limited to model plant species possessing considerable advantages like small genome size, tractability for genetic studies, ease of use, short generation time, and consequently availability of immense genetic resources. Discoveries from model species are extremely valuable but not enough for improvement of agronomic characteristics of economically important plants mainly due to divergence of mechanisms through evolution. Transient techniques are emerging as powerful tools for functional studies in diverse plant species and for validation of discoveries made in model species. Virus Induced Gene Silencing (VIGS), a transient reverse genetics tool, is extensively being used for performing rapid loss-of-function experiments in plants. Several of the advantages of VIGS including its suitability for high throughput studies will extend functional studies to diverse plant species, contributing to our understanding of unique biological processes. One of the main factors hindering even wider application of VIGS is its requirement for specific conditions with each species. This manuscript reviews the available information in the literature regarding efforts invested in several plant species and points out the key factors to be considered optimizing for achievement of efficient gene knock-down phenotypes in novel plant species.

In this critical review, binders for electrochemical supercapacitors are introduced and current technologies on the preparation of binders are reviewed in detail. Different types of materials for binder preparation are reviewed by comparing their advantages, disadvantages, and performance with active materials in ES electrodes. Several new trends for the future development of binder preparation are also discussed.