Ginkgo biloba L. (ginkgo) is generally regarded as a tolerant species to environmental stresses. However, its tolerance mechanisms are not well understood, particularly for salt stress. To evaluate the species’ physiological responses to salt stress, 3-year-old ginkgo seedlings were exposed to a range of salinity levels (0% to 1.0% NaCl). A significant reduction in maximum (Fv/Fm) and actual (ΦPSII) quantum yields of photosystem II (PSII) photochemistry and the nonphotochemical quenching (qN) coefficient only occurred in late treatment stages at the salinity levels of 0.6% to 1.0%. As salt concentration increased, the response time and chlorophyll (Chl) fluorescence indices decreased. Overall, the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and peroxidase (POD); contents of catalase (CAT), reduced glutathione (GSH), and flavonoids; and scavenging rate of free radicals enhanced under salinity stress. These data indicate that ginkgo seedlings are tolerant to low salt stress, and enzymatic and nonenzymatic antioxidant systems seem to work synergistically to reduce lipid oxidation under NaCl stress because malondialdehyde (MDA) content did not increase. Correlation and principal component analyses determined that water potential, Chl fluorescence parameters, activities of POD and SOD, contents of CAT and flavonoids, and hydroxyl (•OH) and diphenyl picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging capability were sensitive to salt stress. These parameters can be used for in vitro or rapid and nondestructive monitoring of the responses of ginkgo seedlings to salinity stress. It is of significance to understand the tolerance mechanisms of ginkgo to salt stress, reduce the harm of NaCl and other snow-melting agents to ginkgo as shade trees, and develop new salt-tolerant varieties.

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As both NAND flash memory manufacturers and users are turning their attentions from planar architecture towards three-dimensional (3D) architecture, it becomes critical and urgent to understand the characteristics of 3D NAND flash memory. These characteristics, especially those different from planar NAND flash, can significantly affect design choices of flash management techniques. In this article, we present a characterization study on the state-of-the-art 3D floating gate (FG) NAND flash memory through comprehensive experiments on an FPGA-based 3D NAND flash evaluation platform. We make distinct observations on its performance and reliability, such as operation latencies and various error patterns, followed by careful analyses from physical and circuit-level perspectives. Although 3D FG NAND flash provides much higher storage densities than planar NAND flash, it faces new performance challenges of garbage collection overhead and program performance variations and more complicated reliability issues due to, e.g., distinct location dependence and value dependence of errors. We also summarize the differences between 3D FG NAND flash and planar NAND flash and discuss implications on the designs of NAND flash management techniques brought by the architecture innovation. We believe that our work will facilitate developing novel 3D FG NAND flash-oriented designs to achieve better performance and reliability.

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