IbMYB1, a transcription factor (TF) for R2R3-type MYB TFs, is a key regulator of anthocyanin biosynthesis during storage of sweet potatoes. Anthocyanins provide important antioxidants of nutritional value to humans, and also protect plants from oxidative stress. This study aimed to increase transgenic potatoes' (Solanum tuberosum cv. LongShu No.3) tolerance to environmental stress and enhance their nutritional value. Transgenic potato plants expressing IbMYB1 genes under the control of an oxidative stress-inducible peroxidase (SWPA2) promoter (referred to as SM plants) were successfully generated through Agrobacterium-mediated transformation. Two representative transgenic SM5 and SM12 lines were evaluated for enhanced tolerance to salinity, UV-B rays, and drought conditions. Following treatment of 100 mM NaCl, seedlings of SM5 and SM12 lines showed less root damage and more shoot growth than control lines expressing only an empty vector. Transgenic potato plants in pots treated with 400 mM NaCl showed high amounts of secondary metabolites, including phenols, anthocyanins, and flavonoids, compared with control plants. After treatment of 400 mM NaCl, transgenic potato plants also showed high DDPH radical scavenging activity and high PS II photochemical efficiency compared with the control line. Furthermore, following treatment of NaCl, UV-B, and drought stress, the expression levels of IbMYB1 and several structural genes in the flavonoid biosynthesis such as CHS, DFR, and ANS in transgenic plants were found to be correlated with plant phenotype. The results suggest that enhanced IbMYB1 expression affects secondary metabolism, which leads to improved tolerance ability in transgenic potatoes.

No abstract

No abstract

In the paper we consider the non‐linear aerosol dynamic equation on time and particle size, which contains the advection process of condensation growth and the process of non‐linear coagulation. We develop an efficient second‐order characteristic finite element method for solving the problem. A high accurate characteristic method is proposed to treat the condensation advection while a second‐order extrapolation along the characteristics is proposed to approximate the non‐linear coagulation. The method has second‐order accuracy in time and the optimal‐order accuracy of finite element spaces in particle size, which improves the first‐order accuracy in time of the classical characteristic method. Numerical experiments show the efficient performance of our method for problems of log‐normal distribution aerosols in both the Euler coordinates and the logarithmic coordinates. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

To obtain high accuracy and efficiency in the simulations, an optimum time step should be taken in finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods. The authors investigated how time steps impact on numerical dispersion of two FDTD methods including the FDTD(2,2) method and the FDTD(2,4) method. Through rigorously analytical and numerical analysis, it is found that small time steps of the FDTD methods do not always have small numerical errors. Our findings reveal that these two FDTD methods present different behaviours with respect to time steps: (1) for the FDTD(2,2) method, smaller time steps limited by the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition increase numerical dispersion and lead to larger simulation errors and (2) for the FDTD(2,4) method, as the time step increases, numerical dispersion errors first decrease and then increase. Our findings are also comprehensively validated from one-to three-dimensional cases through several numerical examples including wave propagation, resonant frequencies of cavities and a practical engineering problem.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.