Genetic Engineering of Disease and Pest Resistance in Plants: Present State of the Art

1993 ◽  
Vol 48 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 673-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Günter Strittmatter ◽  
Dorothee Wegener

Abstract Rapid progress in gene technology has allowed, on the one hand, insight to be gained into the complex molecular mechanisms of plant/pathogen recognition and the natural defence strategies of host plants. On the other hand, this technology can also be used for the controlled and efficient generation of genetic variability and for the identification of desirable genotypes, far beyond the possibilities of classical breeding. The first successful attempts have been made to improve resistance against pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi and insects by engineering transgenic plants. The majority of these strategies were based on constitutively expressing single proteins that are either toxic to the pathogen/pest, or interfere with its reproductive cycle. More refined strategies, which are at the stage of testing, try to mimic and modify naturally-evolved defence reactions of plants and, thereby, will potentially confer a more durable resistance to a broad range of pathogens

Database ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifan Shao ◽  
Haoru Li ◽  
Jinghang Gu ◽  
Longhua Qian ◽  
Guodong Zhou

Abstract Extraction of causal relations between biomedical entities in the form of Biological Expression Language (BEL) poses a new challenge to the community of biomedical text mining due to the complexity of BEL statements. We propose a simplified form of BEL statements [Simplified Biological Expression Language (SBEL)] to facilitate BEL extraction and employ BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers) to improve the performance of causal relation extraction (RE). On the one hand, BEL statement extraction is transformed into the extraction of an intermediate form—SBEL statement, which is then further decomposed into two subtasks: entity RE and entity function detection. On the other hand, we use a powerful pretrained BERT model to both extract entity relations and detect entity functions, aiming to improve the performance of two subtasks. Entity relations and functions are then combined into SBEL statements and finally merged into BEL statements. Experimental results on the BioCreative-V Track 4 corpus demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in BEL statement extraction with F1 scores of 54.8% in Stage 2 evaluation and of 30.1% in Stage 1 evaluation, respectively. Database URL: https://github.com/grapeff/SBEL_datasets


1998 ◽  
Vol 08 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. M. P. VAN DER AALST

Workflow management promises a new solution to an age-old problem: controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. This paper discusses the use of Petri nets in the context of workflow management. Petri nets are an established tool for modeling and analyzing processes. On the one hand, Petri nets can be used as a design language for the specification of complex workflows. On the other hand, Petri net theory provides for powerful analysis techniques which can be used to verify the correctness of workflow procedures. This paper introduces workflow management as an application domain for Petri nets, presents state-of-the-art results with respect to the verification of workflows, and highlights some Petri-net-based workflow tools.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9&10) ◽  
pp. 747-765
Author(s):  
F. Orts ◽  
G. Ortega ◽  
E.M. E.M. Garzon

Despite the great interest that the scientific community has in quantum computing, the scarcity and high cost of resources prevent to advance in this field. Specifically, qubits are very expensive to build, causing the few available quantum computers are tremendously limited in their number of qubits and delaying their progress. This work presents new reversible circuits that optimize the necessary resources for the conversion of a sign binary number into two's complement of N digits. The benefits of our work are two: on the one hand, the proposed two's complement converters are fault tolerant circuits and also are more efficient in terms of resources (essentially, quantum cost, number of qubits, and T-count) than the described in the literature. On the other hand, valuable information about available converters and, what is more, quantum adders, is summarized in tables for interested researchers. The converters have been measured using robust metrics and have been compared with the state-of-the-art circuits. The code to build them in a real quantum computer is given.


1967 ◽  
Vol 71 (677) ◽  
pp. 342-343
Author(s):  
F. H. East

The Aviation Group of the Ministry of Technology (formerly the Ministry of Aviation) is responsible for spending a large part of the country's defence budget, both in research and development on the one hand and production or procurement on the other. In addition, it has responsibilities in many non-defence fields, mainly, but not exclusively, in aerospace.Few developments have been carried out entirely within the Ministry's own Establishments; almost all have required continuous co-operation between the Ministry and Industry. In the past the methods of management and collaboration and the relative responsibilities of the Ministry and Industry have varied with time, with the type of equipment to be developed, with the size of the development project and so on. But over the past ten years there has been a growing awareness of the need to put some system into the complex business of translating a requirement into a specification and a specification into a product within reasonable bounds of time and cost.


Author(s):  
José Teodoro Garfella ◽  
María Jesús Máñez ◽  
Joaquín Ángel Martínez

Today there are many publications or papers related with several graphic surveys of architectural heritage carried out using a variety of both traditional and cutting edge methods. Yet, the implementation of new graphical documentation systems, such as Automated Digital Photogrammetry, has introduced a fresh approach to dealing with architectural surveys by making them more accessible to the general public and, to a certain extent, increasing their usability (Garfella, Máñez, Cabeza, & Soler, 2014). The present study aims, on the one hand, to offer an overview of architectural survey systems and, on the other hand, to evaluate the differences in the degree of precision or accuracy between the latest state-of-the-art methods and the already well-established ones. This will enable us to examine the results obtained in this experiment to look for concordances and discrepancies between them that can be helpful when using such systems to deal with tasks in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Giorgio (Georg) Orlandi

Abstract The book under review serves as a significant contribution to the field of Trans-Himalayan linguistics. Designed as a vade mecum for readers with little linguistic background in these three languages, Nathan W. Hill’s work attempts, on the one hand, a systematic exploration of the shared history of Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese, and, on the other, a general introduction to the reader interested in obtaining an overall understanding of the state of the art of the historical phonology of these three languages. Whilst it is acknowledged that the book in question has the potential to be a solid contribution to the field, it is also felt that few minor issues can be also addressed.


Author(s):  
Davide Picca ◽  
Dominique Jaccard ◽  
Gérald Eberlé

In the last decades, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has obtained a high level of success. Interactions between NLP and Serious Games have started and some of them already include NLP techniques. The objectives of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, providing a simple framework to enable analysis of potential uses of NLP in Serious Games and, on the other hand, applying the NLP framework to existing Serious Games and giving an overview of the use of NLP in pedagogical Serious Games. In this paper we present 11 serious games exploiting NLP techniques. We present them systematically, according to the following structure:  first, we highlight possible uses of NLP techniques in Serious Games, second, we describe the type of NLP implemented in the each specific Serious Game and, third, we provide a link to possible purposes of use for the different actors interacting in the Serious Game.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9354-9361
Author(s):  
Kun Xu ◽  
Linfeng Song ◽  
Yansong Feng ◽  
Yan Song ◽  
Dong Yu

Existing entity alignment methods mainly vary on the choices of encoding the knowledge graph, but they typically use the same decoding method, which independently chooses the local optimal match for each source entity. This decoding method may not only cause the “many-to-one” problem but also neglect the coordinated nature of this task, that is, each alignment decision may highly correlate to the other decisions. In this paper, we introduce two coordinated reasoning methods, i.e., the Easy-to-Hard decoding strategy and joint entity alignment algorithm. Specifically, the Easy-to-Hard strategy first retrieves the model-confident alignments from the predicted results and then incorporates them as additional knowledge to resolve the remaining model-uncertain alignments. To achieve this, we further propose an enhanced alignment model that is built on the current state-of-the-art baseline. In addition, to address the many-to-one problem, we propose to jointly predict entity alignments so that the one-to-one constraint can be naturally incorporated into the alignment prediction. Experimental results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance and our reasoning methods can also significantly improve existing baselines.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ya-Dan Wen ◽  
Hong Wang ◽  
Yi-Zhun Zhu

The recognition of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) has been evolved from a toxic gas to a physiological mediator, exhibiting properties similar to NO and CO. On the one hand, H2S is produced from L-cysteine by enzymes of cystathionineγ-lyase (CSE) and cystathionineβ-synthase (CBS), 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase (3MST) in combination with aspartate aminotransferase (AAT) (also called as cysteine aminotransferase, CAT); on the other hand, H2S is produced from D-cysteine by enzymes of D-amino acid oxidase (DAO). Besides sulfide salt, several sulfide-releasing compounds have been synthesized, including organosulfur compounds, Lawesson’s reagent and analogs, and plant-derived natural products. Based on garlic extractions, we synthesized S-propargyl-L-cysteine (SPRC) and its analogs to contribute our endeavors on drug development of sulfide-containing compounds. A multitude of evidences has presented H2S is widely involved in the roles of physiological and pathological process, including hypertension, atherosclerosis, angiogenesis, and myocardial infarcts. This review summarizes current sulfide compounds, available H2S measurements, and potential molecular mechanisms involved in cardioprotections to help researchers develop further applications and therapeutically drugs.


Cancers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Hasan Soheilifar ◽  
Michael Grusch ◽  
Hoda Keshmiri Neghab ◽  
Razieh Amini ◽  
Hamid Maadi ◽  
...  

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the leading causes of cancer mortality. Angiogenesis is a rate-determining step in CRC development and metastasis. The balance of angiogenic and antiangiogenic factors is crucial in this process. Angiogenesis-related genes can be regulated post-transcriptionally by microRNAs (miRNAs) and some miRNAs have been shown to shuttle between tumor cells and the tumor microenvironment (TME). MiRNAs have context-dependent actions and can promote or suppress angiogenesis dependent on the type of cancer. On the one hand, miRNAs downregulate anti-angiogenic targets and lead to angiogenesis induction. Tumor suppressor miRNAs, on the other hand, enhance anti-angiogenic response by targeting pro-angiogenic factors. Understanding the interaction between these miRNAs and their target mRNAs will help to unravel molecular mechanisms involved in CRC progression. The aim of this article is to review the current literature on angioregulatory miRNAs in CRC.


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