The drift kinetic equation is solved for investigation of the plasma response to electromagnetic geodesic acoustic modes. The plasma flow within magnetic surfaces is considered. A perpendicular magnetic perturbation with poloidal number m=2 is created due to the m=2 parallel return current.

Purpose: Early detection and intervention can decrease the mortality of breast cancer significantly. Assessments of genetic/ genomic variants in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) have generated great enthusiasm for their potential application as clinically actionable biomarkers in the management of earlystage breast cancer.Experimental Design: In this study, 861 serial plasma and matched tissue specimens from 102 patients with early-stage breast cancer who need chemotherapy and 50 individuals with benign breast tumors were deeply sequenced via nextgeneration sequencing (NGS) techniques using large gene panels.Results: Cancer tissues in this cohort of patients showed profound intratumor heterogeneities (ITHGs) that were properly reflected by ctDNA testing. Integrating the ctDNA detection rate of 74.2% in this cohort with the corresponding predictive results based on Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System classification (BI-RADS) could increase the positive predictive value up to 92% and potentially dramatically reduce surgical overtreatment. Patients with positive ctDNA after surgery showed a higher percentage of lymph node metastasis, indicating potential recurrence and remote metastasis. The ctDNA-positive rates were significantly decreased after chemotherapy in basal-like and Her2 þ tumor subtypes, but were persistent despite chemotherapy in luminal type. The tumor mutation burden in blood (bTMB) assessed on the basis of ctDNA testing was positively correlated with the TMB in tumor tissues (tTMB), providing a candidate biomarker warranting further study of its potentials used for precise immunotherapy in cancer.Conclusions: These data showed that ctDNA evaluation is a feasible, sensitive, and specific biomarker for diagnosis and differential diagnosis of patients with early-stage breast cancer who need chemotherapy.

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Germination and thermoinhibition in lettuce (Lactuca sativa 'Jianyexianfeng No. 1') seeds were investigated by a proteomic comparison among dry seeds, germinated seeds at 15°C, at 15°C after imbibition at 25°C for 48 h, or at 25°C in KNO 3 (all sampled individually at germination), and ungerminated seeds at 25°C, a thermoinhibitory temperature. Before twodimensional gel electrophoresis analysis, storage proteins (greater than 50% of total extractable protein) were removed by polyethylene glycol precipitation, which significantly improved the detection of less abundant proteins on two-dimensional gels. A total of 108 protein spots were identified to change more than 2-fold (P , 0.05) in abundance in at least one germination treatment. Nineteen proteins increasing and one protein decreasing in abundance during germination had higher abundance in germinated 15°C, 15°C after imbibition at 25°C for 48 h, and 25°C in KNO 3 seeds than in ungerminated 25°C seeds. Gene expression of 12 of those proteins correlated well with the protein accumulation. Methionine metabolism, ethylene production, lipid mobilization, cell elongation, and detoxification of aldehydes were revealed to be potentially related to lettuce seed germination and thermoinhibition. Accumulation of three proteins and expression of five genes participating in the mevalonate (MVA) pathway of isoprenoid biosynthesis correlated positively with seed germinability. Inhibition of this pathway by lovastatin delayed seed germination and increased the sensitivity of germination to abscisic acid. MVA pathway-derived products, cytokinins, partially reversed the lovastatin inhibition of germination and released seed thermoinhibition at 25°C. We conclude that the MVA pathway for isoprenoid biosynthesis is involved in lettuce seed germination and thermoinhibition.Seed germination is a complex process that is influenced by many environmental factors, such as light, temperature, and moisture (Bewley et al., 2013). Temperature is the most important environmental factor in regulating seed germination. For a given species, there is an optimal temperature or temperature range for seed germination, below and above which seed germination will be delayed or inhibited. The failure of a seed to germinate at supraoptimal temperatures is commonly called thermoinhibition (Reynolds and Thompson, 1971;Abeles, 1986). In nature, thermoinhibition of seed germination is an adaptive regeneration strategy for the seeds of winter annual plants, which prevents the seeds germinating during the summer when the conditions are not appropriate for seedling growth (Baskin and Baskin, 1998;Allen et al., 2007). However, thermoinhibition often creates a problem for crop production. It causes delayed and poor germination of crop species with low optimal temperatures for seed germination and thus limits the time and region for crop cultivation. In the case of lettuce (Lactuca sativa) seeds, which exhibit thermoinhibition at 25°C to 30°C depending on variety and production environment (Guzman et al., 1992...

A model is proposed for a local up-down symmetric equilibrium in the vicinity of a specified magnetic surface with given elongation and triangularity. Different from the Miller's model [R. L. Miller et al., Phys. Plasmas 5, 973 (1998)], the derivative of the Shafranov shift in the present model is self-consistently determined. The equilibrium accounts for all the essential features, like the elongation, the triangularity, and the Shafranov shift etc., of a shaped cross section. Hence, it can be used for investigation of radially localized plasma modes, like reversed shear Alfvenic eigenmodes and ballooning mode, etc., and it is also suitable for local equilibrium construction used for flux tube plasma simulations. V C 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.

A local up-down symmetric tokamak equilibrium model is proposed. The model, with constant plasma shape parameters, is a special case of the more general Miller's local model [R. L. Miller et al., Phys. Plasmas 5, 973 (1998)]. Correspondingly, the equilibrium is determined only by a given reference flux surface, the local safety factor, the local pressure profile, and the profile of local toroidal field function. Although it is not complete, the model is particularly suitable for analytically investigating the effect of plasma shape factors on the radially localized plasma modes, like reversed shear Alfvenic eigenmodes, ballooning mode, etc. As an example of the application, the residual zonal flow in a shaped plasma is evaluated, and the result is in qualitative agreement with the previous investigations.

Kinetic effects of the toroidal rotation on the geodesic acoustic mode are theoretically investigated. It is found that when the toroidal rotation increases, the damping rate increases in the weak rotation regime due to the rotation enhancement of wave-particle interaction, and it decreases in the strong rotation regime due to the reduction of the number of resonant particles. Theoretical results are consistent with the behaviors of the geodesic acoustic mode recently observed in DIII-D and ASDEX-Upgrade. The kinetic damping effect of the rotation on the geodesic acoustic mode may shed light on the regulation of turbulence through the controlling the toroidal rotation.