The widespread agricultural problem of pre-harvest sprouting (PHS) could potentially be overcome by improving seed dormancy. Here, we report that miR156, an important grain yield regulator, also controls seed dormancy in rice. We found that mutations in one MIR156 subfamily enhance seed dormancy and suppress PHS with negligible effects on shoot architecture and grain size, whereas mutations in another MIR156 subfamily modify shoot architecture and increase grain size but have minimal effects on seed dormancy. Mechanistically, mir156 mutations enhance seed dormancy by suppressing the gibberellin (GA) pathway through de-represssion of the miR156 target gene Ideal Plant Architecture 1 ( IPA1 ), which directly regulates multiple genes in the GA pathway. These results provide an effective method to suppress PHS without compromising productivity, and will facilitate breeding elite crop varieties with ideal plant architectures.

Many Americans are exposed to low levels of organophosphorous (OP) pesticides. In is unclear whether these exposures impact sperm production. We investigated whether there was an association between urinary OP insecticide metabolites and sperm concentration and motility in newly married men from a rural area of eastern People's Republic of China. Ninety-four cases and 95 controls were included based on their median residual value of sperm concentration and motility after adjusting for relevant covariates. Their urine was analyzed for six dialkylphosphate (DAP) compounds. After adjustment for demographic and exposure variables, the odds of being a case were greater (Odds Ratio=1.30, 95% Confidence Interval 1.02-1.65) in men with higher urinary concentrations of dimethylphosphate (DMP) compared to men with lower levels. No significant differences between cases and controls were found among the other DAP concentrations. DMP exposure and sperm concentration and motility should be explored further in environmental exposure studies.

Reports arose from major Chinese wheat production regions that flixweed was not controlled by tribenuron after the herbicide was continuously used for several years. Flixweed seeds were collected from wheat fields that had been treated with tribenuron repeatedly over 3 to 15 yr or from road sides and remote hills that had never received tribenuron in Jiangsu, Hebei, Shanxi, Sichuan, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Henan provinces, and Tianjin and Beijing metropolises in China. The response of various biotypes to tribenuron was determined by whole plant experiments in the greenhouse. The experiments demonstrated that 11 of 32 flixweed biotypes were susceptible to tribenuron. The remaining 21 biotypes expressed moderate to high levels of tribenuron resistance with resistance indices ranging from 4 to > 1,500. DNA sequence analysis of acetolactate synthase (ALS) genes of selected biotypes 6, 7, 27, and 29 revealed a point mutation at position 197 of the ALS gene, as numbered relative to the protein sequence of Arabidopsis, where proline was substituted by leucine in biotype 7 and by threonine in biotype 29. These mutations are known to confer resistance to ALS-inhibiting herbicides and are responsible for the high resistance of these biotypes to tribenuron. The results also indicate that tribenuron resistance in flixweed is widespread in China and management programs to control these resistant populations are warranted.

In this paper, we present GDA, a generalized decision aggregation framework that integrates information from distributed sensor nodes for decision making in a resource efficient manner. Traditional approaches that target similar problems only take as input the discrete label information from individual sensors that observe the same events. Different from them, our proposed GDA framework is able to take advantage of the confidence information of each sensor about its decision, and thus achieves higher decision accuracy. Targeting generalized problem domains, our framework can naturally handle the scenarios where different sensor nodes observe different sets of events whose numbers of possible classes may also be different. GDA also makes no assumption about the availability level of ground truth label information, while being able to take advantage of any if present. For these reasons, our approach can be applied to a much broader spectrum of sensing scenarios. The advantages of our proposed framework are demonstrated through both theoretic analysis and extensive experiments.

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In this study, the enantioselective activity of the chiral fungicide triticonazole (TRZ) against target pathogens of seedborne diseases and the effect on the early phenotypic indexes and physiological and biochemical indexes of wheat following the soaking of seeds were studied. S-TRZ had low fungicidal activity and significantly inhibited the germination of wheat seeds. Seedlings in the S-TRZ treatment group suffered severe oxidative damage; the contents of glutathione (GSH) and malondialdehyde (MDA) were significantly increased. S-TRZ significantly inhibited the synthesis of gibberellin (GA) and ethylene (ETH), while it significantly increased that of jasmonic acid (JA). R-TRZ showed the highest activity against two smut fungi; the treatment of seeds with 5 g (ai)/100 kg R-TRZ had little influence on early wheat growth. The plant hormones were synthesized normally; seedlings grew well, and the fresh weight increased significantly following this treatment. Based on these data, we propose to develop and apply R-TRZ using the national recommended doses to control seed-borne diseases of wheat.

With increasing competition, many healthcare organizations have undergone tremendous reform in the last decade aiming to increase efficiency, decrease waste, and reshape the way that care is delivered. This study focuses on the operational efficiency improvement of hospital's registration process. The operational efficiency related factors including the service process, queue strategy, and queue parameters were explored systematically and illustrated with a case study. Guided by the principle of business process reengineering (BPR), a simulation approach was employed for process redesign and performance optimization. As a result, the queue strategy is changed from multiple queues and multiple servers to single queue and multiple servers with a prepare queue. Furthermore, through a series of simulation experiments, the length of the prepare queue and the corresponding registration process efficiency was quantitatively evaluated and optimized.