Sclerotinia stem rot, caused by Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, is a destructive soil-borne disease leading to huge yield loss.  We previously reported that Klebsiella variicola FH-1 could degrade atrazine herbicides, and the vegetative growth of atrazine-sensitive crops (i.e., soybean) was significantly increased in the FH-1-treated soil.  Interestingly, we found that FH-1 could promote soybean growth and induce resistance to S. sclerotiorum.  In our study, strain FH-1 could grow in a nitrogen-free environment, dissolve inorganic phosphorus and potassium, and produce indoleacetic acid and a siderophore.  The results of pot experiments showed that K. variicola FH-1 promoted soybean plant development, substantially improving plant height, fresh weight, and root length, and induced resistance against S. sclerotiorum infection in soybean leaves.  The area under the disease progression curve (AUDPC) for treatment with strain FH-1 was significantly lower than the control and was reduced by up to 42.2% within 48 h (P<0.001).  Moreover, strain FH-1 rcovered the activities of catalase, superoxide dismutase, peroxidase, phenylalanine ammonia lyase, and polyphenol oxidase, which are involved in plant protection, and reduced malondialdehyde accumulation in the leaves.  The mechanism of induction of resistance appeared to be primarily resulted from the enhancement of transcript levels of PR10, PR12, AOS, CHS, and PDF1.2 genes.  The colonization of FH-1 on soybean root, determined using CLSM and SEM, revealed that FH-1 colonized soybean root surfaces, root hairs, and exodermis to form biofilms.  In summary, K. variicola FH-1 exhibited the biological control potential by inducing resistance in soybean against S. sclerotiorum infection, providing new suggestions for green prevention and control.

Maize (Zea mays L.), also known as corn, is the third most cultivated crop in the world.  Northern corn leaf blight (NCLB) is a globally devastating maize foliar disease caused by Setosphaeria turcica (Luttrell) Leonard and Suggs.  Early intelligent diagnosis and warning is an effective and economical strategy to control this disease.  Today, deep learning is beginning to play an essential role in agriculture.  Notably, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) are amongst the most successful machine learning techniques in plant disease detection and diagnosis.  Our study aims to identify NCLB in the maize-producing area in Jilin Province based on several DCNN models.  We established a database of 985 leaf images of healthy and infected maize and applied data augmentation techniques including image segmentation, image resizing, image cropping, and image transformation, to expand to 30 655 images.  Several proven convolutional neural networks, such as AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG16, and VGG19, were then used to identify diseases.  Based on the best performance of the DCNN pre-trained model GoogleNet, some of the recent loss functions developed for deep facial recognition tasks such as ArcFace, CosFace, and A-Softmax were applied to detect NCLB.  We found that a pre-trained GoogleNet architecture with the Softmax loss function can achieve an excellent accuracy of 99.94% on NCLB diagnosis.  The analysis was implemented in Python with two deep learning frameworks, Pytorch and Keras.  The techniques, training, validation, and test results are presented in this paper.  Overall, our study explores intelligent identification technology for NCLB and effectively diagnoses NCLB from images of maize.

The genus Adelphocoris (Hemiptera: Miridae) is a group of key insect pests in cotton fields in China that includes three dominant species: A. suturalis (Jakovlev), A. lineolatus (Goeze) and A. fasciaticollis (Reuter). Previous field surveys have found that adults of these Adelphocoris species usually move onto specific host plants when the plants enter the flowering stage. To determine the potential trade-offs for this host-plant preference behavior, the performance of these three Adelphocoris spp. on flowering and non-flowering cotton and alfalfa were compared in the laboratory. The results showed that Adelphocoris spp. had significantly higher nymphal developmental and survival rates, along with increased adult longevity and fecundity on flowering cotton and alfalfa than on non-flowering plants of either species. In addition, compared with cotton plants, alfalfa generally promoted better performance of these three Adelphocoris species, especially for A. lineolatus. Simple correlation analysis indicated that female adult longevity was positively correlated to male adult longevity and female fecundity, and female fecundity was positively correlated to nymphal development and survival rates. This study demonstrated a positive correlation between adult preference and offspring/adult performance for all three Adelphocoris species, with no evidence of any trade-offs for this preference for flowering host plants. These findings support the hypothesis that hemimetabolous insects such as mirid bugs have positive adult preference-adult/nymphal performance relationships, which is likely due to the similar feeding habits and nutritional requirements of adults and nymphs.

Porcine skeletal muscle genes play a major role in determining muscle growth and meat quality. Construction of a full-length cDNA library is an effective way to understand the expression of functional genes in muscle tissues. In addition, novel genes for further research could be identified in the library. In this study, we constructed a full-length cDNA library from porcine muscle tissue. The estimated average size of the cDNA inserts was 1 076 bp, and the cDNA fullness ratio was 86.2%. A total of 1 058 unique sequences with 342 contigs (32.3%) and 716 singleton (67.7%) expressed sequence tags (EST) were obtained by clustering and assembling. Meanwhile, 826 (78.1%) ESTs were categorized as known genes, and 232 (21.9%) ESTs were categorized as unknown genes. 65 novel porcine genes that exhibit no identity in the TIGR gene index of Sus scrofa and 124 full-length sequences with unknown functions were deposited in the dbEST division of GenBank (accession numbers: EU650784-EU650788, GE843306, GH228978-GH229100). The abundantly expressed genes in porcine muscle tissue were related to muscle fiber development, energy metabolism and protein synthesis. Gene ontology analysis showed that sequences expressed in porcine muscle tissue contained a high percentage of binding activity, catalytic activity, structural molecule activity and motor activity, which involved mainly in metabolic, cellular and developmental process, distributed mainly in intracellular region. The sequence data generated in this study would provide valuable information for identifying porcine genes expressed in muscle tissue and help to advance the study on the structure and function of genes in pigs.

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the world’s major food crops, and often suffers from tremendous yield loss caused by abiotic stresses. The MADS-box genes are known to play versatile roles in plants, controlling plant responses to multiple abiotic stresses. However, understanding of regulation of their expressions by the conventional loss-of-function approach is very difficult. So far, regulation of MADS-box gene expression is little known. The best approach to retrieve expression regulation of this category of genes is to characterize expression of their promoters. In this study, the promoter of a homolog (GenBank accession no. EC864166) of maize MADS-box gene m18 was cloned by way of genome-walking PCR, named Pro66. Predicative analysis indicated that Pro66 contains more than one TATA box and multiple cis-acting environmental conditions-responsive elements (ECREs). Pro66 could drive expression of the β-glucuronidase (GUS)-encoding gene in maize, and heterologous expression of GUS in red pepper stressed by water deficit, salt, copper, iron deficiency, heat, cold, and grown under short and long photoperiods, echoing predicative ECREs. Conclusively, maize MADS-box gene m18 likely plays versatile functions in maize response to multiple abiotic stresses due to the promoter with multiple cis-acting elements. The complex arrangement of multiple cis-acting elements in the promoter features meticulously regulated expression of m18. The results give informative clues for heterologous utilisation of the promoters in monocot and dicot species. The copy of the ECREs and heterologous expression of the promoter in dicot species are also discussed.