Hebei Agricultural University

Nucleotide-binding, leucine-rich repeat (NLR) receptors are widespread intracellular immune sensors across kingdoms. Plant G10-type coiled-coil (CCG10)-NLRs constitute a distinct phylogenetic clade that remains poorly characterized. Here, we identified a gain-of-function mutant of wheat autoimmunity 3 (WAI3GOF), which encodes a constitutively active CCG10-NLR resulting from a residue substitution in the leucine-rich repeat (LRR) domain. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) analysis reveals that activated WAI3 assembles into a distinctive octameric resistosome. Arabidopsis RPS2, another CCG10-NLR, also forms an octamer, indicating a conserved structural property across monocot and dicot plants. The WAI3 resistosome induces a prolonged and sustained increase in cytosolic calcium, likely facilitated by a unique channel architecture arising from its divergent coiled-coil (CC) domain configuration. Notably, this domain arrangement may be shared by plant NLRs that lack the conserved EDVID (Glu-Asp-Val-Ile-Asp) motif in their CC domains. Together, our findings uncover a conserved yet previously uncharacterized NLR resistosome structure and provide insights into the plant immune receptor plasticity.

Chinese jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill., 2n = 2x = 24) is a drought-tolerant, nutrient-rich fruit crop. However, its genetic improvement is constrained by protandry, low fruit set, and severe embryo abortion. Interspecies hybridization between Chinese jujube and Indian jujube (Ziziphus mauritiana Lam., 2n = 4x = 48) is further hindered by asynchronous flowering. We developed a dual-regime protocol combining temperature control and strategic heavy pruning to advance the flowering time of Indian jujube (cultivar 'Niunaidaqingzao', N) by 2months, thereby synchronizing its anthesis with that of Chinese jujube ('Dongzao', D) and wild Chinese jujube ('Suanzao', S). In vitro artificial self-pollination (AS) and in vitro artificial cross-pollination (AC) were conducted to assess pollen tube elongation and ovary expansion. Triple AS (TAS) boosted pollen tube emergence to 59%-87% across the three genotypes, more than doubling in vitro spontaneous self-pollination (SSP) rates and outperforming single AS 1.4 to 2.7 times (P < 0.05). Ovary-swelling frequencies of TAS reached 68.52% in wild Chinese jujube S and 27.78% in Indian jujube N, indicating 2.85 and 2.14 times increases over SSP and 1.88-4.11 times increases over single AS. In ♀S × ♂D, ♀D × ♂S, and ♀S × ♂N crosses, triple AC (TAC) raised pollen tube emergence to 54%-72% (1.3-2.2 times of single AC) and ovary expansion to 26%-39% (1.4-1.9 times of single AC) (P < 0.05). These findings provide a practical and efficient strategy for overcoming asynchronous flowering and reproductive barriers of interspecies hybridization in genus Ziziphus, enabling the establishment of interspecies hybrid populations for downstream breeding programs.

To address the challenge of abnormal tobacco shred detection in cigarette production lines, this study proposes an improved lightweight YOLOv8-based model that balances model efficiency and detection accuracy. First, the C3Ghost and GhostConv structures from GhostNet are integrated into the YOLOv8n backbone network, thereby reducing the number of model parameters. Second, a Context Anchor Attention mechanism is introduced to enhance feature extraction performance. In addition, a progressive feature pyramid network is constructed to improve multi-scale detection capabilities, and the WIoU v3 boundary loss function is adopted to optimize bounding box regression performance. Finally, validation on a dataset of anomalous tobacco shreds demonstrates the lightweight nature and competitive performance of the proposed method. The results show that: (1) compared with four other models, the proposed model exhibits advantages in terms of speed and accuracy; compared with the original model, detection precision is improved by 9.5%, and recall is increased by 10.6%; (2) the detection model achieves 86.27 frames per second for tobacco production line image detection, enabling real-time detection of abnormal tobacco shreds during the production process. This study offers a promising technical approach for intelligent quality detection in cigarette production lines under the studied conditions. This study addresses the challenge of detecting abnormal tobacco shreds in high-speed cigarette production lines, where traditional inspection methods are inefficient and unreliable. The proposed lightweight detection model achieves improved accuracy while maintaining real-time performance, making it suitable for industrial deployment on resource-constrained devices. Experimental validation demonstrates significant performance improvements over existing methods, enabling automated quality control in cigarette manufacturing processes.

UDP-glycosyltransferases (UGTs) represent a large multigene family that play a central role in glycosylating a highly diverse array of natural products, underscoring their critical importance in various biological processes. However, the functional roles of a substantial majority of UGTs remain to be elucidated. In the present study, we characterized the glycosyltransferase UGT78G3, a member of the UGT78 glycosyltransferase family in the model legume Medicago truncatula. Amino-acid sequence analysis revealed a conserved PSPG motif at the C-terminus of UGT78G3. Liquid chromatography-coupled tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis demonstrated that UGT78G3 catalyzes the formation of kaempferol 3-O-glucoside in vitro. However, neither UGT78G3 overexpression nor CRISPR/Cas9-mediated mutagenesis resulted in significant changes to the endogenous levels of kaempferol 3-O-glucoside, indicating that UGT78G3 does not play a predominant role in the biosynthesis of kaempferol 3-O-glucoside in vivo. Our findings identify a putative glycosyltransferase in M. truncatula and provide a target for biocatalyst design aimed at synthesizing flavonoid glucosides.