Comparative transcriptomic and metabolomic analyses reveal key regulatory gene for methyl jasmonate-induced steroidal saponins synthesis in Dioscorea composita.

Dioscorea composita (D. composita) is a perennial herb with abundant steroidal saponins that have gained worldwide attention for their remarkable efficacy in cardiovascular diseases. However, few studies have been worked on the regulatory network of steroidal saponins biosynthesis under phytohormone induced.

Tunable Phonon Polariton Hybridization in a Van der Waals Hetero-Bicrystal.

Phonon polaritons, the hybrid quasiparticles resulting from the coupling of photons and lattice vibrations, have gained significant attention in the field of layered van der Waals heterostructures. Particular interest has been paid to hetero-bicrystals composed of molybdenum oxide (MoO) and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), which feature polariton dispersion tailorable via avoided polariton mode crossings. In this work, the polariton eigenmodes in MoO-hBN hetero-bicrystals self-assembled on ultrasmooth gold are systematically studied using synchrotron infrared nanospectroscopy.

Exfoliated Magnesium Diboride (MgB) Nanosheets as Solid Fuels.

Magnesium diboride (MgB) has been explored as an alternative fuel to boron (B) due to its high energy density and the additive effect of magnesium (Mg) to promote B combustion. However, the primary oxidation of MgB does not occur unless it decomposes at a high temperature (830 °C), which makes ignition difficult and the reaction slow. Recently, two-dimensional (2D) exfoliated MgB nanosheets have attracted increasing attention due to their unique properties and potential applications in various fields.

Dioscorea composita WRKY5 positively regulates AtSOD1 and AtABF2 to enhance drought and salt tolerances.

DcWRKY5 increases the antioxidant enzyme activity and proline accumulation, oppositely, reduces the accumulation of ROS and MDA, through directly activating the genes expression, finally enhances the salt and drought tolerance. Drought and salinity are two main environmental factors that limit the large-scale cultivation of the medicinal plant Dioscorea composita (D. composita).

Dioscorea composita WRKY12 is involved in the regulation of salt tolerance by directly activating the promoter of AtRCI2A.

Dioscorea composita (D. composita) is an important medicinal plant worldwide with high economic value. However, its large-scale cultivation was limited by soil salinization.

The Gcn5-Ada2-Ada3 histone acetyltransferase module has divergent roles in pathogenesis of Candida glabrata.

Candida glabrata is an opportunistic fungal pathogen and the second most prevalent species isolated from candidiasis patients. C. glabrata has intrinsic tolerance to antifungal drugs and oxidative stresses and the ability to adhere to mucocutaneous surfaces.

Electrically Driven Hyperbolic Nanophotonic Resonators as High Speed, Spectrally Selective Thermal Radiators.

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate electrically driven, spectrally selective thermal emitters based on globally aligned carbon nanotube metamaterials. The self-assembled metamaterial supports a high degree of nanotube ordering, enabling nanoscale ribbons patterned in the metamaterial to function both as Joule-heated incandescent filaments and as infrared hyperbolic resonators imparting spectral selectivity to the thermal radiation. Devices batch-fabricated on a single chip emit polarized thermal radiation with peak wavelengths dictated by their hyperbolic resonances, and their nanoscale heated dimensions yield modulation rates as high as 1 MHz.

Dynamic circular birefringence response with fractured geometric phase metasurface systems.

Control over symmetry breaking in three-dimensional electromagnetic systems offers a pathway to tailoring their optical activity. We introduce fractured Pancharatnam–Berry-phase metasurface systems, in which a full-waveplate geometric phase metasurface is fractured into two half-waveplate-based metasurfaces and actively configured using shear displacement. Local relative rotations between stacked half-nanowaveplates within the metasurface system are transduced by shear displacement, leading to dynamic modulation of their collective geometric phase properties.

Ultrahigh-Quality Infrared Polaritonic Resonators Based on Bottom-Up-Synthesized van der Waals Nanoribbons.

van der Waals nanomaterials supporting phonon polariton quasiparticles possess extraordinary light confinement capabilities, making them ideal systems for molecular sensing, thermal emission, and subwavelength imaging applications, but they require defect-free crystallinity and nanostructured form factors to fully showcase these capabilities. We introduce bottom-up-synthesized α-MoO structures as nanoscale phonon polaritonic systems that feature tailorable morphologies and crystal qualities consistent with bulk single crystals. α-MoO nanoribbons serve as low-loss hyperbolic Fabry-Pérot nanoresonators, and we experimentally map hyperbolic resonances over four Reststrahlen bands spanning the far- and mid-infrared spectral range, including resonance modes beyond the 10th order.

Inorganic Chiral Hybrid Nanostructures for Tailored Chiroptics and Chirality-Dependent Photocatalysis.

Inorganic chiral hybrid nanostructures that embed chirality within distinct material compositions can create novel chiral properties and functionalities absent from achiral nanostructures; however, they remain largely unexplored. We report, for the first time, a class of chiral plasmonic metal-semiconductor core-shell nanostructures that employ structurally chiral nanoparticles as chirality inducing templates to grow functional shell materials, which allowed us to independently control material parameters such as core geometry and shell thickness, as well as handedness of the system. We experimentally and theoretically achieved enhanced and tunable chiroptical activity of the heterostructures as a result of the core-shell strong coupling effect.

Dioscorea composita WRKY3 positively regulates salt-stress tolerance in transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana.

Dioscorea composita (D. composita) is a perennial dioecious herb with strong biotic and abiotic stress tolerance. However, what roles WRKY transcription factors might play in regulating abiotic stress responses in this medicinal plant is unknown.

Alginate-Capped Silver Nanoparticles as a Potent Anti-mycobacterial Agent Against .

Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, (). Although progress has been made in TB control, still about 10 million people worldwide develop TB annually and 1.5 million die of the disease.

Spectral- and Polarization-Dependent Scattering of Gold Nanobipyramids for Exogenous Contrast in Optical Coherence Tomography.

Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) reveals the subsurface microstructure of biological tissue and provides information regarding the polarization state of light backscattered from tissue. Complementing OCT's structural signal with molecular imaging requires strategies to simultaneously detect multiple exogenous contrast agents with high specificity in tissue. Specific detection of molecular probes enables the parallel visualization of physiological, cellular, and molecular processes.

Fungal kinases and transcription factors regulating brain infection in Cryptococcus neoformans.

Cryptococcus neoformans causes fatal fungal meningoencephalitis. Here, we study the roles played by fungal kinases and transcription factors (TFs) in blood-brain barrier (BBB) crossing and brain infection in mice. We use a brain infectivity assay to screen signature-tagged mutagenesis (STM)-based libraries of mutants defective in kinases and TFs, generated in the C.

Tunable Hyperbolic Metamaterials Based on Self-Assembled Carbon Nanotubes.

We show that packed, horizontally aligned films of single-walled carbon nanotubes are hyperbolic metamaterials with ultrasubwavelength unit cells and dynamic tunability. Using Mueller matrix ellipsometry, we characterize the films' optical properties, which are doping level dependent, and find a broadband hyperbolic region tunable in the mid-infrared. To characterize the dispersion of in-plane hyperbolic plasmon modes, we etch the nanotube films into nanoribbons with differing widths and orientations relative to the nanotube axis, and we observe that the hyperbolic modes support strong light localization.

Dynamic gating of infrared radiation in a textile.

The human body absorbs and loses heat largely through infrared radiation centering around a wavelength of 10 micrometers. However, neither our skin nor the textiles that make up clothing are capable of dynamically controlling this optical channel for thermal management. By coating triacetate-cellulose bimorph fibers with a thin layer of carbon nanotubes, we effectively modulated the infrared radiation by more than 35% as the relative humidity of the underlying skin changed.

Coherent Discriminatory Modal Manipulation of Acoustic Phonons at the Nanoscale.

Understanding and controlling the phononic characteristics in solids is crucial to elucidate many physical phenomena and develop new phononic devices with optimal performance. Although substantial progress on the spatial control of phonons by material design has been achieved, the manipulation of phonons in the time domain has been less studied but can elucidate in-depth insight into various phonon-coupling processes. In this work, we explore different time-domain pump-control(s)-probe phonon manipulation schemes in both simulations and experiments with good consistency.

Protein kinase A governs growth and virulence in Candida tropicalis.

Candida tropicalis is one of the most important human fungal pathogens causing superficial infections in locations such as the oral mucosa and genital tract, as well as systemic infections with high mortality. In its sister species Candida albicans, the cyclic AMP/protein kinase A (cAMP/PKA) pathway regulates fungal adhesion and dimorphism, both of which correlate closely with virulence. CaTpk1 and CaTpk2, the catalytic subunits of PKA, not only share redundant functions in hyphal growth, adhesion, and biofilm formation, but also have distinct roles in stress responses and pathogenesis, respectively.

Assembled Suprastructures of Inorganic Chiral Nanocrystals and Hierarchical Chirality.

Chiral organizations ubiquitously exist in biomaterials via hierarchical assembly of chiral molecules, but assembly of chiral inorganic nanocrystals (NCs) has been lacking. Recent development of cinnabar HgS NCs that can possess precisely engineered chirality originating from both atomic lattice and morphology offers an emerging class of inorganic building blocks to explore their hierarchical assembly. Two different forms of suprastructures, collinear chains and propellers, have been achieved with various chiral HgS NC building blocks via distinct assembly mechanisms.

Cooperative expression of atomic chirality in inorganic nanostructures.

Cooperative chirality phenomena extensively exist in biomolecular and organic systems via intra- and inter-molecular interactions, but study of inorganic materials has been lacking. Here we report, experimentally and theoretically, cooperative chirality in colloidal cinnabar mercury sulfide nanocrystals that originates from chirality interplay between the crystallographic lattice and geometric morphology at different length scales. A two-step synthetic scheme is developed to allow control of critical parameters of these two types of handedness, resulting in different chiral interplays expressed as observables through materials engineering.

New facets of antifungal therapy.

Invasive fungal infections remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised patients, and such infections are a substantial burden to healthcare systems around the world. However, the clinically available armamentarium for invasive fungal diseases is limited to 3 main classes (i.e.

Engineering Acoustic Phonons and Electron-Phonon Coupling by the Nanoscale Interface.

Precise engineering of phonon-phonon (ph-ph) and electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions by materials design is essential for an in-depth understanding of thermal, electrical, and optical phenomena as well as new technology breakthrough governed by fundamental physical laws. Due to their characteristic length scale, the ph-ph and e-ph interactions can be dramatically modified by nanoscale spatial confinement, thus opening up opportunities to finely maneuver underlying coupling processes through the interplay of confined size, fundamental length scale, and interface. We have combined ultrafast optical spectroscopy with a series of well-designed nanoscale core-shell structures possessing precisely tunable interface to demonstrate for the first time unambiguous experimental evidence of coherent interfacial phonon coupling between the core and shell constituents.