Performance Assessment of Five Different Soil Moisture Sensors under Irrigated Field Conditions in Oklahoma.

Meeting the ever-increasing global food, feed, and fiber demands while conserving the quantity and quality of limited agricultural water resources and maintaining the sustainability of irrigated agriculture requires optimizing irrigation management using advanced technologies such as soil moisture sensors. In this study, the performance of five different soil moisture sensors was evaluated for their accuracy in two irrigated cropping systems, one each in central and southwest Oklahoma, with variable levels of soil salinity and clay content. With factory calibrations, three of the sensors had sufficient accuracies at the site with lower levels of salinity and clay, while none of them performed satisfactorily at the site with higher levels of salinity and clay.

Notch1 acts via Foxc2 to promote definitive hematopoiesis via effects on hemogenic endothelium.

Hematopoietic and vascular development share many common features, including cell surface markers and sites of origin. Recent lineage-tracing studies have established that definitive hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells arise from vascular endothelial-cadherin(+) hemogenic endothelial cells of the aorta-gonad-mesonephros region, but the genetic programs underlying the specification of hemogenic endothelial cells remain poorly defined. Here, we discovered that Notch induction enhances hematopoietic potential and promotes the specification of hemogenic endothelium in differentiating cultures of mouse embryonic stem cells, and we identified Foxc2 as a highly upregulated transcript in the hemogenic endothelial population.

Iron regulatory protein-1 protects against mitoferrin-1-deficient porphyria.

Mitochondrial iron is essential for the biosynthesis of heme and iron-sulfur ([Fe-S]) clusters in mammalian cells. In developing erythrocytes, iron is imported into the mitochondria by MFRN1 (mitoferrin-1, SLC25A37). Although loss of MFRN1 in zebrafish and mice leads to profound anemia, mutant animals showed no overt signs of porphyria, suggesting that mitochondrial iron deficiency does not result in an accumulation of protoporphyrins.

DHODH modulates transcriptional elongation in the neural crest and melanoma.

Melanoma is a tumour of transformed melanocytes, which are originally derived from the embryonic neural crest. It is unknown to what extent the programs that regulate neural crest development interact with mutations in the BRAF oncogene, which is the most commonly mutated gene in human melanoma. We have used zebrafish embryos to identify the initiating transcriptional events that occur on activation of human BRAF(V600E) (which encodes an amino acid substitution mutant of BRAF) in the neural crest lineage.

Large intergenic non-coding RNA-RoR modulates reprogramming of human induced pluripotent stem cells.

The conversion of lineage-committed cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) by reprogramming is accompanied by a global remodeling of the epigenome, resulting in altered patterns of gene expression. Here we characterize the transcriptional reorganization of large intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) that occurs upon derivation of human iPSCs and identify numerous lincRNAs whose expression is linked to pluripotency. Among these, we defined ten lincRNAs whose expression was elevated in iPSCs compared with embryonic stem cells, suggesting that their activation may promote the emergence of iPSCs.