Metabolomic and Transcriptomic Analysis Reveal the Role of Metabolites and Genes in Modulating Flower Color of .

Food-deceptive flowers primarily use visual signals (such as color) to mimic model plants and deceive insects into achieving pollination. is a food-deceptive orchid that has a pink labellum and two purple petals with a yellow base and has been proven to be pollinated by bumblebees. However, the chemical and molecular bases of the floral color are not well understood.

The ecological adaptation of the unparalleled plastome character evolution in slipper orchids.

Plastomes may have undergone adaptive evolution in the process of plant adaptation to diverse environments, whereby species may differ in plastome characters. Cypripedioideae successfully colonized distinct environments and could be an ideal group for studying the interspecific variation and adaptive evolution of plastomes. Comparative study of plastomes, ancestral state reconstruction, phylogenetic-based analysis, ecological niche modelling, and selective pressure analysis were conducted to reveal the evolutionary patterns of plastomes in Cypripedioideae and their relationship with environmental factors.

An at-scale tailless flapping wing hummingbird robot: II. Flight control in hovering and trajectory tracking.

Flight control such as stable hovering and trajectory tracking of tailless flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles is a challenging task. Given the constraint on actuation capability, flight control authority is limited beyond sufficient lift generation. In addition, the highly nonlinear and inherently unstable vehicle dynamics, unsteady aerodynamics, wing motion caused body oscillations, and mechanism asymmetries and imperfections due to fabrication process, all pose challenges to flight control.

A Double-Layered Belief Rule Base Model for Driving Anger Detection Using Human, Vehicle, and Environment Characteristics: A Naturalistic Experimental Study.

"Road rage," namely, driving anger, has been becoming increasingly common in auto era. As "road rage" has serious negative impact on road safety, it has attracted great concern to relevant scholar, practitioner, and governor. This study aims to propose a model to effectively and efficiently detect driving anger states with different intensities for taking targeted intervening measures in intelligent connected vehicles.

Schlieren photography on freely flying hawkmoth.

The aerodynamic force on flying insects results from the vortical flow structures that vary both spatially and temporally throughout flight. Due to these complexities and the inherent difficulties in studying flying insects in a natural setting, a complete picture of the vortical flow has been difficult to obtain experimentally. In this paper, , a widely used technique for highspeed flow visualization, was adapted to capture the vortex structures around freely flying hawkmoth ().

Flight mechanics and control of escape manoeuvres in hummingbirds. I. Flight kinematics.

Hummingbirds are nature's masters of aerobatic manoeuvres. Previous research shows that hummingbirds and insects converged evolutionarily upon similar aerodynamic mechanisms and kinematics in hovering. Herein, we use three-dimensional kinematic data to begin to test for similar convergence of kinematics used for escape flight and to explore the effects of body size upon manoeuvring.

Flight mechanics and control of escape manoeuvres in hummingbirds. II. Aerodynamic force production, flight control and performance limitations.

The superior manoeuvrability of hummingbirds emerges from complex interactions of specialized neural and physiological processes with the unique flight dynamics of flapping wings. Escape manoeuvring is an ecologically relevant, natural behaviour of hummingbirds, from which we can gain understanding into the functional limits of vertebrate locomotor capacity. Here, we extend our kinematic analysis of escape manoeuvres from a companion paper to assess two potential limiting factors of the manoeuvring performance of hummingbirds: (1) muscle mechanical power output and (2) delays in the neural sensing and control system.

Three-dimensional vortex wake structure of flapping wings in hovering flight.

Flapping wings continuously create and send vortices into their wake, while imparting downward momentum into the surrounding fluid. However, experimental studies concerning the details of the three-dimensional vorticity distribution and evolution in the far wake are limited. In this study, the three-dimensional vortex wake structure in both the near and far field of a dynamically scaled flapping wing was investigated experimentally, using volumetric three-component velocimetry.

Volumetric visualization of the near- and far-field wake in flapping wings.

The flapping wings of flying animals create complex vortex wake structure; understanding its spatial and temporal distribution is fundamental to animal flight theory. In this study, we applied the volumetric 3-component velocimetry to capture both the near- and far-field flow generated by a pair of mechanical flapping wings. For the first time, the complete three-dimensional wake structure and its evolution throughout a wing stroke were quantified and presented experimentally.

The mechanics and control of pitching manoeuvres in a freely flying hawkmoth (Manduca sexta).

Insects produce a variety of exquisitely controlled manoeuvres during natural flight behaviour. Here we show how hawkmoths produce and control one such manoeuvre, an avoidance response consisting of rapid pitching up, rearward flight, pitching down (often past the original pitch angle), and then pitching up slowly to equilibrium. We triggered these manoeuvres via a sudden visual stimulus in front of free-flying hawkmoths (Manduca sexta) while recording the animals' body and wing movements via high-speed stereo videography.

Modulation of leading edge vorticity and aerodynamic forces in flexible flapping wings.

In diverse biological flight systems, the leading edge vortex has been implicated as a flow feature of key importance in the generation of flight forces. Unlike fixed wings, flapping wings can translate at higher angles of attack without stalling because their leading edge vorticity is more stable than the corresponding fixed wing case. Hence, the leading edge vorticity has often been suggested as the primary determinant of the high forces generated by flapping wings.

[siRNAs targetting sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase 1 protect mouse oocytes from apoptosis].

Objective: To investigate the potential of siRNAs targeting sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase 1 (SMPD1) in protecting the oocytes from apoptosis, and explore new approaches to female fertility preservation.

Methods: Chemically synthesized siRNA targeting SMPD1 were introduced into mouse oocytes retrieved by hyperstimulation, and the cell apoptosis was analyzed by comic assay 48 and 72 h later.

Results: In the oocytes without any siRNA injection, oocyte DNA damage occurred after 24 h, and large amount of DNA fragments migrated from the cells 48 h later.

Power distribution in the hovering flight of the hawk moth Manduca sexta.

We investigated inertial and aerodynamic power consumption during hovering flight of the hawk moth Manduca sexta. The aerodynamic power was estimated based on the aerodynamic forces and torques measured on model hawk-moth wings and hovering kinematics. The inertial power was estimated based on the measured wing mass distribution and hovering kinematics.

Aerodynamic effects of flexibility in flapping wings.

Recent work on the aerodynamics of flapping flight reveals fundamental differences in the mechanisms of aerodynamic force generation between fixed and flapping wings. When fixed wings translate at high angles of attack, they periodically generate and shed leading and trailing edge vortices as reflected in their fluctuating aerodynamic force traces and associated flow visualization. In contrast, wings flapping at high angles of attack generate stable leading edge vorticity, which persists throughout the duration of the stroke and enhances mean aerodynamic forces.

Wingbeat time and the scaling of passive rotational damping in flapping flight.

Flying animals exhibit remarkable capabilities for both generating maneuvers and stabilizing their course and orientation after perturbation. Here we show that flapping fliers ranging in size from fruit flies to large birds benefit from substantial damping of angular velocity through a passive mechanism termed flapping counter-torque (FCT). Our FCT model predicts that isometrically scaled animals experience similar damping on a per-wingbeat time scale, resulting in similar turning dynamics in wingbeat time regardless of body size.

Rescue of the albino phenotype by introducing a functional tyrosinase minigene into Kunming albino mice.

Aim: To use the tyrosinase minigene as a visual marker to perform microinjection training and improve the techniques related with transgene to greatly elevate the efficiency of gene transfer.

Methods: A mouse tyrosinase minigene, i.e.

Generation of the regulatory protein rtTA transgenic mice.

Aim: To translate Tet-on system into a conditional mouse model, in which hepatitis B or C virus (HBV or HCV) gene could be spatiotemporally expressed to overcome "immune tolerance" formed during the embryonic development and "immune escape" against hepatitis virus antigen(s), an effector mouse, carrying the reverse tetracycline-responsive transcriptional activator (rtTA) gene under the tight control of liver-specific human apoE promoter, is required to be generated.

Methods: To address this end, rtTA fragment amplified by PCR was effectively inserted into the vector of pLiv.7 containing apoE promoter to create the rtTA expressing vector, i.

Temporal control of Cre recombinase-mediated in vitro DNA recombination by Tet-on gene expression system.

Conditional gene expression and gene deletion are important experimental approaches for examining the functions of particular gene products in mouse models. These strategies exploiting Cre-mediated site-specific DNA recombination have been incorporated into transgenic and gene-targeting procedures to allow in vivo manipulation of DNA in embryonic stem cells (ES cells) or living animals. The Cre/lox P system has become widely used in conditional gene targeting, conditional gene repair and activation, inducible chromosome translocation, and chromosome engineering.

Temporal and tight hepatitis C virus gene activation in cultured human hepatoma cells mediated by a cell-permeable Cre recombinase.

Conditional gene expression has greatly facilitated the examination of the functions of particular gene products. Using the Cre/lox P switching expression system, we plan to develop efficient conditional transgene activation of hepatitis C virus core protein (HCV-C) cDNA (nucleotide 342-914) in the transgenic mice to overcome "immune tolerance" formed during the embryonic period and "immune escape" against hepatitis virus antigen in our project. To use this system in vivo, the dormant transgenic construct, i.