The largest meta-analysis on the global prevalence of microsporidia in mammals, avian and water provides insights into the epidemic features of these ubiquitous pathogens.

Background: Microsporidia are obligate intracellular parasites that can infect nearly all invertebrates and vertebrates, posing a threat to public health and causing large economic losses to animal industries such as those of honeybees, silkworms and shrimp. However, the global epidemiology of these pathogens is far from illuminated.

Methods: Publications on microsporidian infections were obtained from PubMed, Science Direct and Web of Science and filtered according to the Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale.

BrassicaEDB: A Gene Expression Database for Brassica Crops.

The genus contains several economically important crops, including rapeseed (, 2 = 38, AACC), the second largest source of seed oil and protein meal worldwide. However, research in rapeseed is hampered because it is complicated and time-consuming for researchers to access different types of expression data. We therefore developed the Expression Database (BrassicaEDB) for the research community.

Similar bowtie structures and distinct largest strong components are identified in the transcriptional regulatory networks of Arabidopsis thaliana during photomorphogenesis and heat shock.

Photomorphogenesis and heat shock are critical biological processes of plants. A recent research constructed the transcriptional regulatory networks (TRNs) of Arabidopsis thaliana during these processes using DNase-seq. In this study, by strong decomposition, we revealed that each of these TRNs can be represented as a similar bowtie structure with only one non-trivial and distinct strong component.