Hasil untuk "Plant culture"

Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Rutledge Chin Feman et al.

As generative AI technologies are increasingly being launched across the globe, assessing their competence to operate in different cultural contexts is exigently becoming a priority. While recent years have seen numerous and much-needed efforts on cultural benchmarking, these efforts have largely focused on specific aspects of culture and evaluation. While these efforts contribute to our understanding of cultural competence, a unified and systematic evaluation approach is needed for us as a field to comprehensively assess diverse cultural dimensions at scale. Drawing on measurement theory, we present a principled framework to aggregate multifaceted indicators of cultural capabilities into a unified assessment of cultural intelligence. We start by developing a working definition of culture that includes identifying core domains of culture. We then introduce a broad-purpose, systematic, and extensible framework for assessing cultural intelligence of AI systems. Drawing on theoretical framing from psychometric measurement validity theory, we decouple the background concept (i.e., cultural intelligence) from its operationalization via measurement. We conceptualize cultural intelligence as a suite of core capabilities spanning diverse domains, which we then operationalize through a set of indicators designed for reliable measurement. Finally, we identify the considerations, challenges, and research pathways to meaningfully measure these indicators, specifically focusing on data collection, probing strategies, and evaluation metrics.

Heesup Yun, Isaac Kazuo Uyehara, Ioannis Droutsas et al.

Three-dimensional (3D) procedural plant architecture models have emerged as an important tool for simulation-based studies of plant structure and function, extracting plant architectural parameters from field measurements, and for generating realistic plants in computer graphics. However, measuring the architectural parameters and nested structures for these models at the field scales remains prohibitively labor-intensive. We present a novel algorithm that generates a 3D plant architecture from an image, creating a functional structural plant model that reflects organ-level geometric and topological parameters and provides a more comprehensive representation of the plant's architecture. Instead of using 3D sensors or processing multi-view images with computer vision to obtain the 3D structure of plants, we proposed a method that generates token sequences that encode a procedural definition of plant architecture. This work used only synthetic images for training and testing, with exact architectural parameters known, allowing testing of the hypothesis that organ-level architectural parameters could be extracted from image data using a vision-language model (VLM). A synthetic dataset of cowpea plant images was generated using the Helios 3D plant simulator, with the detailed plant architecture encoded in XML files. We developed a plant architecture tokenizer for the XML file defining plant architecture, converting it into a token sequence that a language model can predict. The model achieved a token F1 score of 0.73 during teacher-forced training. Evaluation of the model was performed through autoregressive generation, achieving a BLEU-4 score of 94.00% and a ROUGE-L score of 0.5182. This led to the conclusion that such plant architecture model generation and parameter extraction were possible from synthetic images; thus, future work will extend the approach to real imagery data.

J. Lamichhane, V. Venturi

Plant diseases are often thought to be caused by one species or even by a specific strain. Microbes in nature, however, mostly occur as part of complex communities and this has been noted since the time of van Leeuwenhoek. Interestingly, most laboratory studies focus on single microbial strains grown in pure culture; we were therefore unaware of possible interspecies and/or inter-kingdom interactions of pathogenic microbes in the wild. In human and animal infections, it is now being recognized that many diseases are the result of multispecies synergistic interactions. This increases the complexity of the disease and has to be taken into consideration in the development of more effective control measures. On the other hand, there are only a few reports of synergistic pathogen–pathogen interactions in plant diseases and the mechanisms of interactions are currently unknown. Here we review some of these reports of synergism between different plant pathogens and their possible implications in crop health. Finally, we briefly highlight the recent technological advances in diagnostics as these are beginning to provide important insights into the microbial communities associated with complex plant diseases. These examples of synergistic interactions of plant pathogens that lead to disease complexes might prove to be more common than expected and understanding the underlying mechanisms might have important implications in plant disease epidemiology and management.

Shaily Bhatt, Tal August, Maria Antoniak

Improving cultural competence of language technologies is important. However most recent works rarely engage with the communities they study, and instead rely on synthetic setups and imperfect proxies of culture. In this work, we take a human-centered approach to discover and measure language-based cultural norms, and cultural competence of LLMs. We focus on a single kind of culture, research cultures, and a single task, adapting writing across research cultures. Through a set of interviews with interdisciplinary researchers, who are experts at moving between cultures, we create a framework of structural, stylistic, rhetorical, and citational norms that vary across research cultures. We operationalise these features with a suite of computational metrics and use them for (a) surfacing latent cultural norms in human-written research papers at scale; and (b) highlighting the lack of cultural competence of LLMs, and their tendency to homogenise writing. Overall, our work illustrates the efficacy of a human-centered approach to measuring cultural norms in human-written and LLM-generated texts.

Diana Sachmpazidi, Mike Verostek, Jayna Petrella et al.

Physics programs are continually evolving to better support student learning and meet the diverse needs of their populations. Achieving many of these goals requires not only structural adjustments but also fundamental shifts in departmental culture. Recognizing this, disciplinary organizations in physics have placed systemic change and equity at the center of reform efforts, identifying them as essential pillars of meaningful and sustainable change. Yet tools for assessing departmental culture around educational change remain limited. In this study, we introduce the Culture around Systemic Change Survey (CSCS), a new instrument designed to measure faculty and staff perceptions of their department's "current" and "ideal" states. Using responses from the "current" scale only (N=111 participants across 33 departments), we conducted a psychometric evaluation of the CSCS. Exploratory factor analysis supported a five-factor structure, including Open-Mindedness (OM), Student Involvement (SI), Collective Interpretation of Evidence (CE), Sustainability (S), and Disruption of Systemic Injustices (DI). As survey development is an iterative process, future work will focus on refinement and confirmatory analysis. This work sets the foundation for conducting population studies that assess the state of progress of the physics community along an equitable and systemic culture to pursuing educational change.

ZENG Wenjuan, ZHU Youpeng, CHEN Jiaxin, LI Hongyu, WANG Shuanghui, GONG Yihui, CHEN Zhiyin

Codon usage bias serves as an important driving force for gene expression regulation and molecular evolution, and is of particular importance in the study of plant organellar genomes. Camellia sinensis cv. ‘Zhuyeqi’, an important tea cultivar in China, has not yet received a systematic report on the codon usage patterns of its organellar genomes. This study was systematic bioinformatic analysis of the 52 chloroplast-encoded genes and 29 mitochondrial-encoded genes of ‘Zhuyeqi’. The results reveal that: (1) both the chloroplast genome (ENC=44.64±3.25) and the mitochondrial genome (ENC=51.98±3.47) exhibit weak codon usage bias, with the chloroplast bias primarily driven by natural selection (GC3s and ENC correlation R2=0.482). While the mitochondrial bias is jointly influenced by natural selection and mutational pressure (R2=0.312). (2) Relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) analysis demonstrates that both organellar genomes significantly prefer synonymous codons ending in A/U, and the highly expressed chloroplast genes (rpoC2, psbA) exhibit stronger codon preferences. (3) a multi-parameter screening approach identified 20 optimal chloroplast codons (GCA, GCU) and 23 optimal mitochondrial codons (GCC, AGG). This study provided elucidation of the codon usage characteristics and evolutionary driving forces in the organellar genomes of Camellia sinensis cv. ‘Zhuyeqi’, offering crucial theoretical guidance for the optimization of the tea molecular breeding system and the efficient expression of exogenous genes.

Kriti Agarwal, Samhruth Ananthanarayanan, Srinitish Srinivasan et al.

This paper presents the development of a novel plant communication application that allows plants to "talk" to humans using real-time sensor data and AI-powered language models. Utilizing soil sensors that track moisture, temperature, and nutrient levels, the system feeds this data into the Gemini API, where it is processed and transformed into natural language insights about the plant's health and "mood." Developed using Flutter, Firebase, and ThingSpeak, the app offers a seamless user experience with real-time interaction capabilities. By fostering human-plant connectivity, this system enhances plant care practices, promotes sustainability, and introduces innovative applications for AI and IoT technologies in both personal and agricultural contexts. The paper explores the technical architecture, system integration, and broader implications of AI-driven plant communication.

Huihan Li, Arnav Goel, Keyu He et al.

In open-ended generative tasks like narrative writing or dialogue, large language models often exhibit cultural biases, showing limited knowledge and generating templated outputs for less prevalent cultures. Recent works show that these biases may stem from uneven cultural representation in pretraining corpora. This work investigates how pretraining leads to biased culture-conditioned generations by analyzing how models associate entities with cultures based on pretraining data patterns. We propose the MEMOed framework (MEMOrization from pretraining document) to determine whether a generation for a culture arises from memorization. Using MEMOed on culture-conditioned generations about food and clothing for 110 cultures, we find that high-frequency cultures in pretraining data yield more generations with memorized symbols, while some low-frequency cultures produce none. Additionally, the model favors generating entities with extraordinarily high frequency regardless of the conditioned culture, reflecting biases toward frequent pretraining terms irrespective of relevance. We hope that the MEMOed framework and our insights will inspire more works on attributing model performance on pretraining data.

Olivia Agatha, Daniela Mutwil-Anderwald, Jhing Yein Tan et al.

Sesquiterpene lactones (STLs) are a prominent group of plant secondary metabolites predominantly found in the Asteraceae family and have multiple ecological roles and medicinal applications. This review describes the ecological significance of STLs, highlighting their roles in plant defense mechanisms against herbivory and as phytotoxins, alongside their function as environmental signaling molecules. We also cover the substantial role of STLs in medicine and their mode of action in health and disease. We discuss the biosynthetic pathways and the various modifications that make STLs one of the most diverse groups of metabolites. Finally, we discuss methods in identifying and predicting STL biosynthesis pathways.

Mozzamil Mohammed, Åke Brännström, Pietro Landi et al.

Plant-frugivore interactions play a central role for plant persistence and spatial distribution by promoting the long-range dispersal of seeds by frugivores. However, plant-frugivore interactions are increasingly being threatened by anthropogenic activities. An important anthropogenic threat that could expose plant-frugivore systems to extinction risk is fruit harvesting. Here, we develop an individual-based and a pair-approximation model of plant-frugivore-human interactions to elucidate the effects of human harvesting of fruits on plant establishment, persistence, and spatial distribution. Our results show that frugivores strongly affect global density of plants and gradually shift their spatial distribution from aggregated to random, depending on the attack rate and dispersal efficiency of frugivores. We find that, in the absence of frugivores, plants experiencing intense fruit harvesting cannot persist even if their fecundity is high. In the presence of frugivores, fruit harvesting profoundly affects the global dispersal of seeds and thus changes the spatial distributions of plants from random to aggregated, potentially causing plant extinction. Our results demonstrate that sufficiently efficient frugivores mitigate the negative impact of fruit harvesting on plant populations and enable plant establishment precluded by harvesting. Taken together, these results draw attention to previously underappreciated impacts of fruit harvesting in plant-frugivore-human interactions.

Alexa S. Tyszka, Eric C. Bretz, Holly M. Robertson et al.

Chloroplasts and mitochondria each contain their own genomes, which have historically been and continue to be important sources of information for inferring the phylogenetic relationships among land plants. The organelles are predominantly inherited from the same parent, and therefore should exhibit phylogenetic concordance. In this study, we examine the mitochondrion and chloroplast genomes of 226 land plants to infer the degree of similarity between the organelles’ evolutionary histories. Our results show largely concordant topologies are inferred between the organelles, aside from four well-supported conflicting relationships that warrant further investigation. Despite broad patterns of topological concordance, our findings suggest that the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes evolved with significant differences in molecular evolution. The differences result in the genes from the chloroplast and the mitochondrion preferentially clustering with other genes from their respective organelles by a program that automates selection of evolutionary model partitions for sequence alignments. Further investigation showed that changes in compositional heterogeneity are not always uniform across divergences in the land plant tree of life. These results indicate that although the chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes have coexisted for over 1 billion years, phylogenetically, they are still evolving sufficiently independently to warrant separate models of evolution. As genome sequencing becomes more accessible, research into these organelles’ evolution will continue revealing insight into the ancient cellular events that shaped not only their history, but the history of plants as a whole.

Roxana Djalali Farahani-Kofoet, Jan Graefe, Rita Zrenner

Two rapid asparagus (<i>Asparagus officinalis</i> L.) screening methods, in sand culture and in vitro, were tested to evaluate the response of young seedlings against <i>F. oxysporum</i> f. sp. <i>asparagi</i> (isolate Foa1). Root morphological parameters were evaluated and correlated with the symptomatology and expression of the defense-related genes at 5 and 7 dpi. In sand cultivation, the Foa1-inoculated cultivars showed no visible disease symptoms on their roots until 7 dpi. Two-factorial ANOVA statistics found no significant interaction between the cultivars and treatments for most root parameters but some differences between the cultivars. The in vitro Foa1-inoculated cultivars showed high susceptibility according to their symptomatology and differed greatly in the length of the primary root at 5 dpi. In some cultivars, the primary root length and root surface area were higher upon Foa1 inoculation. The expression changes were very different among the cultivars, with significant induction of <i>PR1</i>, <i>POX,</i> and <i>PAL</i> at 5 dpi in all cultivars in vitro but only in two cultivars in sand cultivation. The in vitro screening method, although more artificial, seemed to be more reliable than sand cultivation since the fungus was able to develop well in the culture medium. In sand-filled pots, the fungus may have been hindered in its development, even though a considerable higher amount of Foa1 was inoculated. In addition, the fungal growth was easily trackable in tubes, while in sand cultivation, the results were only visible after pulling the seedlings out of the pots 12 dpi.

Dan Wang, Dan Wang, Nan Yang et al.

Soil salinity is an important environmental problem that seriously affects plant growth and crop productivity. Phytoremediation is a cost-effective solution for reducing soil salinity and potentially converting the soils for crop production. Sesuvium portulacastrum is a typical halophyte which can grow at high salt concentrations. In order to explore the salt tolerance mechanism of S. portulacastrum, rooted cuttings were grown in a hydroponic culture containing ½ Hoagland solution with or without addition of 400 mM Na for 21 days. Root and leaf samples were taken 1 h and 21 days after Na treatment, and RNA-Seq was used to analyze transcript differences in roots and leaves of the Na-treated and control plants. A large number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in the roots and leaves of plants grown under salt stress. Several key pathways related to salt tolerance were identified through KEGG analysis. Combined with physiological data and expression analysis, it appeared that cyclic nucleotide gated channels (CNGCs) were implicated in Na uptake and Na+/H+ exchangers (NHXs) were responsible for the extrusion and sequestration of Na, which facilitated a balance between Na+ and K+ in S. portulacastrum under salt stress. Soluble sugar and proline were identified as important osmoprotectant in salt-stressed S. portulacastrum plants. Glutathione metabolism played an important role in scavenging reactive oxygen species. Results from this study show that S. portulacastrum as a halophytic species possesses a suite of mechanisms for accumulating and tolerating a high level of Na; thus, it could be a valuable plant species used for phytoremediation of saline soils.

Haijing Fu, Wangbin Ye, Ruiyang Zhao et al.

Aashu1*, Y. P. S. Solanki1, Divya Phougat1 and Tanya Barpanda2

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the genetic diversity in 48 genotypes of wheat for 25 traits under two environments i.e., timely and late sown conditions, at Wheat and Barley Section, Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CCS HAU, Hisar during rabi, 2019-20. The genetic diversity analysis revealed the formation of seven clusters in both environments. Based on the genetic distance, it was concluded that crossing of genotypes from cluster V with clusters I and IV to get a broad spectrum of variation for both environments. Cluster VII for timely sown and cluster V for late sowing conditions contained genotypes with high mean performance for grain yield and other traits and therefore these genotypes can be utilized for yield improvement. Based on the analysis of percent contribution of different traits to total genetic divergence, it was found that under timely sown condition CTD 1, total gluten content and for late sown condition zinc content, CTD 2 contributed the most.

Rama T. Rashad, Khaled A. H. Shaban, Samia H. Ashmaye et al.

Bio-farming is an eco-friendly advance that minimizes the required chemical additives for optimizing the quality of crops that their storage is often accompanied by seeds’ components degradation. Magnetic treatment of seed was considered as a promising tool improves germination and growth. This study aims to evaluate the effect of individual and combined application of bio-fertilizers and the N-P-K mineral fertilizers preceded by magnetic treatment of dry and/or water-soaked seeds before sowing on the yield and quality of soybean cultivated in a saline soil.The field experiment was carried out in a split-split plot design with triplicates. The main two factors (F1) were not bio-fertilized and bio-fertilized plots. The sub-factors (F2) were three application rates (A: 50%, B: 75%, and C: 100%) of recommended doses of the three N, P, K fertilizers. The sub-sub factors (F3) were seeds not magnetically treated (NM) and magnetically treated (M). All factors were studied for dry soybean seeds (without soaking) and soaked seeds in magnetically treated water. After harvesting, soil and plant samples were analyzed. The most significant increase in the soybean seed yield (kg ha-1) was by 49.98% for the bio-fertilized magnetized dry seeds at 75% and 100% mineral N-P-K fertilization compared with the NM soaked seeds at 50% N-P-K (A rate) without bio-fertilization. The 75% mineral fertilization significantly increased the protein (%) by 41.69% and decreased the proline (mg g-1dw) by 46.68%. Magnetic treatment of seeds before cultivation and combined bio/mineral N-P-K fertilization reduced the Proline that alleviats the stress conditions.

Matthias Körschens, Paul Bodesheim, Christine Römermann et al.

Monitoring the responses of plants to environmental changes is essential for plant biodiversity research. This, however, is currently still being done manually by botanists in the field. This work is very laborious, and the data obtained is, though following a standardized method to estimate plant coverage, usually subjective and has a coarse temporal resolution. To remedy these caveats, we investigate approaches using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to automatically extract the relevant data from images, focusing on plant community composition and species coverages of 9 herbaceous plant species. To this end, we investigate several standard CNN architectures and different pretraining methods. We find that we outperform our previous approach at higher image resolutions using a custom CNN with a mean absolute error of 5.16%. In addition to these investigations, we also conduct an error analysis based on the temporal aspect of the plant cover images. This analysis gives insight into where problems for automatic approaches lie, like occlusion and likely misclassifications caused by temporal changes.

Md Saroar Jahan, Jhuma kabir Mim, Sampo Niittyviita et al.

Not only does cold climate pose a problem for outdoor plants during winter in the northern hemisphere, but for indoor plants as well: low sunlight, low humidity, and simultaneous cold breezes from windows and heat from radiators all cause problems for indoor plants. People often treat their indoor plants like mere decoration, which can often lead to health issues for the plant or even death of the plant, especially during winter. A plant monitoring system was developed to solve this problem, collecting information on plants' indoor environmental conditions (light, humidity, and temperature) and providing this information in an accessible format for the user. Preliminary functional tests were conducted in similar settings where the system would be used. In addition, the concept was evaluated by interviewing an expert in the field of horticulture. The evaluation results indicate that this kind of system could prove useful; however, the tests indicated that the system requires further development to achieve more practical value and wider usage.

Richard Plant, Amir Hussain

The Covid-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented global public health emergency, and concomitantly an unparalleled opportunity to investigate public responses to adverse social conditions. The widespread ability to post messages to social media platforms provided an invaluable outlet for such an outpouring of public sentiment, including not only expressions of social solidarity, but also the spread of misinformation and misconceptions around the effect and potential risks of the pandemic. This archive of message content therefore represents a key resource in understanding public responses to health crises, analysis of which could help to inform public policy interventions to better respond to similar events in future. We present a benchmark database of public social media postings from the United Kingdom related to the Covid-19 pandemic for academic research purposes, along with some initial analysis, including a taxonomy of key themes organised by keyword. This release supports the findings of a research study funded by the Scottish Government Chief Scientists' Office that aims to investigate social sentiment in order to understand the response to public health measures implemented during the pandemic.

Julia Heuritsch

The extensive focus on performance indicators in research evaluation has been facing critique in science studies. Stemming from a neoliberalist paradigm, metrics allegedly objectify and create certainty about researchers' performance. This has created a publish-or-perish culture where deviant behaviour, such as research misconduct, may have become the rule of the game. Not only does this culture foster a decrease of scientists' well-being, but also a decrease in research quality. In recent years, calls for a culture change have accumulated, from discussing detrimental cultural aspects under IchbinHannah to studies that demonstrate the connection between research culture and research integrity. This study is a qualitative analysis of how astronomers reimagine their research culture. This includes alternative output formats, alternative evaluation criteria and how they aspire to do research differently. In summary, we find that the time is ripe for a transformation in research culture towards a more participative and diverse work environment. This may include the use of an open knowledge management infrastructure, where all sorts of research output of various stages can be stored and shared. Moreover, through a more reflexive evaluation, which is continuously adapted to the needs of the researchers, scientific quality may be encouraged, rather than producing more and more publications. This study sets the basis for future action research with the aim of transforming academic cultures towards more participative ones, where scientists can let their creative minds thrive and collaborate beyond disciplinary boundaries.