Land plants alternate between multicellular haploid and diploid phases, requiring a tight coordination between vegetative growth and sexual reproduction. We investigated SWI3A/B, an ancient core subunit of the SWI/SNF complex, of the non-vascular liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. A mutation in the promoter of MpSWI3A/B affected gametangiophore development and spermiogenesis in males, revealing its male-specific role in reproductive development. The MpSWIA/B mutant line amplifies vegetative propagation in males under conditions that would normally induce reproductive growth. The phenotype was underpinned by transcriptomic changes, showing that MpSWI3A/B modulates key regulators of gametangiophore initiation (e.g. BONOBO, GLID), sperm development and motility (e.g. DUO1, PKAR), and asexual reproduction (e.g. KAI2). We propose that, as a chromatin-level regulator, MpSWI3A/B may contribute to balancing vegetative and reproductive phases and highlight the protein's potential when exploring ancient epigenetic functions that coordinate developmental phase transitions in land plants.
Psychosoziale Arbeitsbelastungen wie hoher Zeitdruck, geringe Unterstützung oder lange Arbeitszeiten erhöhen das Risiko für verschiedene Erkrankungen. Seit 2013 setzt Deutschland verstärkt auf rechtliche, politische und institutionelle Maßnahmen, um diese Risiken zu verringern. Während frühere Studien zeigen, dass Betriebe psychosoziale Belastungen zunehmend in Gefährdungsbeurteilungen berücksichtigen, bleibt offen, ob dies auch zu einer breiteren Umsetzung konkreter Präventionsmaßnahmen geführt hat. Wir nutzen kombinierte Daten aus Deutschland aus drei Wellen der Europäischen Unternehmenserhebung zu neuen und aufkommenden Risiken (ESENER 2014, 2019, 2024). Im Fokus steht die Verbreitung von sieben Maßnahmen zur Prävention psychosozialer Risiken und deren zeitliche Entwicklung zwischen 2014 und 2024 sowie mögliche Unterschiede nach Betriebsgröße und Branche. Die Analyse erfolgt anhand deskriptiver Auswertungen und multivariabler Regressionsmodelle. Größere Betriebe und Unternehmen im Bildungs‑, Gesundheits- und Sozialwesen setzen deutlich häufiger Maßnahmen zur Prävention psychosozialer Risiken um als kleine Betriebe und Organisationen in anderen Branchen. Verglichen mit 2014 zeigen sich 2019 und 2024 insgesamt positive Entwicklungen, insbesondere bei Stressprävention, Konfliktlösungsverfahren und organisatorischen Anpassungen. Die Analysen verdeutlichen zudem, dass die zeitlichen Entwicklungen nach Betriebsgröße und Branche variieren. Die Ergebnisse weisen auf eine Verbesserung der betrieblichen Präventionspraxis in Deutschland hin, insbesondere im Bereich Stressprävention und struktureller Maßnahmen zur Verringerung psychosozialer Belastungen. Gleichzeitig bestehen Defizite in kleinen Betrieben und in Bezug auf einzelne Maßnahmen.
We study a crystal composed of active units governed by self-alignment and chirality. The first mechanism acts as an effective torque that aligns the particle orientation with its velocity, while the second drives individual particles along circular orbits. We find that even a weak degree of chirality, when coupled with self-alignment, induces collective motion of the entire crystal along circular trajectories in space. We refer to this phase as a circling crystal. When chirality outweighs self-alignment, the circular global motion is suppressed in favor of vortex-like regions of coordinated motion. This state is characterized by oscillating spatial velocity correlations, a power law decay of the energy spectrum, and oscillatory temporal correlations. Our findings can be tested experimentally in systems ranging from epithelial tissues to swarming robots, governed by chirality and self-alignment.
Odd diffusion breaks time-reversal symmetry in overdamped systems through transverse probability currents while preserving equilibrium steady states. In this work, we develop a dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) for densely interacting odd-diffusive fluids and apply it to ultrasoft particles in two dimensions. In the bulk, odd diffusion qualitatively reshapes collective relaxation by generating transient circulating current patterns that do not exist in normal fluids. Under harmonic ring confinement, the circulation of the probability current induces an angular redistribution of density along the ring during relaxation. This unique footprint of odd diffusion opens up a shorter pathway to equilibrium. Repulsive interactions significantly enhance these effects. Excellent agreement with Brownian dynamics simulations confirms that our odd-DDFT framework quantitatively captures all essential nonequilibrium aspects of the nontrivial odd transport and collective redistribution for dense fluids in both bulk and confined geometries.
The quantum capacity of a noisy channel quantifies the maximum rate at which quantum information can be transmitted reliably. For general channels, its evaluation requires an optimization over arbitrarily many channel uses. Degradable channels form a central exception: their capacity is given by the single-letter coherent information, while antidegradable channels have zero capacity. Nevertheless, even for these fundamental classes, it has remained open whether communication above capacity becomes possible when a fixed non-maximal error is tolerated. Here we resolve this problem by proving an exponential strong converse for every finite-dimensional degradable and antidegradable channel: at any rate above capacity, the fidelity of every coding scheme decays exponentially with the number of channel uses. As an immediate consequence, we establish the first all-code exponential strong converse for the quantum erasure channel throughout its full parameter range, strengthening previous results that applied only to almost all codes. We also show that exponential strong-converse bounds are preserved under receiver post-processing. This yields efficiently computable semidefinite-programming bounds for arbitrary finite-dimensional channels, improved bounds for Pauli channels, and an exact exponential strong converse for a nondegradable multilevel amplitude-damping family.
