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AP2/ERF transcription factors are extensively involved in regulating plant growth, development, and stress responses. In this study, a genome-wide systematic identification and analysis of the LhAP2/ERF gene family was performed in lily, leading to the identification of 304 LhAP2/ERF genes that were unevenly distributed across 12 chromosomes. Phylogenetic analysis classified these genes into 5 subfamilies and 17 subgroups, with members of the same subfamily exhibiting highly similar gene structures and conserved motifs. Cis-acting element prediction indicated that this gene family is widely involved in light response, hormone regulation, stress response, and growth and development processes. Transcriptome analysis revealed that the expression levels of most LhAP2/ERF genes changed significantly during petal senescence, among which LhERF061 were selected to research its role in petal senescence. The results showed LhERF061 encodes a hydrophilic protein localized in the nucleus, with moderately expression in petals. Its expression gradually decreased during flower senescence and was significantly induced by abscisic acid (ABA), low temperature, and loss-water stress. Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) of LhERF061 accelerated cut flower senescence in lily flowers, accompanied by reduced relative water content and increased accumulation of malondialdehyde (MDA) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). In contrast, transient overexpression of LhERF061 in lily petals and heterologous overexpression in Arabidopsis thaliana both significantly delayed petal and whole-plant senescence. This study provides a theoretical basis for elucidating the AP2/ERF gene family in lily and for molecular breeding aimed at extending the vase life of cut lily flowers.
Nitrogen and chlorophyll are two key indicators of coffee nutrient status, yet their field estimation remains constrained by single-view imaging and single-task modeling, which overlook multi-view spatial heterogeneity and the physiological correlation between the two traits. To address this limitation, this paper proposes VAG-ViT, a lightweight dual-task Vision Transformer that jointly estimates leaf nitrogen (LNC) and chlorophyll (SPAD) from three-view (In-situ, Adaxial, Abaxial) RGB images, together with CCN-2025, a field phenotyping dataset of 571 sample groups spanning two phenological stages. VAG-ViT extracts cross-view commonalities via a shared shallow encoder, reconstructs high-order semantics via view-specific deep branches, and dynamically recalibrates view contributions via a view-adaptive gating (VAG) module that suppresses field noise; a dual-task regression head then exploits the physiological correlation between nitrogen and chlorophyll. Under five-fold stratified cross-validation, VAG-ViT attains R2 of 89.02 ± 1.82 % (LNC) and 89.81 ± 1.89 % (SPAD), outperforming the best CNN baseline by roughly 4 percentage points, and the VAG module reduces RMSE by up to 45.7 % in the nitrogen-deficient bin. These results are achieved with only 3.98 M parameters and 1.14G FLOPs, about 76 % fewer parameters than a concatenation-based ViT-Tiny. Deployed in an Android application, the model delivers real-time end-to-end field inference, offering an efficient and promising route to precision nutrient monitoring for coffee and, potentially, other crops in complex field conditions.
Green mold, caused by Penicillium digitatum, remains one of the most destructive postharvest citrus diseases. In this study, indigenous endophytic strain, Bacillus subtilis L1–21 was applied to citrus fruits and associated culturable epiphytic and endophytic microorganism were subsequently isolated and screened for antagonistic activity against P. digitatum. A total of 21 bacterial and 7 fungal isolates were recovered, among which 6 bacterial strains showed in vitro antagonism. Three highly effective isolates (strains 2, 14, and 16) were selected and combined with endophyte L1–21 to construct three Bacillus-based synergistic consortia (SynCom-1, 2, 3). In dual-culture assays, single strains inhibited P. digitatum by 53–66%, whereas SynCom treatments achieved up to 90% inhibition. In vivo assays further showed that SynCom-3 provided > 95% disease suppression compared with untreated controls. Defense-related activities (peroxidase; POD, chitinase, lipase, phenylalanine ammonia-lyase; PAL and protease) and fruit acids (organic acids and sugars) were quantified, indicating that endophyte treatments were associated with treatment-dependent modulation of host physiological and defense responses during pathogen challenge. In addition, microbiome profiling showed that endophyte L1–21 application caused shifts in citrus-associated beneficial microbiome composition and differential enrichment of multiple bacterial taxa (Bacillus, Levilactobacillus, Leuconostoc) and suppressed opportunistic genera such as Kozakia and Shimwellia. Overall, these results support the development of indigenous Bacillus-based SynCom as a promising biocontrol candidate against citrus green mold and provide an ecological context for endophyte L1–21-associated microbiome changes.
Trace element contamination, like cadmium (Cd), threatens agriculture and health. This study assessed Cd stress effects on photosynthesis in faba bean and evaluated mitigation using intercropping with wheat and calcium oxide nanoparticles (CaO NPs). Five treatment groups were established: faba bean monoculture without Cd addition (M), monoculture with Cd addition (M + Cd), monoculture with both Cd and CaO NPs (M + Cd + CaO NPs), wheat-faba bean intercropping with Cd addition (I + Cd), and intercropping with both Cd and CaO NPs (I + Cd + CaO NPs). Compared with M, the M + Cd treatment significantly suppressed faba bean growth by 34.1–102.9
Nanofluids, with their tunable optical properties, have emerged as promising spectral beam-splitting (SBS) media for improving the overall performance of photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) systems. However, widespread application has been hindered by the high cost, complex fabrication processes, and limited stability of many existing nanofluids. This study proposes a hybrid nanofluid composed of antimony-doped tin oxide (ATO) and zinc oxide (ZnO) as a low-cost and adaptable SBS medium. The system’s optical-thermal-electrical performance is systematically evaluated in SBS-PV/T configurations employing both silicon (Si) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) solar cells. ATO and ZnO provide complementary spectral absorption in the near-infrared and ultraviolet regions, respectively, while maintaining high transmittance in the visible spectrum. By varying the mass ratio and total concentration of the nanofluid, system-level performance is optimized for different PV cell types. Results indicate that the optimal ATO-ZnO composition is cell-dependent: for a thermal-to-electrical weighting factor of 3, and the Si-based PV/T system achieves the highest merit function (MF) of 1.80 at 1.0×10−4 in weight concentration with an ATO/ZnO mass ratio of 1:3; while the GaAs-based system shows optimal performance at a 3:1 ratio of ATO to ZnO with an MF of 1.36. These findings demonstrate the practical viability and adaptability of ATO-ZnO hybrid nanofluids for enhancing the energy efficiency of SBS-PV/T systems, offering a scalable solution for solar thermal-electrical cogeneration.
