Washington State University

About: Washington State University is a education organization based out in Pullman, Washington, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Gene. The organization has 26947 authors who have published 57736 publications receiving 2341509 citations. The organization is also known as: WSU & Wazzu.

An overview of the systematics of the Sordariomycetes based on a four-gene phylogeny

Abstract: The Sordariomycetes is one of the largest classes in the Ascomycota, and the majority of its species are characterized by perithecial ascomata and inoperculate unitunicate asci. It includes more than 600 genera with over 3000 species and represents a wide range of ecologies including pathogens and endophytes of plants, animal pathogens and mycoparasites. To test and refine the classification of the Sordariomycetes sensu Eriksson (2006), the phylogenetic relationship among 106 taxa from 12 orders out of 16 in the Sordariomycetes was investigated based on four nuclear loci (nSSU and nLSU rDNA, TEF and RPB2), using three species of the Leotiomycetes as outgroups. Three subclasses (i.e. Hypocreomycetidae, Sordariomycetidae and Xylariomycetidae) currently recognized in the classification are well supported with the placement of the Lulworthiales in either a basal group of the Sordariomycetes or a sister group of the Hypocreomycetidae. Except for the Microascales, our results recognize most of the orders as monophyletic groups. Melanospora species form a clade outside of the Hypocreales and are recognized as a distinct order in the Hypocreomycetidae. Glomerellaceae is excluded from the Phyllachorales and placed in Hypocreomycetidae incertae sedis. In the Sordariomycetidae, the Sordariales is a strongly supported clade and occurs within a well supported clade containing the Boliniales and Chaetosphaeriales. Aspects of morphology, ecology and evolution are discussed.

Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant

Abstract: Despite the fact that deep neural networks are powerful models and achieve appealing results on many tasks, they are too large to be deployed on edge devices like smartphones or embedded sensor nodes. There have been efforts to compress these networks, and a popular method is knowledge distillation, where a large (teacher) pre-trained network is used to train a smaller (student) network. However, in this paper, we show that the student network performance degrades when the gap between student and teacher is large. Given a fixed student network, one cannot employ an arbitrarily large teacher, or in other words, a teacher can effectively transfer its knowledge to students up to a certain size, not smaller. To alleviate this shortcoming, we introduce multi-step knowledge distillation, which employs an intermediate-sized network (teacher assistant) to bridge the gap between the student and the teacher. Moreover, we study the effect of teacher assistant size and extend the framework to multi-step distillation. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on CIFAR-10,100 and ImageNet datasets and on CNN and ResNet architectures substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Probing essential oil biosynthesis and secretion by functional evaluation of expressed sequence tags from mint glandular trichomes.

Abstract: Functional genomics approaches, which use combined computational and expression-based analyses of large amounts of sequence information, are emerging as powerful tools to accelerate the comprehensive understanding of cellular metabolism in specialized tissues and whole organisms. As part of an ongoing effort to identify genes of essential oil (monoterpene) biosynthesis, we have obtained sequence information from 1,316 randomly selected cDNA clones, or expressed sequence tags (ESTs), from a peppermint (Mentha x piperita) oil gland secretory cell cDNA library. After bioinformatic selection, candidate genes putatively involved in essential oil biosynthesis and secretion have been subcloned into suitable expression vectors for functional evaluation in Escherichia coli. On the basis of published and preliminary data on the functional properties of these clones, it is estimated that the ESTs involved in essential oil metabolism represent about 25% of the described sequences. An additional 7% of the recognized genes code for proteins involved in transport processes, and a subset of these is likely involved in the secretion of essential oil terpenes from the site of synthesis to the storage cavity of the oil glands. The integrated approaches reported here represent an essential step toward the development of a metabolic map of oil glands and provide a valuable resource for defining molecular targets for the genetic engineering of essential oil formation.

SMC1β-deficient female mice provide evidence that cohesins are a missing link in age-related nondisjunction

Abstract: Mitotic chromosome segregation is facilitated by the cohesin complex, which maintains physical connections between sister chromatids until anaphase. Meiotic cell division is considerably more complex, as cohesion must be released sequentially to facilitate orderly segregation of chromosomes at both meiosis I and meiosis II. This necessitates meiosis-specific cohesin components; recent studies in rodents suggest that these influence chromosome behavior during both cell division and meiotic prophase. To elucidate the role of the meiosis-specific cohesin SMC1beta (encoded by Smc1l2) in oogenesis, we carried out meiotic studies of female SMC1beta-deficient mice. Our results provide the first direct evidence that SMC1beta acts as a chiasma binder in mammals, stabilizing sites of exchange until anaphase. Additionally, our observations support the hypothesis that deficient cohesion is an underlying cause of human age-related aneuploidy.