In order to solve the potential environmental and ecological problem that was aroused by the enormous amounts of the invasive aquatic biomass, a fast disposal process that directly subcritical hydrothermal conversion of those fresh aquatic biomass was developed according to the hydrothermal technology and the characteristic of high water content of aquatic biomass. This process was operated on a autoclave with a 3 L capacity, and the effects of hydrothermal conditions of different temperatures (150~280 ℃) and different retention time (0~60 min) on hydrothermal conversion of two model aquatic biomass were concentrated on. The two model aquatic biomass were water hyacinth and a mixed biomass sample (water lettuce and green waste of flower market), respectively. The results showed that this process could convert successfully the two model aquatic biomass into ecological organic fertilizer after treatment. The yield of solid product, which was reutilized as organic fertilizer, decreased with increasing reaction temperature and retention time. Besides, the high content of lignocelluloses was fast decomposed with an elevated reaction temperature and a longer retention time, but the lignin could hardly be decomposed at the given reaction temperature and time of this test. The analysis result of fertilizer nutrient in solid product also showed that these two organic fertilizers were rich of humic acid and nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, in which the highest total humic acid amounts could reach as much as 38.29% (for water hyacinth) and 41.76% (for mixed biomass), and the total nutrient amounts were not less than 4.1% (for water hyacinth) and 3.0% (for mixed biomass) among the all treatments.In conclusion, as using this hydrothermal process, the enormous amount of aquatic biomass can be effectively converted into organic fertilizer, and bring about great ecological and socioenvironmental benefits.

As excellent germplasm resources in China, Shaoxing duck is famous for its high egg production all over the world. Laying traits, rather than the growth and development traits, are the main breeding criteria in the duck breeding at present. We usually use egg laying traits as the main breeding goal, but ignore the growth and development traits, especially in drake breeding. Defective growth and development may lead to the loss of duck breeding value and the low fertilization rate, which will finally reduce the economic benefit of drakes. Thus, drakes’ growth traits must be emphasized in breeding of laying ducks. We must pay more attention to the selection of the drakes’ growth traits. This study analyzed the correlation between the polymorphism of growth hormone (GH) gene with the growth performance and slaughter in Shaoxing ducks, which provided some reference material for monitoring the growth and development of Shaoxing ducks breeding.
As the candidate genes, GH gene is closely related to the growth and development. The SNP loci of GH were scanned by direct sequencing method.
The body size was measured at the age of 12 weeks, and the slaughter indexes were measured at the age of 53 weeks. All ducks were sampled randomly according to the group, and the relevance of Shaoxing duck growth performance and slaughter performance were analyzed.
The genomic DNA was extracted by phenol chloroform method from blood. All data were sampled randomly according to the group.
According to the published GH gene sequence in GenBank, the primers were designed to amplify the sequences of intron 2, exon 4 and exon 5. The SNP loci of GH were scanned by direct sequencing method, and the sequences were compared by using DNAStar to look for the polymorphic loci. The genotype and allele frequencies were calculated and tested by Hardy-Weinberg balance. The correlation between the genotypes and traits was calculated by using statistical software JMP 4.0 (SAS Institute, 2002) to estimate the least square means of traits. The results showed two loci: GH 2 514 A>G, GH 2 691 C>T. The χ2 test revealed that all loci were in the balance of Hardy-Weinberg (P>0.05 ). For GH (2 514 A>G & 2 691 C>T), 6-week body mass, 8-week body mass, 12-week keel bone length, 53-week chest width of the individuals with genotype TT were higher than the genotype CT. The breast muscle mass, abdominal fat mass and abdominal fat percentage of individuals with genotype TT were significantly higher than those with genotype CT and CC (P<0.05). It is suggested that GH gene may be the major gene which directly control the abdominal fat and breast muscle related traits, or may be tightly linked with the major genes indirectly.

Many countries such as USA, Canada, Denmark and Swiss, and their states or provinces, have carried out systematic researches on the remediation criteria of contaminated soils, and their relevant remediation standards for contaminated soils have also been enacted nationwide or statewide. Especially for USA, it has so many states that there are a series of methodologies provided for references, just as “soil cleanup levels” in Alaska, “soil remediation standards” in Arizona, “soil cleanup target levels” in Florida, “soil remediation goals” in North Carolina, and so do many other countries such as “Canada soil quality guidelines” and “Canadawide standards for petroleum hydrocarbons”, “cutoff criteria” in Denmark, “action values” in Germany, “target cleanup levels” in Italy, “soil remediation intervention values” in Netherlands, and “cleanup values” in Swiss. Generally speaking, the protection of human health is the key point in most of the remediation standards among various countries or states. Meanwhile, ecosystem safety is also included as the protected objects independently, and sometimes groundwater protection is also taken into consideration directly or indirectly. At the same time, the past, current or future land uses are often discriminated in the remediation criteria for most of the countries or states. Nevertheless, the remediation standard for contaminated soils is still a gap in China and thus it is of great urgency to carry out the systematic and comprehensive research on the remediation criteria to meet the need for contaminated soil remediation under various land uses. In general, the research about “derivation methods of remediation criteria/standards for contaminated soils under different land uses and analysis of their standard values” is of great significance and necessity. Firstly, the connotation and function of remediation criteria and standards for contaminated soils are explained in brief combined with the screening values. Noticeably, the preliminary remediation goal is that remediation standards of contaminated soils intend for the protection of human health, was firstly developed at the national level in USA, while its guidance was commonly used to derive some screening levels under the similar supposed contexts and thus the screening values were used as the remediation goals for these soils. However, in 1996, the Soil Screening Guidance (SSG) was enacted by US EPA for the derivation of screening values specially, and stated that the function of soil screening levels is to screen out a contaminated site and its potential pollutants. And in most European countries, the screening values are regarded as soilenvironmental quality standards rather than remediation standards of contaminated soils. In fact, remediation standards of contaminated soils should be the guidance for the nationwide or statewide remediation projects and the protection of plow lands. Land uses should be considered in derivation and development of remediation standards for contaminated soils, and the reference methods are suggested for the development of remediation standards for contaminated soils under various land uses. Then, it is followed by deriving and enacting methods of remediation criteria for contaminated soils under different land uses and the analysis of their standard values. We set forth the variations of the methods and the standard values under various land uses as the result of various remedial requirements and exposure scenarios from three aspects, that is, human health, ecosystem safety and groundwater protection. Generally speaking, exposure scenarios are different in various land uses, and there are some discrimination on exposure population, exposure pathways, and exposure parameters based on human health, while the differences are mainly reflected on receptors, and toxic indicators for ecobased remediation criteria. As for groundwater protection based remediation criteria, water quality standards are often used for the back calculation of soil remediation criteria by the soilwater partition equation, and they are somewhat different in terms of the function of groundwater under various land uses. Otherwise, remediation standards for Cd and benzene contaminated soils in some countries and states are compared qualitatively. In conclusion, many countries have enacted the nationwide or statewide remediation standards for contaminated soils, and are expressed by different denominations. In general, four types of land uses (agricultural, residential, commercial/industrial, groundwaterprotection land uses) are considered in development of remediation standards, and there are some discrimination on the methods and the standard values under various land uses.

The effects of five hydroponic nutrient solutions, Hoagland formula, Japanese Yamazaki formula (JY), Japanese Garden formula (JG), South China Agricultural University (SCAU) formula B for leafy vegetables and England Hewitt formula (EH) on the biomass production and nutritional quality of aeroponically grown lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) were compared. The results showed that the pH levels of five solutions were increased to some extent during the treatment. The highest increase in pH was observed in EH, while the lowest was in SCAU formula B. Plants grown in SCAU formula B solution showed high fresh and dry mass of roots and shoots, compared to the plants grown in other four nutrient solutions. Furthermore, The plants treated with SCAU formula B showed the highest ascorbic acid content, FRAP (ferric reducing/antioxidant power) value, DPPH (1,1-diphenyl-2-picrydrazyl) radical scavenging rate, as well as soluble sugar content in the leaves among all nutrient solution-treated plants. However, the soluble protein content was comparable to that of JG-treated plants, while the glutathione contents was lower than that of JG-treated plants. Furthermore, the nitrate contents of stems and leaves of SCAU formula B-treated plants were significantly lower than those of EH and Hoaglandtreated plants, but a little higher than those of JG and JY-treated plants. These results indicate that aeroponically grown lettuce in SCAU formula B solution produce high biomass yield, high antioxidant content and antioxidant activity, and low nitrate content, suggesting that SCAU formula B is the most ideal nutrient solution for aeroponically grown lettuce, whereas EH and JY formulas are unsuitable for aeroponically grown lettuce.

With the advent of molecular marker techniques in the past two decades, genome-wide association study (GWAS) was proved to be an effective tool to reveal genetic architecture of complex traits in human, animal and plants. GWAS typically focuses on associations between genetic markers and quantitative traits in natural populations and takes advantage of recombination events in the evolutionary history. In human, more than 6 000 variant loci were discovered to associate with > 500 quantitative traits and complex diseases. In animals, GWAS was conducted specially on economically important traits, genetic defect diseases and other complex diseases of the main livestock and poultries. In plants, GWAS has been applied to study flowering time, developmental traits and agronomical traits of Arabidopsis, rice, maize and cotton. 
Despite the initial success of GWAS that has been achieved, the uncovered associated loci usually have small effects on phenotype and only account for very limited phenotypic variation. The remaining unexplained genetic variance is the socalled “missing heritability”. Three possible factors were responsible for the failure of detecting the cause loci. First, the efficiency of detecting the smalleffect loci is very low and more smalleffect loci are undiscovered. Most GWASs proceed on the base of the assumption that common phenotypic variation is caused by common genetic variation. The power to detect the cause loci is a function of allele frequency, thus it is difficult to identify the functional variants at low frequency though they have larger effects on the phenotype. Second, GWAS was unable to deal with the phenotypic variances caused by structural variation (i.e. copy number variation). Third, current GWASs pay little attention to the interactions among the genetic variances and ones between genetic and environmental factors, which have been affirmed by the results of linkage analysis.
New strategies for GWAS were discussed. The package GMDR-GPU was developed to analyze epistasis effects, and the software QTXNetwork could simultaneously research single locus effect, digenic epistasis effect and their environment interactions in a full genetic model. The unbiased prediction of genetic effects could be obtained.
GWAS would make breakthrough in two aspects for the foreseeable future, due to the increasing availability of high throughput genome sequencing for human and plants. First, the increased advances in “omics” technology (transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics) will provide an opportunity to study the association of phenotypic variations with mRNA, protein or metabolite, which position the omics loci linked to the interested traits. Second, multitrait GWAS will improve statistical power for identifying genes contributing to complex traits.

Single nucleotide polymorphism ( SNP) is a kind of DNA polymorphism in genome which results from the variance of single nucleotide . In diploid organisms ( such as human , A rabidopsis thaliana , Oryz a sativ a , etc .) , many SNP markers were discovered as genetic markers ,and had been widely used for population parameter estimation and association mapping .However , SNP discovery and application in the polyploid organisms ( such as Gossy p ium hirsutum , Brassica napus , T riticum aestivum , etc .) were limited and lagged . In order to facilitate SNP discovery in polyploid plants , this paper reviewed the genomic complexity of polyploidy , the obstacle and the solutions of SNPs discovery in polyploid plants , including these methods of sequencing of polymerase chain reaction ( PCR) amplicons from locus‐specific primer , distinguishing SNPs from homoeologous sequence variants ( HSVs) through living models of allopolyploid ancestral genomes , use of next‐generation sequencing for SNP discovery ,scanning along seeking potential SNPs by bioinformatics tool , Mendelian transmission test of candidate SNPs . In conclusion , the applications of solutions mentioned above are feasible and reliable for the highthroughput SNP discovery in polyploid plants.

Fatty acids are ubiquitous molecules, which are typically bounded to other compounds such as glycerol, sugar or phosphate head groups to form various derivatives. They have diverse and potent biological activities, such as antiinflammatory, antitumor, antiprotozoan, antiviral, antifungal and antibacterial activities. Although the antimicrobial activity of fatty acids and their derivatives has been well known for many years, the structural and functional features causing them to prevent microbial growth or survival are still unknown. The purpose of the present study was to find out the correlation between structural features and the antimicrobial activities. At first step, it was necessary to evaluate the efficacy of various fatty acids and their derivatives to control the growth of Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Candida albicans. The microorganisms used for screening studies were common in food (E. coil O157:H7) and clinical specimens (C. albicans) and were individually maintained through monthly transfers to the respective fresh medium (E. coil O157:H7 in trypticase soy broth at 37 ℃; C. albicans in SabouraudDextrose broth at 30 ℃) and were stored at 4 ℃. Stock cultures were inoculated and grown on respective broth for 1824 h to prepare active and working cultures. The tested samples included 10 kinds of saturated fatty acids, six different unsaturated fatty acids, nine kinds of monoacylglycerols, two types of fatty acid methyl esters, three kinds of fatty acid ethyl esters and four classes of fatty alcohols. They were dissolved in 95% ethanol, sterile Tween80 (final concentrations of ethanol and Tween80 were 1.5%, respectively) and then were filtersterilized using a 0.22 μm pore size membrane filter. Ethanol and Tween80 controls were used for each experiment to ensure that any observed inhibition was not due to them. Antibiotics were dissolved in 1.5% ethanol and tween80 used as positive controls. The respective broths which contained 0.015, 0.007 5 mol/L fatty acids and their derivatives were inoculated with approximately 1.0×1055.0×105 CFU/mL of active cultures, then they were incubated for 24 h at the optimum temperature. Samples (100 μL) were removed and immediately diluted 10fold in sterile physiological saline. The number of viable microorganisms was determined through a standard plate count technique. All the tested mediumchain fatty acids (C812) and their corresponding chain monoacylglycerols, longchain unsaturated fatty acids (>C12) showed more antimicrobial activities than fatty alcohols. Longchain fatty acids, fatty acid methyl esters and fatty acid ethyl esters had feeblish antimicrobial activity. Of the saturated fatty acids, The C13 fatty acids; as compared with their saturated counterparts, the C14:1, C16:1, C16:2 unsaturated fatty acids were more highly active, however, the linolenic acid (C18:3) was not very active. The fatty acid etherified with the alcohol and methanol showed no inhibition. The 1, 3dilaurin was less active than the fatty acid. The monoglyceride was proved to be more active. In sum, the chain length, substituent, numbers and position of double bond are the important factors influencing the antimicrobial activity of fatty acids and their derivatives.

The seeds of two -row barley ( Hordeum vulgare L .) cultivar ZJU3 were treated by chemical mutagen ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS) to develop a mutant library . In M2 generation , biological and agronomiccharacters were examined ,and the identified mutants were validated in M3 generation . Totally 97 phenotypemutants , involved in seedling habits , maturity , leaf morphology , plant height , spike shape and spikelet fertility were obtained from 3000treated plants , with mutated frequency of 7.46% The results indicate thefeasibility of developing barley mutant population using EMS treatment and the discussion is done on forward genetics approachof genefunction study using mutant population for barley geneticimprovement .

Using multi-polarization (HH/HV/VH/VV) airborne syntheti caperture radar (SAR) data, polarimetric responses of rice and typical features and their differences were analyzed, then rice identification method based on its characteristics of polarimetric response was established.The results showed that backscattering coefficients of rice in different polarizations were of great difference, and the difference between horizontal polarization (HH) and vertical polarization (VV) of rice was significantly higher than other surface features. Based on the characteristic, rice information was extracted using the ratio of horizontal and vertical polarizations [‹ HH ›／‹ VV ›] ,and good results were achieved. Rice identification accuracy was over 90.0%. The image enhanced rice information was classified. Classification result showed that rice of different growth stages can be distinguished to some extent.

The experiments were conducted to identify thermo‐tolerant rice genotypes and characterize physiological traits relevant to heat stress tolerance . Seventy‐two rice genotypes were exposed to high temperature (４０ ℃ /３５ ℃ , １４ h/１０ h) for １２ d at heading stage , and floret fertility was examined . The similar results were obtained in the two years?experiments that there was a distinctly genotypic difference in floret fertility as affected by heat stress . When rice seedlings were exposed to heat stress , chlorophyll content (SPAD value) , plant height , root length , shoot and root biomass were dramatically reduced , with thermo‐tolerant genotypes being relatively less affected than sensitive ones . Meanwhile ,high temperature enhanced membrane lipid peroxidation , as expressed by malondialdehyde content and increased superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity . Thermo‐tolerant genotypes had less and more increase in MDA content and SOD activity than sensitive ones under heat stress relative to the control , respectively .Accordingly the thermo‐tolerant genotypes were identified , with genotypes CJ６ , MY４６ and JX１７ being highly thermo‐tolerant , MH６３ , Kasalath and IRAT４２１７ being very sensitive .

Effects of the empty pYL１５６ vector ( pYL１５６ ∷ ００ ) , the most commonly used control vector for Tobacco rattle v irus ( TRV )‐induced gene silencing analysis on viral symptom development and growth of VIGS‐treated tomato and N icotiana benthamiana plants were investigated . It was shown that VIGS‐treatment for pYL１５６ ∷ ００ caused severe systemic viral symptoms and obvious growth repression in treated plants . Therefore , pYL１５６ ∷ ００ is not a good control vector for TRV‐induced gene silencing analysis in these plant species . To set a better control for this analysis , two new constructs ,pYL１５６ ∷ N IRi and pYL１５６ ∷ eG FP , were made . They were released by inserting a ２５３ bp fragment of a Phaseolus vulgaris nitrite reductase gene intron and a ４００ bp fragment of the jellyfish GFP coding
sequence in pYL１５６ ∷ ００ , respectively . Effects of the two new control constructs on viral symptom development and growth of VIGS‐treated N . benthamiana plants were compared with pYL１５６ ∷ ００ . The results showed that VIGS‐treatment for pYL１５６ ∷ ００ caused severe systemic viral symptoms and significant growth repression in treated plants , resulting in death of ２６.７％ plants . VIGS‐treatment for pYL１５６ ∷ N IRi also led to obvious viral symptoms and growth repression , but in a less severe extent than that for pYL１５６ ∷ ００ , resulting in death of １３.３％ plants . However , VIGS‐treatment for pYL１５６ ∷ eG FP did not cause any obvious viral symptom and growth repression . Severity of viral symptom and growth repression was well correlated with the accumulation level of TRV virus . These results demonstrate that pYL１５６ ∷ eG FP is an excellent control vector for TRV‐induced gene silencing analysis , and provide some insights into the direction to establish an excellent control for VIGS analysis .