Search for: All records

Through their expansive mycelium network, soil fungi alter the physical arrangement and chemical composition of their local environment. This can significantly impact bacterial distribution and nutrient transport and can play a dramatic role in shaping the rhizosphere around a developing plant. However, direct observation and quantitation of such behaviors is extremely difficult due to the opacity and complex porosity of the soil microenvironment. In this study, we demonstrate the development and use of an engineered microhabitat to visualize fungal growth in response to varied levels of confinement. Microfluidics were fabricated using photolithography and conventional soft lithography, assembled onto glass slides, and prepared to accommodate fungal cultures. Selected fungal strains across three phyla (Ascomycota:Morchella sextalata,Fusarium falciforme; Mucoromycota:Linnemannia elongata,Podila minutissima,Benniella; Basidiomycota:Laccaria bicolor, andSerendipitasp.) were cultured within microhabitats and imaged using time-lapse microscopy to visualize development at the mycelial level. Fungal hyphae of each strain were imaged as they penetrated through microchannels with well-defined pore dimensions. The hyphal penetration rates through the microchannels were quantified via image analysis. Other behaviors, including differences in the degree of branching, peer movement, and tip strength were also recorded for each strain. Our results provide a repeatable and easy-to-use approach for culturing fungi within a microfluidics platform and for visualizing the impact of confinement on hyphal growth and other fungal behaviors pertinent to their remodeling of the underground environment. 

Multi-robot cooperative control has been extensively studied using model-based distributed control methods. However, such control methods rely on sensing and perception modules in a sequential pipeline design, and the separation of perception and controls may cause processing latencies and compounding errors that affect control performance. End-to-end learning overcomes this limitation by implementing direct learning from onboard sensing data, with control commands output to the robots. Challenges exist in end-to-end learning for multi-robot cooperative control, and previous results are not scalable. We propose in this article a novel decentralized cooperative control method for multi-robot formations using deep neural networks, in which inter-robot communication is modeled by a graph neural network (GNN). Our method takes LiDAR sensor data as input, and the control policy is learned from demonstrations that are provided by an expert controller for decentralized formation control. Although it is trained with a fixed number of robots, the learned control policy is scalable. Evaluation in a robot simulator demonstrates the triangular formation behavior of multi-robot teams of different sizes under the learned control policy. 

SUMMARY Switch defective/sucrose non‐fermentable (SWI/SNF) chromatin remodeling complexes are evolutionarily conserved, multi‐subunit machinery that play vital roles in the regulation of gene expression by controlling nucleosome positioning and occupancy. However, little is known about the subunit composition of SPLAYED (SYD)‐containing SWI/SNF complexes in plants. Here, we show that theArabidopsis thalianaLeaf and Flower Related (LFR) is a subunit of SYD‐containing SWI/SNF complexes. LFR interacts directly with multiple SWI/SNF subunits, including the catalytic ATPase subunit SYD,in vitroandin vivo. Phenotypic analyses oflfr‐2mutant flowers revealed that LFR is important for proper filament and pistil development, resembling the function of SYD. Transcriptome profiling revealed that LFR and SYD shared a subset of co‐regulated genes. We further demonstrate that the LFR and SYD interdependently activate the transcription ofAGAMOUS(AG), a C‐class floral organ identity gene, by regulating the occupation of nucleosome, chromatin loop, histone modification, and Pol II enrichment on theAGlocus. Furthermore, the chromosome conformation capture (3C) assay revealed that the gene loop atAGlocus is negatively correlated with theAGexpression level, and LFR‐SYD was functional to demolish theAGchromatin loop to promote its transcription. Collectively, these results provide insight into the molecular mechanism of the Arabidopsis SYD‐SWI/SNF complex in the control of higher chromatin conformation of the floral identity gene essential to plant reproductive organ development.