De novo genome assembly and annotation of Holothuria scabra (Jaeger, 1833) from nanopore sequencing reads

Luo Honglin,Huang Guanghua,Li Jianbin,Yang Qiong,Zhu Jiajie,Zhang Bin,Feng Pengfei,Zhang Yongde,Yang Xueming 한국유전학회 2022 Genes & Genomics Vol.44 No.12

Background: Holothuria scabra is a costly gourmet and traditional Chinese tonic medicine. However, the lack of high-quality genome information hinders the genetic, phylogenetic, and bioactivator researches. Objective: To construct high-quality genomic data of H. scabra and conduct genome-wide phylogenetic analysis. Methods: The whole genome of a male H. scabra was sequenced based on Nanopore MinION platform, and the sequence was assembled by wtdbg2. Transcriptome sequencing was used to aid the gene annotation. Repeat sequences, non-coding RNA, pseudogene and gene functional annotation were analyzed. 750 single-copy gene families from ten species were applied to construct phylogenetic tree for evolutionary analysis by using the ML method. Results: The H. scabra genome of 1.18 Gb (N50 = 1557,492 bp) with 500.42 Mb of putative repetitive sequences was assembled from a male H. scabra individual, and 16,642 protein-coding genes, 951 pseudogenes, 1791 motifs and 45,400 domains from the generated assembly were identified. The divergence time between H. scabra and its ancestor was estimated approximately 192.6 million years ago. H. scabra and A. japonicas joined together while sea urchin and sea star diverged about 440 Mya ago. Some key genes involved in notochord and gill slits development, skeleton degeneration and nervous system, as well as homeobox genes differ between H. scabra and Apostichopus japonicas. Conclusion: We report the first whole genome of H. scabra with expectation that this will be a valuable resource for genetic, phylogenetic, breading, molecular biology and bioactivator studies of sea cucumbers and other invertebrates.

MITIGATING THE EFFICIENCY-INNOVATION TENSION WITH STRATEGIC MARKETING LEVERS

Jaakko Aspara,Xueming Luo 글로벌지식마케팅경영학회 2014 Global Marketing Conference Vol.2014 No.7

A well-known dilemma in strategic marketing is whether a firm can be simultaneously both efficient in its existing business and innovative in creating new business (Atuahene-Gima 2005; Christensen 1997). Beleaguered companies such as AOL, Kmart, Motorola, Nokia, Polaroid, and Sears are examples that were once highly efficient in serving customers, but partly due to that efficiency in their existing business, paradoxically failed to introduce innovations. The potential tension “between innovation and efficiency-is one that’s bedeviling CEOs everywhere” (Hindo 2007). Two questions regarding the efficiency-innovation tradeoffs are especially intriguing to researchers and managers alike. First, to what extent are such tradeoffs driven by efficient firms’ lack of eagerness or willingness to innovate in the first place, or lack of ability to innovate and promote innovations? Second, can certain strategic marketing factors mitigate the tension of such tradeoffs? Indeed, anecdotal evidence indicates that not all firms that are efficient in their current business (e.g., Charles Schwab, Capital One) lack innovative thrust. In fact, efficient firms may actually be eager to innovate: Nokia, for instance, originally innovated an online “app store” service as well as touchscreen smartphones and Internet tablets in the 1990s and 2000s, much earlier than Apple (Ben-Aaron 2009; MobileGazzette 2008). Similarly, Polaroid was originally a pioneer in developing digital cameras and imaging services in the 1980s (Tripsas and Gavetti 2000). The eventual failures of Nokia’s and Polaroid’s innovation efforts, thus, do not seem to be due to their lack of eagerness to innovate, but perhaps the inability to manage the efficiency-innovation tension. In contrast, other companies seem to be able to manage this tension. For instance, in financial services, Charles Schwab is often commended both for its efficiency and its innovativeness, and the firm itself feels the “need to invest in innovation to maintain a competitive edge” (Gilson 2012). Against this backdrop, we focus on two questions: (1) What exactly are the tradeoffs and tensions between a firm’s existing efficiency, innovativeness in its new offerings, and new offering performance? And (2) how can strategic marketing assets such as customer base and advertising intensity mitigate the tradeoffs? Should such assets help to alleviate the inherent tension, they would give executives tools to pursue both efficiency and innovation at the same time and succeed with their new innovative offerings. Empirically, we focus on the service sector, whereby the actual technical development of innovations is not very costly in tangible financial terms (Crawford and di Benedetto 2008; Droege et al. 2009; Thomke 2003)-making the intangible firm capabilities most likely determinants of (innovation) performance rather than tangible resources (cf. Vorhies, Morgan, and Autry 2009). Therewith, we examine our research questions with a comprehensive census dataset of all new service introductions (n≈500) in one national market: The Finnish mutual funds industry (1997-2010). The sector of financial services is especially relevant for the efficiency-innovation tradeoffs because in this sector, many firms are compelled to engage in both efficient operations and effective (financial) innovations. Our empirical focus on all firms in one market precisely identifies and measures the efficiency levels of all competing firms, relative to the best-performing competitors, as well as innovativeness (earliness) in introducing new services compared to all rivals. For a marketing perspective, we focus on firms’ existing customer-perceived service efficiency (over the entire portfolio of existing services, i.e., funds)-defined through the ratio of output value that customers obtain from the firms’ current services to the (customer) cost inputs. We also carefully delineate between (a) innovativeness of a new service introduction and (b) its performance. Doing so can reveal the potentially contradictory effects of existing efficiency on new service innovativeness (willingness to innovate) vis-à-vis new service performance (ability to make innovations succeed). As our key results, we firstly identify and explicate the baseline efficiency-innovation tradeoffs. Specifically, our results suggest that while existing service efficiency increases the innovativeness of new services introduced by the firm, it simultaneously (1) leads to decreased business performance for the new services introduced and (2) diminishes the positive influence of innovativeness on performance. In sum, these findings imply that on the baseline, highly efficient service firms may be too eager to innovate, considering the sub-par performance they are likely to receive for those innovations. Secondly, our results reveal two strategic marketing factors, which have the potential to mitigate the tradeoffs. We find that the firm’s (a) focused customer base and (b) high advertising intensity can nullify the negative effect of existing service efficiency on innovativeness and the negative moderating effect of efficiency on the innovativeness-performance link.

Weighted Average Consensus of Second-order Multi-agent Systems with Various Intelligence Levels via Sampled-data Control

Jinhui Zeng,Pin Wang,Zheng Lan,Xueming Luo,Jianghong Li,Jiaxi Hu 제어·로봇·시스템학회 2023 International Journal of Control, Automation, and Vol.21 No.5

In this paper, weighted average consensus of second-order multi-agent systems (MASs) via sampleddata control is investigated. Specially, since the intelligence degree of each agent may be different in practical applications, the concept of intelligence level is introduced to characterize the intelligence degrees of agents in this paper. A novel distributed continuous-time control protocol with various intelligence levels is put forward based on sampled data in order to reduce the updating rates and computational burden of the controller. A necessary and sufficient condition is derived to achieve weighted average consensus under the proposed protocol. Moreover, according to the acquired result, the authors also give the choosing approaches of the feedback gains and sampling period. Finally, several numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the reliability of the theoretical results.