Engineering topics
Wang, Yixu
Publications and source records attributed to Wang, Yixu.
Identification of synthetic consortia from a set of plant-beneficial bacteria
The use of microbial inoculants in agriculture as biofertilisers and/or biopesticides is an appealing alternative to replace or reduce the practice of agrochemicals. Plant microbiota studies are revealing the different bacterial groups which are populating plant microbiomes re-energising the plant probiotic bacteria (PPB) translational research sector. Some single-microbial strain bioinoculants have proven valid in agriculture (e.g., based on Trichoderma, mycorrhiza or rhizobia); however, it is now recommended to consider multistrain consortia since plant-beneficial effects are often a result of community-level interactions in plant microbiomes. A limiting step is the selection of a fitting combination of microbial strains in order to accomplish the best beneficial effect upon plant inoculation. In this study, we have used a subset of 23 previously identified and characterised rice-beneficial bacterial colonisers to design and test a series of associated experiments aimed to identify potential PPB consortia which are able to co-colonise and induce plant growth promotion. Bacterial strains were co-inoculated in vitro and in planta using several different methods and their co-colonisation and co-persistence monitored. Results include the identification of two 5-strain and one 2-strain consortia which displayed plant growth-promoting features. Future practical applications of microbiome research must include experiments aimed at identifying consortia of bacteria which can be most effective as crop amendments.
Qubit-Oscillator Concatenated Codes: Decoding Formalism and Code Comparison
Concatenating bosonic error-correcting codes with qubit codes can substantially boost the errorcorrecting power of the original qubit codes. It is not clear how to concatenate optimally, given that there are several bosonic codes and concatenation schemes to choose from, including the recently discovered Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) – stabilizer codes [Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 080503 (2020)] that allow protection of a logical bosonic mode from fluctuations of the conjugate variables of the mode. We develop efficient maximum-likelihood decoders for and analyze the performance of three different concatenations of codes taken from the following set: qubit stabilizer codes, analog or Gaussian stabilizer codes, GKP codes, and GKP-stabilizer codes. We benchmark decoder performance against additive Gaussian white noise, corroborating our numerics with analytical calculations. We observe that the concatenation involving GKP-stabilizer codes outperforms the more conventional concatenation of a qubit stabilizer code with a GKP code in some cases. We also propose a GKP-stabilizer code that suppresses fluctuations in both conjugate variables without extra quadrature squeezing and formulate qudit versions of GKP-stabilizer codes.