Infection of plant cells by RNA viruses leads to the generation of organelle-like subcellular structures that contain the viral replication complex. During Turnip mosaic virus (TuMV) infection of Nicotiana benthamiana, the viral membrane protein 6K₂ plays a key role in the release of motile replication vesicles from the host endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Here, we demonstrate that 6K₂ contains a GxxxG motif within its predicted transmembrane domain that is vital for TuMV infection. Replacement of the Gly with Val within this motif inhibited virus production, and this was due to a relocation of the viral protein to the Golgi apparatus and the plasma membrane. This indicated that passage of 6K₂ through the Golgi apparatus is a dead-end avenue for virus infection. Impairing the fusion of transport vesicles between the ER and the Golgi apparatus by overexpression of the SNARE Sec22 protein resulted in enhanced intercellular virus movement. Likewise, expression of nonfunctional, Golgi-located synaptotagmin during infection enhanced TuMV intercellular movement. 6K₂ copurified with VTI11, a prevacuolar compartment SNARE protein. An Arabidopsis thaliana vti11 mutant was completely resistant to TuMV infection. We conclude that TuMV replication vesicles bypass the Golgi apparatus and take an unconventional pathway that may involve prevacuolar compartments/multivesicular bodies for virus infection.

In this paper the global response characteristics of a piecewise smooth dynamical system with contact, which is specifically used to describe the rotor/stator rubbing systems, is studied analytically. A method to derive the global response characteristics of the model is proposed by studying each piece of the equations corresponding to different phases of the rotor motion, i.e., the phase without rubbing, the phase with rubbing and the phase of self-excited backward whirl. After solving the typical responses in each phase and deriving the corresponding existence boundaries in the parameter space, an overall picture of the global response characteristics of the model is obtained. As is shown, five types of the coexistences of the different rotor responses and deep insights into the interactive effect of parameters on the dynamic behavior of the model are gained.

Dry whip is an instability of rotor-to-stator contact systems and may lead to a catastrophic failure of rotating machinery. The physical reason for the onset of dry whip in rotor/stator systems with imbalance is not yet well understood. This paper explores the development of the rotor response into dry whip of a specific rotor-to-stator contact model and finds that the rotor in resonance at a negative (natural) frequency of the coupled nonlinear rotor/stator system is the physical reason for the onset of dry whip with imbalance. Based on this find, the equations of motion of the rotor/stator system are formulated in a different way that includes the dynamic characteristics in the vicinity of the onset point of dry whip. The onset condition of dry whip with imbalance is then derived by using the multiple scale method. As shown by examples, the analytical onset condition of dry whip agrees well with the numerically simulated one. In addition, the results are consistent with phenomena observed in tests.

Random vibrations occur in many engineering systems including buildings subject to earthquake excitation, vehicles traveling on a rough road and off-shore platform in random waves. Analysis of random vibrations for linear systems has been well studied. For nonlinear systems, particularly for multi-degree-of-freedom systems, however, there are still many challenges including analyzing the probability distribution of transient responses of the system. Monte Carlo simulation was considered the only viable method for this task. In this paper, We propose a method to construct semi-analytical transient solutions of the probability distribution of transient responses of nonlinear systems by using the radial basis function neural networks. The activation functions consist of normalized Gaussian probability density functions. Two examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution method. The transient probability distributions and response moments of these examples are presented, which have not been reported in the literature before.

Dry friction backward whirl is a self-excited vibration state in rotor-to-stator contact systems, by which the rotor is in continuous contact with the stator, slipping continuously on the contact surface and whirling backward at a supersynchronous frequency. To correctly cope the response of dry friction backward whirl, the effect of dry friction must be taken into account in rotor/stator models. From the knowledge on the characteristics of dry friction backward whirl, the whirl frequency, the existence condition and the solution of this response are derived analytically in this paper. The analytical results are verified by simulations and shown in good correspondence to the experimental observations.

Global bifurcations include sudden changes in chaotic sets due to crises. There are three types of crises defined by Grebogi et al. [Physica D 7, 181 (1983)]: boundary crisis, interior crisis, and metamorphosis. In this paper, by means of the extended generalized cell mapping (EGCM), boundary and interior crises of a fractional-order Duffing system are studied as one of the system parameters or the fractional derivative order is varied. It is found that a crisis can be generally defined as a collision between a chaotic basic set and a basic set, either periodic or chaotic, to cause a sudden discontinuous change in chaotic sets. Here chaotic sets involve three different kinds: a chaotic attractor, a chaotic saddle on a fractal basin boundary, and a chaotic saddle in the interior of a basin and disjoint from the attractor. A boundary crisis results from the collision of a periodic (or chaotic) attractor with a chaotic (or regular) saddle in the fractal (or smooth) boundary. In such a case, the attractor, together with its basin of attraction, is suddenly destroyed as the control parameter passes through a critical value, leaving behind a chaotic saddle in the place of the original attractor and saddle after the crisis. An interior crisis happens when an unstable chaotic set in the basin of attraction collides with a periodic attractor, which causes the appearance of a new chaotic attractor, while the original attractor and the unstable chaotic set are converted to the part of the chaotic attractor after the crisis. These results further demonstrate that the EGCM is a powerful tool to reveal the mechanism of crises in fractional-order systems.