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Background: The Xibe population is one of China’s officially recognised populations and is now distributed separately from west to east in the northern part of China. X-chromosomal short tandem repeats have a special inheritance pattern, and could be used as complements in forensic application, especially for complex or deficiency cases. Subjects and methods: This study obtained the allelic and haplotypic frequencies of 19 X-STR loci in the Xibe population from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, and studied the genetic differentiations between the Xibe and other populations. Results: The combined power of discrimination in females and males and mean exclusion chances in deficiency cases, normal trios and duo cases was at least 0.999 999 994. In the haplotypic study, the Xibe population showed a more similar pattern of haplotype distribution with Asian populations than populations from other continents, while allelic study also indicated a closer relationship between the Xibe and Asian populations. Conclusions: The 19 X-STR loci would be useful in forensic application in the studied population. The Xibe population showed a closer genetic relationship with Asian populations in the study, and more population data would be necessary for more detailed genetic relationship studies.

Imaging cameras are cost-effective sensors for spacecraft navigation. Image-driven techniques to extract the target spacecraft from its background are efficient and do not require pretraining. In this paper, we introduce several image-driven foreground extraction methods, including combining the difference of Gaussian-based scene detection and graph manifold ranking-based foreground saliency generation. We successfully apply our foreground extraction method on infrared images from the STS-135 flight mission captured by the space shuttle's Triangulation and LIDAR Automated Rendezvous and Docking System (TriDAR) thermal camera. Our saliency approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance and provides an order of magnitude reduction in processing speed from the traditional methods. Furthermore, we develop a new uncooperative spacecraft pose estimation method by combining our foreground extraction technique with the level-set region-based pose estimation with novel initialization and gradient descent enhancements. Our method is validated using synthetically generated Envisat, Radarsat model, and International Space Station motion sequences. The proposed process is also validated with real rendezvous flight images of the International Space Station. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Human papillomavirus (HPV) detection based on cervical cytology specimens is useful for cervical cancer screening. The aim of this study was to compare Mojin HPV kit (a newly developed HPV genotyping assay) with the Cobas 4800 HPV test in detecting high-risk (HR) HPV. Methods: A total of 347 cervical exfoliated cell specimens were tested using the Mojin HPV kit and Cobas 4800 HPV test. When the results from the two tests were inconsistent, gene sequencing was performed for correction. Results: For HR-HPV, the results of the two assays agreed by 96.3% [Kappa = 0.911; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.863 - 0.958)]. The positive and negative coincidence rates between the two tests were 96.0% (95% CI: 92.7% - 98.0%) and 97.0% (95% CI: 91.5% - 99.4%), respectively. Of the 13 samples with discordant results, 3 samples were false positive and 10 samples were true negative for Mojin HPV test, according to the identification by sequencing. For HPV16 genotyping, the total coincidence rate between the 2 tests was 100% (Kappa = 1.000), and 99.7% (Kappa = 0.973; 95% CI: 0.905 - 1.000) for HPV18. Conclusions: Mojin HPV kit may be as effective as Cobas 4800 HPV assay in detecting the total HR-HPV, especially HPV16 or HPV18. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four gram-negative, aerobic, motile, non-spore, forming rods with a wide pH and temperature range for growth (pH 7.0-11.0, optimum pH 8.0; 20-45°C, optimum 28°C) strains were isolated from root nodules of Sphaerophysa salsula and characterized by means of a polyphasic approach. Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed that the four strains formed a new lineage related to the genus Rhizobium and the sequence similarities between the isolate and the most related type strain Rhizobium giardinii was 96.5%. These strains also formed a distinctive group from the reference strains for defined Rhizobium species based on housekeeping gene sequences ( atpD and recA), BOX-PCR fingerprinting, phenotypic features and symbiotic properties. The representative strain CCNWGS0238 has DNA-DNA relatedness of less than 33.4% with the most closely related species R. giardinii. It is therefore proposed as a new species, Rhizobium sphaerophysae sp. nov., with isolate CCNWGS0238 (=ACCC17498 = HAMBI3074) as the type strain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]