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For green synthesis in organic phases, the catalysis of lipases needs to be further improved. Here a strategy is to simulate the activation of lipases at water/oil interface by immobilizing lipase on an available carrier material, which can replace the water at the interface to stabilize enzyme against denaturation from organic phase. The carrier is selected as cotton fiber on which Pseudomonas cepacia lipase is immobilized by physical adsorption in a column glass bottle to form a simple bioreactor together with the bottle. In synthesis of fragrance ester hexyl acetate via transesterification of hexanol with vinyl acetate, the bioreactor exhibits a 3-fold increase in the ability to transform substrate, relative to native lipase in terms of the initial period of reaction at 37°C and 160 rpm. And also the bioreactor is very stable in catalysis for that it has an extra long half life t1/2 = 636 h, calculated from the decrease degree of molar conversions in six times of 6-hour transesterifications. More interestingly, the bioreactor behaves excellent activity at room temperature and in a static state, and can transform nearly 100% hexanol after 48 h. All these indicate that the bioreactor has great potential for industrial application.

Pseudogenes have been reported to play oncogenic or tumor-suppressive roles in cancer progression. However, the molecular mechanism of most pseudogenes in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains unknown. Herein, we characterized a novel pseudogene-miRNA-mRNA network associated with PDAC progression using bioinformatics analysis. After screening by dreamBase and GEPIA, 12 up-regulated and 7 down-regulated differentially expressed pseudogenes (DEPs) were identified. According to survival analysis, only elevated AK4P1 indicated a poor prognosis for PDAC patients. Moreover, we found that AK4 acts as a cognate gene of AK4P1 and also predicts worse survival for PDAC patients. Furthermore, 32 miRNAs were predicted to bind to AK4P1 by starBase, among which miR-375 was identified as the most potential binding miRNA of AK4P1. A total of 477 potential target genes of miR-375 were obtained by miRNet, in which 49 hub genes with node degree ≥ 20 were identified by STRING. Subsequent analysis for hub genes demonstrated that YAP1 may be a functional downstream target of AK4P1. To confirmed the above findings, microarray, and qRT-PCR assay revealed that YAP1 was dramatically upregulated in both PDAC cells and tissues. Functional experiments showed that knockdown of YAP1 significantly suppressed PDAC cells growth, increased apoptosis, and decreased the ability of invasion. In conclusion, amplification of AK4P1 may fuel the onset and development of PDAC by targeting YAP1 through competitively binding to miR-375, and serve as a promising biomarker and therapeutic target for PDAC.

Postharvest pathogens such as C. gloeosporioides (MA), C.oxysporum (ME) and P. steckii (MF) are the causal agents of disease in mangoes. This paper presents an in vitro investigation into the antifungal effect of a chitosan (CTS)/nano-titanium dioxide (TiO2) composite coating against MA, ME and MF. The results indicated that, the rates of MA, ME and MF mortality following the single chitosan treatment were 63.3%, 84.8% and 43.5%, respectively, while the rates of mycelial inhibition were 84.0%, 100% and 25.8%, respectively. However, following the addition of 0.5% nano-TiO2 into the CTS, both the mortality and mycelial inhibition rates for MA and ME reached 100%, and the mortality and mycelial inhibition rate for MF also increased significantly, reaching 75.4% and 57.3%, respectively. In the MA, the dry weight of mycelia after the CTS/0.5% nano-TiO2 treatment decreased by 36.3% in comparison with the untreated group, while the conductivity value was about 1.7 times that of the untreated group, and the protein dissolution rate and extravasation degree of nucleic acids also increased significantly. Thus, this research revealed the potential of CTS/nano-TiO2 composite coatings in the development of new antimicrobial materials.

Chitosan nanoparticles (CSNPs) have attracted wide interest, however, there has been no substantial information about a direct comparison of the antimicrobial activity of CSNPs on bacteria and fungi. Thus, in this study, simple, economically feasible CSNPs were synthesized and assessed for their antimicrobial activity. This investigation indicated that the coordination inducing effect of CSNPs could dissociate the tryptophan (Trp) and tyrosine (Tyr) residue groups on the peptide chain of the bovine serum albumin (BSA) molecule, thereby increasing the absorption intensity. The growth of E. coli and S. aureus could be completely inhibited when the concentration of CSNPs in the solution was higher than 0.6 mg/mL. The CSNPs showed more potent antibacterial activity against Gram-negative bacteria (E. coli) than against Gram-positive bacteria (S. aureus). In addition, the CSNPs were effective at initiating cellular leakage of fungal mycelia and damping off fungal pathogens, and their antifungal effects were stronger on P. steckii than on A. oryzae. Furthermore, the antimicrobial activity of the CSNPs was found to be more effective against bacteria than against fungi. This study thus ascertained the antimicrobial activity of synthesized CSNPs against different microorganisms, as well as their different degrees of inhibition.

Identifying permanent water and temporary water in flood disasters efficiently has mainly relied on change detection method from multi-temporal remote sensing imageries, but estimating the water type in flood disaster events from only post-flood remote sensing imageries still remains challenging. Research progress in recent years has demonstrated the excellent potential of multi-source data fusion and deep learning algorithms in improving flood detection, while this field has only been studied initially due to the lack of large-scale labelled remote sensing images of flood events. Here, we present new deep learning algorithms and a multi-source data fusion driven flood inundation mapping approach by leveraging a large-scale publicly available Sen1Flood11 dataset consisting of roughly 4831 labelled Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical imagery gathered from flood events worldwide in recent years. Specifically, we proposed an automatic segmentation method for surface water, permanent water, and temporary water identification, and all tasks share the same convolutional neural network architecture. We utilize focal loss to deal with the class (water/non-water) imbalance problem. Thorough ablation experiments and analysis confirmed the effectiveness of various proposed designs. In comparison experiments, the method proposed in this paper is superior to other classical models. Our model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 52.99%, Intersection over Union (IoU) of 52.30%, and Overall Accuracy (OA) of 92.81% on the Sen1Flood11 test set. On the Sen1Flood11 Bolivia test set, our model also achieves very high mIoU (47.88%), IoU (76.74%), and OA (95.59%) and shows good generalization ability.

In the event of an emergency, the timely and appropriate first-aid operations provided by non-medical personnel at the scene of accident before the arrival of medical professionals are crucial to help minimize the frequency in accidental induced deaths and injuries. Thus, it is essential to provide the effective first-aid training to the public. College students are considered to be the ideal candidates due to their excellent learning ability, maturity as well as the strong adaptability. Not as in most advanced countries, little education on the first aid is currently offered in Chinese universities especially those non-medical institutes. To determine the feasibility of introducing the first-aid education into the school curriculum, here we reported the study on the efficacy of the one-day first-aid training at Wenzhou-Kean University (WKU), an American-Chinese joint education institute. The general survey was initially conducted among all the freshman (n = 620) students at WKU to identify their interests as well as demand for the first-aid education. Along with the one-day first aid workshop which included both the lecture and the operation sessions, the pre-post study was performed to evaluate the efficacy of the workshop. The first-aid knowledge and skills as well as social awareness were judged before and after the training among the participants (Pre: n = 95; Post: n = 85). Results demonstrated that more than 95% of students appreciate the importance of first-aid training in universities indicating an extremely high demand. More than 40% students prefer to have the first-aid education as part of their curriculum. It also revealed that students lack professional knowledge towards the key first-aid skills such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The pre-post efficacy study suggested that participants’ knowledge as well as skills have been significantly improved after the workshop. The correctness rate of objective questions for CPR was raised from 68.4% to almost 100%; For Heimlich method, the accuracy rate was elevated about 2.4 fold. We also surveyed the social awareness among the participants. The ratio of people who are willing to take a leading role in emergency rescue at the accidental site with the absence of medical professionals increased from 11.5% to 23.2%. To conclude, our study indicates that the one-day first-aid workshop not only significantly improved students’ skills and knowledge, but also raised their social awareness. Therefore, there is an urgent need to implement first-aid education into the curriculum of WKU and other Chinese Universities.

The green synthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) from biological waste, as well as their excellent antibacterial properties, is currently attracting significant research attention. This study synthesized AgNPs from different mango peel extract concentrations while investigating their characteristics and antibacterial properties. The results showed that the AgNPs were irregular with rod-like, spherical shapes and were detected in a range of 25 nm to 75 nm. The AgNPs displayed antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), showing a more significant impact when synthesized with 0.20 g/mL of mango peel extract. Therefore, the antibacterial effect of different diluted AgNP concentrations on the growth kinetic curves of E. coli and S. aureus after synthesis with 0.20 g/mL mango peel extract was analyzed. The results indicated that the AgNP antibacterial activity was higher against S. aureus than against E. coli, while the AgNP IC50 in these two strains was approximately 1.557 mg/mL and 2.335 mg/L, respectively. This research provides new insights regarding the use of postharvest mango byproducts and the potential for developing additional AgNP composite antibacterial materials for fruit and vegetable preservation.

Polygonized isosurfaces of anatomical structures commonly suffer from severe artifacts (e.g.,?noise and staircases), due to inhomogeneous binary volumes. Most state-of-the-art techniques can reduce these artifacts but inevitably ruining anatomical structures' morphology. Given an initial polygonization of an isosurface, we first eliminate these apparent staircases based on a context-aware Laplace filter, and then solve the morphology-preserving problem of anatomical structures as an optimization of the local spatial quadrics (LSQ) of fitted Bezier surfaces during mesh evolution. This results in a conceptually simple approach that provides a unified framework for not only handling artifacts, but also for enabling the morphology preservation of anatomical structures. We design an effective mesh smoothing framework that focuses on medical data.The LSQ gives an isosurface mesh a compact approximation to the underlying surface.We improve the staircase detection strategy by a novel cascaded operation.

While modern optical and laser 3D scanners can generate high accuracy mesh models, to largely avoid their introducing noise which prohibits practical applications still results in high cost. Thus, optimizing noisy meshes while preserving their geometric details is necessary for production, which still remains as challenging work. In this paper we propose a novel and efficient two-stage feature-preserving mesh denoising framework which can remove noise while preserving fine features of a surface mesh. We improve the capability of feature preservation of our vertex updating scheme by employing an extension of the quadric error metrics (QEM), which can track and minimize updating errors and hence well preserve the overall shape as well as detailed features of a mesh. We further leverage vertex normals to guide the vertex updating process, as the normal field of a mesh reflects the geometry of the underlying surface. In addition, to obtain a more accurate normal field to guide vertex updating, we develop an improved normal filter by integrating advantages of existing filters. Compared with traditional gradient descent based schemes, our method performs better on challenging regions with rich geometric features. Moreover, a local entropy metric is proposed to measure stability of a mesh and the effectiveness of vertex updating algorithms. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively remove noise from noisy meshes while preserving or recovering geometrical features of original objects.

Composition has a great impact upon the visual quality of a photograph. This chapter studies the composition in portrait paintings and proposes an algorithm to improve the composition of portrait photographs based on an example portrait painting. From a study of portrait painting, it can be shown that the placement of the face and the figure in portrait paintings is pose-related. Based on this observation, our algorithm improves the composition of a portrait photograph by referencing the placement of the face and the figure from an example portrait painting. The example portrait painting is selected based on the similarity of its figure pose to that of the input photograph. This similarity measure is modelled as a graph matching problem. Finally, space cropping is performed using an optimisation function to assign a similar location for each body part of the figure in the photograph with that in the example portrait painting. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. A user study shows that the proposed pose-based composition improvement is preferred more than the rule-based methods.

In this chapter, we examine the global chromatic and achromatic aspects of a painting. Their organisation is particular to each artist, with work by that artist showing consistency in its contrast organisation. This organisation forms a significant part of their ‘style’. Contrast can be broken down into its chromatic aspects (hue and saturation) and its achromatic aspect (lightness). We propose a method by which this style may be transferred from a painting to a photograph. The principle behind our method is to transfer the inherent structures of the contrast properties. This differentiates our method from a simple colour transfer, using which the hues of an image may be shifted, and in doing so damages the semantic properties of the photograph.

The lightness and saturation of an image may be subject to adjustment for the purpose of aesthetic improvement. Normally, this is in the form of a contrast adjustment. Such an adjustment would work upon the maximum, minimum and mean values of the lightness and/or saturation. The third value in the colour triumvirate is hue, but existing image improvement approaches rarely manipulate this value for the reason of its importance to the semantic reading of an image. Looking to painters for inspiration, we propose a method by which a region of contiguous hue in an image may be subject to one of two contrast adjustments: hue spread and hue compression. These are broadly analogous to adjustments of the relative form of Itten’s contrast of temperature. We develop a tool, which employs superpixels, using which a user may segment regions of similar hue, at varying scales. This allows the user to quickly select semantically related regions. These local regions also provide the basic region of operation for three proposed hue operations: (1) hue spread, (2) hue compression and (3) hue shift. We show that when combined with superpixel segmentation, these operations are capable of increasing, decreasing and changing regions of local hue contrast in a manner that is aesthetically agreeable. We demonstrate our framework on a variety of input images and discuss its evaluation from the feedback of several expert users.

In the previous chapter, colour contrast was examined as phenomena within the art domain. In this chapter, we review computational models that might be employed to define these phenomena. In the engineering domain, there is not a standard measurement model of lightness, saturation or hue contrast. All existing models would probably be better regarded as application tools rather than as descriptions of basic visual function. Colour contrast is broadly understood as being one of two things: a relationship between two things (i.e. simple contrast) or the variance of a property within a single thing (i.e. complex contrast).

Within a painting, two forms of geometry can be identified: 2D and 3D. 2D geometry is defined by such things as the corner, the centre, the edge and the middle. 3D geometry is defined as simplified planes, such as foreground, middle ground and background and is particularly important in enhancing the depth of a landscape painting. These geometries function as structural scaffolding around which the painter builds their contrasts. The composition of a painting is covered by its 2D geometry. We examine the rule of thirds which, through an examination of its history, is shown to be more complex and interesting than its current form. We also look at the placement of the region of interest and of the horizon and find them to be governed by simple principles. A photographer’s vignette is simple: a darkening of the edges and corners, and perhaps also a lightening of the centre. In contrast, a painter’s vignette is complex and involves interplay between the 2D and 3D geometries of the painting.

Quantifying the style of visual art has long been a challenging yet largely overlooked problem. Of key importance in the style of a painting is the manner in which the artist has employed hue. We propose a means to quantify global hue contrast as two values: hue variety and hue antagonism. These were derived from Johannes Itten’s work on colour contrast. Using our approach, the hue contrast of a single image can be visually expressed as a single point in a plot. For this reason, the approach is particularly suitable for the comparative analysis of groups of artworks, such as those by two or more artists or an artist at different times in their career. We describe two case studies of such an analysis, and the results agree with observations. We also include a user study that supports the validity of our proposed approach.

In order to understand a phenomenon, one must be able to navigate it: to name its parts and to know its up from its down. Colour is a great challenge in this respect, being dimensionally very complex. This chapter examines the ways in which colour is understood in the visual art domain. Of particular focus is contrast and the many forms that it takes. Firstly, we examine RYB, HSL and other colour spaces and describe the role that they played in our work. We also detail the work of Johannes Itten (1888-1967) whose writings on colour contrast informed a lot of our research. A painter’s colour-thinking is high-level, addressing the structure-based contrast properties of a painting. This structure takes many forms: per region, per object, as a whole across the entire painting, between regions and objects, etc. These we describe and exemplify. We also address the role that they played in our research. The so-called colour harmony describes as high-level principles the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colour contrasts. We detail historical and contemporary ideas on the subject, much of which has its roots in the work of early twentieth-century mystics. Using this work as a starting point, and the work of the Impressionist painters as reference, we offer our own simple rules of hue harmony.

While contemporary paintings come in every conceivable form, pre-modern paintings were understood in terms of only five categories or ‘genres’, with some genres being more important than others. These genres, in descending order of importance, were: history painting (which were large multifigure compositions addressing significant topics), portrait, genre, landscape and still life. This book examines two of those genres: the landscape and the portrait. Paintings in general are supremely organised things, the function of this organisation being to create a memorable visual impact. For landscapes, this impact is achieved largely through accentuating the illusion of depth that they convey. For portraits, the face and the figure are of prime importance. This chapter introduces the histories of these genres and examines them for their functional differences.

This chapter proposes a method to manipulate the regional contrast in snapshot style portrait photographs by using pre-modern portrait paintings as aesthetic examples: to improve the visual appeal and focus of attention of the photographs. The example portrait painting is selected based on a comparison of the existing contrast properties of the painting and those of the photograph. The contrast organisation in the selected example painting is transferred to the photograph by mapping the inter- and intra-regional contrast values of the regions, such as the face and skin areas of the foreground figure, the non-face/skin part of the foreground and the background region. A novel piecewise nonlinear transformation curve is used to achieve this contrast mapping. Finally, the transition boundary between regions is smoothed to achieve the final results. Experimental results demonstrate that, by using this proposed method, the visual appeal of portrait photographs is effectively improved and the face and the figure become more salient.