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Key message: A complete set of monosomic alien addition lines of Radish-Brassica oleracea exhibiting extensive variations was generated and well characterized for their chromosome behaviors and phenotypic characteristics. Monosomic alien addition lines (MAALs) are developed through interspecific hybridization, where an alien chromosome from a relative species is introduced into the genome of the recipient plant, serving as valuable genetic resources. In this study, an allotetraploid Raphanobrassica (RRCC, 2n = 36) was created from the interspecific hybridization between radish (Raphanus sativus, RR, 2n = 18) and Brassica oleracea (CC, 2n = 18). Subsequently, this Raphanobrassica was repeatedly backcrossed with radish to generate an aneuploid population. The identification of a complete set of MAALs (RR + 1C1−9, 2n = 19) was achieved using PCR with C chromosome-specific markers and fluorescence in situ hybridization, revealing extensive morphological variations, particularly in the shape and size of the fleshy root. A complete set of MAALs was achieved with only one chromosome from 1 to 9 linkage groups of the C genome. Compared with parental radish, most of the MAALs showed a noticeable delay in root swelling, particularly the RR-C6 that did not exhibit obvious root swelling throughout its entire growth stage. Cytological analysis indicated that the MAAL lines containing chromosome C8 exhibited the highest frequency of intergenomic chromosome pairings. Additionally, some introgressive radish lines derived from MAALs displayed a preference toward the donor B. oleracea or over-parent heterosis for some certain nutritional components. Overall, these MAALs serve as valuable germplasm for the genetic enhancement of radish and provide insights into the interactions between the R genome and C chromosomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flue-cured tobacco (FCT) can be classified into upper (B), middle (C), and lower (X) parts based on characteristics such as the FCT's main veins, leaf shape, color, and thickness. Accurately measuring the geometric parameters of the main veins is crucial for identifying the different parts. However, this task has proven to be challenging. Therefore, segmenting the main veins is a prerequisite to reducing calculation errors and improving the precision of part identification. To obtain enough semantic information and improve segmentation accuracy, we propose a fine segmentation model (MSHF-Net) of FCT's main veins based on multi-level-scale features of hybrid fusion. Firstly, MobileNetV2 with a dilated convolution layer (DMobileNetV2) is selected as the backbone network for feature extraction, which optimizes training and inference speed to minimize computing costs. Subsequently, Hybrid Fusion Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (HFASPP) is designed to be the strengthened backbone module for capturing more high-level semantic information, effectively preventing intermittent segmentation of some main veins. Additionally, considering the low proportion of main vein targets in the original image, the double shallow feature branches (DSFBS) are included to obtain more low-level semantic information. Finally, a channel attention mechanism (ECANet) is added to enhance useful information and eliminate redundant information after the hybrid fusion of high-low-level semantic information, preventing mis-segmentation of regions. Experimental validation demonstrates the efficiency of the MSHF-Net, with parameters of only 7.92 M, thus ensuring minimal computational requirements. The model achieves an impressive mean intersection over union (MIoU) of 85.57% and mean pixel accuracy (mPA) of 93.10% on a diverse test set of FCT parts. When applied to segment main veins in a 2296 × 1548 × 3 tobacco image, the model takes just over 0.1 s. It is noteworthy that none of the 291 randomly segmented tobacco leaf main veins show mis-segmentation, highlighting the model's robustness and practical applicability in various scenarios. These results emphasize the superior segmentation performance of the proposed model, establishing a crucial foundation for accurately discriminating FCT parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at the controllability of acoustically manipulated non-contact aggregation of bi-particle. Based on the acoustic wave radiation model of the transducer and the acoustic wave interference theory, the mathematical model between the spatial levitation point and the phase of the phased array ultrasonic array unit is established. A double-sided phased array test system was developed and the phase calculation algorithm for independently manipulating bi-particle was optimized. The algorithm is capable of independently distributing the energy applied to each levitation point. Through simulation and experiment, the horizontally aggregation characteristics of two levitated particles are investigated, and a interesting relationship between particles aggregation and standing wave phase difference is revealed, which follows the law of "attraction in the same phase but repulsion in the opposite phase". By adjusting the tilt angle of the standing wave acoustic trap, the critical distance when particles to accelerate and collision is sharply reduced from 1.5λ to 0.5λ, which provides a new perspective and potential application path for acoustic manipulation technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low-carbon transformation is a broad and profound systemic change that will inevitably impact many areas of the urban environment, economy, and social system. We evaluated the impact of China's ongoing "low-carbon pilot policy" on urban housing prices as a "quasi-natural experiment." Existing research findings and hedonic theory predictions suggest that the low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) policy is increasing urban housing prices through air quality improvements. However, this study contradicts these speculations based on the situation in China. This study employed the analytical framework of staggered difference-in-differences (DID), which revealed that the LCCP policy had generally reduced housing prices; the implementation of the policy had led to an average decrease of 6.2% in housing prices in pilot cities, compared to non-pilot cities. The LCCP policy affected housing prices by influencing both the "demand side" and "supply side" of housing. In terms of the demand side, the policy significantly reduced the level of urban air pollution but did not impact housing prices. Instead, it negatively affected housing prices by lowering labor wages. In terms of the supply side, housing prices were negatively affected, mainly by increasing the cost of emission reduction of real estate enterprises, which impacted the original longstanding housing production process. Additionally, there were significant differences in the impact of the LCCP policy on housing prices in cities across different geographical locations and different tiers of cities. This study suggests important policy insights for achieving stable market housing prices and promoting high-quality urban development in the process of low-carbon transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key message: ZmWRKY64 positively regulates Arabidopsis and maize Cd stress through modulating Cd uptake, translocation, and ROS scavenging genes expression. Cadmium (Cd) is a highly toxic heavy metal with severe impacts on crops growth and development. The WRKY transcription factor is a significant regulator influencing plant stress response. Nevertheless, the function of the WRKY protein in maize Cd stress response remains unclear. Here, we identified a maize WRKY gene, ZmWRKY64, the expression of which was enhanced in maize roots and leaves under Cd stress. ZmWRKY64 was localized in the nucleus and displayed transcriptional activity in yeast. Heterologous expression of ZmWRKY64 in Arabidopsis diminished Cd accumulation in plants by negatively regulating the expression of AtIRT1, AtZIP1, AtHMA2, AtNRAMP3, and AtNRAMP4, which are involved in Cd uptake and transport, resulting in Cd stress tolerance. Knockdown of ZmWRKY64 in maize led to excessive Cd accumulation in leaf cells and in the cytosol of the root cells, resulting in a Cd hypersensitive phenotype. Further analysis confirmed that ZmWRKY64 positively regulated ZmABCC4, ZmHMA3, ZmNRAMP5, ZmPIN2, ZmABCG51, ZmABCB13/32, and ZmABCB10, which may influence Cd translocation and auxin transport, thus mitigating Cd toxicity in maize. Moreover, ZmWRKY64 could directly enhance the transcription of ZmSRG7, a reported key gene regulating reactive oxygen species homeostasis under abiotic stress. Our results indicate that ZmWRKY64 is important in maize Cd stress response. This work provides new insights into the WRKY transcription factor regulatory mechanism under a Cd-polluted environment and may lead to the genetic improvement of Cd tolerance in maize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key message: Cadmium-induced TaWAK20 regulates the cadmium stress response by phosphorylating TaSPL5 in wheat. Receptor-like kinases (RLKs) are thought to play important roles in responses to abiotic stresses in plants. In this study, we identified a cadmium (Cd)-induced RLK in wheat, TaWAK20, which is a positive regulator of the Cd stress response. TaWAK20 is specifically expressed in root tissue. Overexpression of TaWAK20 significantly improved the tolerance of Cd stress in wheat and decreased Cd accumulation in wheat plants by regulating reactive oxygen species production and scavenging. Yeast one-hybrid assays, electrophoretic mobility shift assays, and firefly luciferase activity analyses demonstrated that the TaWAK20 promoter was bound by the TabHLH35 transcription factor. TaWAK20 interacted with and phosphorylated squamosa promoter binding protein-like 5 (TaSPL5). Furthermore, phosphorylation of TaSPL5 increased its DNA-binding activity. In addition, Arabidopsis-expressing phosphorylated TaSPL5 exhibited greater Cd tolerance than Arabidopsis-expressing unphosphorylated TaSPL5. Taken together, these data identify a TabHLH35–TaWAK20–TaSPL5 module that regulates Cd stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In wheat, TaMYC8 is a negative regulator of cadmium (Cd)-responsive ethylene signaling. In this study, we functionally characterized TabHLH094, a basic helix–loop–helix (bHLH) transcription factor (TF) that inhibits the transcriptional activity of TaMYC8. The TabHLH094 protein was found in the nucleus of tobacco epidermal cells and exhibited transcriptional activation activity. Real-time quantitative PCR (RT–qPCR) indicated that TabHLH094 exhibited root-specific, Cd-responsive expression in wheat seedlings. Overexpression of TabHLH094 enhanced the tolerance of wheat seedlings to Cd exposure. The protein–protein interaction between TabHLH094 and TaMYC8 was verified by glutathione S-transferase (GST) pulldown, coimmunoprecipitation (Co–IP), yeast two-hybrid (Y2H), and bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) analyses. TabHLH094 was found to reduce the ability of TaMYC8 to bind to the TaERF6 promoter. Furthermore, TabHLH094 could also reduce aminocyclopropanecarboxylate oxidase (ACO) and ACC synthase (ACS) activities, both of which are necessary for ethylene biosynthesis. Taken together, these results indicate that TabHLH094 mediates Cd tolerance by regulating the transcriptional activity of TaMYC8 and decreasing ethylene production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lignocellulose in maize straw includes cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, and the degradation of lignocellulose is a complex process in which multiple enzymes are jointly involved. In exploring the co-degradation of a certain substrate by multiple enzymes, different enzymes are combined freely for the achievement of the effective synergism. Additionally, some organic acids and small molecule aromatic compounds can also increase the enzymatic activity of lignin enzymes and improve the degradation rate of lignin. In this study, manganese peroxidase (MnP) from Irpex lacteus (I. lacteus) was heterologously expressed in food-grade Schizosaccharomyces pombe (S. pombe). The multiple enzymes co-fermentation conditions were initially screened by orthogonal tests: 0.5% CaCl2, 1% 10,000 U/g Laccase (Lac), 0.3% MnSO4, and 0.4% glucose oxidase (GOD). It was showed that the lignin degradation rate could reach 65.85% after 3 days of synergistic degradation with the addition of 0.02% Tween-80, 0.5 mM oxalic acid. This indicates that oxalic acid has a promoting effect on the activity of MnP, and the promoting effect is more significant when Tween-80 is complexed with oxalic acid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atom-transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) is a well-known technique for controlled polymer synthesis. However, the ATRP usually employed toxic heavy metal ionas as the catalyst and was susceptible to molecular oxygen, which made it should be conducted under strictly anoxic condition. Conducting ATRP under ambient and biocompatible conditions is the major challenge. In this study, cytochrome C was explored as an efficient biocatalyst for ATRP under biocompatible conditions. The cytochrome C catalyzed ATRP showed a relatively low polymer dispersity index of 1.19. More interestingly, the cytochrome C catalyzed ATRP showed superior oxygen resistance as it could be performed under aerobic conditions with high dissolved oxygen level. Further analysis suggested that the Fe(II) embed in the cytochrome C might serve as the catalytic center and methyl radical was responsible for the ATRP catalysis. This work explored new biocompatible catalyst for aerobic ATRP, which might open new dimension for practical ATRP and application of cytochrome C protein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabis paniculata Franch (Brassicaceae) has been widely used for the phytoremediation of heavy mental, owing to its hyper tolerance of extreme Pb, Zn, and Cd concentrations. However, studies on its genome or plastid genome are scarce. In the present study, we obtained the complete chloroplast (cp) genome of A. paniculata via de novo assembly through the integration of Illumina reads and PacBio subreads. The cp genome presents a typical quadripartite cycle with a length of 153,541 bp, and contains 111 unigenes, with 79 protein-coding genes, 28 tRNAs and 4 rRNAs. Codon usage analysis showed that the codons for leucine were the most frequent codons and preferentially ended with A/U. Synonymous (Ks) and non-synonymous (Ka) substitution rate analysis indicated that the unigenes, ndhF and rpoC2, related to "NADH-dehydrogenase" and "RNA polymerase" respectively, underwent the lowest purifying selection pressure. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that Arabis flagellosa and A. hirsuta are more similar to each other than to A. paniculata, and Arabis is the closest relative of Draba among all Brassicaceae genera. These findings provide valuable information for the optimal exploitation of this model species as a heavy-metal hyperaccumulator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabis paniculata has been reported as a hyperaccumulator and functions in cadmium (Cd) tolerance and accumulation. However, the genes involved in Cd stress resistance in A. paniculata are still unknown. In this work, genes of the natural resistance-associated macrophage proteins (NRAMPs) were characterized in A. paniculata, and their evolutionary relationship and expression patterns were analysed. Expression profiles indicated that ApNRAMPs showed large differences in response to Cd stress. It was highly induced by Cd in root and shoot tissues. To investigate the function of ApNRAMP4 under Cd stress, ApNRAMP4 was cloned and expressed in yeast and Arabidopsis. The results indicated that yeast and Arabidopsis expressing ApNRAMP4 showed normal growth under Cd stress. In addition, transgenic yeast and Arabidopsis showed the ability to concentrate Cd. Under 20 μM CdCl2, Cd concentrations in wild type (WT) and transgenic yeast were 3.11 and 5.92 mg/kg, respectively. Cd concentrations in root tissues of WT and transgenic Arabidopsis were 0.18 and 0.54 mg/kg, respectively. In shoot tissues of WT and transgenic Arabidopsis, Cd concentrations were 0.13 and 0.49 mg/kg, respectively. This report provides genomic information on hyperaccumulator A. paniculata. In addition, the present work identified key NRAMP genes that may serve as resources for heavy metal phytoremediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface quality inspection and control are extremely important for electronic manufacturing. The use of machine vision technology to automatically detect the defects of products has become an indispensable means for better quality control. A machine vision-based surface quality inspection system is usually composed of two processes: image acquisition and automatic defect detection. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach for the defect detection of Copper Clad Laminate (CCL) images acquired from an industrial CCL production line. In the proposed approach, a new convolutional neural network (CNN) that realizes fast defect detection while maintaining high accuracy is designed. Our proposed approach makes four contributions. First, we introduce the depthwise separable convolution to reduce the calculation time. Second, we improve the squeeze-and-excitation block to improve network performance. Third, we introduce the squeeze-and-expand mechanism to reduce the computation cost. Fourth, we employ a smoother activation function (Mish) to allow improved information flow. The proposed network is compared with the benchmark CNNs (including Inception, ResNet and MobileNet). The experimental results show that compared with the benchmark networks, our proposed network has achieved the best results regarding the accuracy and suboptimal results in terms of the speed compared with the benchmark networks. Therefore, our proposed method has been integrated into an industrial CCL production line as a guideline for online defective product rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperthermophilic Thermotoga spp. are excellent candidates for the biosynthesis of cellulosic ethanol producing strains because they can grow optimally at 80 °C with ability to degrade and utilize cellulosic biomass. In T. neapolitana (Tne), a putative iron-containing alcohol dehydrogenase was, for the first time, revealed to be a bifunctional aldehyde/alcohol dehydrogenase (Fe-AAdh) that catalyzed both reactions from acetyl-coenzyme A (ac-CoA) to acetaldehyde (ac-ald), and from ac-ald to ethanol, while the putative aldehyde dehydrogenase (Aldh) exhibited only CoA-independent activity that oxidizes ac-ald to acetic acid. The biochemical properties of Fe-AAdh were characterized, and bioinformatics were analyzed. Fe-AAdh exhibited the highest activities for the reductions of ac-CoA and acetaldehyde at 80–85 °C, pH 7.54, and had a 1-h half-life at about 92 °C. The Fe-AAdh gene is highly conserved in Thermotoga spp., Pyrococcus furiosus and Thermococcus kodakarensis, indicating the existence of a fermentation pathway from ac-CoA to ethanol via acetaldehyde as the intermediate in hyperthermophiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this population-based retrospective study, we aimed to investigate the association between age at diagnosis and prognosis of pancreatic cancer (PC) patients using data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and the End Results database. Different factors for stratification, like race, sex, year of diagnosis, pathological grade, American Joint Committee on Cancer stage, historic stage, and tumour location, were included to compare the survival rates of patients of different age groups, and the five-year survival rate was calculated. Multivariate analysis using Cox regression was performed to control for confounder bias, and the hazard ratio was calculated. In total, 126,066 patients were enrolled in this study. The five-year PC-specific survival of patients aged 20–40 years was almost three times that of patients aged >40 years. Stratified by race, sex, year of diagnosis, pathological grade, clinical stage, and tumour location, a descending trend of survival was observed with an increase in age. On multivariate analysis, the mortality risk of PC patients aged 40–80 years was twice that of patients aged <40 years; however, patients aged >80 years had a mortality risk three times that of patients aged <40 years. The survival rate of PC patients has improved in the last few decades. Age at diagnosis is a significant and negative prognostic factor for PC, and patients diagnosed at a relatively earlier stage had the best survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabinofuranosidase plays an essential role in the process of hydrolysis of arabinoxylan (AX). Thermostable, versatile, and efficient arabinofuranosidase is thus of great interest for the biorefinery industry. A GH51 arabinofuranosidase, Abf51, from Hungateiclostridium clariflavum DSM 19732 was heterogeneously expressed in Escherichia coli. Abf51 was found to have an optimal pH and temperature of 6.5 and 60 °C, respectively, with very high thermostability. At the optimal working temperature (60 °C), Abf51 retained over 90% activity after a 2-day incubation and over 60% activity after a 6-day incubation. Abf51 could effectively remove the arabinofuranosyls from three kinds of AX oligosaccharides [23-α-l-arabinofuranosyl-xylotriose (A2XX), 32-α-l-arabinofuranosyl-xylobiose (A3X), and 2333-di-α-l-arabinofuranosyl-xylotriose (A2 + 3XX)], which characterized as either single substitution or double substitution by arabinofuranosyls on terminal xylopyranosyl units. The maximal catalytic efficiency (Kcat/Km) was observed using p-nitrophenyl-α-l-arabinofuranoside (pNPAF) as a substrate (205.0 s−1 mM−1), followed by using A3X (22.8 s−1 mM−1), A2XX (6.9 s−1 mM−1), and A2 + 3XX (0.5 s−1 mM−1) as substrates. Moreover, the presence of Abf51 significantly stimulated the saccharification level of AX (18.5 g L−1) up to six times along with a β-xylanase as well as a β-xylosidase. Interestingly, in our survey of top thermostable arabinofuranosidases, most members were found from GH51, probably due to their owning of (β/α)8-barrel architectures. Our results suggested the great importance of GH51s as candidates for thermostable, versatile, and efficient arabinofuranosidases toward industry application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the 2014 forest resource second-class investigation data and DEM data of Yabuli forest park, we used the GIS technology and Fragstats4.2 analysis software, and adopted the 2-class classification system including land-use type and dominant tree species to analyze the composition elements, patch characteristics and spatial distribution of landscapes in research area. The results are as follows:forest land, accounting for 74.5% of the total area, is the largest landscape type, followed by agricultural land which takes 11.49% of the total area; Broad leaf mixed forest (24.76%), linden forest. (17.57%), larch forest (11.83%), A. mono Maxim (11.74%) and birch (9.89%) are main landscape types in forest land, and the patches are in concentrated distribution. The distribution of the components of each landscape are affected obviously by altitude, exposure and gradient. Great differences also exist in their complexity, adjacency, reunion and fragmentation. The interference of human activities and people's long-term forest management also have a great impact on the spatial distribution of forest landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-strain mixed fermentation can provide a relatively complete lignocellulosic enzyme system compared with single-strain fermentation. This study was firstly to screen strains which have a strong ability to hydrolyse rice straw (RS) enzymatically and enrich true protein (TP). Then, the conditions in the process of SSF, including the optimum inoculum size of mixed strains, inoculation ratio, and different inoculation time of N. crassa 14-8, were optimized. The experimental results showed that the highest TP content could be obtained by using N. crassa 14-8, C. utilis, and P. chrysosporium as mixed strains, and 5 mM Mn2+ and 50 mM veratryl alcohol were used as inducers of lignin peroxidase (LiP) to improve the efficiency of enzymatic hydrolysis. When N. crassa 14-8 was inoculated 1 day later than P. chrysosporium, the total inoculum size was 10%, and the optimum ratio of N. crassa 14-8 to P. chrysosporium was 1:2, the maximum TP yield (8.89%) was obtained, with 123.37% of its increase rate. This work proposed a technique with potential application in large-scale feedstuff protein conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glutamine:fructose-6-phosphate aminotransferase (GFAT) catalyzes the formation of glucosamine-6-phosphate, and its gene is one of the genes essential for microbes. Using the GFAT-encoding gene can prevent the use of a drug-resistant gene as a selection marker in a bacterial system. Another unique property of the GFAT selection marker is that no particular compound is prohibited or required for creating a selective stress for a yeast. Filamentous fungi are major producers of industrial enzymes. However, there has been no report on the construction and application of the GFAT gene as a selection marker in filamentous fungi. To develop a new selection marker, the GFAT-encoding gene gfaA was deleted from the genome of the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans, and the gfat gene of the straw mushroom Volvariella volvacea was used as the selection marker to mediate the transformation and overexpression of a thermostable bacterial laccase in A. nidulans. The GFAT-deficient strain A. nidulans ∆gfaA was not able to grow in the culture medium containing 0.5% yeast extract unless about 20 mM glucosamine was used to supplement to the medium. The gfat gene was amplified and inserted into the integration vector pAL5 and autonomous replication vector Prg3-AMA1-NotI for A. nidulans to generate the gfat vectors pALG and pAMAG, respectively. Using these gfat vectors, the laccase gene lcs from a hyperthermophilic bacterium was overexpressed intra- and extracellularly in A. nidulans ∆gfaA. Therefore, recombinant filamentous fungi can be constructed with gfat vectors, which can be maintained stably in host cells with the naturally occurred selective stress of a medium, forage, pulp, animal gut, wastewater, or soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel context-driven approach to image-based crack detection for automated inspection of aircraft surface and subsurface defects. In contrast to existing image-based crack detection methods, which rely mostly on low-level image processing and data-driven methods, our method explicitly incorporates multiple high-level context into low-level processing. We present two classes of context: geometric/structural context and physical context. We formulate mathematically a sparse decomposition problem to incorporate the context and apply robust principal component analysis to decompose typical repetitive rivet regions into a normal component and a sparse component. Cracks are detected in the sparse component. By applying the proposed context-driven approach to coated and uncoated test specimens, we achieve significant reduction in false detections compared to the approach without exploiting context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the existence and stability of multi-peak solitons in parity-time-symmetric Bessel optical lattices with defects in nonlinear media. The results demonstrate that there always exists a critical propagation constant μ for the existence of multi-peak solitons regardless of whether the nonlinearity is self-focusing or self-defocusing. In self-focusing media, multi-peak solitons exist when the propagation constant μ > μ . In the self-defocusing case, solitons exist only when μ < μ . Only low-power solitons can propagate stably when random noise perturbations are present. Positive defects help stabilize the propagation of multi-peak solitons when the nonlinearity is self-focusing. When the nonlinearity is self-defocusing, however, multi-peak solitons in negative defects have wider stable regions than those in positive defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a novel face hallucination algorithm to synthesize a high-resolution face image from several low-resolution input face images. Face hallucination normally uses two models: a global parametric model which synthesizes the global face shapes from eigenfaces, and a local parametric model which enhances the local high frequency details. We follow a similar process to develop a robust face hallucination algorithm. First, we obtain eigenfaces from a number of low resolution face images segmented from a video sequence using a face tracking algorithm. Then we compute the difference between an interpolated low-resolution face and a mean face, and use this difference as the query to retrieve an approximate sparse eigenface representation. The eigenfaces are combined using the coefficients obtained from the sparse representation and added into the interpolated low-resolution face. In this way, the global shape of the interpolated low resolution face can be successfully enhanced. Second, we improve the example-based super-resolution method for local high frequency information enhancement. Our proposed algorithm uses the Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN) search method to find a number of nearest neighbors for a stack of queries, instead of finding the exact match for each low frequency patch. Median filtering is used to remove the noise from the nearest neighbors in order to enhance the signal. Our proposed algorithm uses a sparse representation and the ANN method to enhance both global face shape and local high frequency information while greatly improving the processing speed, as confirmed empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe shares various important properties with higher eukaryotes and is now considered a useful host for elevated production of mammalian proteins for medicinal applications. The full-length nmt1 promoter has been widely used as a strong promoter in S. pombe expression system. In the present study, the promoters of the eno101 and gpd3 genes in S. pombe were identified as strong constitutive promoters. For convenient applications in the plasmids of S. pombe, these promoters were refined to 276-bp eno and 273-bp gpd promoters by deleting undesired sequences and examining the expression of reporter genes including lacZ and xynA. Both the refined eno and gpd promoters provided approximately 1.5-fold higher expression of LacZ than nmt1 promoter. Furthermore, gene expression under the control of the eno or gpd promoter was not repressed by the components of YES medium while nmt1 promoter was inhibited by thiamine in yeast extract. Therefore, both eno and gpd promoters offer opportunities for efficient production of recombinant proteins by S. pombe in high cell-density fermentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CCAAT/enhancer binding protein delta (C/EBPδ), an important transcriptional factor, regulates cell growth, differentiation and adipogenesis in humans and mice. However, we lack of directive information on the effects of C/EBPδ gene in bovine cells. In the present study, we cloned the CDS areas of bovine C/EBPδ gene and predicted its sequence characteristics. Moreover, we constructed the recombinant adenovirus plasmids of bovine C/EBPδ gene and harvested the subsequent adenoviruses to infect bovine primary fibroblasts. Oil Red O staining results showed lipid droplets accumulated gradually in the adenoviruses treated fibroblasts. Time course real-time PCR results indicated that over-expression of exogenous C/EBPδ regulated the mRNA expression levels of some key adipogenic genes, herein, activated the C/EBPα expression, increased lipoprotein lipase and fatty acid binding protein 4 mRNA expression levels, whereas inhibited leptin receptor gene. In conclusion, the present study demonstrates that the elevated C/EBPδ can induce the adipogenesis in the fibroblasts of cattle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) in lung adenocarcinoma cell A549, and to explore the value of STAT3 on early diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma. Methods: The expression of CEA, STAT3 mRNA and it's protein in human lung adenocarcinoma cell A549 and normal human lung cells MRC-5 were tested by immunohistochemistry staining (PV) and quantitative real time fluorescent PCR. The correlation between STAT3 and CEA in human lung adenocarcinoma cell A549 was analyzed. Results: The protein and mRNA levels of STAT3, CEA in lung adenocarcinoma cell A549 were apparently higher than those in normal human lung cells MRC-5. The levels of STAT3 mRNA and it's protein were positively correlated with CEA in lung adenocarcinoma cell A549. Conclusion: STAT3 have the same value in diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog or heavy rain greatly reduce the visual quality of outdoor surveillance videos. Video quality enhancement can improve the visual quality of surveillance videos providing clearer images with more details to better meet human perception needs and also improve video analytics performance. Existing work in this area mainly focuses on the quality enhancement for high-resolution videos or still images, but few algorithms are developed for enhancing surveillance videos, which normally have low resolution, high noises and compression artifacts. In addition, for snow or rain conditions, the image quality of near-field view is degraded by the obscuration of apparent snowflakes or raindrops, while the quality of far-field view is degraded by the obscuration of fog-like snowflakes or raindrops. Very few video quality enhancement algorithms have been developed to handle both problems. In this paper, we propose a novel video quality enhancement algorithm for see-through snow, fog or heavy rain. Our algorithm not only improves human visual perception experiences for video surveillance, but also reveal more video contents for better video content analyses. The proposed algorithm handles both near-field and far-field snow/rain effects by proposed a two-step approach: (1) the near-field enhancement algorithm identifies obscuration pixels by snow or rain in the near-field view and removes these pixels as snowflakes or raindrops; different from state-of-the-art methods, our proposed algorithm in this step can detect snowflakes on foreground objects or background, and apply different methods to fill in the removed regions. (2) The far-field enhancement algorithm restores the image's contrast information not only to reveal more details in the far-field view, but also to enhance the overall image's quality; in this step, the proposed algorithm adaptively enhances the global and local contrast, which is inspired on the human visual system, and accounts for the perceptual sensitivity to noises, compression artifacts, and the texture of image content. From our extensive testing, the proposed approach significantly improves the visual quality of surveillance videos by removing snow/fog/rain effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chemical resistances of float-glasses subjected to different electric field strength and temperature were investigated. It is indicated that the chemical resistance increases after the float-glasses are annealed with suitable temperature and electric field strength. It is also observed that the Na+ content varies obviously under the conditions of 570 °, 1500 V/cm and 10 min, implying that the application of thermal/electric field improves the chemical resistance of float-glass online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel unsupervised learning method for human action categories. A video sequence is represented as a collection of spatial-temporal words by extracting space-time interest points. The algorithm automatically learns the probability distributions of the spatial-temporal words and the intermediate topics corresponding to human action categories. This is achieved by using latent topic models such as the probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Our approach can handle noisy feature points arisen from dynamic background and moving cameras due to the application of the probabilistic models. Given a novel video sequence, the algorithm can categorize and localize the human action(s) contained in the video. We test our algorithm on three challenging datasets: the KTH human motion dataset, the Weizmann human action dataset, and a recent dataset of figure skating actions. Our results reflect the promise of such a simple approach. In addition, our algorithm can recognize and localize multiple actions in long and complex video sequences containing multiple motions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dimensionality reduction has recently been extensively studied for computer vision applications. We present a novel multilinear algebra based approach to reduced dimensionality representation of multidimensional data, such as image ensembles, video sequences and volume data. Before reducing the dimensionality we do not convert it into a vector as is done by traditional dimensionality reduction techniques like PCA. Our approach works directly on the multidimensional form of the data (matrix in 2D and tensor in higher dimensions) to yield what we call a Datum-as-Is representation. This helps exploit spatio-temporal redundancies with less information loss than image-as-vector methods. An efficient rank-R tensor approximation algorithm is presented to approximate higher-order tensors. We show that rank-R tensor approximation using Datum-as-Is representation generalizes many existing approaches that use image-as-matrix representation, such as generalized low rank approximation of matrices (GLRAM) (Ye, Y. in Mach. Learn. 61:167–191, ), rank-one decomposition of matrices (RODM) (Shashua, A., Levin, A. in CVPR’01: Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE computer society conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, p. 42, ) and rank-one decomposition of tensors (RODT) (Wang, H., Ahuja, N. in ICPR ’04: ICPR ’04: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on pattern recognition (ICPR’04), vol. 1, pp. 44–47, ). Our approach yields the most compact data representation among all known image-as-matrix methods. In addition, we propose another rank-R tensor approximation algorithm based on slice projection of third-order tensors, which needs fewer iterations for convergence for the important special case of 2D image ensembles, e.g., video. We evaluated the performance of our approach vs. other approaches on a number of datasets with the following two main results. First, for a fixed compression ratio, the proposed algorithm yields the best representation of image ensembles visually as well as in the least squares sense. Second, proposed representation gives the best performance for object classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the construction of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cDNAs into ZAP cDNA expression library. Positive clones; Number of genes of HCC-associated tumor antigens identified; RNA transcription and splicing p-associated molecules; Protein metabolism-associated molecules; Energy synthesis-associated molecules; Cell adhesion molecules.