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Objective To establish a rapid screening method for in vitro site-directed mutants or CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knock-in mutants, and to improve mutant screening efficiency and reduce experimental costs. Methods Polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) were carried out with primers designed with the last one, two, and three nucleotides in the 3' end matching the mutated DNA sequences for the constructed in vitro site-directed mutants or CRISPR/Cas9-mediated knock-in mutants, and agarose gel electrophoresis was used to detect specific amplification bands. Results PCR using specific mutation screening primers effectively amplified DNA bands in correct mutants but failed in unsuccessfully mutated samples. The presence of DNA amplification bands revealed by agarose gel electrophoresis confirmed the successful screening for desired mutants. Conclusion The rapid screening method for mutants introduced in this study can easily and quickly identify correct mutants, which significantly simplifies the identification process of mutations, and thereby reduces experimental costs and improves work efficiency.

In the current study, the incorporation of Ba(Sn0.70Nb0.24)O3 (BSN) effectively modifies the phase boundary of the 0.8(Bi0.50Na0.50)TiO3‐0.2(Bi0.50K0.50)TiO3 (BNKT) lead‐free ceramic material, inducing enhanced electrostrain properties at room temperature, particularly results in a "bud‐like" strain profile without negative strain. A comprehensive investigation has been conducted into the microstructure, electrical properties, and electrostrain properties of the above‐mentioned ceramics. The addition of BSN was observed to be well incorporated into the BNKT crystal structure, forming a single perovskite structure according to the X‐ray diffraction pattern. With the increase in BSN solid solution content, the temperature at which the transition from ferroelectric to the relaxor phase occurs shifted from 88.1°C to beneath room temperature (30°C). Specifically, the BNKT‐0.0075BSN ceramic demonstrated a positive strain response of 0.459% along with a large signal piezoelectric coefficient (d33*) of 643 pm/V. Additionally, the strain hysteresis of the BNKT‐0.0175BSN ceramics was only about 3% at 120°C. These experimental findings suggest that BNKT‐xBSN ceramics could be strong contenders for actuators and sensors, presenting promising opportunities for lead‐free ceramic actuator applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drivable road segmentation aims to sense the surrounding environment to keep vehicles within safe road boundaries, which is fundamental in Advance Driver-Assistance Systems (ADASs). Existing deep learning-based supervised methods are able to achieve good performance in this field with large amounts of human-labeled training data. However, the process of collecting sufficient fine human-labeled data is extremely time-consuming and expensive. To fill this gap, in this paper, we innovatively propose a general yet effective semi-supervised method for drivable road segmentation with lower labeled-data dependency, high accuracy, and high real-time performance. Specifically, a main encoder and a main decoder are trained in the supervised mode with labeled data generating pseudo labels for the unsupervised training. Then, we innovatively set up both auxiliary encoders and auxiliary decoders in our model that yield feature representations and predictions based on the unlabeled data subjected to different elaborated perturbations. Both auxiliary encoders and decoders can leverage information in unlabeled data by enforcing consistency between predictions of the main modules and those perturbed versions from auxiliary modules. Experimental results on two public datasets (Cityspace and CamVid) verify that our proposed algorithm can almost reach the same performance with high FPS as a fully supervised method with 100% labeled data with only utilizing 40% labeled data in the field of drivable road segmentation. In addition, our semi-supervised algorithm has a good potential to be generalized to all models with an encoder–decoder structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]