Search

We assessed the effects of TAK-491 (a newly designed potent and selective ARB) alone and in combination with pioglitazone (PIO) on myocardial infarct size (IS). Rats received TAK-491 (0.3, 1, 3, or 10 mgkg−1d−1), PIO (1.0 or 2.5 mgkg−1d−1), or PIO 2.5 mgkg−1d−1 with TAK-491 (1 or 3 mgkg−1d−1) for 4 days. On day 5 rats underwent 30-minute coronary artery occlusion and 4-hour reperfusion. Area at risk (AR) was assessed by blue dye and IS by TTC. Left ventricular (LV) dimensions and function was assessed by echocardiography 35 days after infarction. TAK (1.0–10 mgkg−1d−1), PIO (1.0 to 2.5 mgkg−1d−1), PIO2.5+TAK1.0, and PIO2.5+TAK3.0 significantly reduced IS. IS was the smallest in the TAK 10.0, followed by PIO+TAK 3.0. The protective effects of TAK and PIO were additive, as IS was smaller in the PIO2.5+TAK1.0 than in PIO 2.5 alone ( p = 0.008) or TAK1.0 alone ( p = 0.002); and in PIO2.5+TAK3.0 than in PIO alone ( p < 0.001) or TAK3.0 alone ( p < 0.001). TAK, PIO and their combination tended to attenuate LV remodeling and improved LV function 35 days after infarction; however, the differences among individual groups were not statistically significant. Both TAK-491 and PIO increased calcium-dependent nitric oxide synthase activity, whereas only PIO increased COX2 expression and activity. Both PIO and TAK-491 increased Akt, ERK 1/2 and eNOS phosphorylation and inhibited BAX activation. TAK-491 and PIO independently limited myocardial IS in a dose-dependent fashion; and the effects were additive. The mechanism of protection and the role of TAK-491 in this clinical setting should be further investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyclosporine A (CsA), a calcineurin inhibitor produced by the fungi Trichoderma polysporum and Cylindrocarpon lucidum, is an immunosuppressant prescribed in organ transplants to prevent rejection. Its adverse effect on renal dysfunction has limited its use in a clinical setting. Apigenin (4′,5′,7′-Trihydroxyflavone), a herbal extract, with anti-inflammatory and anti-tumour properties, has been investigated for properties to reverse this adverse effect. This research was conducted to establish a standard protocol for immunohistochemical estimation of Transforming Growth Factor β (TGF-β) expression, as an indicator of Cyclosporine A induced damage, and to observe whether apoptotic index and TGF-β expression can be used to assess effects of Apigenin on CsA induced renal dysfunction. Six groups of 5 male Sprague-Dawley albino rats each were dosed once daily for 21 days, as follows: (1) negative control - oral corn oil, (2) positive control - Cyclosporine A (25 mg/kg), (3) Group 3 - Apigenin (20 mg/kg), (4) Group 4 - Cyclosporine A (25 mg/kg) + Apigenin (10 mg/kg), (5) Group 5 - Cyclosporine A (25 mg/kg) +Apigenin (15 mg/kg) and (6) Group 6 - Cyclosporine A (25 mg/kg) +Apigenin (20 mg/kg). Cyclosporine A was administered intra-peritoneally while Apigenin was given orally. The rat kidneys were harvested and examined microscopically to assess the apoptotic index, and stained by immunohistochemistry for multifunctioning polypeptide TGF-β expression. A high apoptotic index and TGF-β intensity was observed in the Cyclosporine A group. Apigenin significantly reduced the both apoptotic index and TGF-β intensity. The apoptotic index correlated with TGF-β intensity, especially in glomeruli. This study indicates that Cyclosporine A can enhance the TGF-β expression in rat kidney, signifying accelerated apoptosis. TGF-β and apoptotic index may be used to assess Apigenin and its effect on Cyclosporine A induced renal damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: mobile application development is rapidly evolving with substantial economic and scientific interest. One of the primary reasons for mobile application development failure is the increasing number of mobile platforms; some organizations endorse mobile application development before understanding the associated development challenges of each target platform. Objective: the objective of this paper is to identify the challenges of native, web, and hybrid mobile applications, which can undermine the successful development of such applications. Method: we adopted a two-phase research approach: at first, the challenges were identified via a systematic literature review (SLR); and then, the identified challenges were validated through conducting interviews with practitioners. Results: through both research approaches, we identified nine challenges vital to the success of mobile application development and four additional challenges from interviews not reported in the literature. A comparison of the challenges (native, web, and hybrid) identified in SLR indicates that there are slightly more differences than similarities between the challenges. On the other hand, the challenges (native, web, and hybrid) identified in interviews indicates that there are more similarities than differences between the challenges. Our results show a weak negative correlation between the ranks obtained from the SLR and the interviews ([rs(9) = -.034], p = 0.932). The results obtained from our t-test (i.e., t = 0.868, p = 0.402 > 0.05) depicts that there is no significant difference between the findings of SLR and interviews. Conclusions: mobile application development organizations should try to address the identified challenges when developing mobile applications (native, web, or hybrid) to increase the probability of mobile application success.

Aimed at the problems in which the performance of filters derived from a hypothetical model will decline or the cost of time of the filters derived from a posterior model will increase when prior knowledge and second-order statistics of noise are uncertain, a new filter is proposed. In this paper, a Bayesian robust Kalman filter based on posterior noise statistics (KFPNS) is derived, and the recursive equations of this filter are very similar to that of the classical algorithm. Note that the posterior noise distributions are approximated by overdispersed black-box variational inference (O-BBVI). More precisely, we introduce an overdispersed distribution to push more probability density to the tails of variational distribution and incorporated the idea of importance sampling into two strategies of control variates and Rao–Blackwellization in order to reduce the variance of estimators. As a result, the convergence process will speed up. From the simulations, we can observe that the proposed filter has good performance for the model with uncertain noise. Moreover, we verify the proposed algorithm by using a practical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar system.

Abstract At present, advanced researches of optical fiber intrusion measurement are based on the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm. Although these conventional methods overcome the interference of non-stationary random signals, there are still a large number of false alarms in practical applications. This is because there is no specific study on orthogonal polarization signals of false alarm and intrusion. In order to further reduce false alarms, we analyze the correlation of optical fiber signals using birefringence of single-mode fiber. This paper proposes the harmful intrusion detection algorithm based on the correlation of two orthogonal polarization signals. The proposed method uses correlation coefficient to distinguish false alarms and intrusions, which can decrease false alarms. Experiments on real data, which are collected from the practical environment, demonstrate that the difference in correlation is a robust feature. Furthermore, the results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the false alarms and ensure the detection performance when it is used in optical fiber pre-warning system (OFPS).

Phytoliths are microscopic siliceous particles formed in the plants and preserved in the sediments after the plant death and decay. Phytolith formation is controlled by the plant genes and growing environments. As such, phytolith assemblages have been widely used in ancient plant composition analysis, paleoclimate reconstruction, and paleoenvironment reconstruction. For the effective utilization, phytolith description, nomenclature and classification are the most important. This article presents detailed original phytolith data from a peat profile (28°44′55.33″N, 115°39′59.80″N), which is related to the research article of “Climatic controls on peat swamp formation and evolution since 1300 year BP as recorded by phytoliths in the Xishan Mountains, Jiangxi Province, China” [1]. After extracted from peat, the phytoliths were observed under 400 × light microscope, described and nominated according to ICPN1.0 [2], and classified and counted more than 400 particles for each peat sample. 314 microscopic slides were observed and fifty types of phytolith were classified for the peat profile, including woody phytoliths, shrub phytoliths, herbaceous phytoliths and other unidentified morph types. All these provide basic information for paleo-researches. Keywords: Phytolith morphotypes, Microscopic observation, Description, Classification

We discovered a novel fluorophore by incorporating a dimethylamino group (–NMe2) into the conformationally locked green fluorescent protein (GFP) scaffold. It exhibited a marked solvent-polarity-dependent fluorogenic behavior and can potentially find broad applications as an environment-polarity sensor in vitro and in vivo. The ultrafast femtosecond transient absorption (fs-TA) spectroscopy in combination with quantum calculations revealed the presence of a twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT) state, which is formed by rotation of the –NMe2 group in the electronic excited state. In contrast to the bright fluorescent state (FS), the TICT state is dark and effectively quenches fluorescence upon formation. We employed a newly developed multivariable analysis approach to the FS lifetime in various solvents and showed that the FS → TICT reaction barrier is mainly modulated by H-bonding capability instead of viscosity of the solvent, accounting for the observed polarity dependence. These deep mechanistic insights are further corroborated by the dramatic loss of fluorogenicity for two similar GFP-derived chromophores in which the rotation of the –NMe2 group is inhibited by structural locking.

The transcription activator-like effector nuclease (TALEN) technique combined with the somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) method has been successfully applied for creating genetically modified pigs. However, methods for isolating cells with biallelic indels requires further improvement because of the relatively low enrichment efficiency of mutated somatic cells. Moreover, little is known regarding the off-target effects of the TALEN system and the heredity of TALEN-modified pigs. In this study, an efficient method to increase the enrichment efficiency of TALEN-mediated biallelic knockout (KO) cells was established, and corresponding genetically modified pigs with the expected genotype were generated whose off-target effect, fertility and heredity characteristics were aslo evaluated. Two TALEN pairs were constructed to target the porcine α-1,3-galactosyltransferase (GGTA1) gene locus. TALEN mRNA was transfected into the ear fibroblasts followed by the enrichment of α-Gal null cells of minipigs using isolectin B4 (IB4) lectin and magnetic beads. A total of 115 cell colonies were formed and validated to be GGTA1 KO cells by sequencing and 10 biallelic KO cell colonies were used as nuclear donors for SCNT. Thirty GGTA1 biallelic KO piglets were successfully delivered and grew normally. Seventeen potential off-target sites were investigated, and no off-target events were detected in the live piglets. To determine the fertility and heredity characteristics of TALEN-modified pigs, 10 mature founders were mated with each other and the mutations were determined to be transmitted to the F1 piglets. We established a robust and safe technology for developing genetically modified pig lines with expected genotypes for agricultural breeding and biomedical application.

This paper reports the improved procedure for aldol condensation between citral and 2-octanone with Amberlyst A-26 OH to give 11,15-dimethyl-hexadeca-8,10,14-trien-7-one. The improved synthesis utilizing Amberlyst A-26 OH as the solid catalyst produces better yield (93.0%) and enables simple work-up procedure. The experimental conditions are evaluated and optimized at 2-octanone/citral molar ratio of 10, catalyst amount of 5% (mole of citral), and temperature of 60°C in 3.5 h reaction time. 11,15-Dimethyl-hexadeca-8,10,14-trien-7-one is isolated using preparative thin layer chromatography with hexane:ethyl acetate (9.5:0.5) and confirmed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).

Context: The use of controlled vocabularies (CVs) aims to increase the quality of the specifications of the software requirements, by producing well-written documentation to reduce both ambiguities and complexity. Many studies suggest that defects introduced at the requirements engineering (RE) phase have a negative impact, significantly higher than defects in the later stages of the software development lifecycle. However, the knowledge we have about the impact of using CVs, in specific RE activities, is very scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the type of CVs, and the impact they have on the requirements engineering phase of software development. Method: A systematic mapping study, collecting empirical evidence that is published up to July 2019. Results: This work identified 2348 papers published pertinent to CVs and RE, but only 90 primary published papers were chosen as relevant. The process of data extraction revealed that 79 studies reported the use of ontologies, whereas the remaining 11 were focused on taxonomies. The activities of RE with greater empirical support were those of specification (29 studies) and elicitation (28 studies). Seventeen different impacts of the CVs on the RE activities were classified and ranked, being the two most cited: guidance and understanding (38%), and automation and tool support (22%). Conclusions: The evolution of the last 10 years in the number of published papers shows that interest in the use of CVs remains high. The research community has a broad representation, distributed across the five continents. Most of the research focuses on the application of ontologies and taxonomies, whereas the use of thesauri and folksonomies is less reported. The evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the CVs in all RE activities, especially during elicitation and specification, helping developers understand, facilitating the automation process and identifying defects, conflicts and ambiguities in the requirements. Collaboration in research between academic and industrial contexts is low and should be promoted.

In the multi-target traffic radar scene, the clustering accuracy between vehicles with close driving distance is relatively low. In response to this problem, this paper proposes a new clustering algorithm, namely an adaptive ellipse distance density peak fuzzy (AEDDPF) clustering algorithm. Firstly, the Euclidean distance is replaced by adaptive ellipse distance, which can more accurately describe the structure of data obtained by radar measurement vehicles. Secondly, the adaptive exponential function curve is introduced in the decision graph of the fast density peak search algorithm to accurately select the density peak point, and the initialization of the AEDDPF algorithm is completed. Finally, the membership matrix and the clustering center are calculated through successive iterations to obtain the clustering result.The time complexity of the AEDDPF algorithm is analyzed. Compared with the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), k-means, fuzzy c-means (FCM), Gustafson-Kessel (GK), and adaptive Euclidean distance density peak fuzzy (Euclid-ADDPF) algorithms, the AEDDPF algorithm has higher clustering accuracy for real measurement data sets in certain scenarios. The experimental results also prove that the proposed algorithm has a better clustering effect in some close-range vehicle scene applications. The generalization ability of the proposed AEDDPF algorithm applied to other types of data is also analyzed.

Hashtags of microblogs can provide valuable information for many natural language processing tasks. How to recommend reliable hashtags automatically has attracted considerable attention. However, existing studies assumed that all the training corpus crawled from social networks are labelled correctly, while large sample statistics on real social media shows that there are 8.9% of microblogs with hashtags having wrong labels. The notable influence of noisy data to the classifier is ignored before. Meanwhile, recency also plays an important role in microblog hashtag, but the information is not used in the existing studies. Some temporal hashtags such as World Cup will ignite at a particular time, but at other times, the number of people talking about it will sharply decrease. To address the twofold shortcomings above, the authors propose an long short-term memory-based model, which uses temporal enhanced selective sentence-level attention to reduce the influence of wrong labelled microblogs to the classifier. Experimental results using a dataset of 1.7 million microblogs collected from SINA Weibo microblogs demonstrated that the proposed method could achieve significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Background: The activation of tissue factor (TF) is one of the major reasons for coagulation dysregulation after pig-to-primate xenotransplantation. Tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI) is the most important inhibitor of TF. Studies have demonstrated species incompatibility between pig TFPI and human TF. Methods: A pig-to-macaque heterotopic auxiliary liver transplantation model was established to determine the origin of activated TF. Chimeric proteins of human and pig TFPI were constructed to assess the role of Kunitz domains in species incompatibility. Immortalised pig bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells transfected with human TFPI were tested for their ability to inhibit clotting in vitro. Results: TF from recipient was activated early after liver xenotransplantation. Pig TFPI Kunitz domain 2 bound human FXa, but Kunitz domain 1 did not effectively inhibit human TF/FVIIa. Immortalised pig bone marrow mesenchymal cells (BMSCs) transfected with human TFPI showed a prolonged recalcification time in vitro and in a rodent model. Conclusion: Recipient TF is relevant to dysregulated coagulation after xenotransplantation. Kunitz domain 1 plays the most important role in species incompatibility between pig TFPI and human TF, and clotting can be inhibited by human TFPI-transfected pig BMSCs. Our study shows a possible way to resolve the incompatibility of pig TFPI.

Femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy (FSRS) is an emerging molecular structural dynamics technique for functional materials characterization typically in the visible to near-IR range. To expand its applications we have developed a versatile FSRS setup in the ultraviolet region. We use the combination of a narrowband, ~400 nm Raman pump from a home-built second harmonic bandwidth compressor and a tunable broadband probe pulse from sum-frequency-generation-based cascaded four-wave mixing (SFG-CFWM) laser sidebands in a thin BBO crystal. The ground state Raman spectrum of a laser dye Quinolon 390 in methanol that strongly absorbs at ~355 nm is systematically studied as a standard sample to provide previously unavailable spectroscopic characterization in the vibrational domain. Both the Stokes and anti-Stokes Raman spectra can be collected by selecting different orders of SFG-CFWM sidebands as the probe pulse. The stimulated Raman gain with the 402 nm Raman pump is >21 times larger than that with the 550 nm Raman pump when measured at the 1317 cm−1 peak for the aromatic ring deformation and ring-H rocking mode of the dye molecule, demonstrating that pre-resonance enhancement is effectively achieved in the unique UV-FSRS setup. This added tunability in the versatile and compact optical setup enables FSRS to better capture transient conformational snapshots of photosensitive molecules that absorb in the UV range.

In this study, a series of TiO2 nanotubes (NTs) were synthesized employing electrochemical anodization of titanium foil in an ionic liquid solution containing a mixture of glycerol and choline chloride, acting as electrolyte. The as-synthesized TiO2 NTs were calcined at 350, 450, or 550 °C for a 2 h duration to investigate the influence of calcination temperature on NTs formation, morphology, surface properties, crystallinity, and subsequent photocatalytic activity for visible light photodegradation of gaseous formaldehyde (HCHO). Results showed that the calcination temperature has a significant effect on the structure and coverage of TiO2 NTs on the surface. Freshly synthesized TiO2 NTs showed better-ordered structure compared to calcined samples. There was significant pore rupture with increasing calcination temperature. The transformation from anatase to rutile phase appeared after calcination at 450 °C and the weight fraction of the rutile phase increased from 19% to 36% upon increasing the calcination temperature to 550 °C. The band gaps of the TiO2 NTs were in the range from 2.80 to 2.74 eV, shifting the active region of the materials to visible light. The presence of mixed anatase−rutile TiO2 phases in the sample calcined at 450 °C showed enhanced photoactivity, which was confirmed by the 21.56 mg∙L−1∙g−1 removal of gaseous formaldehyde under 120 min of visible light irradiation and displayed enhanced quantum yield, ∅HCHO of 17%.

It is well-known that for a given sequence, its optimal codeword length is fixed. Many coding schemes have been proposed to make the codeword length as close to the optimal value as possible. In this paper, a new block-based coding scheme operating on the subsequences of a source sequence is proposed. It is proved that the optimal codeword lengths of the subsequences are not larger than that of the given sequence. Experimental results using arithmetic coding will be presented.

SiC(Fe) solid solution powders were synthesized by sol–gel method under different reaction time, using methyltriethoxysilane as the silicon and carbon source and analytic ferric chloride as the dopant, respectively. The synthesized powders have been characterized by XRD, SEM and Raman spectra. Results show that the lattice constant decreases with increasing reaction time. The electric permittivities of SiC samples were determined in the frequency range of 8.2 ~ 12.4 GHz. Results show that the permittivity of SiC decreases with increasing reaction time. The SiC(Fe) solid solution powder with reaction time of 4 h with 2 mm thickness exhibit the best microwave absorption property in X-band range (8.2 - 12.4 GHz). The microwave absorption mechanism has been discussed.

In this study, we developed a glycerol-mediated safe and facile method to synthesize colored titania nanoparticles (NPs) via solution route. Our method is considerably effective and greener than other options currently available. Colored titania NPs were produced by hydrolyzing TiCl4 precursor in aqueous solution containing different concentrations of glycerol (0.0, 1.163, 3.834, and 5.815 mol/L) and subsequent calcination at 300 °C for 1 h. Our results highlight firstly that glycerol-mediated synthesis is unlikely to affect the anatase crystalline structure of TiO2, and secondly, that it would lead to coloration, band gap narrowing, and a remarkable bathochromic redshift of the optical response of titania. More importantly, the synthesized colored titania have Ti3+ ions, which, at least in terms of our samples, is the major factor responsible for its coloration. These Ti3+ species could induce mid gap states in the band gap, which significantly improve the visible light absorption capability and photocatalytic performance of the colored titania. The photocatalytic experiments showed that the colored TiO2 NPs prepared in 1.163 mol/L aqueous glycerol solution displayed the best photocatalytic performance. Almost 48.17% of phenolic compounds and 62.18% of color were removed from treated palm oil mill effluent (POME) within 180 min of visible light irradiation.

Very recently, several chaos-based image ciphers using a bit-level permutation have been suggested and shown promising results. Due to the diffusion effect introduced in the permutation stage, the workload of the time-consuming diffusion stage is reduced, and hence the performance of the cryptosystem is improved. In this paper, a symmetric chaos-based image cipher with a 3D cat map-based spatial bit-level permutation strategy is proposed. Compared with those recently proposed bit-level permutation methods, the diffusion effect of the new method is superior as the bits are shuffled among different bit-planes rather than within the same bit-plane. Moreover, the diffusion key stream extracted from hyperchaotic system is related to both the secret key and the plain image, which enhances the security against known/chosen plaintext attack. Extensive security analysis has been performed on the proposed scheme, including the most important ones like key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis, plaintext sensitivity analysis and various statistical analyses, which has demonstrated the satisfactory security of the proposed scheme

For sensors constructed by freestanding membranes, when the gap between a freestanding membrane and the substrate or between membranes is at micron scale, the effects of near-field radiative heat transfer on the sensors’ thermal performance should be considered during sensor design. The radiative heat flux is transferred from a membrane to a plane or from a membrane to a membrane. In the current study of the near-field thermal radiation, the scanning probe technology has difficulty in making a membrane separated at micron scale parallel to a plane or another membrane. A novel MEMS (micro electromechanical system) device was developed by sacrificial layer technique in this work to realize a double parallel freestanding membrane structure. Each freestanding membrane has a platinum thin-film resistor and the distance between the two membranes is 1 m. After evaluating the electrical and thermal characteristics of the lower freestanding membrane, experimental measurements of near-field radiative heat transfer between the lower membrane and the upper membrane were carried out by setting the lower membrane as a heat emitter and the upper membrane as a heat receiver. The near-field radiative heat transfer between the two membranes was validated by finding a larger-than-blackbody radiative heat transfer based on the experimental data.

This paper presents a new chaos-based image cipher using a plaintext-related permutation. The cat map and Lorenz system are employed to shuffle the positions of image pixels and generate the diffusion keystream, respectively. The control parameters of the cat map, i.e. the permutation key, are determined by the Murmur2 hash value of the original image. Owing to the avalanche property of hash functions, completely different shuffled images will be produced even if there is a tiny difference between the original ones, and it helps accelerate the diffusion process. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme requires only one and two cipher cycles to achieve an acceptable and a satisfactory diffusion properties, respectively, whereas two and three cipher cycles are needed by typical schemes to achieve the same properties. Thorough security analysis is carried out, and the results demonstrate the satisfactory security of the proposed scheme.

Planar morphogenesis, a distinct feature of multicellular organisms, is crucial for the development of ovule, progenitor of seeds. Both receptor-like kinases (RLKs) such as STRUBBELIG (SUB) and auxin gradient mediated by PIN-FORMED1 (PIN1) play instructive roles in this process. Fine-tuned intercellular communications between different cell layers during ovule development demands dynamic membrane distribution of these cell-surface proteins, presumably through vesicle-mediated sorting. However, the way it's achieved and the trafficking routes involved are obscure. We report that HAPLESS13 (HAP13)-mediated trafficking of SUB is critical for ovule development. HAP13 encodes the μ subunit of adaptor protein 1 (AP1) that mediates protein sorting at the trans-Golgi network/early endosome (TGN/EE). The HAP13 mutant, hap13-1, is defective in outer integument growth, resulting in exposed nucellus accompanied with impaired pollen tube guidance and reception. SUB is mis-targeted in hap13-1. However, unlike that of PIN2, the distribution of PIN1 is independent of HAP13. Genetic interference of exocytic trafficking at the TGN/EE by specifically downregulating HAP13 phenocopied the defects of hap13-1 in SUB targeting and ovule development, supporting a key role of sporophytically expressed SUB in instructing female gametogenesis.

Tracking vibrational motions during a photochemical or photophysical process has gained momentum, due to its sensitivity to the progression of reaction and change of environment. In this work, we implemented an advanced ultrafast vibrational technique, femtosecond-stimulated Raman spectroscopy (FSRS), to monitor the excited state structural evolution of an engineered green fluorescent protein (GFP) single-site mutant S205V. This mutation alters the original excited state proton transfer (ESPT) chain. By strategically tuning the Raman pump to different wavelengths (i.e., 801, 539, and 504 nm) to achieve pre-resonance with transient excited state electronic bands, the characteristic Raman modes of the excited protonated (A*) chromophore species and intermediate deprotonated (I*) species can be selectively monitored. The inhomogeneous distribution/population of A* species go through ESPT with a similar ~300 ps time constant, confirming that bridging a water molecule to protein residue T203 in the ESPT chain is the rate-limiting step. Some A* species undergo vibrational cooling through high-frequency motions on the ~190 ps time scale. At early times, a portion of the largely protonated A* species could also undergo vibrational cooling or return to the ground state with a ~80 ps time constant. On the photoproduct side, a ~1330 cm−1 delocalized motion is observed, with dispersive line shapes in both the Stokes and anti-Stokes FSRS with a pre-resonance Raman pump, which indicates strong vibronic coupling, as the mode could facilitate the I* species to reach a relatively stable state (e.g., the main fluorescent state) after conversion from A*. Our findings disentangle the contributions of various vibrational motions active during the ESPT reaction, and offer new structural dynamics insights into the fluorescence mechanisms of engineered GFPs and other analogous autofluorescent proteins.

A sub-block algorithm is usually applied in the super-resolution (SR) reconstruction of images because of limitations in computer memory. However, the sub-block SR images can hardly achieve a seamless image mosaicking because of the uneven distribution of brightness and contrast among these sub-blocks. An effectively improved weighted Wallis dodging algorithm is proposed, aiming at the characteristic that SR reconstructed images are gray images with the same size and overlapping region. This algorithm can achieve consistency of image brightness and contrast. Meanwhile, a weighted adjustment sequence is presented to avoid the spatial propagation and accumulation of errors and the loss of image information caused by excessive computation. A seam line elimination method can share the partial dislocation in the seam line to the entire overlapping region with a smooth transition effect. Subsequently, the improved method is employed to remove the uneven illumination for 900 SR reconstructed images of ZY-3. Then, the overlapping image mosaic method is adopted to accomplish a seamless image mosaic based on the optimal seam line.