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Plant height and above-ground biomass are important growth parameters that affect crop yield. Efficient and non-destructive technologies of crop phenotypic monitoring play crucial roles in intelligent farmland management. However, the feasibility of using these technologies to estimate cotton plant height and above-ground biomass has not been determined. This study proposed a low cost and high-throughput imaging method combined with Canopeo to extract the percentages of green color from high-definition digital images and establish a model to estimate the cotton plant height and above-ground biomass. The plant height and above-ground biomass field trials were conducted at two levels of irrigation (soil water content 70% ± 5% and 40%−45%, respectively) using 80 cotton genotypes. The linear fitting performed well across the different cotton genotypes (PH, R2 = 0.9829; RMSE = 2.4 cm; NRMSE = 11% and AGB, R2 = 0.9609; RMSE = 0.6 g / plant; and NRMSE = 5%), and two levels of irrigation (PH, R2 = 0.9604; RMSE = 2.15 cm; NRMSE = 6% and AGB, R2 = 0.9650; RMSE = 4.51 g/plant; and NRMSE = 17%). All reached a higher fitting degree. Additionally, the most comprehensive model to estimate the cotton plant height and above-ground biomass (Y = 0.4832*X + 11.04; Y = 0.4621*X − 0.3591) was determined using a simple linear regression modeling method. The percentages of green color positively correlated with plant height and above-ground biomass, and each model exhibited higher accuracy (R2 ≥ 0.8392, RMSE ≤ 0.0158, NRMSE ≤ 0.06%). Combining a high-definition digital camera with Canopeo enables the prediction of crop growth in the field. The simple linear regression modeling method and the most comprehensive model enable the rapid estimation of the cotton plant height and above-ground biomass. This method can also be used as a baseline to measure other important crop phenotypes.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is an incurable disease caused by out-of-frame DMD gene deletions while in frame deletions lead to the milder Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD). In the last decade several antisense oligonucleotides drugs have been developed to induce a partially functional internally deleted dystrophin, similar to that produced in BMD, and expected to ameliorate the disease course. The pattern of dystrophin expression and functionality in dystrophinopathy patients is variable due to multiple factors, such as molecular functionality of the dystrophin and its distribution. To benchmark the success of therapeutic intervention, a clear understanding of dystrophin expression patterns in dystrophinopathy patients is vital. Recently, several groups have used innovative techniques to quantify dystrophin in muscle biopsies of children but not in patients with milder BMD. This study reports on dystrophin expression using both Western blotting and an automated, high-throughput, image analysis platform in DMD, BMD, and intermediate DMD/BMD skeletal muscle biopsies. Our results found a significant correlation between Western blot and immunofluorescent quantification indicating consistency between the different methodologies. However, we identified significant inter- and intradisease heterogeneity of patterns of dystrophin expression in patients irrespective of the amount detected on blot, due to variability in both fluorescence intensity and dystrophin sarcolemmal circumference coverage. Our data highlight the heterogeneity of the pattern of dystrophin expression in BMD, which will assist the assessment of dystrophin restoration therapies., (© 2021 American Association of Neuropathologists, Inc.)