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Potato is rich in nutrition, and can be vital in improving and enriching the diets of people. However, potatoes contain a natural secondary metabolite group, steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGAs), which can cause human and animal toxicity at higher levels. In this study, we investigated the inhibition effect of film on SGA concentration in tuber during potato growth via a pot experiment in 2016 and a field experiment in 2017. Tubers were sampled every 15 days from flowering to harvest in the pot experiment, and were sampled after harvest in field experiment. The results showed that SGA concentration decreased gradually with the enlargement and maturation of potato tubers. In contrast to blank and white film treatments, the inhibition effect of black film on SGA concentration in tuber was remarkable, while the tuber yield per plant was similar between treatments. In the field experiment, the tuber SGA concentration mulching black film was significantly lower than that mulching white film and blank treatments, while the tuber yield per plant mulching black film among them was comparable. These results suggest that black film may be applied to the production to inhibit SGA concentration accumulation during growth, which is important for consuming potato tubers safely.

Potato and its products have become indispensable foods and snacks for most people. Steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGAs) occur in all tissues of the potato, and consuming potatoes with a high SGA content harms human health. Therefore, the effects of different cooking methods on the SGA content in potato foods were investigated in this study. The results indicated that adding food-grade acetic acid during the manufacturing process did not affect the SGA content in stir-fried shredded potatoes or fresh mashed potatoes. However, the SGA content in potato food after peeling was significantly lower than that in non-peeled food, and the volume ratio of potato skin to flesh decreased with the increase of the potato tuber volume. Therefore, potato breeders and farmers should make the most hard to increase the proportion of commodity potato via corresponding science and technology. In addition, frying significantly reduced the SGA content in potato chips. Further research indicated that SGAs degraded slowly at 150°C, while they degraded rapidly at 190°C within 30 min. The temperature of rapeseed oil in the frying process can be as high above 200°C. Thus, frying significantly decreased the SGA content in potato chips, which could be attributed to temperature. These results will provide a theoretical basis and practical guidance for potato breeding and cooking.

Tomato/potato heterografting-triggered phenotypic variations are well documented, yet the molecular mechanisms underlying grafting-induced phenotypic processes remain unknown. To investigate the phenotypic and transcriptomic responses of grafting parents in heterografting in comparison with self-grafting, tomato (Sl) was grafted onto potato rootstocks (St), and comparative phenotyping and transcriptome profiling were performed. Phenotypic analysis showed that Sl/St heterografting induced few phenotypic changes in the tomato scion. A total of 209 upregulated genes were identified in the tomato scion, some of which appear to be involved in starch and sucrose biosynthesis. Sl/St heterografting induced several modifications in the potato rootstocks (St-R), stolon number, stolon length and tuber number decreased significantly, together with an increase in GA3 content of stolon and tuber, compared with self-grafted potato (St-WT). These results indicate that the tomato scion is less effective at producing substances or signals to induce tuberization but promotes stolon development into aerial stems and sprouting. RNA-Seq data analysis showed that 1529 genes were upregulated and 1329 downregulated between St-WT and St-R; some of these genes are involved in plant hormone signal transduction, with GID1-like gibberellin receptor (StGID1) and DELLA protein (StDELLA) being upregulated. Several genes in auxin, abscisic acid and ethylene pathways were differentially expressed as well. Various hormone signals engage in crosstalk to regulate diverse phenotypic events after grafting. This work provides abundant transcriptome profile data and lays a foundation for further research on the molecular mechanisms underlying RNA-based interactions between rootstocks and scions after tomato/potato heterografting.

Vision-based pedestrian detection has become an active topic in computer vision and autonomous vehicles. It aims at detecting pedestrians appearing ahead of the vehicle using a camera so that autonomous vehicles can assess the danger and take action. Due to varied illumination and appearance, complex background and occlusion pedestrian detection in outdoor environments is a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical feature extraction and weighted kernel sparse representation model for pedestrian classification. Initially, hierarchical feature extraction based on a CENTRIST descriptor is used to capture discriminative structures. A max pooling operation is used to enhance the invariance of varying appearance. Then, a kernel sparse representation model is proposed to fully exploit the discrimination information embedded in the hierarchical local features, and a Gaussian weight function as the measure to effectively handle the occlusion in pedestrian images. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark databases, including INRIA, Daimler, an artificially generated dataset and a real occluded dataset, demonstrating the more robust performance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art pedestrian classification methods.

For feature representation of pedestrian recognition, a hybrid hierarchical feature representation method which combines representation ability of bag of words model and depth layered with learning adaptability is presented. This method first uses HOG local descriptor for local features extraction, and then encoding the feature by a depth of layered coding method, the layered coding method by spatial aggregating restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM). For each coding layer, we steer the unsupervised RBM learning and apply supervised fine-tuning to enhance the visual features representation in classification task. Finally, we learn high-level image feature representation by the positive and negative max pooling, and then classify with the linear support vector machine, feature extraction of depth architectures effectively improve the accuracy of subsequent recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a high recognition rate.

The article establishes the appraisal index system for entire urban agglomeration and its interior cities individually, concretely including five aspects: driving forces for tourism development, the level of tourism development, tourism impacts, tourism economic connection and tourism contributions of different cities to the whole urban agglomeration. As tourism competitiveness has the characteristics of comprehensiveness, systematicness and dynamicness, the article attempts to apply the structural prediction means of system dynamics to evaluating tourism competitiveness, aiming to provide some research methods and analysis ideas for tourism competitiveness measurement and trends analysis in urban agglomeration. Taking Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration as the study area, the article simulates and analyzes the tourism competitiveness trend of the whole region and its interior cities from 2005 to 2020, and the result reflects that integrated development and regional combination of tourism are ...