Sequencing and Characterization of Divergent Marbling Levels in the Beef Cattle ( Muscle) Transcriptome

Marbling is an important trait regarding the quality of beef. Analysis of beef cattle transcriptome and its expression profile data are essential to extend the genetic information resources and would support further studies on beef cattle. RNA sequencing was performed in beef cattle using the Illumina High-Seq2000 platform. Approximately 251.58 million clean reads were generated from a high marbling (H) group and low marbling (L) group. Approximately 80.12% of the 19,994 bovine genes (protein coding) were detected in all samples, and 749 genes exhibited differential expression between the H and L groups based on fold change (>1.5-fold, p<0.05). Multiple gene ontology terms and biological pathways were found significantly enriched among the differentially expressed genes. The transcriptome data will facilitate future functional studies on marbling formation in beef cattle and may be applied to improve breeding programs for cattle and closely related mammals

Sand-mud transition dynamics at embayed beaches during a typhoon season in eastern China

International audienc

Monitoring and evaluation of sand nourishments on an embayed beach exposed to frequent storms in eastern China

Beach nourishment is a proved effective protection approach which has been widely used in recent years. An Argus video monitoring system has been set up to monitor morphological changes and effects of continuous nourishments at Dongsha beach, an embayed beach in Zhoushan Archipelago, eastern China. Video-derived shorelines along with their morphological parameters, such as dry beach width, dry beach area, beach orientation and unit width volume were analyzed during the monitoring period from June 2016 to July 2017. Analysis of video monitoring data shows that shorelines retreated during autumn and winter when storms were intensive, while advanced in spring and summer, with a lot of bulges occurred after nourishment projects. Abrupt variations in the beach orientation were always followed by gradual recoveries to the average beach orientation, while continuous counter-clockwise rotation occurred after March 2017 when storm events were sparse. Comparing the different beach responses to individual storm events, we found that small-scale and short-interval sand nourishment implemented timely after storms can compensate for sediment loss more effectively on this beach. This study can provide a reference for local beach management

Rare-Earth-Catalyzed Regioselective Hydrosilylation of Aryl-Substituted Internal Alkenes

Rare-earth-catalyzed regioselective hydrosilylation of internal alkenes with an ene-diamido samarium alkyl as a precatalyst has been described. The samarium alkyl complex LSmCH₂SiMe₃(THF)₂ (<b>2</b>, L = DipNC­(Me)­C­(Me)­NDip, where Dip = 2,6-<i>i</i>Pr₂C₆H₃) enabled highly regioselective hydrosilylation of aryl-substituted internal alkenes with primary silanes, leading to the selective formation of a series of secondary silanes in high yields

Monitoring and evaluation of sand nourishments on an embayed beach exposed to frequent storms in eastern China

Beach nourishment is a proved effective protection approach which has been widely used in recent years. An Argus video monitoring system has been set up to monitor morphological changes and effects of continuous nourishments at Dongsha beach, an embayed beach in Zhoushan Archipelago, eastern China. Video-derived shorelines along with their morphological parameters, such as dry beach width, dry beach area, beach orientation and unit width volume were analyzed during the monitoring period from June 2016 to July 2017. Analysis of video monitoring data shows that shorelines retreated during autumn and winter when storms were intensive, while advanced in spring and summer, with a lot of bulges occurred after nourishment projects. Abrupt variations in the beach orientation were always followed by gradual recoveries to the average beach orientation, while continuous counter-clockwise rotation occurred after March 2017 when storm events were sparse. Comparing the different beach responses to individual storm events, we found that small-scale and short-interval sand nourishment implemented timely after storms can compensate for sediment loss more effectively on this beach. This study can provide a reference for local beach management

Sketch guided and progressive growing GAN for realistic and editable ultrasound image synthesis

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for anatomical structure inspection in clinical diagnosis. The training of new sonographers and deep learning based algorithms for US image analysis usually requires a large amount of data. However, obtaining and labeling large-scale US imaging data are not easy tasks, especially for diseases with low incidence. Realistic US image synthesis can alleviate this problem to a great extent. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based image synthesis framework. Our main contributions include: 1) we present the first work that can synthesize realistic B-mode US images with high-resolution and customized texture editing features; 2) to enhance structural details of generated images, we propose to introduce auxiliary sketch guidance into a conditional GAN. We superpose the edge sketch onto the object mask and use the composite mask as the network input; 3) to generate high-resolution US images, we adopt a progressive training strategy to gradually generate high-resolution images from low-resolution images. In addition, a feature loss is proposed to minimize the difference of high-level features between the generated and real images, which further improves the quality of generated images; 4) the proposed US image synthesis method is quite universal and can also be generalized to the US images of other anatomical structures besides the three ones tested in our study (lung, hip joint, and ovary); 5) extensive experiments on three large US image datasets are conducted to validate our method. Ablation studies, customized texture editing, user studies, and segmentation tests demonstrate promising results of our method in synthesizing realistic US images.Comment: Accepted by Medical Image Analysis (13 figures, 4 tabels