Transcriptomic Analysis of the Effect of Combined Treatment with 1-Methylcyclopropene and 2,4-Epibrassionolide on the Postharvest Senescence of Fresh Daylily (Hemerocallis citrina)

In this experiment, we used different doses of 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP), 2,4-epibrassionolide (EBR), and their combination to treat fresh daylily and conducted a 15-day storage experiment at ‒1 to 1 ℃. By measuring physicochemical indicators and conducting transcriptomic analysis, the effects of 1-MCP and/or EBR on the postharvest senescence of fresh daylily were studied. The results indicated that combined treatment with 1 μL/L 1-MCP and 1 mg/L EBR after harvest was more effective in delaying adverse changes, such as yellowing, elongation, softening, dispersal, mass loss, and chlorophyll degradation, thereby greatly maintaining the storage quality of fresh daylily. Transcriptomic analysis revealed that the combined treatment regulated the transcription levels of senescence-related genes in daylily; significantly inhibiting the transcription of genes related to the ethylene biosynthesis and signal transduction pathways while activating the transcription of genes related to the brassinolide biosynthesis signal transduction pathway, therefore altering the metabolic balance of growth and senescence hormone levels in daylily. The combined treatment inhibited the transcription of genes related to the chlorophyll degradation pathway, which was beneficial for maintaining the quality of fresh daylily. Additionally, the combined treatment inhibited the transcription of E3 ubiquitin ligase genes closely related to senescence, thereby delaying protein degradation and postponing the physiological process of postharvest senescence in fresh daylily. This study provides a theoretical basis and practical reference for delaying the postharvest senescence and maintaining the storage quality of fresh daylily flower buds

HeadSculpt: Crafting 3D Head Avatars with Text

Recently, text-guided 3D generative methods have made remarkable advancements in producing high-quality textures and geometry, capitalizing on the proliferation of large vision-language and image diffusion models. However, existing methods still struggle to create high-fidelity 3D head avatars in two aspects: (1) They rely mostly on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model whilst missing the necessary 3D awareness and head priors. This makes them prone to inconsistency and geometric distortions in the generated avatars. (2) They fall short in fine-grained editing. This is primarily due to the inherited limitations from the pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, which become more pronounced when it comes to 3D head avatars. In this work, we address these challenges by introducing a versatile coarse-to-fine pipeline dubbed HeadSculpt for crafting (i.e., generating and editing) 3D head avatars from textual prompts. Specifically, we first equip the diffusion model with 3D awareness by leveraging landmark-based control and a learned textual embedding representing the back view appearance of heads, enabling 3D-consistent head avatar generations. We further propose a novel identity-aware editing score distillation strategy to optimize a textured mesh with a high-resolution differentiable rendering technique. This enables identity preservation while following the editing instruction. We showcase HeadSculpt's superior fidelity and editing capabilities through comprehensive experiments and comparisons with existing methods.Comment: Webpage: https://brandonhan.uk/HeadSculpt

A Survey of Deep Face Restoration: Denoise, Super-Resolution, Deblur, Artifact Removal

Face Restoration (FR) aims to restore High-Quality (HQ) faces from Low-Quality (LQ) input images, which is a domain-specific image restoration problem in the low-level computer vision area. The early face restoration methods mainly use statistic priors and degradation models, which are difficult to meet the requirements of real-world applications in practice. In recent years, face restoration has witnessed great progress after stepping into the deep learning era. However, there are few works to study deep learning-based face restoration methods systematically. Thus, this paper comprehensively surveys recent advances in deep learning techniques for face restoration. Specifically, we first summarize different problem formulations and analyze the characteristic of the face image. Second, we discuss the challenges of face restoration. Concerning these challenges, we present a comprehensive review of existing FR methods, including prior based methods and deep learning-based methods. Then, we explore developed techniques in the task of FR covering network architectures, loss functions, and benchmark datasets. We also conduct a systematic benchmark evaluation on representative methods. Finally, we discuss future directions, including network designs, metrics, benchmark datasets, applications,etc. We also provide an open-source repository for all the discussed methods, which is available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/Awesome-Face-Restoration.Comment: 21 pages, 19 figure

Effects of Cold Storage Insulation Packaging Box on the Quality of Sweet Corn in Simulated Cold Chain Transportation

Sweet corn was highly susceptible to senescence due to its elevated physiological metabolism after harvest, resulting in a decline in its edible quality. The aim of this study was to assess the effects of a cold storage insulation packaging box on the quality attributes of postharvest sweet corn (cv. 'Jinguan 218') during a simulated cold chain transportation period of 3 d and subsequent shelf life at room temperature (20 ℃) for 1 d. The control group involved cold storage at 4 ℃ to mimic refrigerated truck transportation. The results showed that the internal temperature of sweet corn packed in the cold storage insulation packaging box remained below 7 ℃ throughout the 3 d period. In comparison to the control group, the cold storage insulation packaging box effectively maintained the quality of sweet corn during cold chain transportation and shelf life, and delayed husk discoloration. The mass loss rate of sweet corn was reduced by 72.66% after 3 d of cold chain distribution using the packaging box, the soluble solid content was increased by 4.97%, and soluble sugar content was enhanced by 10.13%. Meanwhile, the activities of peroxidase (POD), catalase (CAT) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) in sweet corn packaged with the cold storage insulation packaging box were significantly (P<0.05) higher than those in the control group, although the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) was inhibited by cold storage insulation packaging box. Therefore, the cold storage insulation packaging box demonstrated its ability to maintain the quality of sweet corn throughout cold chain logistics and shelf life. This work provides a technical basis for the preservation of sweet corn through cold storage packaging during post-harvest logistics and transportation

Antioxidant Properties of the Mung Bean Flavonoids on Alleviating Heat Stress

Background: It is a widespread belief in Asian countries that mung bean soup (MBS) may afford a protective effect against heat stress. Lack of evidence supports MBS conferring a benefit in addition to water. Results: Here we show that vitexin and isovitexin are the major antioxidant components in mungbean (more than 96 % of them existing in the bean seed coat), and both of them could be absorbed via gavage into rat plasma. In the plasma of rats fed with mungbean coat extract before or after exposure to heat stress, the levels of malonaldehyde and activities of lactate dehydrogenase and nitric oxide synthase were remarkably reduced; the levels of total antioxidant capacity and glutathione (a quantitative assessment of oxidative stress) were significantly enhanced. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that MBS can play additional roles to prevent heat stress injury. Characterization of the mechanisms underlying mungbean beneficial effects should help in the design of diet therapy strategies to alleviate heat stress, as well as provide reference for searching natural medicines against oxidative stress induced diseases

Search for vector-like quark pair production TTˉ(YYˉ)→bWbW\mathrm{T\bar{T}}(\mathrm{Y\bar{Y}})\rightarrow\mathrm{bWbW} using kinematic reconstruction in lepton+jets final states at s\sqrt{s}=13 TeV

A search is presented for the pair production of vector-like quarks, $\mathrm{T\bar{T}}$ or $\mathrm{Y\bar{Y}}$, with an electric charge of either 2/3$|\mathrm{e}|\mathrm{(T)}$ or -4/3$|\mathrm{e}|\mathrm{(Y)}$ in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13~\mathrm{TeV}$ at the LHC. The data were collected by the CMS experiment during the 2016 LHC run, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of $35.8~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$. The $\mathrm{T(Y)}$ quarks are assumed to decay exclusively to a $\mathrm{W}$ boson and a $\mathrm{b}$ quark. The search is carried out using events with a single isolated electron or muon, large missing transverse energy and at least four jets with large transverse momenta. In the search a kinematic reconstruction of the final state is performed. Under the assumption of strong pair production of vector-like quarks and $100\%$ branching fractions to $\mathrm{bW}$, an observed (expected) lower limit of 1295 (1275) GeV at $95\%$ CL is set on the T(Y) quark mass

Changes in Extractable and Non-extractable Polyphenols and Their Antioxidant Properties during Fruit On-tree Ripening in Five Peach Cultivars

To evaluate the changes of total phenolic content and antioxidant capacities of five peach cultivars, this work measured them separately in extractable polyphenols and non-extractable polyphenols during the last month of ripening. Total phenolic content was detected using the Folin-Ciocalteau reagent, while total antioxidant activity was detected by DPPH and FRAP assay. In addition, the contribution of extractable polyphenols and non-extractable polyphenols to the total antioxidant activity of peaches was investigated. It is noted that ripening caused a decrease of total phenolic content associated to extractable polyphenols and non-extractable polyphenols by 45.1%–74.6%, 20.7%–41.7%, respectively. Additionally, total antioxidant activity decreased over the ripening period with a high correlation with total phenolic content. Extractable polyphenols contributed more than 50% to the total antioxidant activity, while the non-extractable antioxidants contributed around 31.3%–45.7% (DPPH) or 12.6%–25.4% (FRAP), which suggests that the antioxidant properties of peaches may be undervalued in previous researches. Keywords: Peach, Extractable phenolics, Non-extractable phenolics, Antioxidant activity, Ripenin

Antifungal Activity of an Abundant Thaumatin-Like Protein from Banana against Penicillium expansum, and Its Possible Mechanisms of Action

Thaumatin-like protein from banana (designated BanTLP) has been purified by employing a simple protocol consisting of diethylaminoethyl Sephadex (DEAE&ndash;Sephadex) chromatography, gel filtration on Sephadex G50, and reversed-phase chromatography. The purified protein was identified by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, with an estimated molecular weight of 22.1 kDa. BanTLP effectively inhibited in vitro spore germination of Penicillium expansum, one of the main postharvest pathogens in fruits. This study further investigated the antifungal properties and underlying mechanisms of BanTLP against P. expansum. Results demonstrated that BanTLP exhibited antifungal activity in a wide pH range (4.0&ndash;10.0) at 20&ndash;50 &deg;C. Propidium iodide (PI) influx and potassium release confirmed that BanTLP induced membrane disruption of the test pathogen, increasing the membrane permeability and disintegration of the cell. This led to cell death, as evidenced by the assays of thiobarbituric acid-reactive species (TBARS) content, the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and 1,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene (DPH) fluorescence integrity. Ultrastructural alterations in P. expansum conidia after BanTLP treatment revealed severe damage to the cell wall. These results suggest that BanTLP purified from banana exerts antifungal activity against P. expansum by inducing plasma membrane disturbance and cell wall disorganization

Robotic Perception of Transparent Objects: A Review

Transparent object perception is a rapidly developing research problem in artificial intelligence. The ability to perceive transparent objects enables robots to achieve higher levels of autonomy, unlocking new applications in various industries, such as healthcare, services, and manufacturing. Despite numerous datasets and perception methods being proposed in recent years, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of these methods and the challenges in this field. To address this gap, this article provides a comprehensive survey of the platforms and recent advances for robotic perception of transparent objects. We highlight the main challenges and propose future directions of various transparent object perception tasks, i.e., segmentation, reconstruction, and pose estimation. We also discuss the limitations of existing datasets in diversity and complexity, and the benefits of employing multimodal sensors, such as RGB-D cameras, thermal cameras, and polarized imaging, for transparent object perception. Furthermore, we identify perception challenges in complex and dynamic environments, as well as for objects with changeable geometries. Finally, we provide an interactive online platform to navigate each reference