Reactive oxygen species induced by water containing nano-bubbles and its role in the improvement of barley seed germination

This paper was presented at the 4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference (MNF2014), which was held at University College, London, UK. The conference was organised by Brunel University and supported by the Italian Union of Thermofluiddynamics, IPEM, the Process Intensification Network, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Heat Transfer Society, HEXAG - the Heat Exchange Action Group, and the Energy Institute, ASME Press, LCN London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL University College London, UCL Engineering, the International NanoScience Community, www.nanopaprika.eu.The study of reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation caused by nano-bubbles (NBs) is of great importance for its application in both physiological activity promotion aspect and sterilization aspect. In this paper, Aminophenyl Fluorescein (APF) was used as a fluorescent reagent for the detection of ROS generation by NBs. The NBs scattering could cause the decrease of fluorescence intensity. Meanwhile, the quenching effect of oxygen could also cause the decrease of fluorescence intensity. Although the above two factors masked the fluorescence intensity generation by ROS, the fluorescence intensity of the water containing NBs still increased with NBs generation time, which proved that oxygen NBs could generate ROS. Moreover, the endogenous ROS in the barley seed cells were measured in the seed that germinated in the water containing NBs and the distilled water respectively. According to the results of seed staining experiments, both the microscope images and the absorbance at 560nm proved that the seeds dipped in the water containing NBs could generate more ROS compared to those in the distilled water. These findings greatly increase the NBs potential use both in agricultural field and environmental field

Indikasi Kerusakan Dingin pada Mentimun Jepang (Cucumis Sativus L.) Berdasarkan Perubahan Ion Leakage dan PH

In this study, the chilling induced in Japanese cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) stored at chilled temperature and the changes in its quality during storage period were examined. Change in ion leakage and pH were used as indicator of chilling injury symptopms. The sample of cucumber were stored at 5ºC (chilling) and 25ºC (non chilling). Percentage of ion leakage for cucumber stored at 5ºC was higher than that at 25 ºC at storage time of 3, 6 and 9 days. The increase in the rate of ion leakage at 5ºC indicates the chilling induced of cell membrane. The increasing tendency of pH was observed for cucumber stored at 5ºC with the value at storage time of 9 days were higher than that at 25ºC. The increase in pH could be thought as the change in acid content which indicate the occurrence of chilling injury. Changes in ion leakage and pH indicate the change in membrane permeability which related to chilling injury

Vision based referee sign language recognition system for the RoboCup MSL league

In RoboCup Middle Size league (MSL) the main referee uses assisting technology, controlled by a second referee, to support him, in particular for conveying referee decisions for robot players with the help of a wireless communication system. In this paper a vision-based system is introduced, able to interpret dynamic and static gestures of the referee, thus eliminating the need for a second one. The referee's gestures are interpreted by the system and sent directly to the Referee Box, which sends the proper commands to the robots. The system is divided into four modules: a real time hand tracking and feature extraction, a SVM (Support Vector Machine) for static hand posture identification, an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) for dynamic unistroke hand gesture recognition, and a FSM (Finite State Machine) to control the various system states transitions. The experimental results showed that the system works very reliably, being able to recognize the combination of gestures and hand postures in real-time. For the hand posture recognition, with the SVM model trained with the selected features, an accuracy of 98,2% was achieved. Also, the system has many advantages over the current implemented one, like avoiding the necessity of a second referee, working on noisy environments, working on wireless jammed situations. This system is easy to implement and train and may be an inexpensive solution

A web server for interactive and zoomable Chaos Game Representation images

Chaos Game Representation (CGR) is a generalized scale-independent Markov transition table, which is useful for the visualization and comparative study of genomic signature, or for the study of characteristic sequence motifs. However, in order to fully utilize the scale-independent properties of CGR, it should be accessible through scale-independent user interface instead of static images. Here we describe a web server and Perl library for generating zoomable CGR images utilizing Google Maps API, which is also easily searchable for specific motifs. The web server is freely accessible at , and the Perl library as well as the source code is distributed with the G-language Genome Analysis Environment under GNU General Public License

Disease-specific survival for limited-stage small-cell lung cancer affected by statistical method of assessment

BACKGROUND: In general, prognosis and impact of prognostic/predictive factors are assessed with Kaplan-Meier plots and/or the Cox proportional hazard model. There might be substantive differences from the results using these models for the same patients, if different statistical methods were used, for example, Boag log-normal (cure-rate model), or log-normal survival analysis. METHODS: Cohort of 244 limited-stage small-cell lung cancer patients, were accrued between 1981 and 1998, and followed to the end of 2005. The endpoint was death with or from lung cancer, for disease-specific survival (DSS). DSS at 1-, 3- and 5-years, with 95% confidence limits, are reported for all patients using the Boag, Kaplan-Meier, Cox, and log-normal survival analysis methods. Factors with significant effects on DSS were identified with step-wise forward multivariate Cox and log-normal survival analyses. Then, DSS was ascertained for patients with specific characteristics defined by these factors. RESULTS: The median follow-up of those alive was 9.5 years. The lack of events after 1966 days precluded comparison after 5 years. DSS assessed by the four methods in the full cohort differed by 0–2% at 1 year, 0–12% at 3 years, and 0–1% at 5 years. Log-normal survival analysis indicated DSS of 38% at 3 years, 10–12% higher than with other methods; univariate 95% confidence limits were non-overlapping. Surgical resection, hemoglobin level, lymph node involvement, and superior vena cava (SVC) obstruction significantly impacted DSS. DSS assessed by the Cox and log-normal survival analysis methods for four clinical risk groups differed by 1–6% at 1 year, 15–26% at 3 years, and 0–12% at 5 years; multivariate 95% confidence limits were overlapping in all instances. CONCLUSION: Surgical resection, hemoglobin level, lymph node involvement, and superior vena cava (SVC) obstruction all significantly impacted DSS. Apparent DSS for patients was influenced by the statistical methods of assessment. This would be clinically relevant in the development or improvement of clinical management strategies

Vision-based portuguese sign language recognition system

Vision-based hand gesture recognition is an area of active current research in computer vision and machine learning. Being a natural way of human interaction, it is an area where many researchers are working on, with the goal of making human computer interaction (HCI) easier and natural, without the need for any extra devices. So, the primary goal of gesture recognition research is to create systems, which can identify specific human gestures and use them, for example, to convey information. For that, vision-based hand gesture interfaces require fast and extremely robust hand detection, and gesture recognition in real time. Hand gestures are a powerful human communication modality with lots of potential applications and in this context we have sign language recognition, the communication method of deaf people. Sign lan- guages are not standard and universal and the grammars differ from country to coun- try. In this paper, a real-time system able to interpret the Portuguese Sign Language is presented and described. Experiments showed that the system was able to reliably recognize the vowels in real-time, with an accuracy of 99.4% with one dataset of fea- tures and an accuracy of 99.6% with a second dataset of features. Although the im- plemented solution was only trained to recognize the vowels, it is easily extended to recognize the rest of the alphabet, being a solid foundation for the development of any vision-based sign language recognition user interface system

Increased expression of integrin-linked kinase is associated with shorter survival in non-small cell lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Integrin-linked kinase (ILK) promotes tumor growth and invasion. Increased ILK expression is correlated with progression of several tumor types, but the expression of ILK has not been investigated in patients with non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs). METHODS: We investigated ILK expression in patients with NSCLC by means of immunohistochemistry. RESULTS: ILK expression was significantly associated with tumor grade, T status, lymph node metastasis and stage. (p = 0.0169 for tumor grade; p = 0.0006 for T status; p = 0.0002 for lymph node metastasis; p < 0.0001 for stage). The 5-year survival rates for patients with strong and weak or no ILK expression levels were 20% and 59%, respectively: the difference was statistically significant (p < 0.0001). A multivariate analysis of survival revealed that ILK expression, T status, N status and vascular invasion were statistically significant prognostic factors (p = 0.0218 for ILK; p = 0.0046 for T status; p < 0.0001 for N status; p < 0.0001 for vascular invasion). CONCLUSIONS: Our study demonstrates that increased expression of ILK is a poor prognostic factor in patients with NSCLC