12,438 research outputs found
Effects of bagging on sugar metabolism and the activity of sugar metabolism related enzymes during fruit development of Qingzhong loquat
To investigate the effects of bagging on sugar metabolism and the activity of sugar metabolism related enzymes in Qingzhong loquat fruit development, the contents of sucrose, glucose and soluble solids as well as the activities of sugar metabolism related enzymes were evaluated. The content of sucrose, glucose and soluble solids increased, while the content of fructose, sorbitol and titratable acidity decreased in ripe fruit in response to bagging. In addition, the activities of acid invertase (AI) and neutral invertase (NI) in the bagged fruit were lower than that in the non-bagged fruit, and the activities of sucrose synthase (SS) and sucrose-phosphate synthase (SPS) in the bagged fruit were higher than that in the non-bagged fruit. The activities of SDH (sorbitol dehydrogenase) and SOX (sorbitol oxidase) in the bagged fruit were lower than those in the non-bagged fruit, but there was no significant difference, whereas the activities of SS and SPS in the bagged fruit were significantly higher than that in the non-bagged fruit, suggesting that bagging mainly increased the products of photosynthesis by enhancing the activities of SS and SPS.Key words: Loquat, bagging, sugar metabolism
Biotechnology issues in four Malaysian mainstream newspapers
Biotechnology has been identified as the new engine of growth for the transformation of Malaysia into a developed nation by 2020. The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of National Policy on biotechnology on media reporting in four Malaysian newspapers. Towards this end, a content analysis of four Malaysian mainstream newspapers (that is, Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, New Straits Times and The Star) over ten years period was conducted. The findings showed that the coverage pattern among the four different mainstream newspapers were different. These findings indicated that the mass media can be a tool for educating the public but it can only be done through the publishing of in-depth articles discussing issues relating to biotechnology. In conclusion, we found that the media has been unsuccessful in its role to teach the public on biotechnology. In this regard, the government will have to take some other measures to educate the public on that issue. Such immediate steps are necessary because it has been more than five years since the announcement of the National Policy on Biotechnology but the interest among Malaysians on biotechnology is still lacking.Key words: Biotechnology, Malaysian mainstream newspapers, National Policy on Biotechnology, genetically modified food (GMF)
Raman spectroscopy of epitaxial graphene on a SiC substrate
The fabrication of epitaxial graphene (EG) on SiC substrate by annealing has
attracted a lot of interest as it may speed up the application of graphene for
future electronic devices. The interaction of EG and the SiC substrate is
critical to its electronic and physical properties. In this work, Raman
spectroscopy was used to study the structure of EG and its interaction with SiC
substrate. All the Raman bands of EG blue shift from that of bulk graphite and
graphene made by micromechanical cleavage, which was attributed to the
compressive strain induced by the substrate. A model containing 13 x 13
honeycomb lattice cells of graphene on carbon nanomesh was constructed to
explain the origin of strain. The lattice mismatch between graphene layer and
substrate causes the compressive stress of 2.27 GPa on graphene. We also
demonstrate that the electronic structures of EG grown on Si and C terminated
SiC substrates are quite different. Our experimental results shed light on the
interaction between graphene and SiC substrate that are critical to the future
applications of EG.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure
Intense beam of metastable Muonium
Precision spectroscopy of the Muonium Lamb shift and fine structure requires
a robust source of 2S Muonium. To date, the beam-foil technique is the only
demonstrated method for creating such a beam in vacuum. Previous experiments
using this technique were statistics limited, and new measurements would
benefit tremendously from the efficient 2S production at a low energy muon
( keV) facility. Such a source of abundant low energy has
only become available in recent years, e.g. at the Low-Energy Muon beamline at
the Paul Scherrer Institute. Using this source, we report on the successful
creation of an intense, directed beam of metastable Muonium. We find that even
though the theoretical Muonium fraction is maximal in the low energy range of
keV, scattering by the foil and transport characteristics of the beamline
favor slightly higher energies of keV. We estimate that
an event detection rate of a few events per second for a future Lamb shift
measurement is feasible, enabling an increase in precision by two orders of
magnitude over previous determinations
Model-Based Feasibility Assessment of Membrane Biofilm Reactor to Achieve Simultaneous Ammonium, Dissolved Methane, and Sulfide Removal from Anaerobic Digestion Liquor
In this study, the membrane biofilm reactor (MBfR) is proposed to achieve simultaneous removal of ammonium, dissolved methane, and sulfide from main-stream and side-stream anaerobic digestion liquors. To avoid dissolved methane stripping, oxygen is introduced through gas-permeable membranes, which also from the substratum for the growth of a biofilm likely comprising ammonium oxidizing bacteria (AOB), anaerobic ammonium oxidation (Anammox) bacteria, denitrifying anaerobic methane oxidation (DAMO) microorganisms, aerobic methane oxidizing bacteria (MOB), and sulfur oxidizing bacteria (SOB). A mathematical model is developed and applied to assess the feasibility of such a system and the associated microbial community structure under different operational conditions. The simulation studies demonstrate the feasibility of achieving high-level (>97.0%), simultaneous removal of ammonium, dissolved methane, and sulfide in the MBfRs from both main-stream and side-stream anaerobic digestion liquors through adjusting the influent surface loading (or hydraulic retention time (HRT)) and the oxygen surface loading. The optimal HRT was found to be inversely proportional to the corresponding oxygen surface loading. Under the optimal operational conditions, AOB, DAMO bacteria, MOB, and SOB dominate the biofilm of the main-stream MBfR, while AOB, Anammox bacteria, DAMO bacteria, and SOB coexist in the side-stream MBfR to remove ammonium, dissolved methane, and sulfide simultaneously
Graph Distillation for Action Detection with Privileged Modalities
We propose a technique that tackles action detection in multimodal videos
under a realistic and challenging condition in which only limited training data
and partially observed modalities are available. Common methods in transfer
learning do not take advantage of the extra modalities potentially available in
the source domain. On the other hand, previous work on multimodal learning only
focuses on a single domain or task and does not handle the modality discrepancy
between training and testing. In this work, we propose a method termed graph
distillation that incorporates rich privileged information from a large-scale
multimodal dataset in the source domain, and improves the learning in the
target domain where training data and modalities are scarce. We evaluate our
approach on action classification and detection tasks in multimodal videos, and
show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the
NTU RGB+D and PKU-MMD benchmarks. The code is released at
http://alan.vision/eccv18_graph/.Comment: ECCV 201
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