Purification of an elicitor from Magnaporthe oryzae inducing defense resistance in rice

Inducible defenses that contribute to overall resistance in plant can be triggered by elicitors. A novel elicitor, derived from the mycelia of the blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, was purified to homogeneity by HiPrep 16/20 DEAE-Sepharose FF, Concanavalin A-Sepharose 4B and HiPrep 16/60 Sephacryl S-100 column chromatography. The purified elicitor appeared as single band corresponding to a molecular weight of 48.53 kDa on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophresis (SDS-PAGE) and a pI of 6.01 on isoeletric focusing (IEF) gel. Treatment with the purified elicitor increased the activities of phenylalanine ammonium-lyase (PAL) and peroxidase (POD) in rice susceptible cultivar CO39. Timecourse analysis showed peak accumulation of PAL appeared at 24 h after treatment, and it was higher in challenge-inoculated plants than non-challenge plants. POD accumulation showed similar kinetics with PAL, but the largest peak appeared at 36 h after treatment. Compared to the untreated control plants, pretreatment of rice leaves with the purified elicitor provided an enhanced level of protection against M. oryzae. N-terminal blocked elicitor was identified as hypothetical protein MG 05155.4 with 26.28% mass fingerprint coverage by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). The results suggest that the purified elicitor is involved in inducing resistance against blast fungus.Keywords: Magnaporthe oryzae, elicitor, purification, induced resistanc

Infant Cry Signal Processing, Analysis, and Classification with Artificial Neural Networks

As a special type of speech and environmental sound, infant cry has been a growing research area covering infant cry reason classification, pathological infant cry identification, and infant cry detection in the past two decades. In this dissertation, we build a new dataset, explore new feature extraction methods, and propose novel classification approaches, to improve the infant cry classification accuracy and identify diseases by learning infant cry signals. We propose a method through generating weighted prosodic features combined with acoustic features for a deep learning model to improve the performance of asphyxiated infant cry identification. The combined feature matrix captures the diversity of variations within infant cries and the result outperforms all other related studies on asphyxiated baby crying classification. We propose a non-invasive fast method of using infant cry signals with convolutional neural network (CNN) based age classification to diagnose the abnormality of infant vocal tract development as early as 4-month age. Experiments discover the pattern and tendency of the vocal tract changes and predict the abnormality of infant vocal tract by classifying the cry signals into younger age category. We propose an approach of generating hybrid feature set and using prior knowledge in a multi-stage CNNs model for robust infant sound classification. The dominant and auxiliary features within the set are beneficial to enlarge the coverage as well as keeping a good resolution for modeling the diversity of variations within infant sound and the experimental results give encouraging improvements on two relative databases. We propose an approach of graph convolutional network (GCN) with transfer learning for robust infant cry reason classification. Non-fully connected graphs based on the similarities among the relevant nodes are built to consider the short-term and long-term effects of infant cry signals related to inner-class and inter-class messages. With as limited as 20% of labeled training data, our model outperforms that of the CNN model with 80% labeled training data in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. Lastly, we apply mel-spectrogram decomposition to infant cry classification and propose a fusion method to further improve the infant cry classification performance

A note on a predator–prey model with modified Leslie–Gower and Holling-type II schemes with stochastic perturbation

AbstractIn this paper, we show there is a stationary distribution of a predator–prey model with modified Leslie–Gower and Holling-type II schemes with stochastic perturbation and it has ergodic property

OMAE2009-79847 EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON SEMI-ACTIVE VIBRATION CONTROL OF JACKET PLATFORMS WITH MAGNETORHEOLOGICAL DAMPER

ABSTRACT Jacket platforms are inevitably undergoing the environmental loads such as wind, waves, current, ice and earthquake etc., which will induce continuous vibration of the platforms. The vibration, on one hand, will cause fatigue damage, decreasing the platform's reliability; on the other hand, the excessive vibration can't satisfy the basic psychological requirements of the personnel. In order to reduce the excessive vibration of jacket platforms effectively, many control strategy and control equipments are proposed and studied. In the present study, a model experiment is designed to investigate the effectiveness of semi-active vibration control system with Magnetorheological (MR) Damper.A typical jacket offshore platform in Mexico Gulf is selected as experimental prototype. The model of the jacket platform is designed based on dynamical similarity criterion by the scale of 1:50. Furthermore, the optimal semi-active system of MR damper is designed by fuzzy control theory. In order to investigate the control effect of MR damper on the jacket platform under regular and random wave state, several model experiment load cases are performed. The experimental results show that the MR system designed by fuzzy theory can reduce the vibration of the platform effectively and in the same time the control effect is stable

INVESTIGATION OF HYDROELASTIC BEHAVIOR OF A PONTOON-TYPE VLFS DURING UNSTEADY EXTERNAL LOADS IN WAVE CONDITION USING A HYBRID FINITE ELEMENT-BOUNDARY ELEMENT (FE-ME) METHOD

The hydroelastic behaviour of a pontoon-type VLFS subjected to unsteady external loads in wave condition is investigated in the context of the time-domain modal expansion theory, in which the boundary element method (BEM) based on time domain Kelvin sources is used for hydrodynamic forces and the finite element method (FEM) is adopted for solving the deflections of the VLFS. In this analysis, the interpolation-tabulation scheme is applied to assess rapidly and accurately the free-surface Green function in finite water depth, and the boundary integral equation of a quarter VLFS model is further established taking advantage of symmetry of flow field and structure. The VLFS is modelled as an equivalent solid plate based on the Mindlin plate theory. The coupled plate-water model is performed to determine the wave-induced responses and transient behaviour under external loads such as a huge mass impact onto the structure and moving loads of an airplane, respectively. These results are verified with existing numerical results and experimental test. Then, the developed numerical tools are used in the study of the combined action taking into account of the mass drop/airplane landing as well as forward or reverse incident wave action. The deflections of the runway, the time history of vertical positions and the trajectory of the airplane are also presented through a systematic time-domain simulation, which illustrates the usefulness of the presently developed numerical solutions

Resonant waves in the gap between two advancing barges

The gap resonance between two advancing rectangular barges in side-by-side arrangement is investigated using a 3-D Rankine source method. A modified Sommerfeld radiation condition accounting for Doppler shift is applied for the low forward speed problem when the scattered waves could propagate ahead of the barges. Numerical studies are conducted to investigate various factors which will influence the wave resonance in the narrow gap with particular attention paid on the forward speed effect and its coupling effects with gap width and draft. It is found that in the absence of forward speed, the trapped water surface oscillates like a flexible plate and the wave flow within the gap behaves like a standing wave. When the two barges are travelling ahead, the resonant wave patterns within the gap are reshaped. Additionally, the resonant frequencies shift to lower value and are compressed within a narrow range. Gap resonances are reduced by the augment of gap width. The effect of draft is shown to be associated with resonant modes. Draft effect becomes less pronounced at higher order resonant modes. Furthermore, both gap width and draft effects on gap resonance are found to be independent from forward speed