Discovering properties of new DNA-binding activity of proteins

Protein-DNA interactions are an essential feature in the genetic activities of life, and the ability to predict and manipulate such interactions has applications in a wide range of fields. This Thesis presents the methods of modelling the properties of protein-DNA interactions. In particular, it investigates the methods of visualising and predicting the specificity of DNA-binding Cys2His2 zinc finger interaction. The Cys2His2 zinc finger proteins interact via their individual fingers to base pair subsites on the target DNA. Four key residue positions on the a- helix of the zinc fingers make non-covalent interactions with the DNA with sequence specificity. Mutating these key residues generates combinatorial possibilities that could potentially bind to any DNA segment of interest. Many attempts have been made to predict the binding interaction using structural and chemical information, but with only limited success. The most important contribution of the thesis is that the developed model allows for the binding properties of a given protein-DNA binding to be visualised in relation to other protein-DNA combinations without having to explicitly physically model the specific protein molecule and specific DNA sequence. To prove this, various databases were generated, including a synthetic database which includes all possible combinations of the DNA-binding Cys2His2 zinc finger interactions. NeuroScale, a topographic visualisation technique, is exploited to represent the geometric structures of the protein-DNA interactions by measuring dissimilarity between the data points. In order to verify the effect of visualisation on understanding the binding properties of the DNA-binding Cys2His2 zinc finger interaction, various prediction models are constructed by using both the high dimensional original data and the represented data in low dimensional feature space. Finally, novel data sets are studied through the selected visualisation models based on the experimental DNA-zinc finger protein database. The result of the NeuroScale projection shows that different dissimilarity representations give distinctive structural groupings, but clustering in biologically-interesting ways. This method can be used to forecast the physiochemical properties of the novel proteins which may be beneficial for therapeutic purposes involving genome targeting in general

Angle Range and Identity Similarity Enhanced Gaze and Head Redirection based on Synthetic data

In this paper, we propose a method for improving the angular accuracy and photo-reality of gaze and head redirection in full-face images. The problem with current models is that they cannot handle redirection at large angles, and this limitation mainly comes from the lack of training data. To resolve this problem, we create data augmentation by monocular 3D face reconstruction to extend the head pose and gaze range of the real data, which allows the model to handle a wider redirection range. In addition to the main focus on data augmentation, we also propose a framework with better image quality and identity preservation of unseen subjects even training with synthetic data. Experiments show that our method significantly improves redirection performance in terms of redirection angular accuracy while maintaining high image quality, especially when redirecting to large angles

Training-Free Location-Aware Text-to-Image Synthesis

Current large-scale generative models have impressive efficiency in generating high-quality images based on text prompts. However, they lack the ability to precisely control the size and position of objects in the generated image. In this study, we analyze the generative mechanism of the stable diffusion model and propose a new interactive generation paradigm that allows users to specify the position of generated objects without additional training. Moreover, we propose an object detection-based evaluation metric to assess the control capability of location aware generation task. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both control capacity and image quality

Influence of Personality Characteristics and Psychological Intervention on Treatment Satisfaction of Juvenile Orthodontic Patients

Orthodontics is the correction and treatment of malocclusion deformity caused by a variety of reasons. Malocclusion malformation has a direct impact on people’s facial features, while likely to cause some diseases involving the mouth in the long-term life. For adolescents, malocclusion has a great physical and mental impact. This article first have a simple overview of malocclusion deformity and orthodontic treatment, analysis of youth physical and mental development characteristics and adolescent personality traits. Through the way of completely random sampling, eighty teenage orthodontic patients can be divided into two groups, respectively as the control group and psychological intervention group. Though survey assessment after several stages treatment, explore impact on the psychological intervention in patients with juvenile orthodontic treatment satisfaction degree