使用线段表实现线段编码与种子填充快速算法

在图像处理中常用水平线段集表示区域,提出了一种采用线段表结构来表示区域,并给出使用线段表改进传统像素标记与种子填充算法的快速算法。该算法中,线段表的每个表项对应一条水平线段,它包含L、xL、xR、y和F 5个参数,即表示上下线段连通关系的标记,左、右端点的x坐标,线段的y坐标与表示线段特征或类型的标志。具有相同标记的线段表表项构成连通区域。以线段表为基础,水平与垂直方向的连通检测可分别进行,水平方向可通过行程编码实现,垂直方向则通过比较上下线段的端点坐标来确定。线段编码是像素标记的改进,由行程编码、线段标记、统一标记与标记排序4个步骤组成。采用线段表结构后,线段编码中利用桶排序,种子填充新算法中,利用队列结构并避免重复扫描来提高效率,与轮廓填充算法相比较效率都可提高近一倍。     

Detecting Overlapping Community Structures in Networks

Community structure has been recognized as an important statistical feature of networked systems over the past decade. A lot of work has been done to discover isolated communities from a network, and the focus was on developing of algorithms with high quality and good performance. However, there is less work done on the discovery of overlapping community structure, even though it could better capture the nature of network in some real-world applications. For example, people are always provided with varying characteristics and interests, and are able to join very different communities in their social network. In this context, we present a novel overlapping community structures detecting algorithm which first finds the seed sets by the spectral partition and then extends them with a special random walks technique. At every expansion step, the modularity function Q is chosen to measure the expansion structures. The function has become one of the popular standards in community detecting and is defined in Newman and Girvan (Phys. Rev. 69:026113, 2004). We also give a theoretic analysis to the whole expansion process and prove that our algorithm gets the best community structures greedily. Extensive experiments are conducted in real-world networks with various sizes. The results show that overlapping is important to find the complete community structures and our method outperforms the C-means in quality.     

Up in smoke: I. Smoke-derived germination cues for postfire annual,Nicotiana attenuata torr. Ex. Watson

Some postfire annuals with dormant seeds use heat or chemical cues from charred wood to synchronize their germination with the postfire environment. We report that wood smoke and polar extracts of wood smoke, but not the ash of burned wood, contain potent cue(s) that stimulate germination in the postfire annual plant,Nicotiana attenuata. We examined the responses of seeds from six populations of plants from southwest Utah to extracts of smoke and found the proportion of viable seeds that germinated in the presence of smoke cues to vary between populations but to be consistent between generations. With the most dormant genotypes, we examine three mechanisms by which smoke-derived chemical cues may stimulate germination (chemical scarification of the seed coat and nutritive- and signal-mediated stimulation of germination) and report that the response is consistent with the signal-mediated mechanism. The germination cue(s) found in smoke are produced by the burning of hay, hardwood branches, leaves, and, to a lesser degree, cellulose. Moreover, the cues are found in the common food condiment, liquid smoke, and we find no significant differences between brands. With a bioassay-driven fractionation of liquid smoke, we identified 71 compounds in active fractions by GC-MS and AA spectrometry. However, when these compounds were tested in pure form or in combinations that mimicked the composition of active fractions over a range of concentrations, they failed to stimulate germination to the same degree that smoke fractions did. Moreover, enzymatic oxidation of some of these compounds also failed to stimulate germination. In addition, we tested 43 additional compounds also reported from smoke, 85 compounds that were structurally similar to those reported from smoke and 34 compounds reported to influence germination in other species. Of the 233 compounds tested, 16 proved to inhibit germination at the concentrations tested, and none reproduced the activity of wood smoke. By thermally desorbing smoke produced by cellulose combustions that was trapped on Chromosorb 101, we demonstrate that the cue is desorbed between 125 and 150°C. We estimate that the germination cues are active at concentrations of less than 1 pg/seed and, due to their chromatographic behavior, infer that a number of different chemical structures are active. In separate experiments, we demonstrate that cues remain active for at least 53 days in soil under greenhouse conditions and that the application of aqucous extracts of smoke to soil containing seeds results in dramatic increases in germination of artificial seed banks. Hence, although the chemical nature of the germination cue remains elusive, the stability of the germination cues, their water-solubility, and their activity in low concentrations suggest that these cues could serve as powerful tools for the examination of dormant seed banks and the selective factors thought to be important in the evolution of postfire plant communities.     

Bacteria-Responsive Self-Assembly of Antimicrobial Peptide Nanonets for Trap-and-Kill of Antibiotic-Resistant Strains

Bacterial trapping using nanonets is a ubiquitous immune defense mechanism against infectious microbes. These nanonets can entrap microbial cells, effectively arresting their dissemination and rendering them more vulnerable to locally secreted microbicides. Inspired by this evolutionarily conserved anti-infective strategy, a series of 15 to 16 residue-long synthetic β-hairpin peptides is herein constructed with the ability to self-assemble into nanonets in response to the presence of bacteria, enabling spatiotemporal control over microbial killing. Using amyloid-specific K114 assay and confocal microscopy, the membrane components lipoteichoic acid and lipopolysaccharide are shown to play a major role in determining the amyloid-nucleating capacity as triggered by Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria respectively. These nanonets displayed both trapping and killing functionalities, hence offering a direct improvement from the trap-only biomimetics in literature. By substituting a single turn residue of the non-amyloidogenic BTT1 peptide, the nanonet-forming BTT1-3A analog is produced with comparable antimicrobial potency. With the same sequence manipulation approach, BTT2-4A analog modified from BTT2 peptide showed improved antimicrobial potency against colistin-resistant clinical isolates. The peptide nanonets also demonstrated robust stability against proteolytic degradation, and promising in vivo efficacy and biosafety profile. Overall, these bacteria-responsive peptide nanonets are promising clinical anti-infective alternatives for circumventing antibiotic resistance.     

A new method using feature extraction for identifying paddy rice species for quality seed selection

The purpose of this work was to explore a new feature extraction method for classifying paddy seeds using a feature extraction algorithm to achieve the area ratio, horizontal–slant and front–rear angles and find whether the proposed features have high discriminating power. Another objective was to find the smallest feature set that can ensure highly accurate recognition of seeds. A total of a 100 image features were extracted, and features having significant discriminating power were identified based on the analysis of variance (ANOVA). From the 100 features, 14 features were found to have high discriminating power and from these features, six were selected as the proposed features. Experimental results show that the proposed features and removal of redundant features enhanced the discriminating power of the feature set, and that the proposed features have an excellent discriminating property for seeds. The presented features resulted in the highest classification accuracy (98.8%) when compared to other methods.     

Peptide Nanophotonics: From Optical Waveguiding to Precise Medicine and Multifunctional Biochips

Optical waveguiding phenomena found in bioinspired chemically synthesized peptide nanostructures are a new paradigm which can revolutionize emerging fields of precise medicine and health monitoring. A unique combination of their intrinsic biocompatibility with remarkable multifunctional optical properties and developed nanotechnology of large peptide wafers makes them highly promising for new biomedical light therapy tools and implantable optical biochips. This Review highlights a new field of peptide nanophotonics. It covers peptide nanotechnology and the fabrication process of peptide integrated optical circuits, basic studies of linear and nonlinear optical phenomena in biological and bioinspired nanostructures, and their passive and active optical waveguiding. It is shown that the optical properties of this generation of bio‐optical materials are governed by fundamental biological processes. Refolding the peptide secondary structure is followed by wideband optical absorption and visible tunable fluorescence. In peptide optical waveguides, such a bio‐optical effect leads to switching from passive waveguiding mode in native α‐helical phase to an active one in the β‐sheet phase. The found active waveguiding effect in β‐sheet fiber structures below optical diffraction limit opens an avenue for the future development of new bionanophotonics in ultrathin peptide/protein fibrillar structures toward advanced biomedical nanotechnology.     

生物基防腐技术的研究进展及其在木包装中的应用展望

目的 为满足木包装材料的使用要求和防疫要求,需将木材进行防腐处理,但传统的防腐处理方式易对环境和物品造成污染,存在安全隐患,生物基防腐技术可解决上述问题。方法 介绍当前木包装材料的使用现状,阐述国内外生物基防腐技术的研究进展,并分析和讨论木包装材料在使用中存在的问题。结果 生物基防腐技术是一种绿色、高效的木材防腐技术,目前已取得了一定的研究成果。结论 生物基防腐技术可以满足木包装材料在运输和存储中的各种需求,并且具有环保无毒的优点,因而具有非常广阔的开发和应用前景。     

基于SVM区域构造的复杂中文版面分析

针对现有的版面分析算法对参数的敏感性以及弱适用性等缺陷,提出基于SVM区域构造的复杂中文文档版面分析算法。该算法通过选取最能代表区域字符特征的连通区(种子连通区)作为测试的第一特征,利用具有强学习和泛化能力的支持向量机实现区域构造,在构造的区域中运用投影快速判断文档阅读顺序。实验结果表明,该方法具有更好的适应性,对复杂的中文版面有满意的分析结果。