Authenticity green coffee bean species and geographical origin using near-infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometrics

To prevent the adulteration of agricultural resources and provide a solution to enhance the green coffee bean supply chain, authentication using the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technique was investigated. Partial least square with discrimination analysis (PLS-DA) models combined with various preprocessing methods were built from NIR spectra of 153 Vietnamese green coffee samples. The model combined with the standard normal variate and the first order of derivative yielded excellent performance in predicting coffee species with the error cross-validation of 0.0261. PLS-DA model of mean centre and first-order derivative spectra also yielded good performance in verifying geographical indication of green coffee with the error of 0.0656. By contrast, the predicting abilities of post-harvest methods were poor. The overall results showed a high potential of the NIRS in online authentication practices.     

The Role of microRNAs in Development of Colitis-Associated Colorectal Cancer

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most deadly cancer worldwide, and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is one of the critical factors in CRC carcinogenesis. IBD is responsible for an unphysiological and sustained chronic inflammation environment favoring the transformation. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) belong to a class of highly conserved short single-stranded segments (18–25 nucleotides) non-coding RNA and have been extensively discussed in both CRC and IBD. However, the role of miRNAs in the development of colitis-associated CRC (CAC) is less clear. The aim of this review is to summarize the major upregulated (miR-18a, miR-19a, miR-21, miR-31, miR-155 and miR-214) and downregulated (miR-124, miR-193a-3p and miR-139-5p) miRNAs in CAC, and their roles in genes’ expression modulation in chronic colonic-inflammation-induced carcinogenesis, including programmed cell-death pathways. These miRNAs dysregulation could be applied for early CAC diagnosis, to predict therapy efficacy and for precision treatment.     

A Case Report of Germline Compound Heterozygous Mutations in the BRCA1 Gene of an Ovarian and Breast Cancer Patient

The germline carrier of the BRCA1 pathogenic mutation has been well proven to confer an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Despite BRCA1 biallelic pathogenic mutations being extremely rare, they have been reported to be embryonically lethal or to cause Fanconi anemia (FA). Here we describe a patient who was a 48-year-old female identified with biallelic pathogenic mutations of the BRCA1 gene, with no or very subtle FA-features. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and breast cancer at the ages of 43 and 44 and had a strong family history of breast and gynecological cancers.     

Design of an Electromagnetic Frequency Tunned Antenna for Mobile Communications

Wireless Personal Communications - Current mobile communications technology relies heavily on efficient design of antennas, where the operational characteristics of the wireless communication...     

Coexistence of three ferroelectric phases and enhanced piezoelectric properties in BaTiO3–CaHfO3 lead-free ceramics

Perovskite ferroelectrics possess the fascinating piezoelectric properties near a morphotropic phase boundary, attributing to a low energy barrier that the results in structural instability and easy polarization rotation. In this work, a new lead-free system of (1-x)BaTiO₃-xCaHfO₃ was designed, and characterized by a coexistence of ferroelectric rhombohedral-orthorhombic-tetragonal (R-O-T) phases. With the increase amount of CaHfO₃ (x), a stable coexistence region of three ferroelectric phases (R-O-T) exists at 0.06 ≤ x ≤ 0.08. Both large piezoelectric coefficient (d₃₃～400 pC/N), inverse piezoelectric coefficient (d₃₃^*～547 pm/V) and planar electromechanical coupling factor (k_p～58.2%) can be achieved for the composition with x = 0.08 near the coexistence of three ferroelectric phases. Our results show that the materials with the composition located at a region where the three ferroelectric R-O-T phases coexist would have the lowest energy barrier and thus greatly promote the polarization rotation, resulting in a strong piezoelectric response.     

Research on the overall architecture of Internet of Things middleware for intelligent industrial parks

With the continuous development of the Internet of Things technology and the proposal of “Made in China 2025”, the construction of IoT applicat     

Analysis and optimization of DS-CDMA systems with time-limited partial response chip waveforms

Conventional direct sequence code division multiple access systems (DS-CDMA) using offset quadrature phase shift key (OQPSK) usually employ a strictly bandlimited partial response square-root raised cosine pulse as the chip waveform. They have the disadvantage of large envelope fluctuation that will incur performance degradation due to the intermodulation and bandwidth enlargement caused by post nonlinear processing. To improve the performance of DS-CDMA systems, the chip waveform and receiver should be properly selected. This paper presents a systematic performance analysis of a matched filter receiver and zero-forcing filter (ZF) receiver for DS-CDMA using a time-limited partial response chip waveform. Nevertheless the systematic performance analysis is applicable to bandlimited chip pulse as well. For the zero-forcing filters, we propose to select the frequency responses that satisfy the first Nyquist criterion. With this class of filters, we can choose the roll-off factor to minimize the total power of multiple access interference and noise power. The zero-forcing filter with proper choice of roll-off factor, referred to as optimum ZF, yields a performance better than the matched filter counterpart. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the optimum ZF with superposed quadrature amplitude modulation signal as the time pulse waveform is evaluated. It is shown that the optimum ZF provides better BER performance than conventional OQPSK and minimum shift keying, and its envelope uniformity is much better than that of OQPSK.