Agro-Morphological and Molecular Characterization Reveal Deep Insights in Promising Genetic Diversity and Marker-Trait Associations in Fagopyrum esculentum and Fagopyrum tataricum.

Characterisation of genetic diversity is critical to adequately exploit the potential of germplasm collections and identify important traits for breeding programs and sustainable crop improvement. Here, we characterised the phenotypic and genetic diversity of a global collection of the two cultivated buckwheat species Fagopyrum esculentum and Fagopyrum tataricum (190 and 51 accessions, respectively) using 37 agro-morphological traits and 24 SSR markers. A wide range of variation was observed in both species for most of the traits analysed. The two species differed significantly in most traits, with traits related to seeds and flowering contributing most to differentiation. The accessions of each species were divided into three major phenoclusters with no clear geographic clustering. At the molecular level, the polymorphic SSR markers were highly informative, with an average polymorphic information content (PIC) of over 0.65 in both species. Genetic diversity, as determined by Nei's expected heterozygosity (He), was high (He = 0.77 and He = 0.66, respectively) and differed significantly between species (p = 0.03) but was homogeneously distributed between regions, confirming the lack of genetic structure as determined by clustering approaches. The weak genetic structure revealed by the phenotypic and SSR data and the low fixation indices in both species suggested frequent seed exchange and extensive cultivation and selection. In addition, 93 and 140 significant (p < 0.05) marker-trait associations (MTAs) were identified in both species using a general linear model and a mixed linear model, most of which explained >20% of the phenotypic variation in associated traits. Core collections of 23 and 13 phenotypically and genetically diverse accessions, respectively, were developed for F. esculentum and F. tataricum. Overall, the data analysed provided deep insights into the agro-morphological and genetic diversity and genetic relationships among F. esculentum and F. tataricum accessions and pointed to future directions for genomics-based breeding programs and germplasm management.

Influence of Hulling, Cleaning and Brushing/Polishing of (Pseudo)Cereal Grains on Compositional Characteristics.

(Pseudo)cereal grains have been the basis of human nutrition for thousands of years. The various types of cereals are usually harvested by grain harvesters and must be technologically processed in different ways before consumption. In addition to genotype and growing conditions, the compositional characteristics of the (pseudo)cereal grains are highly dependent on the processes used. In the present study, the effects of hulling, cleaning and brushing/polishing wheat, spelt, oat, barley, common and Tartary buckwheat grains and their fractions on physical parameters (thousand kernel weight, kernel width, fractional yield) and nutritional characteristics (protein, fat, ß-glucan, macro- and microelements) were investigated. Grain samples contained 22.7-148.5 mg/g protein, 4.5-69.6 mg/g fat and 0.5-54.4 mg/g ß-glucan. The content of macro- (K, Mg, P, S, Ca) and microelements (Mn, Fe, Zn, Na, Cu, Cr, Mo) varied considerably among the studied (pseudo)cereals and their grain fractions. Analysis of variance showed that species and fractions significantly influenced most of the analyzed characteristics. However, the composition of the edible fractions was not significantly dependent on the brushing/polishing process.

Dress-up: deep neural framework for image-based human appearance transfer.

The fashion industry is at the brink of radical transformation. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in fashion applications creates many opportunities for this industry and make fashion a better space for everyone. Interesting to this matter, we proposed a virtual try-on interface to stimulate consumers purchase intentions and facilitate their online buying decision process. Thus, we present, in this paper, our flexible person generation system for virtual try-on that aiming to treat the task of human appearance transfer across images while preserving texture details and structural coherence of the generated outfit. This challenging task has drawn increasing attention and made huge development of intelligent fashion applications. However, it requires different challenges, especially in the case of a wide divergences between the source and target images. To solve this problem, we proposed a flexible person generation framework called Dress-up to treat the 2D virtual try-on task. Dress-up is an end-to-end generation pipeline with three modules based on the task of image-to-image translation aiming to sequentially interchange garments between images, and produce dressing effects not achievable by existing works. The core idea of our solution is to explicitly encode the body pose and the target clothes by a pre-processing module based on the semantic segmentation process. Then, a conditional adversarial network is implemented to generate target segmentation feeding respectively, to the alignment and translation networks to generate the final output results. The novelty of this work lies in realizing the appearance transfer across images with high quality by reconstructing garments on a person in different orders and looks from simlpy semantic maps and 2D images without using 3D modeling. Our system can produce dressing effects and provide significant results over the state-of-the-art methods on the widely used DeepFashion dataset. Extensive evaluations show that Dress-up outperforms other recent methods in terms of output quality, and handles a wide range of editing functions for which there is no direct supervision. Different types of results were computed to verify the performance of our proposed framework and show that the robustness and effectiveness are high by utilizing our method.

You can try without visiting: a comprehensive survey on virtually try-on outfits.

Since the last years and until now, technology has made fast progress for many industries, in particularly, garment industry which aims to follow consumer desires and demands. One of these demands is to fit clothes before purchasing them on-line. Therefore, many research works have been focused on how to develop an intelligent apparel industry to ensure the online shopping experience. Image-based virtual try-on is among the most potential approach of virtual fitting that tries on target clothes into customer's image, therefore, it has received considerable research efforts in the recent years. However, there are several challenges involved in development of virtual try-on that make it difficult to achieve naturally looking virtual outfit such as shape, pose, occlusion, illumination cloth texture, logo and text etc. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive and structured overview of extensive research on the advancement of virtual try-on. This review first introduces virtual try-on and its challenges followed by its demand in fashion industry. We summarize state-of-the-art image based virtual try-on for both fashion detection and fashion synthesis as well as their respective advantages, drawbacks, and guidelines for selection of specific try-on model followed by its recent development and successful application. Finally, we conclude the paper with promising directions for future research.

Genetic variability of morpho-physiological response to phosphorus deficiency in Tunisian populations of Brachypodium hybridum.

Brachypodium hybridum (Poaceae) is widely distributed in the dry environments in Mediterranean basin, due to its high tolerance to drought. Investigating the natural variation of B. hybridum in response to environmental stresses is crucial for unraveling the genetic network of its stress tolerance. 79 B. hybridum lines from eight Tunisian populations were screened for their performance to low P availability using morpho-physiological parameters. ANOVA showed that treatment and population*treatment factors were the most contributors in the explained variance for the majority of parameters. A considerable population differentiation was detected in control and under P level (Qst = 0.77 vs Qst = 0.62). This suggests that B. hybridum exhibit an adaptive differential response to P deficiency related environmental conditions. Results revealed that Raouad and Sejnen lines were the most tolerant to P deficiency followed by Haouaria and Enfidha lines. The remaining populations were classified as sensitive. This pattern suggests that coastal populations were more tolerant to P deficiency than the inland ones. A slightly higher heritability was evidenced under low P level for most of traits, indicating that the direct selection under P deficiency is more reliable than an indirect one under optimal P supply.

Fatigue and physical activity in cancer survivors: A cross-sectional population-based study.

PURPOSE: A substantial proportion of cancer survivors experience fatigue after diagnosis. Physical activity (PA) can impact fatigue after cancer. In this study, we evaluated the prevalence and association of fatigue and the practice of PA in a population with early cancer. METHODS: Using the national population-based French cross-sectional study Vie après le cancer 2, we included 1984 patients with early breast (61.1%), prostate (21.5%), and colorectal (17.4%) cancer. Severe fatigue at 2 years postdiagnosis was defined by a score ≥40 in the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer quality of life questionnaire (EORTC QLQ C30) fatigue subscale. PA was defined as (a) self-reported PA before diagnosis (active/inactive) and (b) change in PA since diagnosis (increased/maintained exposure vs decreased exposure/remaining inactive). Multivariate regression examined associations of severe fatigue with PA, adjusting for baseline clinical and treatment variables. RESULTS: Median age was 52 years. 51.5% of patients experienced severe fatigue 2 years post-diagnosis. 87.7% reported to be physically active before cancer diagnosis; 53.3% of patients either decreased PA or remained inactive at 2 years postdiagnosis. At 2 years postdiagnosis, severe fatigue was associated with a change in PA since diagnosis: patients with decreasing PA/remaining inactive from pre- to postdiagnosis had a higher risk of severe fatigue vs those with increasing/maintaining PA (adjusted odds ratio [95% confidence interval] 2.32 [1.85-2.90]). CONCLUSION: Fatigue continues to be a substantial problem for cancer survivors 2 years after cancer diagnosis and is associated with PA decreasing/remaining inactive since diagnosis. Interventions to maintain or increase PA for cancer survivors should be tested to mitigate long-term fatigue after cancer.

Comparative analysis of two sister Erythrophleum species (Leguminosae) reveal contrasting transcriptome-wide responses to early drought stress.

With the ongoing climate change, African rainforests are expected to experience severe drought events in the future. In Africa, the tropical genus Erythrophleum (Fabaceae) includes two forest sister timber tree species displaying contrasting geographical distributions. Erythrophleum ivorense is adapted to wet evergreen Guineo-Congolian forests, whereas E. suaveolens occurs in a wider range of climates, being found in moist dense forests but also in gallery forests under a relatively drier climate. This geographical distribution pattern suggests that the two species might cope differently to drought at the genomic level. Yet, the genetic basis of tolerance response to drought stress in both species is still uncharacterized. To bridge this gap, we performed an RNA-seq approach on seedlings from each species to monitor their transcriptional responses at different levels of drought stress (0, 2 and 6 weeks after stopping watering seedlings). Monitoring of wilting symptoms revealed that E. suaveolens displayed an earlier phenotypic response to drought stress than E. ivorense. At the transcriptomic level, results revealed 2020 (1204 down-regulated/816 up-regulated) and 1495 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in response to drought stress from a total of 67,432 and 66,605 contigs assembled in E. ivorense and E. suaveolens, respectively. After identifying 30,374 orthologs between species, we found that only 7 of them were DEGs shared between species, while 587 and 458 were differentially expressed only in E. ivorense or E. suaveolens, respectively. GO and KEGG enrichment analysis revealed that the two species differ in terms of significantly regulated pathways as well as the number and expression profile of DEGs (Up/Down) associated with each pathway in the two stress stages. Our results suggested that the two studied species react differently to drought. E. suaveolens seems displaying a prompt response to drought at its early stage strengthened by the down-regulation of many DEGs encoding for signaling and metabolism-related pathways. A considerable up-regulation of these pathways was also found in E. ivorense at the late stage of drought, suggesting this species may be a late responder. Overall, our data may serve as basis for further understanding the genetic control of drought tolerance in tropical trees and favor the selection of crucial genes for genetically enhancing drought resistance.