NaBiS2 decorated polysaccharide sponges for adsorption-photocatalytic degradation of dye under visible light illumination.

Dye is emissions aggravating aquatic ecosystem pollution, and photocatalysis is considered the most appealing option to remove dyes by degradation. However, the current photocatalysts suffer from agglomeration, large bandgaps, high mass transfer resistance, and high operation cost. Herein, we present a facile hydrothermally induced phase separation and in situ synthesis strategy for fabrication of sodium bismuth sulfide (NaBiS2)-decorated chitosan/cellulose sponges (NaBiCCSs). The NaBiCCSs demonstrate unique polysaccharide cellular structure (150-500 µm), uniformly immobilized NaBiS2 nanoparticles (70-90 nm), narrow bandgap (1.18 eV), high photocurrent (0.74 µA/cm2), and outstanding compressibility. Benefiting from the characteristics and the high affinity to dyes, the NaBiCCSs provide innovative synergistic adsorption-photocatalytic degradation model for dye removal, attaining a superior methylene blue removal rate of 98.38 % under visible light illumination and offering good reusability. This study offers a sustainable technical solution for dye contaminant removal.

Insights into sweet potato SR proteins: from evolution to species-specific expression and alternative splicing.

MAIN CONCLUSION: SR proteins from sweet potato have conserved functional domains and similar gene structures as that of Arabidopsis and rice in general. However, expression patterns and alternative splicing regulations of SR genes from different species have changed under stresses. Novel alternative splicing regulations were found in sweet potato SR genes. Serine/arginine-rich (SR) proteins play important roles in plant development and stress response by regulating the pre-mRNA splicing process. However, SR proteins have not been identified so far from an important crop sweet potato. Through bioinformatics analysis, our study identified 24 SR proteins from sweet potato, with comprehensively analyzing of protein characteristics, gene structure, chromosome localization, and cis-acting elements in promotors. Salt, heat, and mimic drought stresses triggered extensive but different expressional regulations on sweet potato SR genes. Interestingly, heat stress caused the most active disturbances in both gene transcription and pre-mRNA alternative splicing (AS). Tissue and species-specific transcriptional and pre-mRNA AS regulations in response to stresses were found in sweet potato, in comparison with Arabidopsis and rice. Moreover, novel patterns of pre-mRNA alternative splicing were found in SR proteins from sweet potato. Our study provided an insight into similarities and differences of SR proteins in different plant species from gene sequences to gene structures and stress responses, indicating SR proteins may regulate their downstream genes differently between different species and tissues by varied transcriptional and pre-mRNA AS regulations.

Three-Dimensional Reconstruction with a Laser Line Based on Image In-Painting and Multi-Spectral Photometric Stereo.

This paper presents a multi-spectral photometric stereo (MPS) method based on image in-painting, which can reconstruct the shape using a multi-spectral image with a laser line. One of the difficulties in multi-spectral photometric stereo is to extract the laser line because the required illumination for MPS, e.g., red, green, and blue light, may pollute the laser color. Unlike previous methods, through the improvement of the network proposed by Isola, a Generative Adversarial Network based on image in-painting was proposed, to separate a multi-spectral image with a laser line into a clean laser image and an uncorrupted multi-spectral image without the laser line. Then these results were substituted into the method proposed by Fan to obtain high-precision 3D reconstruction results. To make the proposed method applicable to real-world objects, a rendered image dataset obtained using the rendering models in ShapeNet has been used for training the network. Evaluation using the rendered images and real-world images shows the superiority of the proposed approach over several previous methods.