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Background: IVS-II-5 G>C (HBB: c.315+5 G>C) is a rare β-thalassemia mutation. However, there is no clear evidence regarding the effect of this defect or co-inheritance of other β-thalassemia mutations on phenotypes. Methods: The clinical phenotypes associated with compound heterozygosity for the IVS-II-5 G>C mutation and other β-thalassemia mutations, together with the genetic modifiers' potential effect of the genetic modifiers α-thalassemia, were studied in 13 patients. In addition, analyses of red cell indices, hemoglobin component, iron status, and α-globin genes were carried out in 19 heterozygotes. Results: Next-generation sequencing of 24 undiagnosed patients with transfusion-dependent thalassemia (TDT) or non-transfusion-dependent thalassemia (NTDT) identified 13 carriers of the IVS-II-5 G>C mutation. There was a wide spectrum of phenotypic severity in compound heterozygotes and 6 (46.2%) of 13 were transfusion dependent. Analysis of 19 heterozygotes indicated that most were hematologically normal without appreciable microcytosis or hypochromia, and approximately half had normal hemoglobin A2 levels at the same time. Conclusion: Compound heterozygotes for IVS-II-5 G>C and other severe β-thalassemia mutations are phenotypically severe enough to necessitate appropriate therapy and counselling. Coinheritance of this nucleotide substitution with other β-thalassemia mutations may account for a considerable portion of the incidence of undiagnosed patients with NTDT and TDT in Guangxi. Therefore, the IVS-II-5 G>C mutation can pose serious difficulties in screening and counselling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inconsistency of chlorophyll content in rapeseed directly affects the quality of seed, so it is necessary to establish a rapid and nondestructive detection technology of chlorophyll in mature rapeseed. In this paper, the content of chlorophyll in rapeseed samples was determined by ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, and the near-infrared spectrum data were collected. The partial least squares regression model of chlorophyll content in rapeseed was established based on hyperspectral technology through first derivative and standard normal variable transformation pretreatment. The results of the cross-test showed that the determination coefficient of the validation set of the prediction model of chlorophyll content in rapeseed was greater than 0.85, and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the cross-test was less than 0.3 mg/kg. The results showed that the method could accurately predict the chlorophyll content in rapeseed and provide important technical support for rapid monitoring of seed quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past fewyears, multi-core processors incorporating four, six, eight, or more cores on a single die have become ubiquitous. Those cores, having their own private caches, often share a higher level cache memory, which leads to compete among different tasks. This can seriously affect the average performance of multi-core systems as the probability of cache hit could be lowered. In realizing this, we study the problem of scheduling bag-of-tasks (BoT) applications with shared cache constraint on multi-core systems. We first use cache space isolation techniques to divide shared caches into partitions. Then, we give a motivational example and outline the shared cache aware scheduling problem of multi-core systems. Finally, to provide an optimum solution for this problem, we propose a heuristic shared cache contention aware scheduling (SCAS) algorithm on multi-core systems. Our extensive simulation performance evaluation study clearly demonstrate that our proposed SCAS algorithm outperforms the existing traditional scheduling algorithm Min-min and the modified algorithm MSCAS in terms of schedule length and average response time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectrum technology has been widely used in crop non-destructive testing diagnosis for crop information acquisition. Since spectrum covers a wide range of bands, it is of critical importance to extract the sensitive bands. In this paper, we propose a methodology to extract the sensitive spectrum bands of rapeseed using multiscale multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. Our obtained sensitive bands are relatively robust in the range of 534 nm-574 nm. Further, by using the multifractal parameter (Hurst exponent) of the extracted sensitive bands, we propose a prediction model to forecast the Soil and plant analyzer development values ((SPAD), often used as a parameter to indicate the chlorophyll content) and an identification model to distinguish the different planting patterns. Three vegetation indices (VIs) based on previous work are used for comparison. Three evaluation indicators, namely, the root mean square error, the correlation coefficient, and the relative error employed in the SPAD values prediction model all demonstrate that our Hurst exponent has the best performance. Four rapeseed compound planting factors, namely, seeding method, planting density, fertilizer type, and weed control method are considered in the identification model. The Youden indices calculated by the random decision forest method and the K-nearest neighbor method show that our Hurst exponent is superior to other three Vis, and their combination for the factor of seeding method. In addition, there is no significant difference among the five features for other three planting factors. This interesting finding suggests that the transplanting and the direct seeding would make a big difference in the growth of rapeseed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]