Vita Publications

Mutagenesis drives natural selection. In the lab, mutations allow gene function to be deciphered. [...]

Long-term studies of Caenorhabditis elegans larval development traditionally require tedious manual observations because larvae must move to develop, and existing immobilization techniques either perturb development or are unsuited for young larvae. Here, we present a simple microfluidic device to simultaneously follow development of ten C. [...]

Programmed cell death (PCD) is an important process in the development of multicellular organisms. Apoptosis, a form of PCD characterized morphologically by chromatin condensation, membrane blebbing, and cytoplasm compaction, and molecularly by the activation of caspase proteases, has been extensively investigated. [...]

Dense core vesicles (DCVs) are thought to be generated at the late Golgi apparatus as immature DCVs, which subsequently undergo a maturation process through clathrin-mediated membrane remodeling events. This maturation process is required for efficient processing of neuropeptides within DCVs and for removal of factors that would otherwise interfere with DCV release. [...]

Clearance of dying cells is essential for development and homeostasis. Conserved genes mediate apoptotic cell removal, but whether these genes control non-apoptotic cell removal is a major open question. [...]

Phytomedicine has often been used as “alternative therapy,” which in our opinion is unfortunate as it prevents its main actionsbeing systematically studied, side effects explored, and toxicity tested, like all single-compound-based medicine. Our group is interested infinding which traditional or modern phytomedicines actually work and which are simply “working” through placebo, standardizing phytomedicinepreparations, studying their toxicity, and finding active molecules in plants for modification and chemical synthesis as single compounds.Although fluctuation in efficacy due to seasonal and geographical variations in phytomedicine remains a concern, if well regulated, even plantextracts without isolated compounds can serve medicinal needs where single-compound options are currently not great. [...]

This paper presents a patch-sparsity-based image inpainting algorithm through a facet deduced directional derivative. The algorithm could ensure the continuity of boundaries of the inpainted region and achieve a better performance on restoring the missing structure of an image. [...]

This paper presents a distribution information based intuitionistic fuzzy clustering method for infrared ship segmentation. The algorithm could effectively suppress the influences of nontarget objects with high intensity and intensity inhomogeneity in the infrared ship images. [...]

Interferential background, boundary uncertainty, and noises are usually involved in infrared pedestrian imaging, which erect barrier for accurate segmentation. To counter the conundrum rising in these cases, we present a novel intuitionistic fuzzy clustering-based segmentation method, which integrates structural symmetry and local homoplasy information, for precise infrared pedestrian segmentation. [...]

A turbulent medium with eddies of different scales gives rise to fluctuations in the index of refraction during the process of wave propagation, which interferes with the original spatial relationship, phase relationship and optical path. The outputs of two-dimensional imaging systems suffer from anamorphosis brought about by this effect. [...]