Chilling injury is a physiological disorder affecting the quality of carambola fruit. In the present study, the effect of exogenous γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) on CI development in carambola fruit during storage at 4°C for 15 days was investigated. The results showed that 2.5-mM GABA reduced CI index, maintained pericarp lightness, and decreased the electrolyte leakage (EL) and malondialdehyde content (MDA) while increased the superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), and catalase (CAT) enzyme activities. Endogenous GABA content was significantly higher in the treated fruit than in the control fruit during the whole storage. Besides, the treatment promoted the accumulation of proline and ascorbic acid (AsA) under chilling stress. Compared to the control, GABA-treated fruit exhibited a higher activity of phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) and total phenolic compounds, and a lower activity of polyphenol oxidase (PPO). In addition, the Safranin O/fast green staining revealed via microscopic images that the GABA treatment reduced the cell walls degradation of carambola fruit. Moreover, the results displayed a lower activity of phospholipase D (PLD) and lipoxygenase (LOX) enzymes, which coincided with a higher content of oleic acid (C18:1), linoleic acid (C18:2n6), and α-linolenic acid (C18:3n3) after 15 days of treatment, leading to the maintenance of the integrity and prevention of the membrane of the rapid softening of carambola fruit. The findings of the present work showed particularly new insights into the crosstalk between GABA and fatty acids. GABA might preserve the pericarp of carambola fruit by increasing the content of the unsaturated fatty acid (UFA) γ-linolenic acid and reducing the saturated fatty acid (SFA) such as caproic acid (C6:0), caprylic acid (C8:0), myristic acid (C14:0), and palmitic acid (C16:0) progressively. GABA can be used as an appropriate postharvest technology for improving the quality of carambola fruit during low-temperature storage.

In this study, field experiments were conducted in 2 yr with two rice varieties to compare use of light and temperature resources, crop growth characteristics, yield traits, and cooking and eating quality of machine-transplanted rice (Oryza sativa) in rice-wheat (Triticum aestivum) double cropping system among five sowing dates.The results showed that the total growth duration, total cumulative temperature, and total cumulative solar radiation and total biomass production from transplanting to maturity decreased with the delay in sowing date. The first sowing date (22 May) had a 1.8-11.7% higher total biomass production and 0.2-16.7% higher grain yield than the other four sowing dates (29 May, 5 June, 11 June, 18 June) across two cultivars and 2 yr. Early sowing increased leaf aera index at heading and maturity, daily mean temperature, cumulative temperature, use efficiency of cumulative temperature and solar radiation, crop growth rate, leaf area duration, and biomass production during jointing to heading and heading to maturity. Early sowing increased gel consistency, reduced amylose and protein content and increased the taste value of cooked rice. When the sowing date was delayed, rice starch Rapid Viscosity Analyzer (RVA) profile parameter, including the peak viscosity and breakdown value decreased, and the setback value increased. These results suggest that early sowing can improve use of temperature and light resources, crop growth characteristics, starch RVA spectrum characteristics, reduce rice protein content, and consequently increase biomass production, grain yield, and improve cooking and eating quality of machine-transplanted rice in eastern China. INTRODUCTIONRice (Oryza sativa) is the staple food for more than 65% of the population in China and nearly 4 billion people in Asia, where 90% of the rice produced and consumed globally

In this paper, we propose a different perspective on the use of support material: rather than printing support structures for overhangs, our idea is to make use of its transient nature, i.e. the fact that it can be dissolved when placed in a solvent, such as water. This enables a range of new use cases, such as quickly dissolving and replacing parts of a prototype during design iteration, printing temporary assembly labels directly on the object that leave no marks when dissolved, and creating time-dependent mechanisms, such as fading in parts of an image in a shadow art piece or releasing relaxing scents from a 3D printed structure sequentially overnight. Since we use regular support material (PVA), our approach works on consumer 3D printers without any modifications. To facilitate the design of objects that leverage dissolvable support, we built a custom 3D editor plugin that includes a simulation showing how support material dissolves over time. In our evaluation, our simulation predicted geometries that are statistically similar to the example shapes within 10% error across all samples.

In the era of big data, the rapid development of mobile participatory sensing devices brings the explosive expansion of data, making information overload a serious problem. In this case, a personalized recommendation system on mobile social media appears. Collaborative filtering is the most widely used approach in a recommendation system. Nevertheless, there still exist many problems, such as the serious data sparsity problem and the cold start problem. Existing approaches cannot effectively solve these problems. Most of the existing recommendation approaches are based on single information source and cannot effectively solve the cold start and data sparsity problems. In addition, some approaches proposed to solve data sparsity fail to consider the effects of users' influences and prediction order on recommendation accuracy. Accordingly, from the perspective of increasing the categories of information, the similarity propagation approach based on a heterogeneous network is proposed to ease the cold start problems by improving the similarity calculation method. In addition, to ease the data sparsity problems, we propose a hybrid collaborative filtering approach based on a score prediction graph to finish the user-item score matrix in order. Finally, we conduct validation experiments on the MovieLens dataset. Compared with five state-of-the-art approaches, our approach outperforms them in terms of the performances of mean absolute error, root-mean-square error, recall, and diversity.

Objectives To comprehend the epigenetic mechanism of low temperature in delaying senescence of fruit, the changes of DNA methylation patterns of genes related to ethylene biosynthesis and signaling were analyzed in tomato fruit. ResultsIn the present results, the expression level of LeEIN3, SlERF-A1 and LeERT10 decreased, and the expression level of LeCTR1 increased in tomato fruit stored at the low temperature of 11 o C. Meanwhile, the DNA methylation level of CpG island of LeEIN3, SlERF-A1 and LeERT10 increased, and the DNA methylation level of CpG island of LeCTR1 decreased in tomato fruit, respectively. The low temperature suppressed ethylene signaling via changing DNA methylation and gene expression, and delayed senescence of tomato fruit.Conclusions The present study offered valuable information for understanding the role of DNA methylation in senescence of fruit, and provided a foundation for genetic modifying the epigenetic target sites and controlling fruit senescence.