Cronobacter spp. is an emerging pathogen that causes meningitis, sepsis, bacteremia, and necrotizing enterocolitis in neonates and children. The present study developed an assay integrating real-time PCR and high resolution melting (HRM) analysis targeting the OmpA gene for the specific detection and rapid identification of Cronobacter spp. (formerly Enterobacter sakazakii) in powdered infant formula. Eleven Cronobacter field isolates and 25 reference strains were examined using one pair of primers, having the accuracy of 100% in reference to conventional methods. The assay was proved to be highly sensitive with a detection limit of 102 CFU/ml without pre-enrichment, and highly concordant (100%) when compared with ISO-IDF 22964 in 89 actual samples. The method performed for Cronobacter spp. detection was less than 24 h, drastically shortened, compared to several days using standard culturing method, it is probe-free and reduces a risk of PCR carryover. Moreover, all Cronobacter strains examined in this study were genotyped into two species according to their HRM profiles. The established method should provide a molecular tool for direct detection and simultaneous genotyping of Cronobacter spp. in powdered infant formula.

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Biometric identification has caused a multitude of problems in the networking environment, such as the storage of user's biometric template and the leakage of user's privacy, therefore, biometric encryption has been the focus of the recent studies which are based on Fuzzy Vault, Fuzzy Commitment, and dynamic key generation. However, due to fuzzy information inherent biological characteristics, essentially deterministic analysis techniques, Fuzzy Vault, and Fuzzy Commitment have been accused of stored biometric templates and short keys. Fuzzy Information Processing needs suitable technology, such as fuzzy logic, to obtain better results. In this paper, we propose a new fingerprint encryption scheme which utilizes the high-dimension space projection. Unlike the reliance on biometric templates in Fuzzy Vault-based scheme or "encrypted" templates in Fuzzy Commitment-based scheme, this new scheme, similar to the Communicated by V. Loia.

A pollen defective male sterile rice mutant, osms55, was isolated from an elite indica cultivar HHZ using EMS (ethyl methanesulfonate) mutagenesis strategy. Genetic analysis showed that osms55 was controlled by a single recessive gene. Genome-wide SNP analysis using the high-throughput Illumina Infinium iSelect SNP (50 K) microarray technology indicated that the genetic makeup of osms55 is the same as wild type (WT) HHZ. Using a modified MutMap method, we successfully identified a mutation in the LOC_Os02g40450 (MER3) gene that is co-segregated with the male sterility phenotype. The mutation is located at the intron splice-recognition site, leading to a 15 nucleotide deletion in the fifth exon. Different from the published MutMap method that aligns the mutant pool DNA sequence with the assembled WT genome, the method used in this study was to align the re-sequencing data of the mutant pool DNA and WT HHZ with the Nipponbare reference genome. The resulting SNPs of mutant/Nipponbare and WT HHZ/Nipponbare were further compared to determine the candidate mutant gene. This modified method does not need an assembled WT genome as reference and thus is more cost-effective and widely applicable.

The optimal design of a separable two-dimensional (2D) finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a nonlinear programming problem. In this paper, an iterative alternating optimization technique for optimally designing the separable 2D FIR filter in the mini-max sense and the least-square sense is proposed. Implementation of the proposed technique only requires a suitable initial solution. The simulation experiment validates the effectiveness of the proposed technique.