Transcriptome analysis of purple pigment formation in Colocasia esculenta

Taro(Colocasia esculenta(L.)Schott)is an important crop in Africa,Southeast Asia,and subtropics and is used as a food and medicine.The purple color pigmentation is an appealing character in taro.We sampled taro corms of the cultivar‘Lipu Taro’at four developmental stages,including LPYS1(without purple pigment,50 days of development(DOD)),LPYS2(very few purple pigments,75 DOD),LPYS3(moderate purple pigments,115 DOD)and LPYS4(high purple pigments,205 DOD).The purpose of our study was to identify the key genes underpinning the purple pigmentation in taro based on RNA-sequencing.Through RNA-Seq,6453 differentially expressed transcripts(DETs)were identified between purple and non-purple pigmented samples.We identified 41 and 12 flavonoid and anthocyanin related DETs transcripts,respectively.These DETs were upregulated at LPYS2,LPYS3,and LPYS4 as compared to LPYS1,indicating their positive contribution to the color formation in taro.Moreover,we identified several DETs encoding for transcription factors,including MYB and bHLH,known to be major regulators of structural genes involved in the flavonoid-anthocyanin pathway.Finally,we reported several plant hormones(ethylene,auxin,gibberellin,jasmonic acid,and cytokinin)related DETs,which are predicted to play important roles in the corm coloration.Different regulation of transcripts representing the flavonoid-anthocyanin biosynthesis pathway,plant hormone transduction pathway,and transcription factors may have key roles in purple pigmentation in taro.Our findings will facilitate future research on improving the quality and appeal of taro.

Motion-Blurred Image Restoration Based on Joint Invertibility of PSFs

To implement restoration in a single motion blurred image,the PSF(Point Spread Function)is difficult to estimate and the image deconvolution is ill-posed as a result that a good recovery effect cannot be obtained.Considering that several different PSFs can get joint invertibility to make restoration wellposed,we proposed a motion-blurred image restoration method based on joint invertibility of PSFs by means of computational photography.Firstly,we designed a set of observation device which composed by multiple cameras with the same parameters to shoot the moving target in the same field of view continuously to obtain the target images with the same background.The target images have the same brightness,but different exposure time and different motion blur length.It is easy to estimate the blur PSFs of the target images make use of the sequence frames obtained by one camera.According to the motion blur superposition feature of the target and its background,the complete blurred target images can be extracted from the observed images respectively.Finally,for the same target images with different PSFs,the iterative restoration is solved by joint solution of multiple images in spatial domain.The experiments showed that the moving target observation device designed by this method had lower requirements on hardware conditions,and the observed images are more convenient to use joint-PSF solution for image restoration,and the restoration results maintained details well and had lower signal noise ratio(SNR).