Conversion of a normal maize hybrid into a waxy version using in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 targeted mutation activity

Waxy maize is a specialty maize that produces mainly amylopectin starch with special food or industrial values. The objective of this study was to overcome the limitations of wx mutant allele acquisition and breeding efficiency by conversion of parental lines from normal to waxy maize. The intended mutation activity was achieved by in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 machinery involving desired-target mutation of the Wx locus in the ZC01 background,abbreviated as ZC01-DTM^(wx). Triple selection was applied to segregants to obtain high genome background recovery with transgene-free wx mutations. The targeted mutation was identified, yielding six types of mutations among progeny crossed with ZC01-DTM^(wx).The amylopectin contents of the endosperm starch in mutant lines and hybrids averaged94.9%, while those of the wild-type controls were significantly(P < 0.01) lower, with an average of 76.9%. Double selection in transgene-free lines was applied using the Bar strip test and Cas9 PCR screening. The genome background recovery ratios of the lines were determined using genome-wide SNP data. That of lines used as male parents was as high as98.19% and that of lines used as female parents was as high as 86.78%. Conversion hybrids and both parental lines showed agronomic performance similar to that of their wild-type counterparts. This study provides a practical example of the efficient extension of CRISPR/Cas9 targeted mutation to industrial hybrids for transformation of a recalcitrant species.

Conversion from whispered speech to normal speech using the extended bilinear transformation method

A method of conversion from whispered speech to normal speech using the extended bilinear transformation was proposed. On account of the different deviation degrees of the whisper＇s formants in different frequency bands, the spectrum of the whispered speech will be processed in the separate partitions of this paper. On the basis of this spectrum, we will establish a conversion function able to usefully convert whispered speech to normal speech. Because of the whisper＇s non-linear offset in relation to normal speech, this paper introduces an expansion factor in the bilinear transform function making it correspond more closely to the actual conversion demands of whispered speech to normal speech. The introduction of this factor takes the non-linear move of the spectrum and the compression of the formant bandwidth into consideration, thus effectively reducing the spectrum distortion distance in the conversion. The experiment results show that the conversion presented in this paper effectively improves both the sound quality and the intelligibility of whispered speech.

Extracting the interference components of normal modes in shallow water waveguide using singular value decomposition method

The normal mode interference characteristic in shallow water waveguide is a valu- able topic in the fields of underwater acoustic. A method for extracting the interference components of normal modes from broadband acoustic propagation data recorded by a single hy- drophone without any prior information is present in this paper. First, a Hermitian matrix is formed by the power spectral density. Second, a singular value decomposition （SVD） is performed on the Hermitian matrix to obtain the orthonormal eigenvectors, which are proportional to the interference components of normal modes. The fundamental equations of the new extracting method are derived based on normal mode and waveguide invariant theory. And the validity of the present method is verified by the numerical simulation and experimental results. In addition, the extracted results of normal-mode interference components are intended to be used for passive ranging of broadband sources.