Search Results (9)

Multiplication is an arithmetic operation that has a significant impact on the performance of several real-life applications such as digital signals, image processing, and machine learning. The main concern of electronic system designers is energy optimization with minimal penalties in terms of speed and area for designing portable devices. In this work, a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design and delay/area performance comparison of array, Wallace tree, and radix-4 Booth multipliers was performed. This study employs different word lengths, with an emphasis on the design of floating-point multipliers. All multiplier circuits were designed and synthesized using Alliance open-source tools in 350 nm process technology with the minimum delay constraint. The findings indicate that the array multiplier has the highest delay and area for all the multiplier sizes. The Wallace multiplier exhibited the lowest delay in the mantissa multiplication of single-precision floating-point numbers. However, no significant difference was observed when compared with the double-precision floating-point multipliers. The Wallace multiplier uses the lowest area in both the single- and double-precision floating-point multipliers. Full article

Edible and medicinal substances can be contaminated by fungi during harvesting, processing, and storage, leading to mycotoxin production and quality deterioration. The distribution of mycotoxigenic fungi in edible and medicinal substances was investigated in this study. Fungi and mycotoxins were detected in 163 commercially available edible and medicinal substances using standard microbiological techniques and high-performance liquid chromatography. A total of 92.0% of samples contained fungi (0.5–5.3 lg colony-forming units (CFU)·g⁻¹); 208 fungal strains belonging to 16 genera were identified, predominantly Aspergillus and Penicillium. Aspergillus section Nigri (30.3%) produced fumonisin B₂, which was distributed mainly in radix and rhizome samples. Thirteen samples had mycotoxins, of which ochratoxin A was the most common, followed by aflatoxins and zearalenone (ZEN). One Nelumbinis semen sample contained 10.75 μg·kg⁻¹ AFB₁, and one Raisin tree semen sample contained 484.30 μg·kg⁻¹ ZEN, which exceeded regulatory limits in Europe and China. These findings highlight the potential risks associated with fungal contamination and mycotoxins in edible and medicinal substances. Enhanced quality control measures are essential to reduce contamination during harvesting, processing, and storage. Expanded mycotoxin screening, improved preservation techniques, and stricter regulatory standards need to be implemented to ensure consumer safety. Full article

Phytolacca acinosa Roxb. and P. americana L. are recognized as the primary sources of Phytolaccae Radix, which is traditionally utilized for various medicinal purposes. However, because of their potent toxicity, it is essential to distinguish these species. This study has aimed to clarify the classification of Phytolacca species based on their morphology and genetic differences. The chloroplast genome of P. acinosa was sequenced and comparative analyses were conducted to identify the regions of variation and nucleotide diversity among the species. The results revealed that P. acinosa shares more sequence similarity with other Phytolacca species than with P. americana. Additionally, the dN/dS analysis showed that the ndhH gene of P. americana had a value of 1.0871, indicating positive selection. The phylogenetic tree, supported by strong bootstrap values and posterior probabilities, confirmed that P. acinosa and P. americana formed distinct clusters. Furthermore, the estimated divergence time between P. acinosa and P. americana was approximately 15.07 million years ago, indicating that they diverged earlier than P. insularis, P. polyandra, P. japonica, and P. latbenia. These findings indicated that P. acinosa and P. americana are phylogenetically distinct species, highlighting the need for accurate species identification and taxonomic reassessment to ensure the safe use of these toxic medicinal plants. Full article

In this paper, a multichannel FIR filter design based on the Time Division Multiplex (TDM) approach that incorporates one multiply and add unit, regardless of the variable coefficient length and varying channels, by associating the resource sharing doctrine is suggested. A multiplier based on approximate distributed arithmetic (DA) circuits is employed for effective resource optimization. Although no explicit multiplication was conducted in this realization, the radix-8 and radix-4 Booth algorithms are utilized in the DA framework to curtail and optimize the partial products (PPs). Furthermore, the input stream is truncated with an erratum mending unit to roughly construct the partial products. For an aggregation of PPs, an approximate Wallace tree is taken into consideration to further minimize hardware expenses. Consequently, the suggested design’s latency, utilized area, and power usage are largely reduced. The Xilinx Vertex device is expedited, given the synthesis of the suggested multichannel realization with 16 taps, which is simulated using the Verilog formulary. It is observed that the filter structure with one channel produced the desired results, and the system’s frequency can support up to 429 MHz with a reduced area. Utilizing TSMC 180 nm CMOS technology and the Cadence RC compiler, cell-level performance is also achieved. Full article

Angelica dahurica var. formosana (ADF), which belongs to the Umbelliferae family, is one of the original plants of herbal raw material Angelicae Dahuricae Radix. ADF roots represent an enormous biomass resource convertible for disease treatment and bioproducts. But, early bolting of ADF resulted in lignification and a decrease in the coumarin content in the root, and roots lignification restricts its coumarin for commercial utility. Although there have been attempts to regulate the synthesis ratio of lignin and coumarin through biotechnology to increase the coumarin content in ADF and further enhance its commercial value, optimizing the biosynthesis of lignin and coumarin remains challenging. Based on gene expression analysis and phylogenetic tree profiling, AdNAC20 as the target for genetic engineering of lignin and coumarin biosynthesis in ADF was selected in this study. Early-bolting ADF had significantly greater degrees of root lignification and lower coumarin contents than that of the normal plants. In this study, overexpression of AdNAC20 gene plants were created using transgenic technology, while independent homozygous transgenic lines with precise site mutation of AdNAC20 were created using CRISPR/Cas9 technology. The overexpressing transgenic ADF plants showed a 9.28% decrease in total coumarin content and a significant 12.28% increase in lignin content, while knockout mutant plants showed a 16.3% increase in total coumarin content and a 33.48% decrease in lignin content. Furthermore, 29,671 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were obtained by comparative transcriptomics of OE-NAC20, KO-NAC20, and WT of ADF. A schematic diagram of the gene network interacting with AdNAC20 during the early-bolting process of ADF was constructed by DEG analysis. AdNAC20 was predicted to directly regulate the transcription of several genes with SNBE-like motifs in their promoter, such as MYB46, C3H, and CCoAOMT. In this study, AdNAC20 was shown to play a dual pathway function that positively enhanced lignin formation but negatively controlled coumarin formation. And the heterologous expression of the AdNAC20 gene at Arabidopsis thaliana proved that the AdNAC20 gene also plays an important role in the process of bolting and flowering. Full article

Prolonged postprandial hyperlipidemia may cause the development of cardiovascular diseases. This study explored whether postprandial triglyceride-rich lipoprotein (TRL) clearance responsiveness to Platycodi radix beverage (PR) is associated with changes in blood microbiota profiles. We conducted an 8-week randomized controlled clinical trial involving normolipidemic adults with low fruit and vegetable intakes. Participants underwent an oral fat tolerance test and 16S amplicon sequencing analysis of blood microbiota. Using the Qualitative Interaction Trees, we identified responders as those with higher baseline dietary fat intake (>38.5 g/day) and lipoprotein lipase levels (>150.6 ng/mL), who showed significant reductions in AUC for triglyceride (TG) and chylomicron-TG after the oral fat tolerance test. The LEfSe analysis showed differentially abundant blood microbiota between responders and non-responders. A penalized logistic regression algorithm was employed to predict the responsiveness to intervention on the TRL clearance based on the background characteristics, including the blood microbiome. Our findings suggest that PR intake can modulate postprandial TRL clearance in adults consuming higher fat intake over 38.5 g/day and low fruit and vegetable intake through shared links to systemic microbial signatures. Full article

In this work, we propose a novel data-driven approach to recover missing or corrupted motion capture data, either in the form of 3D skeleton joints or 3D marker trajectories. We construct a knowledge-base that contains prior existing knowledge, which helps us to make it possible to infer missing or corrupted information of the motion capture data. We then build a kd-tree in parallel fashion on the GPU for fast search and retrieval of this already available knowledge in the form of nearest neighbors from the knowledge-base efficiently. We exploit the concept of histograms to organize the data and use an off-the-shelf radix sort algorithm to sort the keys within a single processor of GPU. We query the motion missing joints or markers, and as a result, we fetch a fixed number of nearest neighbors for the given input query motion. We employ an objective function with multiple error terms that substantially recover 3D joints or marker trajectories in parallel on the GPU. We perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on publicly available motion capture datasets, namely CMU and HDM05. From the results, it is observed that the recovery of boxing, jumptwist, run, martial arts, salsa, and acrobatic motion sequences works best, while the recovery of motion sequences of kicking and jumping results in slightly larger errors. However, on average, our approach executes outstanding results. Generally, our approach outperforms all the competing state-of-the-art methods in the most test cases with different action sequences and executes reliable results with minimal errors and without any user interaction. Full article

The data movement between the processing and storage units has been one of the most critical issues in modern computer systems. The emerging Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) technology has drawn tremendous attention due to its non-volatile ability and the potential in computation application. These properties make them a perfect choice for application in modern computing systems. In this paper, an 8-bit radix-4 non-volatile parallel multiplier is proposed, with improved computational capabilities. The corresponding booth encoding scheme, read-out circuit, simplified Wallace tree, and Manchester carry chain are presented, which help to short the delay of the proposed multiplier. While the presence of RRAM save computational time and overall power as multiplicand is stored beforehand. The area of the proposed non-volatile multiplier is reduced with improved computing speed. The proposed multiplier has an area of 785.2 $\mathsf{\mu }$m${}^2$ with Generic Processing Design Kit 45 nm process. The simulation results show that the proposed multiplier structure has a low computing power at 161.19 $\mathsf{\mu }$W and a short delay of 0.83 ns with 1.2 V supply voltage. Comparative analyses are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multiplier design. Compared with conventional booth multipliers, the proposed multiplier structure reduces the energy and delay by more than 70% and 19%, respectively. Full article

Mass spectrometers enable identifying proteins in biological samples leading to biomarkers for biological process parameters and diseases. However, bioinformatic evaluation of the mass spectrometer data needs a standardized workflow and system that stores the protein sequences. Due to its standardization and maturity, relational systems are a great fit for storing protein sequences. Hence, in this work, we present a schema for distributed column-based database management systems using a column-oriented index to store sequence data. In order to achieve a high storage performance, it was necessary to choose a well-performing strategy for transforming the protein sequence data from the FASTA format to the new schema. Therefore, we applied an in-memory map, HDDmap, database engine, and extended radix tree and evaluated their performance. The results show that our proposed extended radix tree performs best regarding memory consumption and runtime. Hence, the radix tree is a suitable data structure for transforming protein sequences into the indexed schema. Full article