UV reflection properties of plumage and skin of domesticated turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo f. dom.) as revealed by UV photography

Genome characterization and analysis is an imperative step in identifying and selectively breeding for improved traits of agriculturally important species. Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) represent a transcribed portion of the genome and are an effective way to identify genes within a species. Downstream applications of EST projects include DNA microarray construction and interspecies comparisons. In this study, 694 ESTs were sequenced and analyzed from a library derived from a 24-day-old turkey embryo. The 437 unique sequences identified were divided into 76 assembled contigs and 361 singletons. The majority of significant comparative matches occurred between the turkey sequences and sequences reported from the chicken. Whole genome sequence from the chicken was used to identify potential exon–intron boundaries for selected turkey clones and intron-amplifying primers were developed for sequence analysis and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) discovery. Identified SNPs were genotyped for linkage analysis on two turkey reference populations. This study significantly increases the number of EST sequences available for the turkey.Key words: turkey, cDNA, expressed sequence tag, single nucleotide polymorphism.

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Facial UV photo imaging for skin pigmentation assessment using conditional generative adversarial networks

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-020-79995-4 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Kaname Kojima ◽

Kosuke Shido ◽

Gen Tamiya ◽

Kenshi Yamasaki ◽

Kengo Kinoshita ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Skin Pigmentation ◽

Generative Adversarial Networks ◽

Pigment Spot ◽

Detection Analysis ◽

Adversarial Networks ◽

Skin Cancers ◽

Uv Photography ◽

Highly Correlated ◽

Image Pairs ◽

Skin Damages

AbstractSkin pigmentation is associated with skin damages and skin cancers, and ultraviolet (UV) photography is used as a minimally invasive mean for the assessment of pigmentation. Since UV photography equipment is not usually available in general practice, technologies emphasizing pigmentation in color photo images are desired for daily care. We propose a new method using conditional generative adversarial networks, named UV-photo Net, to generate synthetic UV images from color photo images. Evaluations using color and UV photo image pairs taken by a UV photography system demonstrated that pigment spots were well reproduced in synthetic UV images by UV-photo Net, and some of the reproduced pigment spots were difficult to be recognized in color photo images. In the pigment spot detection analysis, the rate of pigment spot areas in cheek regions for synthetic UV images was highly correlated with the rate for UV photo images (Pearson’s correlation coefficient 0.92). We also demonstrated that UV-photo Net was effective for floating up pigment spots for photo images taken by a smartphone camera. UV-photo Net enables an easy assessment of pigmentation from color photo images and will promote self-care of skin damages and early signs of skin cancers for preventive medicine.

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