Conversion of tropical forests into agriculture may present a serious risk to amphibian diversity if amphibians are not able to use agricultural areas as habitat. Recently, in Xishuangbanna Prefecture, Yunnan Province - a hotspot of frog diversity within China - two-thirds of the native tropical rainforests have been converted into rubber plantation agriculture. We conducted surveys and experim...

the present work reports and discusses the results of a 3d simulation of the injection molding process of a rubber compound that includes the mold flling stage and  material curing, using the computer code is developed in “udf” part of the fluent 6.3 cae software. the data obtained from a rheometer (mdr 2000) is used to characterize the rubber material in order to fnd the cure model parameters ...

Only two types of rubber oxygenases, rubber oxygenase (RoxA) and latex clearing protein (Lcp), have been described so far. RoxA proteins (RoxAs) are c-type cytochromes of ≈70 kDa produced by Gram-negative rubber-degrading bacteria, and they cleave polyisoprene into 12-oxo-4,8-dimethyltrideca-4,8-diene-1-al (ODTD), a C15 oligo-isoprenoid, as the major end product. Lcps are common among Gram-posi...

The rapidly growing car industry in China has led to an equally rapid expansion of monoculture rubber in many regions of South East Asia. Xishuangbanna, the second largest rubber planting area in China, located in the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, supplies about 37% of the domestic natural rubber production. There, high income possibilities from rubber drive a dramatic expansion of monocultu...

Ethylene is a stimulant to increase natural rubber latex. After ethylene application, both fresh yield and dry matter of latex are substantially improved. Moreover, we found that ethylene improves the generation of small rubber particles. However, most genes involved in rubber biosynthesis are inhibited by exogenous ethylene. Therefore, we conducted a proteomics analysis of ethylene-stimulated ...

Accurate and up-to-date mapping and monitoring of rubber plantations is challenging. In this study, we presented a simple method for rapidly and accurately mapping rubber plantations in the Xishuangbanna region of southwest China using phenology-based vegetation index differencing. Temporal profiles of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Atmospher...

Tapping panel dryness (TPD) is a serious threat to natural rubber yields from rubber trees, but the molecular mechanisms underlying TPD remain poorly understood. To identify TPD-related genes and reveal these molecular mechanisms, we sequenced and compared the transcriptomes of bark between healthy and TPD trees. In total, 57,760 assembled genes were obtained and analyzed in details. In contras...

The automatic vitality detection of a fingerprint has become an important issue in personal verification systems based on this biometric. It has been shown that fake fingerprints made using materials like gelatine or silicon can deceive commonly used sensors. Recently, the extraction of vitality features from fingerprint images has been proposed to address this problem. Among others, static and...