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Colorful seashells: Identification of haem pathway genes associated with the synthesis of porphyrin shell color in marine snails(Wiley-Blackwell, 2017-10-30)Very little is known about the evolution of molluskan shell pigments, although Mollusca is a highly diverse, species rich, and ecologically important group of animals comprised of many brightly colored taxa. The marine snail genus Clanculus was chosen as an exceptional model for studying the evolution of shell color, first, because in Clanculus margaritarius and Clanculus pharaonius both shell and foot share similar colors and patterns; and second, because recent studies have identified the pigments, trochopuniceus (pink-red), and trochoxouthos (yellow-brown), both comprised of uroporphyrin I and uroporphyrin III, in both shell and colored foot tissue of these species. These unusual characteristics provide a rare opportunity to identify the genes involved in color production because, as the same pigments occur in the shell and colored foot tissue, the same color-related genes may be simultaneously expressed in both mantle (which produces the shell) and foot tissue. In this study, the transcriptomes of these two Clanculus species along with a third species, Calliostoma zizyphinum, were sequenced to identify genes associated with the synthesis of porphyrins. Calliostoma zizyphinum was selected as a negative control as trochopuniceus and trochoxouthos were not found to occur in this species. As expected, genes necessary for the production of uroporphyrin I and III were found in all three species, but gene expression levels were consistent with synthesis of uroporphyrins in mantle and colored foot tissue only in Clanculus. These results are relevant not only to understanding the evolution of shell pigmentation in Clanculus but also to understanding the evolution of color in other species with uroporphyrin pigmentation, including (mainly marine) mollusks soft tissues and shells, annelid and platyhelminth worms, and some bird feathers.
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Plasmonic color-graded nanosystems with achromatic sub-wavelength architectures for light filtering and advanced SERS detection(American Chemical Society (ACS), 2016-03-09)Plasmonic colour-graded systems are devices featuring a spatially variable plasmonic response over their surface. They are widely used as nanoscale colour filters; their typical size is small enough to allow integration with miniaturized electronic circuits paving the way to realize novel nanophotonic devices. Currently, most plasmonic colour-graded systems are intrinsically discrete, as their chromatic response exploits the tailored plasmon resonance of micro-architectures characterized by different size and/or geometry for each target colour. Here we report the realization of multifunctional plasmon-graded devices where continuously-graded chromatic response is achieved by smoothly tuning the composition of the resonator material while simultaneously maintaining an achromatic nanoscale geometry. The result is a new class of versatile materials: we show their application as plasmonic filters with a potential pixel size smaller than half of the exciting wavelength, but also as multiplexed surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrates. Many more implementations, like photovoltaic efficiency boosters or colour routers await, and will benefit from the low fabrication cost and intrinsic plasmonic flexibility of the presented systems.
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A chromaticity-brightness model for color images denoising in a Meyer’s “u + v” framework(Springer Nature, 2017-09-11)A variational model for imaging segmentation and denoising color images is proposed. The model combines Meyer’s “u+v” decomposition with a chromaticity-brightness framework and is expressed by a minimization of energy integral functionals depending on a small parameter ε>0. The asymptotic behavior as ε→0+ is characterized, and convergence of infima, almost minimizers, and energies are established. In particular, an integral representation of the lower semicontinuous envelope, with respect to the L1-norm, of functionals with linear growth and defined for maps taking values on a certain compact manifold is provided. This study escapes the realm of previous results since the underlying manifold has boundary, and the integrand and its recession function fail to satisfy hypotheses commonly assumed in the literature. The main tools are Γ-convergence and relaxation techniques.
