Hainan, the largest tropical island in China, belongs to the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot and harbors large areas of tropical forests, particularly in the uplands. The Changhua watershed is the cradle of Hainan's main river and a center of endemism for plants and birds. The watershed contains great habitat diversity and is an important conservation area. We analyzed the impact of rubber and ...

Hevea brasiliensis (Willd. Ex Adr. Juss.) Muell.-Arg. is the primary source of natural rubber that is native to the Amazon rainforest. The singular properties of natural rubber make it superior to and competitive with synthetic rubber for use in several applications. Here, we performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) of H. brasiliensis bark on the Illumina GAIIx platform, which generated 179,326,804 r...

Element distribution maps from Hevea brasiliensis natural rubber latex thin films were obtained, by electron energy-loss spectroscopic imaging in a low-energy (80 kV) transmission electron microscope. C, N, O, P, Na, Ca, Mg, Al, Si, and S maps are presented for latex fractionated by centrifugation, either followed by dialysis or not. Most elements forming non-carbon compounds are concentrated i...

The handling of vinyl polysiloxane (addition silicone) impression putties with latex gloves is said to interfere with the setting of these impression materials. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of handling techniques on the setting of vinyl polysiloxane impression putties using several types of gloves. The setting of these materials was evaluated by means of an elasticimeter. Fou...

Communications to the Editor on condom usage except in case 3. Natural rubber has been well known to cause contact dermatitis. Recently other allergic reactions to rubber or latex products, such as rhinitis, asthma, and anaphylaxis, have also been described.2 Seaton and Cherrie reported a case of rubber glove asthma, and Turjanmaa et al described allergic reactions to nibber condoms. Were there...

Deformable models have recently been accepted as a standard technique to segment diierent features in facial images. Despite they give a good approximation of the salient features in a facial image, the resulting shapes of the segmentation process seem somewhat artiicial with respect to the natural feature shapes. In this paper we show that active contour models (in particular, rubber snakes) g...

Rubber tree (Heveabrasiliensis) is the only commercially cultivated plant for producing natural rubber, one of the most essential industrial raw materials. Knowledge of the evolutionary and functional characteristics of kinases in H. brasiliensis is limited because of the long growth period and lack of well annotated genome information. Here, we reported mitogen-activated protein kinases in H.b...