Age estimation is an important yet very challenging problem in computer vision. Existing methods for age estimation usually apply a divide-and-conquer strategy to deal with heterogeneous data caused by the non-stationary aging process. However, the facial aging process is also a continuous process, and the continuity relationship between different components has not been effectively exploited. In this paper, we propose BridgeNet for age estimation, which aims to mine the continuous relation between age labels effectively. The proposed BridgeNet consists of local regressors and gating networks. Local regressors partition the data space into multiple overlapping subspaces to tackle heterogeneous data and gating networks learn continuity aware weights for the results of local regressors by employing the proposed bridge-tree structure, which introduces bridge connections into tree models to enforce the similarity between neighbor nodes. Moreover, these two components of BridgeNet can be jointly learned in an end-to-end way. We show experimental results on the MORPH II, FG-NET and Chalearn LAP 2015 datasets and find that BridgeNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

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BackgroundAutophagy and molecular chaperones both regulate protein homeostasis and maintain important physiological functions. Atg7 (autophagy-related gene 7) and Hsp27 (heat shock protein 27) are involved in the regulation of neurodegeneration and aging. However, the genetic connection between Atg7 and Hsp27 is not known.MethodsThe appearances of the fly eyes from the different genetic interactions with or without polyglutamine toxicity were examined by light microscopy and scanning electronic microscopy. Immunofluorescence was used to check the effect of Atg7 and Hsp27 knockdown on the formation of autophagosomes. The lifespan of altered expression of Hsp27 or Atg7 and that of the combination of the two different gene expression were measured.ResultsWe used the Drosophila eye as a model system to examine the epistatic relationship between Hsp27 and Atg7. We found that both genes are involved in normal eye development, and that overexpression of Atg7 could eliminate the need for Hsp27 but Hsp27 could not rescue Atg7 deficient phenotypes. Using a polyglutamine toxicity assay (41Q) to model neurodegeneration, we showed that both Atg7 and Hsp27 can suppress weak, toxic effect by 41Q, and that overexpression of Atg7 improves the worsened mosaic eyes by the knockdown of Hsp27 under 41Q. We also showed that overexpression of Atg7 extends lifespan and the knockdown of Atg7 or Hsp27 by RNAi reduces lifespan. RNAi-knockdown of Atg7 expression can block the extended lifespan phenotype by Hsp27 overexpression, and overexpression of Atg7 can extend lifespan even under Hsp27 knockdown by RNAi.ConclusionsWe propose that Atg7 acts downstream of Hsp27 in the regulation of eye morphology, polyglutamine toxicity, and lifespan in Drosophila.

A new lupane acid, 2beta-carboxyl,3beta-hydroxyl-norlupA (1)-20 (29)-en-28-oic acid (1), together with five known lupane acid derivatives (2-6), were isolated from the stings of Gleditsia sinensis Lam.. Their structures were elucidated on the basis of 1D and 2D NMR techniques. All these known compounds were isolated from this genus for the first time. The new compound 1 showed strong anti-HIV activity.

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