Labour Costs on the Vegetables: A Research on the location effect on salaries in Jiangsu Province, China

ABSTRACT: In this study, the labour requirement and labour cost of common vegetable cultivation were investigated to help agricultural enterprises and family farms establishing reasonable “working hour” management systems in Jiangsu Province. The labour requirement of each step of three type of producers, agriculture enterprises, family farms, and private vegetable growers, in three regions in Jiangsu Province, named north, middle and south Jiangsu, was investigated by on-site observation or questionnaire survey during 2018 and 2019. The labour cost of each step and each vegetable was counted according to the labour requirement and the salary level. The results indicated that “residue cleaning”, “soil preparation and bedding”, “plant regulation”, “auxin treatment of tomato flowers” and “hand pollination” accounted for higher proportions of labour cost amongst the entire vegetable culture process. No significant differences in the labour requirements of the investigated vegetables were reported amongst three regions in Jiangsu Province. However, the order of labour cost is south Jiangsu > north Jiangsu > middle Jiangsu, due to the salary difference amongst three regions. Watermelon, broccoli and chive are more suitable for growing by agricultural enterprises since they have relatively low unit labour and high prices. We established a method to calculate and analyze labour requirement and cost of vegetable production in Jiangsu Province, which also may be instructive for other regions. In addition, our results provided useful data for various vegetable producers to improve their labour management.

Mesenchymal Stem Cell Senescence and Osteogenesis

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are stem cells with the potential ability to differentiate into various cells and the ability to self-renew and resemble fibroblasts. These cells can adhere to plastic to facilitate the culture process. MSCs can be used in research into tissue biotechnology and rejuvenation medicine. MSCs are also beneficial in recipient tissue and differentiate as a breakthrough strategy through paracrine activity. Many databases have shown MSC-based treatment can be beneficial in the reduction of osteogenesis induced by senescence. In this article, we will discuss the potential effect of MSCs in senescence cells related to osteogenesis.

Strategies for Successful Project Execution – A Transformation in Project Delivery without Disruption

Cost overruns on lump sum turnkey projects have challenged Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) project implementations. Several causes can be attributed to this problem but common to all is that despite significant efforts spent in planning and estimating the job, most projects fail in the execution stage. A new approach to EPC projects execution and delivery combines better management of scope brought by the Advanced Work Packaging (AWP) procedure and efficiencies from the LEAN principles of an engaged workforce that was Toyota's success in manufacturing industry can be applied to construction industry. The implementation of this enhanced process supported by a digital tool, an end-to-end platform, can be extremely useful for projects in Petroleum Industry. Methods, Procedures, Process: The approach has been designed to tackle three crucial challenges of project execution: people (company culture), process inefficiencies and data handling. The sense of inclusion, empowerment of a worker and the clarity of scope of every activity to be performed have a profound impact on the performance of the worker. It is designed to involve all stakeholders (from the owner to the last member of the crew) giving them an opportunity to contribute to the project implementation. The proposed enhancement of the processes at every stage of the project (from engineering to completion) drastically reduces the traditional inefficiencies of EPC projects which are responsible for cost overruns, schedule delays and poor quality of work. Results, Observations, Conclusions: A plethora of digital tools used today in EPC industry create a large pool of data that can be leveraged to have an insight on the projects. However, all the data produced by different and disconnected tools are still used in silo and large data available creates complexity in analyzing and interpreting it. The AWP+LEAN approach brings transformation without disruption: an automated integration with existing systems used in the organization can be established in order to collect, give consistency and synchronize all the available information hassle-free. The novelty of the approach presented in the paper compared to the other practices is its non-disruptive nature. The idea is to combine in a consistent fashion, all the information collected during the project by different tools and orchestrate them to provide a deep insight and granular visibility to the project. This means that there are no switching costs for the EPC companies and less resistance from people in adopting the new processes, making the journey to improvement easy and smooth.

Dynamic Changes of DNA Methylation During Wild Strawberry (Fragaria nilgerrensis) Tissue Culture

Tissue culture is an important tool for asexual propagation and genetic transformation of strawberry plants. In plant tissue culture, variation of DNA methylation is a potential source of phenotypic variation in regenerated plants. However, the genome wide dynamic methylation patterns of strawberry tissue culture remain unclear. In this study, we used whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) to study genomic DNA methylation changes of a wild strawberry Fragaria nilgerrensis at six stages: from explants of shoot tips to outplanting and acclimation. Global methylation levels showed that CG sites exhibited the highest methylation level in all stages with an average of 49.5%, followed by CHG (33.2%) and CHH (12.4%). Although CHH accounted for the lowest proportion of total cytosine methylation, it showed the most obvious methylation change and the most of these changes occurred in the transposable element regions. The overall methylation levels alternately decreased and increased during the entire tissue culture process and the distribution of DNA methylation was non-uniform among different genetic regions. Furthermore, much more differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were detected in dedifferentiation and redifferentiation stages and most of them were transposable elements, suggesting these processes involved activating or silencing of amounts of transposons. The functional enrichment of the DMR-related genes indicated that genes involved in hormone metabolic processes, plant development and the stress response changed methylation throughout the tissue culture process. Finally, the quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was conducted to examine the association of methylation and gene expression of a set of different methylated genes. Our findings give deeper insight into the epigenetic regulation of gene expression during the plant tissue cultures process, which will be useful in the efficient control of somaclonal variations and in crop improvement.

Application Analysis of Prefabricated Highrise Building Construction

This paper analyzes the application of prefabricated high-rise building construction. Based on the quality of prefabricated buildings, this paper studies the theory and practice of quality management in manufacturing and construction industry at home and abroad. Based on the background of "integration of two modernizations", this paper combs the relevant research results of intelligent information transmission and collaborative management, and makes an in-depth study on the quality problem and improvement mechanism of prefabricated buildings as the core problem. This paper analyzes the performance and causes of quality problems in the construction process of prefabricated buildings by using arrangement diagram method and 4M1E method. This paper puts forward the quality problem improvement mechanism from four aspects: organization, culture, process control, technical guarantee and information collaborative management.

Towards Biomanufacturing of Cell-Derived Matrices

Cell-derived matrices (CDM) are the decellularised extracellular matrices (ECM) of tissues obtained by the laboratory culture process. CDM is developed to mimic, to a certain extent, the properties of the needed natural tissue and thus to obviate the use of animals. The composition of CDM can be tailored for intended applications by carefully optimising the cell sources, culturing conditions and decellularising methods. This unique advantage has inspired the increasing use of CDM for biomedical research, ranging from stem cell niches to disease modelling and regenerative medicine. However, while much effort is spent on extracting different types of CDM and exploring their utilisation, little is spent on the scale-up aspect of CDM production. The ability to scale up CDM production is essential, as the materials are due for clinical trials and regulatory approval, and in fact, this ability to scale up should be an important factor from the early stages. In this review, we first introduce the current CDM production and characterisation methods. We then describe the existing scale-up technologies for cell culture and highlight the key considerations in scaling-up CDM manufacturing. Finally, we discuss the considerations and challenges faced while converting a laboratory protocol into a full industrial process. Scaling-up CDM manufacturing is a challenging task since it may be hindered by technologies that are not yet available. The early identification of these gaps will not only quicken CDM based product development but also help drive the advancement in scale-up cell culture and ECM extraction.