Koji Noshita

Kyushu University | Kyudai · Department of Biology

The present study examines the 3-dimensional data of human crania from the Yayoi period (800 BC to AD 250) of the Japanese archipelago by geometric morphometrics to investigate demic diffusion patterns. This is the first study on the Yayoi crania using their 3D data and geometric morphometrics with a much larger number of skeletal remains outside o...

Background: The physiological functions of plants are carried out by leaves, which are important organs. The morphological traits of leaves serve multiple functional requirements and demands of plants. Traditional techniques for quantifying leaf morphology rely largely on two-dimensional (2D) methods, resulting in a limited understanding of the thr...

Despite substantial variation in leaf vein architectures among angiosperms, a typical hierarchical network pattern is shared within clades. Functional demands (e.g., hydraulic conductivity, transpiration efficiency, and tolerance to damage and blockage) constrain the network structure of leaf venation, generating a biased distribution in the morpho...

Despite the morphological diversity of organisms, they only occupy a fraction of the theoretically possible spectrum (i.e., morphospace) and have been studied on several taxa. Such morphospace occupation patterns are formed through evolutionary processes under multiple constraints. In this study, we discovered a differential morphospace occupation...

Smoking is one of the risk factors most closely related to the severity of COVID-19. However, the relationship between smoking history and SARS-CoV-2 infectivity is unknown. In this study, we evaluated the ACE2 expression level in the lungs of current smokers, ex-smokers, and non-smokers. The ACE2 expression level of ex-smokers who smoked cigarette...

Despite substantial variation in leaf vein architectures among angiosperms, a typical hierarchical network pattern is shared within clades. Functional demands constrain the network structure of leaf venation, generating a biased distribution in the morphospace. Although network structures and their diversity are crucial for understanding angiosperm...

SfM/MVS photogrammetry has received increasing attention due to its convenience, broadening the range of its applications into archaeology and anthropology. Because the accuracy of SfM/MVS depends on photography, one important issue is that incorrect or low-density point clouds are found in 3D models due to poor overlapping between images. A system...

3-dimensional data have recently attracted many archaeologists’ attention because of their various kinds of merits. The present study compared 3-dimensional data and traditional 2-dimensional data, especially measured drawings, and examined their merits and demerits. We obtained 3-dimensional data of Ongagawa pottery, which has relatively uniform a...

This article quantifies the morphological variations of the Ongagawa pottery of the Early Yayoi period of the Japanese archipelago to clarify its spatiotemporal similarities and differences. We focus on and quantify items of pottery from the birthplace of Ongagawa pottery, i.e., the Itazuke and Sasai sites, and from the Tamura, Ayaragi-go, and Yano...

Trees are thought to have acquired a mechanically optimized shape through evolution, but a scientific methodology to investigate the mechanical rationality of tree morphology remains to be established. The aim of this study was to develop a new method for 3D reconstruction of actual tree shape and to establish a theoretical formulation for elucidat...

The morphological traits of plants contribute to many important functional features such as radiation interception, lodging tolerance, gas exchange efficiency, spatial competition between individuals and/or species, and disease resistance. Although the importance of plant phenotyping techniques is increasing with advances in molecular breeding stra...

Haplotypes provide useful information for genomics-based approaches, genomic prediction, and genome-wide association study. As a small number of superior founders have contributed largely to the breeding history of fruit trees, the information of founder haplotypes may be relevant for performing the genomics-based approaches in these plants. In thi...

Background: Development of an effective antiviral drug for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global health priority. Although several candidate drugs have been identified through in vitro and in vivo models, consistent and compelling evidence from clinical studies is limited. The lack of evidence from clinical trials may stem in part from t...

Recent advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing and image analysis provide large amounts of plant canopy data, but there is no method to integrate the large imagery datasets with the much smaller manually collected datasets. A simple geographic information system (GIS)-based analysis for a UAV-supported field study (GAUSS) analytica...

The pelagic snail Limacina helicina Phipps, 1774 is widely distributed in high-latitude seas and is a sensitive bioindicator of ocean acidification. It is known that the response patterns to ocean acidification differ among populations within or among species. Thus, it is important to understand their genetic population structure and identify the c...

Plants require water, but a deficit or excess of water can negatively impact their growth and functioning. Soil flooding, in which root-zone is filled with excess water, restricts oxygen diffusion into the soil. Global climate change is increasing the risk of crop yield loss caused by flooding, and the development of flooding tolerant crops is urge...

• Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) and image processing have made high‐throughput field phenotyping possible at plot/canopy level in the mass grown experiment. Such techniques are now expected to be used for individual level phenotyping in the single grown experiment. • We found two main challenges of phenotyping individual plants...

Water lilies (Nymphaea spp.) have diverse floral morphologies. Water lilies are not only commonly used as ornamental plants, but they are also important for understanding the diversification of basal angiosperms. Although the diversity in floral morphology of water lily provides useful information for evolutionary biology, horticulture, and horticu...

Development of an effective antiviral drug for COVID-19 is a global health priority. Although several candidate drugs have been identified through in vitro and in vivo models, consistent and compelling evidence for effective drugs from clinical studies is limited. The lack of evidence could be in part due to heterogeneity of virus dynamics among pa...

The biodiversity of stream-dwelling fish and the effects of oil palm and acacia plantations on this biodiversity were evaluated by field research conducted in the Bintulu region of central Sarawak, Malaysia. A quantitative survey was conducted at 61 locations by electrofishing. These 61 locations included 16 sites in oil palm plantations, five site...

Seed shape is an important agronomic trait with continuous variation among genotypes. Therefore, the quantitative evaluation of this variation is highly important. Among geometric morphometrics methods, elliptic Fourier analysis and semi-landmark analysis are often used for the quantification of biological shape variations. Elliptic Fourier analysi...

Precision horticulture: Peachy method for monitoring orchard growth A rapid automated system for monitoring peach tree growth had been developed that could replace laborious field measurements and enable farmers to manage their orchards more effectively. Knowing a tree’s crown width—the mass of branches and foliage growing outwards from its trunk—e...

Accumulating evidence indicates that plants are capable of self/non‐self and kin/stranger discrimination. Plants increase biomass of and resource allocation to roots when they encounter roots of conspecific non‐self neighbors, but not when they encounter self roots. Root proliferation usually occurs at the expense of reproductive investment. Theref...

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction is an essential approach in morphological studies in biology and paleontology. Seeking an optimized protocol for nondestructive observations, we attempted 3D visualization of various molluscan shells and animals with X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). Calcified parts of molluscs were easily visualized...

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) is a C4 tropical grass that plays an essential role in providing nutrition to humans and livestock, particularly in marginal rainfall environments. The timing of head development and the number of heads per unit area are key adaptation traits to consider in agronomy and breeding but are time consuming and labor i...

Progress in remote sensing and robotic technologies decreases the hardware costs of phenotyping. Here, we first review cost-effective imaging devices and environmental sensors, and present a trade-off between investment and manpower costs. We then discuss the structure of costs in various real-world scenarios. Hand-held low-cost sensors are suitabl...

The genetic diversity of one of the most abundant species in the Arctic and subarctic oceans, the pelagic snail Limacina helicina, has not yet been characterized in the north Pacific. This species has different â €? forma' (L. helicina forma helicina, acuta, pacifica and ochotensis), but whether or not the morphological differences between these fo...

Heart failure is a complex clinical syndrome characterized by insufficient cardiac function. In addition to abnormalities intrinsic to the heart, dysfunction of other organs and dysregulation of systemic factors greatly affect the development and consequences of heart failure. Here we show that the heart and kidneys function cooperatively in genera...

The morphology of gastropod shells provides a record of the growth rate at the aperture of the shell, and molecular biological studies have shown that the growth rate gradient along the aperture of a gastropod shell can be closely related to gene expression at the aperture. Here, we develop a novel method for deriving microscopic growth rates from...

Background/Question/Methods The morphological diversity of gastropod shells is a classic question that has been subjected to various physical, geometrical and ecological explanations. Vermeij (1971) pointed out that the apertures of high-spired shells are generally not highly “inclined”. Inclination is defined as the angle between the aperture pl...

The morphology of gastropod shells has been a focus of analyses in ecology and evolution. It has recently emerged as an important issue in developmental biology, thanks to recent advancements in molecular biological techniques. The growing tube model is a theoretical morphological model for describing various coiling patterns of molluscan shells, a...

We studied the morphological diversity of gastropod shell forms from the viewpoint of theoretical morphology, emphasizing the relationships of shell form to postural stability and the available space for soft body, which we assessed in terms of the moment of force and soft-tissue ratio calculations, respectively. The results of computer simulations...

The Spiral Shell Form was developed as an original computer software package designed for theoretical morphological analysis of gastropod shell forms using the Raup's model. It is composed of the following three programs. Spiral Shell Measure is a software for capturing coordinate data of the points of interest on computer image files of a specimen...