Of the hunter and the hunted

Ramadevara Betta in Ramanagara is home to the critically- endangered long-billed vulture. But tourism and widlife photography seem to be doing a lot of harm to the region’s birdlife. The Forest Department’s recent announcement to turn the area into a vulture sanctuary could help

Linking kids and conservation: some thoughts on the vacation training programme

In urban areas the most convenient way to relate with nature, especially among urban kids is to watch ‘nature television’ or during the occasional visit to a zoo or national park. To make kids aware of nature and its conservation, ‘environmental education’ courses are included in the curricula, but the way these are taught has however been deplorable, with no connection to the real environment. Introducing students to bio-resources conservation at the secondary school level in a semi-structured but non-formal ambience with activities that promote observations, interactions and learning is needed to excite young minds towards conservation of our natural resources. Non-destructive field-based activities need to be designed and students made to observe nature, ask questions about what they see, discuss with scientists, elders and peers. Such activities also need to focus on the environment that the students are exposed to and provide opportunities for them to engage and relate with it

First detailed survey of waterbirds in Tirunelveli and Tuticorin districts, Tamil Nadu, India

The semi-arid districts of Tirunelveli and Tuticorin in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu consist of numerous wetlands in the form of irrigation tanks, interconnected by an ancient network of canals, and fed by the rivers originating from the Western Ghats. While these irrigation tanks have socio-economic and cultural significance, very little is known of their ecological importance. These tanks have the potential to harbor good populations of resident and wintering waterbirds but no studies have been done to confirm this. A survey was carried out in 230 irrigation tanks of various sizes in the two districts from November 2008 to January 2011. A total of 83 waterbird species were recorded. Indian Pond Heron Ardeola grayii occurred in most of the surveyed tanks. Large concentrations of wintering waterfowl such as Eurasian Wigeon Anas penelope, Northern Pintail Anas acuta, Garganey Anas querquedula were recorded in tanks closer to the coast. Based on our survey, six sites with large waterbird concentrations have been identified, one of which is Vagaikulam, an active heronry currently under threat from tree felling. These sites along with associated wetlands are important for the long term conservation of waterbirds in the region

A clinico-radiological and pathological profile of lung cancer patients presented to All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Patna)

Background: Lung cancer is one of the most common cancers and cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The clinicopathologicalprofile of lung cancer has shown marked regional and geographical variation. Majority of the patients have locallyadvanced or disseminated disease at presentation and are not candidates for surgery. Objective: The aim of this study was toevaluate the clinico-radiological and pathological profile of lung cancer patients and difference in histopathology betweensmoker and non-smoker. We also assessed yield of the various diagnostic procedures used for confirmation of lung cancer.Materials and Methods: A total of 30 patients diagnosed between May 1, 2016, and December 31, 2016. The completedemographic profile, smoking status, clinical, radiological, and diagnostic details were recorded in the study. Data were enteredand analyzed using SPSS software. Results: A total of 30 patients (19 male and 11 female) included in our study with mean age of55.26 years. Cough (80%) and dyspnea (80%) were the most common symptom and mass (86%), pleural effusion (53.3%) was themost common radiological presentation of patients. Clubbing and hemoptysis both was found only in 8 out of 30 (26%) patients.Adenocarcinoma (46.6%) was the most common histopathological type followed by squamous cell carcinoma (16.6%) and smallcell carcinoma (13.3%). The majority of patients (60%) presented in Stage 4. Computed tomography guided biopsy had better yieldin compare to ultrasonography guided (80% vs. 70.8%). Bronchoscopic procedure had lowest yield (38.8%). Conclusion: Theclinicopathological profile of lung cancer has changed in last few years, especially in the increase in adenocarcinoma incidence,and now it is the most common cause in both smokers and non-smoker

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Testing the impact of a single nucleotide polymorphism in a Plasmodium berghei ApiAP2 transcription factor on experimental cerebral malaria in mice

Cerebral malaria (CM) is the deadliest form of severe Plasmodium infections. Currently, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms by which Plasmodium parasites induce CM. The mouse model of CM, experimental CM (ECM), induced by infection with the rodent parasite, Plasmodium berghei ANKA (PbANKA) has been extensively used to study the pathophysiology of CM. Recent genomic analyses revealed that the coding regions of PbANKA and the closely related Plasmodium berghei NK65 (PbNK65), that does not cause ECM, differ in only 21 single nucleotide polymorphysims (SNPs). Thus, the SNP-containing genes might contribute to the pathogenesis of ECM. Although the majority of these SNPs are located in genes of unknown function, one SNP is located in the DNA binding site of a member of the Plasmodium ApiAP2 transcription factor family, that we recently showed functions as a virulence factor alternating the host\u27s immune response to the parasite. Here, we investigated the impact of this SNP on the development of ECM. Our results using CRISPR-Cas9 engineered parasites indicate that despite its immune modulatory function, the SNP is neither necessary nor sufficient to induce ECM and thus cannot account for parasite strain-specific differences in ECM phenotypes

Testing the impact of a single nucleotide polymorphism in a Plasmodium berghei ApiAP2 transcription factor on experimental cerebral malaria in mice

Cerebral malaria (CM) is the deadliest form of severe Plasmodium infections. Currently, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms by which Plasmodium parasites induce CM. The mouse model of CM, experimental CM (ECM), induced by infection with the rodent parasite, Plasmodium berghei ANKA (PbANKA) has been extensively used to study the pathophysiology of CM. Recent genomic analyses revealed that the coding regions of PbANKA and the closely related Plasmodium berghei NK65 (PbNK65), that does not cause ECM, differ in only 21 single nucleotide polymorphysims (SNPs). Thus, the SNP-containing genes might contribute to the pathogenesis of ECM. Although the majority of these SNPs are located in genes of unknown function, one SNP is located in the DNA binding site of a member of the Plasmodium ApiAP2 transcription factor family, that we recently showed functions as a virulence factor alternating the host's immune response to the parasite. Here, we investigated the impact of this SNP on the development of ECM. Our results using CRISPR-Cas9 engineered parasites indicate that despite its immune modulatory function, the SNP is neither necessary nor sufficient to induce ECM and thus cannot account for parasite strain-specific differences in ECM phenotypes

A single-nucleotide polymorphism in a <i>Plasmodium berghei</i> ApiAP2 transcription factor alters the development of host immunity

The acquisition of malaria immunity is both remarkably slow and unpredictable. At present, we know little about the malaria parasite genes that influence the host’s ability to mount a protective immune response. Here, we show that a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) resulting in a single amino acid change (S to F) in an ApiAP2 transcription factor in the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium berghei (Pb) NK65 allowed infected mice to mount a T helper cell 1 (TH1)–type immune response that controlled subsequent infections. As compared to PbNK65S, PbNK65F parasites differentially expressed 46 genes, most of which are predicted to play roles in immune evasion. PbNK65F infections resulted in an early interferon-γ response and a later expansion of germinal centers, resulting in high levels of infected red blood cell–specific TH1-type immunoglobulin G2b (IgG2b) and IgG2c antibodies. Thus, the Pb ApiAP2 transcription factor functions as a critical parasite virulence factor in malaria infections

A single-nucleotide polymorphism in a Plasmodium berghei ApiAP2 transcription factor alters the development of host immunity

The acquisition of malaria immunity is both remarkably slow and unpredictable. At present, we know little about the malaria parasite genes that influence the host's ability to mount a protective immune response. Here, we show that a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) resulting in a single amino acid change (S to F) in an ApiAP2 transcription factor in the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium berghei (Pb) NK65 allowed infected mice to mount a T helper cell 1 (T(H)1)-type immune response that controlled subsequent infections. As compared to PbNK65(S), PbNK65(F) parasites differentially expressed 46 genes, most of which are predicted to play roles in immune evasion. PbNK65(F) infections resulted in an early interferon-gamma response and a later expansion of germinal centers, resulting in high levels of infected red blood cell-specific T(H)1-type immunoglobulin G2b (IgG2b) and IgG2c antibodies. Thus, the Pb ApiAP2 transcription factor functions as a critical parasite virulence factor in malaria infections