Genotoxicity evaluation of Chlorfenapyr in exposed freshwater African catfish Clarias gariepinus using micronucleus test

Chlorfenapyr is a new formulated insecticide targeted against insecticide resistant species. Its application in targeting harmful aquatic insects may potentially contaminate aquatic environment. This study is to evaluate its genotoxic effects on non-targeted aquatic biota. The study assessed the genotoxic potentials of chlorfenapyr in African catfish (Clarias gariepinus) using the micronucleus (MN) test. Juvenile stage of C. gariepinus were exposed to different concentrations; 5.00 – 15.00 mgL-1 of chlorfenapyr for 96 hours, peripheral blood was collected through the caudal vein and examined for micronucleus induction in the erythrocytes. The tested concentrations of chlorfenapyr did not elicit significant [F (5, 18) = 0.167, p 0.971] increase in MN formation and other nuclear abnormalities in the peripheral erythrocytes of C. gariepinus. The outcome of this study gives credence to the view that chlorfenapyr is not clastogenic and or aneugenic to non-targeted aquatic vertebrate with reference to fish (C. gariepinus)

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

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

Acute Toxicity of Mercury (HgCl 2 ) to African Catfish, Clarias gariepinus

Abstrac

Haematological effect of chlorfenapyr-exposed freshwater African mud catfish, Clarias gariepinus (Burchell 1822)

The effects of chlorfenapyr pesticide were investigated on juvenile of Clarias gariepinus. Sub-lethal test was carried out using 5, 7, 9, 11 and 15 mgL-1 of chlorfenapyr pesticide for 96 hours, and peripheral blood was collected through the caudal vein and examined for haematological changes. There was significant reduction (P0.05) in WBC when compared to the control. RBC increase was directly proportional to increase in chlorfenapyr dose and significantly differed from control (p0.05). HGB increased in a dose-dependent manner. MCV values of all treatment groups, except 15 mgL-1, were higher when compared to control. MCH was not significantly different from control. PLT decreased with increase in concentration and was lower for all treatment when compared with control. Results obtained in this study suggest that exposure to sub-lethal concentrations of chlorfenapyr can alter the haematological indices of non-target organisms