Antimicrobial activity of skin secretions isolated from Indian toad, Bufo melanostictus Schneider 1799

Amphibians like toads have been known to secrete antimicrobial secretions outside their body into their environments, through skin pores and parotid glands. Toad skin-secretions contain four types of compounds namely, biogenic amines, bufadienolides, alkaloids & steroids and peptides & proteins. Bulk of research relating to amphibian antimicrobial secretions has been done on frogs. In toads, such research has only been done in South America, Europe and China. Antimicrobial secretions vary considerably from specie-to-specie and drastically across various biomes. This prompted us to examine and confirm presence of antimicrobial activity (if any) in Indian Common Toad (Bufo melanostictus Schneider 1799) skin secretions since; no such analysis had been previously done on this toad which is found all across the South-east Asia. The antibacterial potency of toad skin secretions was tested against the bacteria, Escherichia coli. After running preliminary antibacterial analysis assays, we found that these cutaneous secretions retrieved from Indian Common Toad possessed potential bactericidal activity. The results that we got confirmed that some unexplored bactericidal components were present in skin secretions of these toads. These conclusions call for further research into biochemistry and molecular characterization of these components

Influence of the nature of confinement on the melting of Wigner molecules in quantum dots

We analyze the quantum melting of two-dimensional Wigner molecules (WM) in confined geometries with distinct symmetries and compare it with corresponding thermal melting. Our findings unfold complementary mechanisms that drive the quantum and thermal crossovers in a WM and show that the symmetry of the confinement plays no significant role in determining the quantum crossover scale $n_X$. This is because the zero-point motion screens the boundary effects within short distances. The phase diagram as a function of thermal and quantum fluctuations determined from independent criteria is unique, and shows "melting" from the WM to both the classical and quantum "liquids." An intriguing signature of weakening liquidity with increasing temperature, $T$, is found in the extreme quantum regime. The crossover is associated with production of defects. However, these defects appear to play distinct roles in driving the quantum and thermal "melting." Our study will help comprehending melting in a variety of experimental traps - from quantum dots to complex plasma.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

Validating Network Value of Influencers by means of Explanations

Recently, there has been significant interest in social influence analysis. One of the central problems in this area is the problem of identifying influencers, such that by convincing these users to perform a certain action (like buying a new product), a large number of other users get influenced to follow the action. The client of such an application is a marketer who would target these influencers for marketing a given new product, say by providing free samples or discounts. It is natural that before committing resources for targeting an influencer the marketer would be interested in validating the influence (or network value) of influencers returned. This requires digging deeper into such analytical questions as: who are their followers, on what actions (or products) they are influential, etc. However, the current approaches to identifying influencers largely work as a black box in this respect. The goal of this paper is to open up the black box, address these questions and provide informative and crisp explanations for validating the network value of influencers. We formulate the problem of providing explanations (called PROXI) as a discrete optimization problem of feature selection. We show that PROXI is not only NP-hard to solve exactly, it is NP-hard to approximate within any reasonable factor. Nevertheless, we show interesting properties of the objective function and develop an intuitive greedy heuristic. We perform detailed experimental analysis on two real world datasets - Twitter and Flixster, and show that our approach is useful in generating concise and insightful explanations of the influence distribution of users and that our greedy algorithm is effective and efficient with respect to several baselines

Development of a context-specific search engine, an executive information system, and a novel www ready external cost model

NJPIES is associated with Information Ecology and Sustainability, a holistic approach to environmental data collection, compilation, integration and provision that puts people, not technology, at the center of the environmental information world. The first main goal of this project was to develop an algorithm and associated computer-based tool that could perform a lifecycle cost analysis for a model system. The application developed solved the primary problem associated with the lifecycle cost analysis of a product: it accounted for all costs (e.g., environmental costs such as ecological costs and health costs associated with emissions) of the activity. A lifecycle cost analysis attempts to identify, measure, and quantify the social costs of human activities such as manufacturing that are not considered with traditional accounting systems. The application developed will quantify, monetize, and rank the damage or external costs to the environment of certain types of emissions. We developed a preliminary algorithm and software and implemented it at two plants: load assembly pack operation at Iowa Army Ammunition Plant (IAAAP) and Armtec, a manufacturer of combustible cartridge cases. The second main goal of this project is to act as a credible information-clearing house in pollution prevention (P2) and related environmental matters, and to educate the public and keep them aware of facts taking place in the environmental/manufacturing world. Intelligent search engines have been built to access these huge databases in human readable format and correlate the data to various reports providing information on the environmentally hazardous chemicals, releases, and facilities in different regions. The third main goal is the enhancement of EnviroDaemon with a hierarchical information search interface. This project describes some approaches that locate information according to syntactic criteria, augmented by pragmatic aspects like the utilization of information in a certain context. The main emphasis of this project lies in the treatment of structured knowledge, where essential aspects about the topic of interest are encoded not only by the individual items, but also by their relationships among each other. Benefits of this approach are enhanced precision and approximate search in an already focused, context specific search engine for the environment

Reductive Biotransformation of Ethyl Acetoacetate: A Comparative Studies using Free and Immobilized Whole Yeast Cells

Bioreduction of ethyl acetoacetate with free and immobilized yeast whole cell was achieved by using water and sucrose combination. After detachment from immobilized beads under basic condition, the corresponding ethyl(S)-(+)-3-hydroxybutanoate was isolated with 98 to 100% yield. Immobilized beads of yeast whole cell were prepared at different temperature which affects the morphology and physiology of the beads for the diffusion of the enzyme, which shown the maximum conversion of the substrate to products as compared to the free yeast whole cell