Metabolomics-Driven Mining of Metabolite Resources:Applications and Prospects for Improving Vegetable Crops

Vegetable crops possess a prominent nutri-metabolite pool that not only contributes to the crop performance in the fields, but also offers nutritional security for humans. In the pursuit of identifying, quantifying and functionally characterizing the cellular metabolome pool, biomolecule separation technologies, data acquisition platforms, chemical libraries, bioinformatics tools, databases and visualization techniques have come to play significant role. High-throughput metabolomics unravels structurally diverse nutrition-rich metabolites and their entangled interactions in vegetable plants. It has helped to link identified phytometabolites with unique phenotypic traits, nutri-functional characters, defense mechanisms and crop productivity. In this study, we explore mining diverse metabolites, localizing cellular metabolic pathways, classifying functional biomolecules and establishing linkages between metabolic fluxes and genomic regulations, using comprehensive metabolomics deciphers of the plant’s performance in the environment. We discuss exemplary reports covering the implications of metabolomics, addressing metabolic changes in vegetable plants during crop domestication, stage-dependent growth, fruit development, nutri-metabolic capabilities, climatic impacts, plant-microbe-pest interactions and anthropogenic activities. Efforts leading to identify biomarker metabolites, candidate proteins and the genes responsible for plant health, defense mechanisms and nutri-rich crop produce are documented. With the insights on metabolite-QTL (mQTL) driven genetic architecture, molecular breeding in vegetable crops can be revolutionized for developing better nutritional capabilities, improved tolerance against diseases/pests and enhanced climate resilience in plants

Understanding our seas: National Institute of Oceanography, Goa

The present article summarizes the research done at the CSIR–National Institute of Oceanography in 2014 in ocean science, resources and technology. Significant research has been conducted on air–sea interactions and coastal circulation, biogeochemistry, biology, marine geophysics, palaeoceanography, marine fishery, gas hydrates and wave energy. Technological advances covered topics like oceanographic tools. Major strides have been made in marine resources research and evaluation

Understanding our seas: National Institute of Oceanography, Goa

The present article summarizes the research done at the CSIR–National Institute of Oceanography in 2014 in ocean science, resources and technology. Significant research has been conducted on air–sea interactions and coastal circulation, biogeochemistry, biology, marine geophysics, palaeoceanography, marine fishery, gas hydrates and wave energy. Technological advances covered topics like oceanographic tools. Major strides have been made in marine resources research and evaluation

Measurement of the Higgs boson production rate in association with top quarks in final states with electrons, muons, and hadronically decaying tau leptons at s√=13TeV

The rate for Higgs (H) bosons production in association with either one (tH) or two (tt¯H) top quarks is measured in final states containing multiple electrons, muons, or tau leptons decaying to hadrons and a neutrino, using proton–proton collisions recorded at a center-of-mass energy of 13TeV by the CMS experiment. The analyzed data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 137fb−1. The analysis is aimed at events that contain H→WW, H→ττ, or H→ZZ decays and each of the top quark(s) decays either to lepton+jets or all-jet channels. Sensitivity to signal is maximized by including ten signatures in the analysis, depending on the lepton multiplicity. The separation among tH, tt¯H, and the backgrounds is enhanced through machine-learning techniques and matrix-element methods. The measured production rates for the tt¯H and tH signals correspond to 0.92±0.19(stat)+0.17−0.13(syst) and 5.7±2.7(stat)±3.0(syst) of their respective standard model (SM) expectations. The corresponding observed (expected) significance amounts to 4.7 (5.2) standard deviations for tt¯H, and to 1.4 (0.3) for tH production. Assuming that the Higgs boson coupling to the tau lepton is equal in strength to its expectation in the SM, the coupling yt of the Higgs boson to the top quark divided by its SM expectation, κt=yt/ySMt, is constrained to be within −0.9<κt<−0.7 or 0.7<κt<1.1, at 95% confidence level. This result is the most sensitive measurement of the tt¯H production rate to date.SCOAP

Response of Gibberellic Acid and Corm Division on Floral Attributes of Gladiolus

This study was conducted to assess the response of Gibberellic acid and corm division on floral attributes of gladiolus cv. Punjab Dawn at Horticulture Research Farm of Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India during two consecutive year (2017-2019). The treatments comprised of growth regulators with two concentration i.e. GA3 100 ppm and 200 ppm including control (distilled water) and corms which are cut having 1bud, 2 buds and 3 buds and whole corm having 4 buds, 5 buds and 6 buds. The experiment was laid out in Randomized Block Design and three replications. The flowering characteristics of Gladiolus are mainly affected by higher concentration of GA3 (200 ppm) as well as whole corm under natural climatic condition. Regarding flowering parameters, it was found that GA3 200 ppm and whole corm i.e. 4 bud, 5 bud and 6 bud influence the quality and quantity parameters, viz. days to spike emergence, days to colour show, days to opening of florets, days to open florets without withering of basal floret, number of florets per spike, longevity of spike, length of spike and rachis (cm) and diameter of florets (cm) as compared to other treatments of GA3 100 ppm and control (distilled water) &nbsp;and cut corms which have 1 bud, 2 buds and 3 buds

Median Predictor based Data Compression Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed self-organizing, low-powered sensing devices with limited computational and communication resources to cooperatively monitor conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure and humidity over a specific area for some specific purposes like target tracking, area monitoring, industrial monitoring, health monitoring, surveillance, environmental monitoring etc and report the collected data of all sensors to the user for analysis. Energy is a primary constraint in the design of sensor networks. This fundamental energy constraint further limits everything from data sensing rates and link bandwidth, to node size and weight. In most cases, the radio is the main energy consumer of the system; lifetime of sensor node may extended by reducing transmissions/receptions of data. It is useful to apply data compression to reduce the volume of data, and the associated energy consumption of transmission. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient data compression algorithm which is lossless and particularly suited to the reduced memory and computational resources of a WSN node. The proposed data compression algorithm gives good compression ratio for highly correlated data as well as low correlated data

Antiviral Activity of Belladonna During Japanese Encephalitis Virus Infection via Inhibition of Microglia Activation and Inflammation Leading to Neuronal Cell Survival

Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is the main cause of viral encephalitis resulting in more than 68 000 clinical cases every year with case fatality rate as high as 30–40% for which no specific treatments are available. We have recently exhibited belladonna may be widely applicable for the treatment of various neurological disorders. Therefore, we developed a hydroalcoholic formulation of belladonna (B200) consisting of atropine and scopolamine and showed its antiviral efficacy against JEV infection. B200 treatment increases neuronal cell survival by reducing JEV induced cytopathic effects which were evident from significant reduction in necrotic cell population by flow-cytometry analysis and caspase 3 and 8 enzymatic activities. B200 treatment was found to reduce the intracellular JEV level observed by significant reduction in JEV–fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) expression in both neurons and microglia. Because microglia plays a crucial role in JEV pathogenesis, we further investigated the anti-JEV effects of B200 on human microglia cells and elucidated the mechanism of action by performing whole-transcriptome sequencing. Gene expression analysis revealed that B200 reduces the pro-apoptotic and inflammatory gene expression observed by significant reduction in BAD, BAX, CASP3, CASP8, IL1B, and CXCL10 and increase in IL10 responsive gene expression. Interestingly, our molecular docking analysis revealed that atropine and scopolamine interact with the His288 residue of NS3 protein, a crucial residue for RNA unwinding and ATPase activity that was further confirmed by degradation of NS3 protein. Drug likeness, ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion), and toxicity analysis further suggests that atropine and scopolamine both cross the blood–brain barrier, which is crucial for effective treatment of Japanese encephalitis (JE)