EFFECT OF ETHANOLIC EXTRACT OF MIMOSA PUDICA ROOT L. ON ACUTE RESTRAINT STRESS-INDUCED ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION IN SWISS ALBINO MICE

Objective: The present study is undertaken to study the ameliorative effects of ethanolic extract of Mimosa pudica root (EMPR) on stress-induced anxiety and depressive-like behavior in Swiss albino mice.Methods: The animals were subjected to acute restraint stress (ARS) for 7 days, and on the 8th day after drugs administration, the antianxiety effect was evaluated using elevated plus maze (EPM) test. Antidepressant activity was evaluated by animal despair models-forced swim test and tail suspension test. Phytochemical analysis of the extract was also conducted.Results: EMPR (1000 and 2000 mg/kg) and the combined test groups have shown significant antianxiety effects similar to the standard diazepam as indicated by an improved open arm exploratory behavior in EPM model. EMPR also significantly reduced the immobility time in the animal despair models tested.Conclusion: Results suggest that EMPR possesses significant anxiolytic and antidepressant activity in male Swiss albino mice

STUDY OF ANTI-ANAEMIC EFFECT OF SCHREBERA SWIETENIOIDES ROXB. IN RAT MODELS

Objective: Ethnobotanical survey of Schrebera swietenioides Roxb revealed the bark of the tree to be useful in anemia. The objective of this study wasto study the ant-anemic effect of methanolic extract of root bark of S. swietenioides Roxb. against phenylhydrazine induced anemic rat model.Methods: The methanolic extracts of Leaf, Stem bark, and Root bark were prepared by soxhlation. Phytochemical analysis of the extracts was performedusing standard testing procedures. The total phenolic content (TPC) of Schrebera leaf extract, Schrebera stem bark extract and Schrebera root barkextract (SRE) was determined by Folin–Ciocalteu method. Hemolytic anemia was induced in male Wistar rats by intraperitoneal administrationof phenylhydrazine HCl (PHZ) at doses of 40 mg/kg body weight/day for 3 consecutive days. Anemic rats were orally treated with SRE at doses of200 and 350 mg/kg body wt/day. The rats were analyzed for hematological parameters such as hemoglobin (Hb), red blood cell count (RBC) andhematocrit or packed cell volume (PCV) on day 4 and 14.Results: Phytochemical screening of the extracts indicated the presence of carbohydrates, saponins, sterols, polyphenols, tannins, and flavonoids.Folin–Ciocalteu method of testing for TPC demonstrated SRE to be rich in total phenols with a value of 266 mg GAE/g of dry extract. Anemia wasinduced successfully in Groups II, III, IV, and V, which was indicated by a mean reduction of 51.6% in RBC count; 53.85% in Hb content, and 54.9% inPCV. Analysis of hematological parameters on day 14 showed that SRE significantly (p<0.05) improved Hb, RBC count, and PCV at a dose of 350 mg/kgbody weight.Conclusion: This study, not only substantiates the folklore use of the root bark of S. swietenioides, but also suggests its inclusion in the treatment ofanemia as it exhibited significant anti-anemic activity.Keywords: Schrebera swietenioides, Anemia, Hematological parameters, Phenyl hydrazine, Hematocrit

Generic Paddy Plant Disease Detector (GP2D2): An Application of the Deep-CNN Model

Rice is the primary food for almost half of the world’s population, especially for the people of Asian countries. There is a demand to improve the quality and increase the quantity of rice production to meet the food requirements of the increasing population. Bulk cultivation and quality production of crops need appropriate technology assistance over manual traditional methods. In this work, six popular Deep-CNN architectures, namely AlexNet, VGG-19, VGG-16, InceptionV3, MobileNet, and ResNet-50, are exploited to identify the diseases in paddy plants since they outperform most of the image classification applications. These CNN models are trained and tested with Plant Village dataset for classifying the paddy plant images into one of the four classes namely, Healthy, Brown Spot, Hispa, or Leaf Blast, based on the disease condition. The performance of the chosen architectures is compared with different hyper parameter settings. AlexNet outperformed other convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in this multiclass classification task, achieving an accuracy of 89.4% at the expense of a substantial number of network parameters, indicating the large model size of AlexNet. For developing mobile applications, the ResNet-50 architecture was adopted over other CNNs, since it has a comparatively smaller number of network parameters and a comparable accuracy of 86.1%. A fine-tuned ResNet-50 architecture supported mobile app, “Generic Paddy Plant Disease Detector (GP2D2)” has been developed for the identification of most commonly occurring diseases in paddy plants. This tool will be more helpful for the new generation of farmers in bulk cultivation and increasing the productivity of paddy. This work will give insight into the performance of CNN architectures in rice plant disease detection task and can be extended to other plants too

Efficacy of lysine versus mupirocin in the treatment of non-diabetic foot ulcer: the sessing scale for assessment of pressure ulcer

Background: This present studies intended to evaluate the wound healing ability, efficacy and tolerability of lysine cream (15%) in non- diabetic foot ulcer assessed by way of sessing scale.Methods: A randomized, open-label, interventional study was directed on 20 subjects (participants) non-diabetic ulcers. Participants were grouped into two groups, control (n=10) and case (n=10). The control was treated with standard treatment with mupirocin and the test group was treated with standard treatment alongside lysine cream (15%) twice every day. Wound healing in the participants was assessed by the sessing scales.Results: A total of 20 participants were allotted into two groups. The results expressed as mean±standard deviation values imply the size and depth of the foot ulcer from the first week to the 8th week. Both the groups showed a significant increase the ulcer healing and decrease the pressure of foot ulcer of over a period of 8 weeks. Assessment of the first week showed no significant ulcer healing and its pressure. The overall outcome indicated that the lysine-treated group extensively reduced each of the parameters favouring wound healing than the standard therapy with mupirocin (control group).Conclusions: Results concluded that, lysine cream is better efficacious in the repair of wound and additionally well tolerated compared to mupirocin

Novel SSR Markers for Polymorphism Detection in Pigeonpea (Cajanus spp.)

With an objective to expand the repertoire of molecular markers in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan), 36 microsatellite or simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci were isolated from a SSR-enriched genomic library. Primer pairs were designed for 23 SSR loci, of which 16 yielded amplicons of expected size. Thirteen SSR markers were polymorphic amongst 32 cultivated and eight wild pigeonpea genotypes representing six Cajanus species. These markers amplified a total of 72 alleles ranging from two to eight alleles with an average of 5.5 alleles per locus. The polymorphic information content for these markers ranged from 0.05 to 0.55 with an average of 0.32 per marker. Phenetic analysis clearly distinguished all wild species genotypes from each other and from the cultivated pigeonpea genotypes. These markers should be useful for genome mapping, trait mapping, diversity studies and assessment of gene flow between populations in pigeonpea

Ethyl ester of Honge oil and palm oil blends with diesel as an ecofriendly fuel in heavy duty vehicles: An investigation

The blends of ethyl esters of pongemia oil (Honge oil) and palm oil are prepared by blending/mixing esters directly 10-20% by volume with diesel (HSD) and the results were quite encouraging leading to 21% mileage improvement in honge oil ester diesel (HOED) 10% blend compared to palm oil ester diesel (POED) 10% blend. But both are the selective improvement blends compared to diesel. Thus HOED 10% shows 72% improvement and considerable reduction of exhaust emissions compared to 64% improvement in POED 10%. The best performance blend compared to HSD is HOED, and it has high calorific value, one of the oil derivatives leading to smooth drive of the vehicle/engine causing less wear and tear

Biodiesel of groundnut oil: A safe alternate fuel in the transport sector

Considering pure biodiesel of groundnut oil and its blend up to 10% in particular with heavy duty Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) vehicles, it is one of the important alternative safe fuels to stabilize green house gas (GHG) emission level in the atmosphere and the results were quite encouraging leading to 22% mileage improvement in groundnut oil ester diesel blend (GOED 10%) compared to 20% in pure groundnut. oil ester (GOE). But both have selective improvement compared to diesel. Thus GOED 10% shows 74% improvement and considerable reduction in exhaust emission compared to 73% improvement in pure GOE. The best performance safe fuel compared to HSD is GOED 10% and besides biodiesel of groundnut oil having an agricultural base, it is one of the possible renewable, oxygenated fuel with high calorific value. It strengthens the environmental issues in reducing emission particulates due to low sulphur content of 0.20 in GOE compared to 0.25 in high speed diesel (HSD)