Comparative study of antibacterial activity of two different earthworm species, Perionyx excavatus and Pheretima posthuma against pathogenic bacteria

Disease outbreaks are being increasingly recognized as a significant constraint on aquaculture production and trade affecting the economic development of the sector in many countries. Extracting and using biologically active compounds from earthworms has traditionally been practiced by indigenous people throughout the world. The aim of the present study was to shown antimicrobial activity through earthworm extract against fish bacterial pathogens. In total, 8 bacterial strains i.e. 6 gram negative viz. Aeromonas hydrophila, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, P. fluorescens, E.coli, Enterobacter aerogens and Shigella sp. and 2 gram positive viz. Staphylococcus aureus and Micrococcus luteus were identified. The extract of earthworm Perionyx excavatus, Pheretima posthuma were prepared and antimicrobial activity of the extract was determined by antimicrobial well diffusion assay. After 24 hrs of incubation period, it was observed that earthworm extract showed antibacterial activity against isolated bacterial strains. Among earthworm extract of two different species, the maximum zone of inhibition was shown against A. hydrophila by Perionyx excavatus (18.33± 0.66 mm) and P. posthuma (16.66±0.33). P. excavatus showed antibacterial activity against all pathogenic bacteria except Shigella spp. However on the other hand, P.posthuma showed antibacterial activity against A. hydrophila, P. fluorescens, E.coli, and S. aureus. The study has proved that earthworm extract can be effectively used for suppression of bacterial infection in fishes and that it can used as potential antimicrobial drug against commercial antibiotic resistance bacteria

Board Independence and Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: The Mediating Role of the Presence of Family Ownership

This paper examines the impact of board independence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and analyses the moderating effect of the presence of family ownership. Using an international sample from 29 countries from 2006 to 2014, our panel Tobit estimation shows that board independence is negatively associated with CSR disclosure practices and they present opposition to CSR disclosure practices. However, family ownership moderates the relationship and enforces the positive orientation of independent directors towards CSR disclosure. This shows that the presence of family ownership reduces independent director concern of reputation risks associated with receiving misleading information and family firms decrease the asymmetries of information between the independent director and management. The study also finds that independent directors encourage CSR disclosure in family firms more in civil law countries where investor protection is low compared to common law countries where investor protection is high.We would like to thank European Union for providing Erasmus Plus International Credit Mobility Scholarship to Mr. Shashank Bansal. This research is performed during his stay at University of Granada, Spain, as a part of scholarship

CyCLIP: Cyclic Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining

Recent advances in contrastive representation learning over paired image-text data have led to models such as CLIP that achieve state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot classification and distributional robustness. Such models typically require joint reasoning in the image and text representation spaces for downstream inference tasks. Contrary to prior beliefs, we demonstrate that the image and text representations learned via a standard contrastive objective are not interchangeable and can lead to inconsistent downstream predictions. To mitigate this issue, we formalize consistency and propose CyCLIP, a framework for contrastive representation learning that explicitly optimizes for the learned representations to be geometrically consistent in the image and text space. In particular, we show that consistent representations can be learned by explicitly symmetrizing (a) the similarity between the two mismatched image-text pairs (cross-modal consistency); and (b) the similarity between the image-image pair and the text-text pair (in-modal consistency). Empirically, we show that the improved consistency in CyCLIP translates to significant gains over CLIP, with gains ranging from 10%-24% for zero-shot classification accuracy on standard benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet1K) and 10%-27% for robustness to various natural distribution shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/goel-shashank/CyCLIP.Comment: 19 pages, 13 tables, 6 figures, Oral at NeuRIPS 202

Drug-excipient behavior in polymeric amorphous solid dispersions

Amorphous drug delivery systems are increasingly utilized to enhance aqueous solubility and oral bioavailability. However, they lack physical and/or chemical stability. One of the most common ways of stabilizing an amorphous form is by formulating it as an amorphous solid dispersion. This review focuses on polymeric amorphous solid dispersions wherein polymers are used as excipients to stabilize the amorphous form. A brief introduction to the basic concepts of amorphous systems such as glass transition temperature and the solubility advantage of amorphous systems is provided. Additionally, information on types of polymers used for the development of amorphous solid dispersions, their structural attributes and mechanisms of stabilization are presented here. Molecular aspects of drug-polymer miscibility and drugpolymer interactions are also discussed

Preparation and characterization of gellan-chitosan polyelectrolyte complex beads

The purpose of the present investigation was to prepare gellan-chitosan polyelectrolyte complex beads in one step and to explore the potential of the prepared beads in the oral delivery of metronidazole (log P = 0.0) and metronidazole benzoate (log P = 2.19). Beads were prepared by extruding aqueous solution of gellan gum (with or without drugs) into chitosan solution in acetic acid pH adjusted to 3.5. Prepared beads exhibited poor encapsulation and burst release for metronidazole, while very high encapsulation and extended release was observed for metronidazole benzoate in simulated gastric fluid (SGF, pH 1.2). Incorporation of type A & B gelatin significantly improved the metronidazole encapsulation in the beads but the release pattern remained the same. Overall, gellan-chitosan beads showed poor retardant capacity of drug release for metronidazole whereas good retardant capacity was observed for metronidazole benzoate.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

Evolving Clustered Random Networks

We propose a Markov chain simulation method to generate simple connected random graphs with a specified degree sequence and level of clustering. The networks generated by our algorithm are random in all other respects and can thus serve as generic models for studying the impacts of degree distributions and clustering on dynamical processes as well as null models for detecting other structural properties in empirical networks

The past, present, and future of the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS)

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven standard for the organization of data and metadata from a growing range of neuroscience modalities. This paper is meant as a history of how the standard has developed and grown over time. We outline the principles behind the project, the mechanisms by which it has been extended, and some of the challenges being addressed as it evolves. We also discuss the lessons learned through the project, with the aim of enabling researchers in other domains to learn from the success of BIDS

Board Independence and Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: The Mediating Role of the Presence of Family Ownership

This paper examines the impact of board independence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and analyses the moderating effect of the presence of family ownership. Using an international sample from 29 countries from 2006 to 2014, our panel Tobit estimation shows that board independence is negatively associated with CSR disclosure practices and they present opposition to CSR disclosure practices. However, family ownership moderates the relationship and enforces the positive orientation of independent directors towards CSR disclosure. This shows that the presence of family ownership reduces independent director concern of reputation risks associated with receiving misleading information and family firms decrease the asymmetries of information between the independent director and management. The study also finds that independent directors encourage CSR disclosure in family firms more in civil law countries where investor protection is low compared to common law countries where investor protection is high