Utilization and synthesis of oligosaccharides by some pathogenic isolates of Colletotrichum capsici (Syd.) butler and bisby

Utilization of four oligosaccharides (viz., maltose, sucrose, lactose and raffinose) as well as of the mixture of their hydrolytic products (viz., glucose, ½ glucose + ½ fructose, ½ glucose + ½ galactose and 1/3 glucose + 1/3 fructose + 1/3 galactose) by three isolates of Colletotrichum capsici (Syd.) Butler and Bisby obtained from leaf-spots of Codiaeum variegatum Blume, Manihot esculenta Crantz and Solanum melongena L. was studied chromatographically. Sucrose, maltose and raffinose were consumed through a hydrolytic pathway, while none of the hydrolytic product could be detected in the medium containing lactose. The pathogens were also capable of utilizing the hydrolytic products of the oligosaccharides. All of them had synthesized an oligosaccharide during the utilization of sucrose and maltose. They failed to do so during the assimilation of lactose. Only Manihot isolate of C. capsici synthesized an oligosaccharide, when it was allowed to grow on raffinose. The growth of all the isolates was better on sucrose than on glucose-fructose mixture. They also exhibited better growth on a mixture of glucose and galactose than on lactose. The growth of all of them was inferior on maltose than on glucose. Codiaeum and Solanum isolates of C. capsici grew better on raffinose than on a mixture of glucose, fructose and galactose. Manihot isolate of the same species, however, showed more or less identical growth on raffinose as well as on the mixture of its hydrolytic products

An evaluation of knowledge, attitude and practice of pharmacovigilance among interns in a tertiary care teaching hospital of North Maharashtra

Background: Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are considered as one of the leading cause throughout the world resulting in significant increase in mortality and morbidity, therefore its monitoring is very essential in today's practice of medicine. Spontaneous reporting of ADRs have played a major role in the detection of unsuspected, serious and unusual ADRs previously undetected during the phases of clinical trials. Under-reporting of ADRs is considered as one of the major hurdle for the success of pharmacovigilance. Aims and objectives were to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of pharmacovigilance among interns in a tertiary care teaching hospital.Methods: A cross sectional, observational, questionnaire based study was carried out using a predesigned Knowledge Attitude Practice (KAP) questionnaire. Study was conducted after the permission of Institutional Ethical Committee (IEC). The study included 100 interns who had completed at least ten months of their internship. The KAP questionnaire was assessed and analyzed and data was presented as percentages.Results: On an average only 31.17% interns answered correctly related with knowledge about pharmacovigilance. 88.63% interns agreed that ADRs reporting is necessary. According to 85.22% interns, pharmacovigilance must be taught in details to healthcare professionals. Only 34.09% had ever seen the ADR reporting form. Only 17.04% interns had knowledge about how to report ADR?Conclusions: Our study revealed that there was lack of awareness related with knowledge, attitude and practice of pharmacovigilance among the interns. There is need of implementation of pharmacovigilance awareness programs for undergraduates

The effect of riluzole alone and in combination with sodium valproate on pentylenetetrazole induced seizures in swiss-albino rats

Background: Riluzole- a glutamate antagonist is known to enhance antiepileptic effects of various other antiepileptic drugs. The present study was undertaken to evaluate anticonvulsant effect of riluzole alone and in combination with sodium valproate on pentylenetetrazole (Metrazol) induced seizures in swiss-albino rats.Methods: Pentylenetetrazole (PTZ) 50 mg/kg intraperitonially (ip) was used to induce seizure in swiss- albino rats. Anticonvulsant effect of riluzole (at 5 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg) and sodium valproate (at 75 mg/kg, 150 mg/kg and 300 mg/kg) was studied on PTZ induced seizures in albino rats. Also effect of riluzole (10mg/kg) in combination with sodium valproate (75 mg/kg, 150 mg/kg and 300 mg/kg) was studied.  Parameters such as time of onset of first clonic convulsion in seconds, frequency of clonic convulsion in 60 minute and total duration of entire convulsion in minutes were studied. For statistical analysis unpaired t test was used.Results: At 5 mg/kg and 10 mg/kg doses riluzole per se was not found to produce any significant effect in PTZ induced seizures (P>0.05). Sodium valproate at 300 mg/kg dose was found to produce significant antiepileptic effect (P0.05). Interestingly significant antiepileptic effect was noted with combination of riluzole (at 10 mg/kg) with sodium valproate at 150 mg/kg and 300 mg/kg dose (P<0.001).Conclusions: Riluzole alone was not found to produce any significant protective effect against PTZ induced seizures in albino rats. However riluzole (10 mg/kg) was found to enhance the antiepileptic activity of sodium valproate

Scaling Reliably: Improving the Scalability of the Erlang Distributed Actor Platform

Distributed actor languages are an effective means of constructing scalable reliable systems, and the Erlang programming language has a well-established and influential model. While the Erlang model conceptually provides reliable scalability, it has some inherent scalability limits and these force developers to depart from the model at scale. This article establishes the scalability limits of Erlang systems and reports the work of the EU RELEASE project to improve the scalability and understandability of the Erlang reliable distributed actor model. We systematically study the scalability limits of Erlang and then address the issues at the virtual machine, language, and tool levels. More specifically: (1) We have evolved the Erlang virtual machine so that it can work effectively in large-scale single-host multicore and NUMA architectures. We have made important changes and architectural improvements to the widely used Erlang/OTP release. (2) We have designed and implemented Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang libraries to address language-level scalability issues and provided and validated a set of semantics for the new language constructs. (3) To make large Erlang systems easier to deploy, monitor, and debug, we have developed and made open source releases of five complementary tools, some specific to SD Erlang. Throughout the article we use two case studies to investigate the capabilities of our new technologies and tools: a distributed hash table based Orbit calculation and Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO). Chaos Monkey experiments show that two versions of ACO survive random process failure and hence that SD Erlang preserves the Erlang reliability model. While we report measurements on a range of NUMA and cluster architectures, the key scalability experiments are conducted on the Athos cluster with 256 hosts (6,144 cores). Even for programs with no global recovery data to maintain, SD Erlang partitions the network to reduce network traffic and hence improves performance of the Orbit and ACO benchmarks above 80 hosts. ACO measurements show that maintaining global recovery data dramatically limits scalability; however, scalability is recovered by partitioning the recovery data. We exceed the established scalability limits of distributed Erlang, and do not reach the limits of SD Erlang for these benchmarks at this scal

Fully adaptive multiresolution schemes for strongly degenerate parabolic equations with discontinuous flux

A fully adaptive finite volume multiresolution scheme for one-dimensional strongly degenerate parabolic equations with discontinuous flux is presented. The numerical scheme is based on a finite volume discretization using the Engquist--Osher approximation for the flux and explicit time--stepping. An adaptivemultiresolution scheme with cell averages is then used to speed up CPU time and meet memory requirements. A particular feature of our scheme is the storage of the multiresolution representation of the solution in a dynamic graded tree, for the sake of data compression and to facilitate navigation. Applications to traffic flow with driver reaction and a clarifier--thickener model illustrate the efficiency of this method

Revising mtDNA haplotypes of the ancient Hungarian conquerors with next generation sequencing

As part of the effort to create a high resolution representative sequence database of the medieval Hungarian conquerors we have resequenced the entire mtDNA genome of 24 published ancient samples with Next Generation Sequencing, whose haplotypes had been previously determined with traditional PCR based methods. We show that PCR based methods are prone to erroneous haplotype or haplogroup determination due to ambiguous sequence reads, and many of the resequenced samples had been classified inaccurately. The SNaPshot method applied with published ancient DNA authenticity criteria is the most straightforward and cheapest PCR based approach for testing a large number of coding region SNP-s, which greatly facilitates correct haplogroup determination

Social Participation and Disaster Risk Reduction Behaviors in Tsunami Prone Areas

This paper examines the relationships between social participation and disaster risk reduction actions. A survey of 557 households in tsunami prone areas in Phang Nga, Thailand was conducted following the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes. We use a multivariate probit model to jointly estimate the likelihood of undertaking three responses to earthquake and tsunami hazards (namely, (1) following disaster-related news closely, (2) preparing emergency kits and/or having a family emergency plan, and (3) having an intention to migrate) and community participation.We find that those who experienced losses from the 2004 tsunami are more likely to participate in community activities and respond to earthquake hazards. Compared to men, women are more likely to prepare emergency kits and/or have an emergency plan and have a greater intention to migrate. Living in a community with a higher proportion of women with tertiary education increases the probability of engaging in community activities and carrying out disaster risk reduction measures. Individuals who participate in village-based activities are 5.2% more likely to undertake all three risk reduction actions compared to those not engaging in community activities. This implies that encouraging participation in community activities can have positive externalities in disaster mitigation