TNM cancer staging: can it help develop a novel staging system for type 2 diabetes?

Abstract: Type 2 diabetes (DM2) constitutes 90%–95% of the diabetes cases and is increasing at an alarming rate in the world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) esti- mates that more than 29 million people in the United States have diabetes, which often causes mortality from macrovascular complications and morbidity from microvascular complications. Despite these troubling facts, there is currently no widely accepted staging system for DM2 like there is for cancer. TNM oncologic staging has taken a complex condition like cancer and conveyed likelihood of survival in simple alpha-numeric terms that both patients and providers can understand. Oncology is now entering the era of precision medicine where cancer treatment is increasingly being tailored to each patient’s cancer. In contrast, DM2 lacks a staging system and remains a largely invisible disease even though it kills more Americans and costs more to treat than cancer. Is a comparable staging system for DM2 possible? We propose the Diabetes Staging System for DM2 that utilizes macrovascular events, microvascular complications, estimated glomerular filtration rate (GFR), and hemoglobin A1C to stage DM2

Growth, fruit set and yield of Santa Rosa plum as affected by nitrogen and boron under rainfed conditions of Kashmir Valley

Present experiment was carried out in a seven year old private plum orchard near SKUAST-Kashmir, Shalimar Campus, Srinagar during 2012 and 2013, to examine the response to nitrogenous fertilizer and boron on growth, fruit set and yield of plum var. Santa Rosa. Urea @ 500 g (N1), CaNO3 @ 1450 g (N2), N1 + 50 g boron (N3) and N2 + 50 g boron (N4) were applied at T1 = Full dose in spring, T2 = Full dose after harvest and T3 = 3/4 dose in spring and 1/4 dose after harvest. Observations were recorded on parameters viz. incremental tree girth, shoot extension growth, plant height, plant spread, leaf area, fruit set, fruit drop, yield, yield efficiency. All the growth parameters were high in treatment combination N1T1. Maximum fruit set (19.68 % and 20.90 %) was recorded in N3T2, yield (20.60 kg/tree and 22.88 kg/tree) was recorded in N4T2, yield efficiency (0.45 and 0.46 kg/cm2) was recorded in N4T2 and minimum fruit drop (4.25 % and 4.55 %) were recorded under the treatment combination N4T2 and N4T3, respectively in the both the years. Both sources of nitrogen and boron can be considered as best fertilizer in plum orchards for improving the growth, fruit set, fruit yield, yield efficiency

Molecular breeding for resilience in maize - A review

Abiotic and biotic constraints have widespread yield reducing effects on maize and should receive high priority for maize breeding research. Molecular Breeding offers opportunities for plant breeders to develop cultivars with resilience to such diseases with precision and in less time duration. The term molecular breeding is used to describe several modern breeding strategies, including marker-assisted selection, marker-assisted backcrossing, marker-assisted recurrent selection and genomic selection. Recent advances in maize breeding research have made it possible to identify and map precisely many genes associated with DNA markers which include genes governing resistance to biotic stresses and genes responsible for tolerance to abiotic stresses. Marker assisted selection (MAS) allows monitoring the presence, absence of these genes in breeding populations whereas marker assisted backcross breeding effectively integrates major genes or quantitative trait loci (QTL) with large effect into widely grown adapted varieties. For complex traits where multiple QTLs control the expression, marker assisted recurrent selection (MARS) and genomic selection (GS) are employed to increase precision and to reduce cost of phenotyping and time duration. The biparental mapping populations used in QTL studies in MAS do not readily translate to breeding applications and the statistical methods used to identify target loci and implement MAS have been inadequate for improving polygenic traits controlled by many loci of small effect. Application of GS to breeding populations using high marker densities is emerging as a solution to both of these deficiencies. Hence, molecular breeding approaches offers ample opportunities for developing stress resilient and high-yielding maize cultivars

Kerr-Schild type initial data for black holes with angular momenta

Generalizing previous work we propose how to superpose spinning black holes in a Kerr-Schild initial slice. This superposition satisfies several physically meaningful limits, including the close and the far ones. Further we consider the close limit of two black holes with opposite angular momenta and explicitly solve the constraint equations in this case. Evolving the resulting initial data with a linear code, we compute the radiated energy as a function of the masses and the angular momenta of the black holes.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. Revised version. To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Long gamma-ray bursts without visible supernovae: a case study of redshift estimators and alleged novel objects

It has been argued that the observational limits on a supernova (SN) associated with GRB060614 convincingly exclude a SN akin to SN1998bw as its originator, and provide evidence for a new class of long-duration GRBs. We discuss this issue in the contexts of indirect 'redshift estimators' and of the fireball and cannonball models of GRBs. The latter explains the unusual properties of GRB060614: at its debated but favoured low redshift (0.125) they are predicted, as opposed to exceptional, if the associated core-collapse SN is of a recently discovered, very faint type. We take the occasion to discuss the 'association' between GRBs and SNe.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures. To be published in Ap

The Differential Efficiency of Chlorella vulgaris and Oscillatoria sp. to Treat the Municipal Wastewater

The utilization of microalgae to treat wastewater becomes an alternative biological wastewater treatment technique worldwide because of its low cost and environmental clean. Chlorella vulgaris and Oscillatoria sp. were cultured in municipal wastewater under controlled laboratory conditions with continuous light illumination and aeration. Physical properties (pH, TDS and Salinity), and nutrient contents (ammonia, nitrite and total phosphorus)were measured in the raw wastewater. Growth rates of the cultured species in terms of optical densities and cell counts, nutrient salts removal efficiencies were measured during the experimental durations after; 24, 48, 72, 96 , 120 and 144hrs. Lipids, proteins and carbohydrates contents were also evaluated after 144hrs. The recorded optical density of Chlorella vulgaris was 0.188±0.01 at 680 nm and 0.17±0.01 at 750 nm after 24hrs then increased to 1.45±0.002 at 680nm and 1.43±0.01 at 750nm at the end of 120hrs, meanwhile the optical density of Oscillatoria sp. was increased from 0.132±0.01 at 680 nm and 0.102±0.01 at 750 nm after 24hrs to 1.054±0.004 at 680 nm and 0.99±0.002 at 750 nm at the end of 120hrs of the experiment. On the other hand, the cell count of Chlorella vulgaris was enriched from 6.8±2.2 cell/ml after 24hrs to 720±120 cell/ml at the end of 120h of the culturing. Overall, efficiencies of nutrients removal were 99.426%, 100% and 82.211% for ammonia, nitrite and total phosphorus respectively at the end of 120hrs of Chlorella vulgaris culturing, while Oscillatoria sp nutrient removal efficiencies recorded 98.125%, 100% and 84.718% for ammonia, Nitrite and total phosphorus respectively. Chlorella vulgaris biomass was estimated 26.66±7.5% lipid 35.1±1.6% protein and 29.34±3.25% carbohydrate, however Oscillatoria sp. biomass was estimated 11.76±0.79% lipids, 32.9±1.92% protein and 27.36±3.78% carbohydrates. Keywords: municipal Wastewater, Chlorella vulgaris, Oscillatoria sp., nutrient removal, biochemical parameters

New bounds on the neutrino magnetic moment from the plasma induced neutrino chirality flip in a supernova

The neutrino chirality-flip process under the conditions of the supernova core is investigated in detail with the plasma polarization effects in the photon propagator taken into account, in a more consistent way than in earlier publications. It is shown in part that the contribution of the proton fraction of plasma is essential. New upper bounds on the neutrino magnetic moment are obtained: mu_nu < (0.5 - 1.1) 10^{-12} mu_B from the limit on the supernova core luminosity for nu_R emission, and mu_nu < (0.4 - 0.6) 10^{-12} mu_B from the limit on the averaged time of the neutrino spin-flip. The best upper bound on the neutrino magnetic moment from SN1987A is improved by the factor of 3 to 7.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, 7 EPS figures, submitted to Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physic