Zinc dynamics in an Alfisol as influenced by levels of farm yard manure

Field experiments were conducted on sandy loam soil at Shimoga, Karnataka, India to study the influence of FYM application on dynamics of zinc in an Alfisol under fingermillet (Eleusine coracana L.) crop. Three levels of FYM viz., 7.5, 15.0 and 22.5 t/ha with and without recommended dose of fertilizer (RDF) were evaluated for the purpose. Changes in available (DTPA extractable) and different fractions of Zn in soil were monitored. Application of FYM at all levels, with or without fertilizers, caused significant (p<0.05) increase in DTPA-Zn, the effect being more pronounced at higher levels. Maximum DTPA- zinc (0.97 mg/kg) in soil was observed in the treatment RDF+FYM@ 22.5 t/ha. Increase in level of FYM application increased the water soluble, sorbed, easily reducible manganese bound, carbonate bound and organic bound fractions of Zn significantly (p<0.05), but decreased residual fractions in soil compared to that of RDF and absolute control treatments. All the fractions except residual one had positive and significant correlation with each other indicating the existence of a dynamic equilibrium among them. DTPA-Zn was positively and significantly (p<0.01) correlated with soil OC, WS, SORB, ERMn, CA, OM and Fe and Alox fractions (r= 0.683,0.603,0.683,0.702,0.777,0.678 and 0.476 respectively) in soil. The treatment receiving RDF+FYM @ 22.5 t/ha excelled over others with respect to grain and straw yield (3.028 t/ha and 1.890 t/ha respectively) of fingermillet. Thus, keeping in view the availability of Zn in soil and yield of fingermillet, FYM @22.5 t/ha supplemented with RDF was found to be the superior one

Case series of Brucellosis from a tertiary care hospital of North Karnataka

Abstract Background: Brucellosis is a zoonosis with worldwide distribution, which is particularly endemic in many countries of the Mediterranean basin. We studied 10 cases of brucellosis with various presentations. Methods: A total of 10 cases with brucellosis were included in the study. History and clinical examination,laboratory parameters were noted. Also the clinical outcomes and complications were determined. Results:Majority of patients were from rural areas (8 out of 10). There were 6 males and 4 females. The age distribution was between 16-35 years. Direct contact was found to be significantly most important predisposing risk factor.Fever and joint pains were the main presenting symptoms. Low hemoglobin (7 cases), relative lymphocytosis (5 cases), low platelet (3 cases), raised creatinine (4 cases) and altered liver function (5 cases) were observed. Conclusion: Brucellosis is an important emerging zoonotic disease but it is often under-diagnosed due to lack of suspicion and diagnostic facilities despite the fact that cattle farming (an important high risk group) is one of the main occupations in rural area. This report should infuse the awareness about this reemerging disease

IN-VITRO CYTOTOXIC EFFECT OF CANTHIUM DICOCCUM ON DIFFERENT CANCER CELL LINES

Objective: Cancer remains one of the most dreaded diseases causing an astonishingly high death rate. Despite the use of surgical resection and aggressive chemotherapy, nearly 50% of patients with carcinoma develop recurrent disease, highlighting the need for improved therapies. Henceforth, complementary and alternative medicine is slowly emerging as an option. A variety of ingredients of traditional medicines and herbs are being widely investigated in several parts of the world to analyze their potential as therapeutic agents against cancer. In the present study we investigated the efficacy of methanol extracts of Canthium dicoccum, for its clonogenic inhibition on Human Breast cancer (MD-MB-231), Prostate cancer (PC-3) and Lung cancer (Calu-6) cell lines.Methods: The cytotoxic effect of methanolic extract of Canthium dicoccum was evaluated by MTT assay on MD-MB-231, Calu-6, and PC-3 cells.Results: The methanol extract of C. dicoccum showed significant cytotoxicity against MD-MB-231and Calu-6, when compared to PC-3 cells.Conclusion: The methanol extracts of C. dicoccum showed effective cytotoxic activities in a dose and time dependent manner. Future work will be interesting to know the chemical composition and also better understanding the mechanism of action will help in developing it as drug for therapeutic application.Â

Effect of Temperature and Period of Storage on Breaking Dormancy in Gladiolus (Gladiolus grandiflorus Hort.) Corms

An experiment was conducted in 2010-2011 at Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru, on three gladiolus cultivars viz., 'Arka Amar', 'Darshan' and 'Kum Kum' to study effects of storage temperature (4°C and room temperature 27±2°C) and length of storage (50, 70 and 90 days) on dormancy of corms. Cv. 'Kum Kum' registered minimum number of days for sprouting (42.71 days), spike emergence (116 days) and days to opening of first floret (128 days). Corms stored at 4°C resulted in lowest number of days for-sprouting (45.24 days), days to spike emergence (114.63 days) and days to opening of first floret (126.60 days) and resulted in highest sprouting percentage (58.7%). Interaction effects revealed that cv. 'Kum Kum' stored at 4°C for 90 days after harvest took minimum number of days to sprouting (25.07 days), days to spike emergence (90.38 days) and days to opening of first floret (102.38 days) resulting in 100% sprouting

ANTIPROLIFERATIVE, ADME AND POTENTIAL IN SILICO G6PDH INHIBITORY ACTIVITY OF NOVEL 2-(1-BENZOFURAN-2-YL)-4-(5-PHENYL-4H-1, 2, 4-TRIAZOL-3-YL) QUINOLINE DERIVATIVES

Objectives: Synthesis of new 2-(1-benzofuran-2-yl)-4-(5-phenyl-4H-1, 2, 4-triazol-3-yl) quinoline and its derivatives for antiproliferative potential against cancer cells.Methods: The general methods were employed for the synthesis and the structures were confirmed by IR, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR and mass spectral analysis. The antiproliferative activity was performed by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay and molecular docking study were performed by Auto Dock Tools. In silico Absorption-Distribution-Metabolism-Excretion-Toxicity (ADMET) study for the drug, likeliness was carried out on ACD/lab-2.Results: The compound 3l showed 44, 44, 38 and 37 % inhibition against MCF-7, HepG2, Colo205 and HeLa cell lines, respectively; whereas, the compounds 3i and 3j exhibited 49 and 42 % inhibition against MCF-7 cell line. The molecular docking study revealed that the compound 3i has the lowest binding energy (-8.60 Kcal mol-1), suggesting to be potentially best inhibitor of Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH). The in silico ADME analysis also revealed that compound 3i does not violate any of the Lipinski rules of five and has the best stimulative human colonic absorption up to 95 %.Conclusion: The study reveals that the compounds containing benzofuran coupled nitrogen heterocycles are essential for activity as they possess excellent drug-like characteristics.Â

Floral biology and reproductive potential of Annona hybrid Arka Sahan

Annona hybrid Arka Sahan has become a commercially important fruit in recent times and it needs an assisted pollination to get good size. Studies on floral biology of Annona hybrid Arka Sahan revealed that major bloom occurs during March-April. Most of the flowers start opening during the afternoon and continued till 7.00 pm, while, pollen dehiscence mainly occurred in early morning in the following day. The maximum stigma receptivity was recorded on the day of anthesis. Completely pendulous petal was more common in Arka Sahan flowers resulting = improper pollination. The minimum number of beetles and bees were observed between 7.00 to 8.00 am. Pollen germination and viability were lower at anthesis (5.8% and 44%, respectively) and declined as the day progressed. The pendulous nature of petals eventually brings some un-pollinated stigmas potentially resulting in delayed selfing leading to misshaped fruits

Death-associated Protein Kinase-1 Expression and Autophagy in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Are Dependent on Activating Transcription Factor-6 and CCAAT/Enhancer-binding Protein-β

Expression of DAPK1, a critical regulator of autophagy and apoptosis, is lost in a wide variety of tumors, although the mechanisms are unclear. A transcription factor complex consisting of ATF6 (an endoplasmic reticulum-resident factor) and C/EBP-β is required for the IFN-γ-induced expression of DAPK1. IFN-γ-induced proteolytic processing of ATF6 and phosphorylation of C/EBP-β are obligatory for the formation of this transcriptional complex. We report that defects in this pathway fail to control growth of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Consistent with these observations, IFN-γ and chemotherapeutics failed to activate autophagy in CLL patient samples lacking ATF6 and/or C/EBP-β. Together, these results identify a molecular basis for the loss of DAPK1 expression in CLL

Mitigating the Exposure Bias in Sentence-Level Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) Transduction

Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) has recently been considered for the Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) transduction. As a follow-up, a tokenizer-free byte-level model based on T5 referred to as ByT5, recently gave promising results on word-level G2P conversion by representing each input character with its corresponding UTF-8 encoding. Although it is generally understood that sentence-level or paragraph-level G2P can improve usability in real-world applications as it is better suited to perform on heteronyms and linking sounds between words, we find that using ByT5 for these scenarios is nontrivial. Since ByT5 operates on the character level, it requires longer decoding steps, which deteriorates the performance due to the exposure bias commonly observed in auto-regressive generation models. This paper shows that the performance of sentence-level and paragraph-level G2P can be improved by mitigating such exposure bias using our proposed loss-based sampling method.Comment: INTERSPEECH 202

Consensus statement from the International Consensus Meeting on the Role of Decompressive Craniectomy in the Management of Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract: Background: Two randomised trials assessing the effectiveness of decompressive craniectomy (DC) following traumatic brain injury (TBI) were published in recent years: DECRA in 2011 and RESCUEicp in 2016. As the results have generated debate amongst clinicians and researchers working in the field of TBI worldwide, it was felt necessary to provide general guidance on the use of DC following TBI and identify areas of ongoing uncertainty via a consensus-based approach. Methods: The International Consensus Meeting on the Role of Decompressive Craniectomy in the Management of Traumatic Brain Injury took place in Cambridge, UK, on the 28th and 29th September 2017. The meeting was jointly organised by the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies (WFNS), AO/Global Neuro and the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Neurotrauma. Discussions and voting were organised around six pre-specified themes: (1) primary DC for mass lesions, (2) secondary DC for intracranial hypertension, (3) peri-operative care, (4) surgical technique, (5) cranial reconstruction and (6) DC in low- and middle-income countries. Results: The invited participants discussed existing published evidence and proposed consensus statements. Statements required an agreement threshold of more than 70% by blinded voting for approval. Conclusions: In this manuscript, we present the final consensus-based recommendations. We have also identified areas of uncertainty, where further research is required, including the role of primary DC, the role of hinge craniotomy and the optimal timing and material for skull reconstruction

Alternative Splicing in Neurogenesis and Brain Development

Alternative splicing of precursor mRNA is an important mechanism that increases transcriptomic and proteomic diversity and also post-transcriptionally regulates mRNA levels. Alternative splicing occurs at high frequency in brain tissues and contributes to every step of nervous system development, including cell-fate decisions, neuronal migration, axon guidance, and synaptogenesis. Genetic manipulation and RNA sequencing have provided insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of alternative splicing in stem cell self-renewal and neuronal fate specification. Timely expression and perhaps post-translational modification of neuron-specific splicing regulators play important roles in neuronal development. Alternative splicing of many key transcription regulators or epigenetic factors reprograms the transcriptome and hence contributes to stem cell fate determination. During neuronal differentiation, alternative splicing also modulates signaling activity, centriolar dynamics, and metabolic pathways. Moreover, alternative splicing impacts cortical lamination and neuronal development and function. In this review, we focus on recent progress toward understanding the contributions of alternative splicing to neurogenesis and brain development, which has shed light on how splicing defects may cause brain disorders and diseases