Lesser Known Ethnomedicinal Plants of Alagar Hills, Madurai District of Tamil Nadu, India

The ethnobotanical uses of plant species viz. Embelia basal (Roxb.) DC., Gymnema lactiferum R.Br., Ophiorrhiza mungos L., and Syzygium alternifolium (Wight) Walp. were recorded from Alagar hills of Madurai district, Tamil Nadu

Chemical Composition and Antioxidant Activity of Heracleum sprengelianum (Wight and Arnott) Essential Oils Growing Wild in Peninsular India

Abstract The essential oils, isolated by hydrodistillation from the leaves, seeds and rhizomes of Heracleum sprengelianum (Wight and Arnott), collected from the Western Ghats of Peninsula India, were analyzed by gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The antioxidant property of these oils was tested, with and without peroxidation inducer, through the egg yolk-based Thiobarbituric Acid Reactive Substances assay (TBARS assay) and in the concentrations of 50, 100, 250 and 500 mg/L. β-Pinene, 1,8-Cineole, β-Phellandrene and ρ-Cymen-8-ol were the main components of H. sprengelianum leaves, seeds and rhizomes essential oils. The oils demonstrated the antioxidant capacity in the absence of radical inducer 2, 20-azobis-(2-amidinopropane) dihydrochloride (ABAP), mainly that of H. sprengelianum at 250 and 500 mg/L, comparable in some cases to that of α-tocopherol and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT). The presence of ABAP diminished the antioxidant ability of all tested essential oils, leaf oils of H. sprengelianum still showing the highest antioxidant capacity at 500 mg/L. At 250 and 500 mg/L for BHA, and 500 mg/L for α-tocopherol, the antioxidant capacity significantly increased in the presence of ABAP

Internet of Things and Machine Learning Applications for Smart Precision Agriculture

Agriculture forms the major part of our Indian economy. In the current world, agriculture and irrigation are the essential and foremost sectors. It is a mandatory need to apply information and communication technology in our agricultural industries to aid agriculturalists and farmers to improve vice all stages of crop cultivation and post-harvest. It helps to enhance the country’s G.D.P. Agriculture needs to be assisted by modern automation to produce the maximum yield. The recent development in technology has a significant impact on agriculture. The evolutions of Machine Learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have supported researchers to implement this automation in agriculture to support farmers. ML allows farmers to improve yield make use of effective land utilisation, the fruitfulness of the soil, level of water, mineral insufficiencies control pest, trim development and horticulture. Application of remote sensors like temperature, humidity, soil moisture, water level sensors and pH value will provide an idea to on active farming, which will show accuracy as well as practical agriculture to deal with challenges in the field. This advancement could empower agricultural management systems to handle farm data in an orchestrated manner and increase the agribusiness by formulating effective strategies. This paper highlights contribute to an overview of the modern technologies deployed to agriculture and suggests an outline of the current and potential applications, and discusses the challenges and possible solutions and implementations. Besides, it elucidates the problems, specific potential solutions, and future directions for the agriculture sector using Machine Learning and the Internet of things

Antioxidant activity of selected lesser known edible fruits from Western Ghats of India

174-178Six species of lesser known edible fruits from Western Ghats of India were analysed for their anthocyanin, ascorbic acid, total phenolics and flavonoid levels and their antioxidant activities using the DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) method. The data obtained shown the anthocyanin, ascorbic acid, total phenolics and flavonoid levels were significantly higher in the methanol extract of Mahonia leschenaultii (Wall. ex Wight & Arn.) Takeda fruits. Gaultheria fragrantissima Wall. and Rubus ellipticus Sm. fruits were also found to have significant amount of phytochemicals analyzed. M. leschenaultii fruits had highest antioxidant activity when compared to all other fruit extracts. There was a strong correlation between the content of phytochemicals and antioxidant activities in all fruit extracts in the following decreasing order: M. leschenaultii > G. fragrantissima > R. ellipticus > Grewia tiliaefolia Vahl > Ziziphus rugosa Lam.> Flueggea leucopyrus Willd

The effect of structure of oil phase, surfactant and co-surfactant on the physicochemical and electrochemical properties of bicontinuous microemulsion

Efforts were made to prepare bicontinuous microemulsions with ten different oil phases involving aliphatic, linear, and aromatic hydrocarbons as oil phases, two co-surfactants (n-butanol and n-pentanol) and two surfactants: cationic (CTAB) and anionic (SDS). Different weight percentages were employed for the preparation of cationic and anionic surfactant based microemulsions as reported in the literature. Out of the 40 compositions (10 oil phases × 2 co-surfactants × 2 surfactants) thus selected only 28 systems showed stable bicontinuous microemulsion phase. This behavior is explained on the basis of the structures of various constituents present in the microemulsions. Viscosity variations of stable bicontinuous microemulsions are found to depend mainly on the nature of co-surfactant. Conductivity behavior on the other hand depends mainly on the weight percentage and composition of aqueous phase. The solubility of pyrene in the oil phase determines the excimer formation and fluorescence behavior in microemulsions. The electron transfer property of both the water-soluble and the oil-soluble redox systems does not depend on the oil phase and the co-surfactant. The significance and importance of characterizing well defined bicontinuous microemulsions is thus highlighted

Using Active Learning for Assisted Short Answer Grading

Efficient and comprehensive assessment of students knowledge is an imperative task in any learning process. Short answer grading is one of the most successful methods in assessing the knowledge of students. Many supervised learning and deep learning approaches have been used to automate the task of short answer grading in the past. We investigate why assistive grading with active learning would be the next logical step in this task as there is no absolute ground truth answer for any question and the task is very subjective in nature. We present a fast and easy method to harness the power of active learning and natural language processing in assisting the task of grading short answer questions. A webbased GUI is designed and implemented to incorporate an interactive short answer grading system. The experiments show that active learning saves the time and effort of graders in assessment and reaches the performance of supervised learning with less amount of graded answers for training

Synthesis of rhodamine based organic nanorods for efficient chemosensor probe for Al (III) ions and its biological applications

A novel highly selective rhodamine based organic nanorods (ONRs) was successfully designed and synthesised, which showed both absorption and fluorescence turn-on responses for Al3+ ions in aqueous solution. The ONRs possess strong fluorescence emission in aqueous solution. These spectral changes are sufficient to detection of Al3+ ions in the visible region of the spectrum and thus support naked eye detection. The aforesaid studies reveal that ONRs−Al3+ complex is highly selective and fully reversible in presence of sulphide anions. This study raises the new possibility of a highly selective and sensitive ONRs having multifunctional detection, including cation and anions, using a successive fluorescence response strategy in biological systems. Besides, the fluorescence microscopic studies confirmed that the fluorescent probe ONRs could be used as an imaging probe for detection of uptake of Al3+ ions in HeLa cells