Potential for yield and soil fertility improvement with integration of organics in nutrient management for finger millet under rainfed Alfisols of Southern India

Finger millet (Eluesine coracana L.) is gaining importance as a food crop with the increasing emphasis on nutritional aspects and drought resilience. However, the average productivity of the crop has stagnated at around 2,000 kg ha−1 in India. Recently released nutrient responsive high yielding varieties are reported to respond better to application of fertilizers/manures. Further, substitution of chemical fertilizers with organic manures to maintain sustainable yields and improve soil health is gaining attention in recent years. Therefore, identifying the appropriate rate and source of nutrition is important to enhance the productivity of finger millet while improving the soil health. A field experiment was conducted during two rainy seasons (July–November, 2018 and 2019) to study the response of finger millet varieties to chemical fertilizers and farmyard manure (FYM) on growth, yields, N use efficiency, N uptake and on soil properties. Two varieties MR-1 and MR-6 were tested with four nutrient management practices viz., unamended control, 100% recommended dose of fertilizers (RDF; 40–20-20 kg NPK ha−1), 50% RDF + 50% recommended dose of nitrogen (RDN) as FYM and 100% RDN as FYM. Among the varieties, MR-6 outperformed MR-1 in terms of growth, yield, N use efficiency and N uptake. The yield enhancement was up to 22.6% in MR-6 compared to MR-1 across the nutrient management practices. Substituting FYM completely or half of the fertilizer dose increased the growth and yield of finger millet compared to application of chemical fertilizers alone. Similarly, the average biomass yield, ears m−2, grain yield, total N uptake and N use efficiency in response to nutrient management practices followed the order of 100% RDN as FYM > 50% RDF + 50% RDN as FYM > 100% RDF. The soil organic carbon, available N, P, K, and S improved by 25.0, 12.9, 5.7, 6.1, and 22.6%, respectively in the plots under higher rate of FYM application (8 Mg ha−1) compared to plots under chemical fertilizers alone. We conclude that substituting chemical fertilizers either completely or by up to 50% with organic manures supplies adequate amounts of nutrients, improves the yield of finger millet, economic returns, and soil properties

Curcumin-Loaded Apotransferrin Nanoparticles Provide Efficient Cellular Uptake and Effectively Inhibit HIV-1 Replication In Vitro

Curcumin (diferuloylmethane) shows significant activity across a wide spectrum of conditions, but its usefulness is rather limited because of its low bioavailability. Use of nanoparticle formulations to enhance curcumin bioavailability is an emerging area of research.In the present study, curcumin-loaded apotransferrin nanoparticles (nano-curcumin) prepared by sol-oil chemistry and were characterized by electron and atomic force microscopy. Confocal studies and fluorimetric analysis revealed that these particles enter T cells through transferrin-mediated endocytosis. Nano-curcumin releases significant quantities of drug gradually over a fairly long period, ∼50% of curcumin still remaining at 6 h of time. In contrast, intracellular soluble curcumin (sol-curcumin) reaches a maximum at 2 h followed by its complete elimination by 4 h. While sol-curcumin (GI(50) = 15.6 µM) is twice more toxic than nano-curcumin (GI(50) = 32.5 µM), nano-curcumin (IC(50)<1.75 µM) shows a higher anti-HIV activity compared to sol-curcumin (IC(50) = 5.1 µM). Studies in vitro showed that nano-curcumin prominently inhibited the HIV-1 induced expression of Topo II α, IL-1β and COX-2, an effect not seen with sol-curcumin. Nano-curcumin did not affect the expression of Topoisomerase II β and TNF α. This point out that nano-curcumin affects the HIV-1 induced inflammatory responses through pathways downstream or independent of TNF α. Furthermore, nano-curcumin completely blocks the synthesis of viral cDNA in the gag region suggesting that the nano-curcumin mediated inhibition of HIV-1 replication is targeted to viral cDNA synthesis.Curcumin-loaded apotransferrin nanoparticles are highly efficacious inhibitors of HIV-1 replication in vitro and promise a high potential for clinical usefulness

An Efficient Targeted Drug Delivery through Apotransferrin Loaded Nanoparticles

BACKGROUND: Cancerous state is a highly stimulated environment of metabolically active cells. The cells under these conditions over express selective receptors for assimilation of factors essential for growth and transformation. Such receptors would serve as potential targets for the specific ligand mediated transport of pharmaceutically active molecules. The present study demonstrates the specificity and efficacy of protein nanoparticle of apotransferrin for targeted delivery of doxorubicin. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Apotransferrin nanoparticles were developed by sol-oil chemistry. A comparative analysis of efficiency of drug delivery in conjugated and non-conjugated forms of doxorubicin to apotransferrin nanoparticle is presented. The spherical shaped apotransferrin nanoparticles (nano) have diameters of 25-50 etam, which increase to 60-80 etam upon direct loading of drug (direct-nano), and showed further increase in dimension (75-95 etam) in conjugated nanoparticles (conj-nano). The competitive experiments with the transferrin receptor specific antibody showed the entry of both conj-nano and direct-nano into the cells through transferrin receptor mediated endocytosis. Results of various studies conducted clearly establish the superiority of the direct-nano over conj-nano viz. (a) localization studies showed complete release of drug very early, even as early as 30 min after treatment, with the drug localizing in the target organelle (nucleus) (b) pharmacokinetic studies showed enhanced drug concentrations, in circulation with sustainable half-life (c) the studies also demonstrated efficient drug delivery, and an enhanced inhibition of proliferation in cancer cells. Tissue distribution analysis showed intravenous administration of direct nano lead to higher drug localization in liver, and blood as compared to relatively lesser localization in heart, kidney and spleen. Experiments using rat cancer model confirmed the efficacy of the formulation in regression of hepatocellular carcinoma with negligible toxicity to kidney and liver. CONCLUSIONS: The present study thus demonstrates that the direct-nano is highly efficacious in delivery of drug in a target specific manner with lower toxicity to heart, liver and kidney

Automation assisted anaerobic phenotyping for metabolic engineering

Abstract Background Microorganisms can be metabolically engineered to produce a wide range of commercially important chemicals. Advancements in computational strategies for strain design and synthetic biological techniques to construct the designed strains have facilitated the generation of large libraries of potential candidates for chemical production. Consequently, there is a need for high-throughput laboratory scale techniques to characterize and screen these candidates to select strains for further investigation in large scale fermentation processes. Several small-scale fermentation techniques, in conjunction with laboratory automation have enhanced the throughput of enzyme and strain phenotyping experiments. However, such high throughput experimentation typically entails large operational costs and generate massive amounts of laboratory plastic waste. Results In this work, we develop an eco-friendly automation workflow that effectively calibrates and decontaminates fixed-tip liquid handling systems to reduce tip waste. We also investigate inexpensive methods to establish anaerobic conditions in microplates for high-throughput anaerobic phenotyping. To validate our phenotyping platform, we perform two case studies—an anaerobic enzyme screen, and a microbial phenotypic screen. We used our automation platform to investigate conditions under which several strains of E. coli exhibit the same phenotypes in 0.5 L bioreactors and in our scaled-down fermentation platform. We also propose the use of dimensionality reduction through t-distributed stochastic neighbours embedding (t-SNE) in conjunction with our phenotyping platform to effectively cluster similarly performing strains at the bioreactor scale. Conclusions Fixed-tip liquid handling systems can significantly reduce the amount of plastic waste generated in biological laboratories and our decontamination and calibration protocols could facilitate the widespread adoption of such systems. Further, the use of t-SNE in conjunction with our automation platform could serve as an effective scale-down model for bioreactor fermentations. Finally, by integrating an in-house data-analysis pipeline, we were able to accelerate the ‘test’ phase of the design-build-test-learn cycle of metabolic engineering

Detecting the invasive fall armyworm pest incidence in farm fields of southern India using Sentinel-2A satellite data

Damage of fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith) on sorghum from the farmers’ fields of southern India was assessed using space-borne data. Comparison of the Sentinel-2A satellite data of pre and post infestation periods revealed reduction in Leaf Area Index (LAI) in the infested fields. Groundtruth data confirmed that FAW infestation reduced LAI by 49.7%, biomass by 32.5% and grain yield by 51.8%. Infestation at Panicle Initiation (PI) stage caused maximum yield loss compared to flag leaf visible and boot stages. The interaction results showed FAW infestation at different crop stages had significant effect on biomass and yield, but not on LAI. Regression analysis with spectral vegetation indices revealed LAI (R2: 0.82) and NDVI (R2: 0.80) were significantly superior in identifying FAW infestation from the satellite data. This study demonstrates feasibility of site specific pest management and prevents further spread of the invasive FAW