\u3cem\u3eTrifolium occidentale\u3c/em\u3e: A Valuable Genetic Resource for White Clover Improvement

Trifolium occidentale Coombe is a stoloniferous, diploid (2n=2x=16) perennial clover indigenous to Portugal, Spain, France, and the British Isles. It grows in relatively dry coastal habitats, in sand dunes and on shallow pocket of soil (Coombe 1961; Coombe and Morisset 1967). As the species grows naturally in saline, dry habitats, it is potentially a source of drought tolerance genes that could be used for the improvement of white clover (Trifolium repens L.) cultivars. Although T. occidentale is reported to be one of the progenitors of white clover (Williams et al. 2012), the 2x forms of T. occidentale cross with difficulty with white clover, resulting in near-sterile triploid hybrids. The two species were first crossed by Chou and Gibson (1968) and subsequently by Gibson and Beinhart (1969), and Chen and Gibson (1974). The relative success of producing F1 hybrids was increased by use of colchicine doubled (4x) T. occidentale. Based on these reports, our objectives were: (1) to artificially double the chromosomes of T. occidentale using colchicine; (2) to use tetraploid (4x) T. occidentale as the pollen parent in crosses with white clover to produce large numbers of F1 hybrids; (3) to evaluate hybrids both cytologically and morphologically; and (4) to develop ad-vanced backcross and intercross progeny for future breeding and selection using white clover as the recurrent parent

Cytological and Agronomic Evaluation of Interspecific Hybrids Between \u3cem\u3eTrifolium repens\u3c/em\u3e L and \u3cem\u3eT. Occidentale\u3cem\u3e coombe

Trifolium occidentale is a diploid wild relative of T. repens with adaptation to dry, saline coastal habitats. Transfer of drought and salt-tolerant adaptive traits from this potential source of germplasm to T. repens could be valuable if interspecific hybridization can be achieved efficiently. To achieve hybridisation, 4x plants of T. occidentale were generated through colchicine chromosome doubling. Interspecific 4x F1 plants were achieved without embryo rescue. F2 populations and backcross (BC) hybrids to white clover were also efficiently achieved. Although male and female fertility in primary F1 and F2 hybrids were lower than in white clover, they were adequate to produce large amounts of seed from small numbers of inflorescences. Thus, early generation pre-breeding interspecific hybrid populations can be readily developed, opening the way for transfer of traits from T. occidentale to white clover. For effective introgression (backcross) breeding, it is also essential that interspecific chromosome pairing and recombination occur. In this study, it was apparent that chromosome pairing was occurring not only between T. occidentale and T. repens subgenomes, but also between the ancestral subgenomes of T. repens. Thus, interspecific hybridization has the potential for major genome recombination and opens the way for introgression of traits from T. occidentale into white clover. Eighty hybrid families, comprising backcross one (BC1), backcross two (BC2) and their inter-crosses, were evaluated in the field and compared with eight commercial T. repens cultivars and nine T. repens x T. uniflorum backcrosses under three natural summer droughts. Some hybrid families performed as well as, or better than, elite cultivars and had superior recovery after drought periods. Selected plants were inter-crossed to further reshuffle the inter-specific chromosomes for introgression

Interspecific Hybridisation between \u3cem\u3eTrifolium repens\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eT. occidentale\u3c/em\u3e for the Improvement of Drought Tolerance in White Clover

Trifolium repens (white clover) is one of the most important forage legumes in temperate region of the world. Phylogenetically it is an allotetraploid between T. pallescens and T. occidentale (Williams et al., 2012). Stands of white clover, although a perennial, often decline significantly by drought stress (Van Den Bosch et al., 1993). T. occidentale is a diploid (2n=2x=16) stoloniferous perennial clover that grows naturally in saline, dry habitats and as such may be a useful source of genes to improve the drought tolerance of white clover cultivars (Hussain and Williams, 2013). Although white clover has been successfully hybridised with various annual and perennial Trifolium species (Williams, 1987), the resulting F1 hybrids have not been effectively utilised as useful genetic material for the improvement of white clover cultivars. The objective of our current research was to evaluate F1 and BC1 hybrids between T. repen and T. occidentale for drought tolerance

Comparing Effect of Double Dose of Hepatitis B Vaccine Verses Conventional Dose in Patients with Chronic Liver Disease

Objective: To compare the effectiveness of double dose hepatitis B vaccine in patients with chronic liver disease versus conventional-doseStudy design: Randomized control trialPlace and Duration:  Six months after the approval of synopsis i.e 15th March 2017 to 14th September 2017, Department of General Medicine, FFH, RawalpindiMethodology: A total of one hundred and sixteen (n=116) diagnosed cases of chronic liver disease of either gender between age 30 to 70 years were enrolled and were divided into two groups one received a double dose (2 ml, 40 µg) and the other received a conventional dose (1 ml, 20 µg). Quantitative anti-HBs was measured at three months in both groups.   Mean with standard deviation calculated for quantitative variables like age, anti-HBs level one month after 3rd dose and frequency and percentages in case of categorical variables like gender and effectiveness. Chi-square test was used to determine the significant difference in both groups regarding the effectiveness of vaccination. A p-value ≤0.05 was taken significantly.Results: In patients who received double dose seroprotection (anit HBs >10 IU/ml) was achieved in 93.1% (n=54/58) patients, while the percentage was 77.6% (n=45/58) in patients who received a conventional dose (P<0.05).Conclusions: Seroprotection (anit HBs >10 IU/ml) at three months was significantly better in patients who received the double dose of vaccine. Vaccine effectiveness was significantly better in younger age group

CNN Transfer Learning for Automatic Fruit Recognition for Future Class of Fruit

Deep fruit recognition model learned on big dataset outperform fruit recognition task on difficult unconstrained fruit dataset. But in practice, we are often lack of resources to learn such a complex model, or we only have very limited training samples for a specific fruit recognition task. In this study we address the problem of adding new classes to an existing deep convolutional neural network framework. We extended our prior work for automatic fruit recognition by applying transfer learning techniques to adding new classes to existing model which was trained for 15 different kind of fruits. Pre-trained model was previously trained on a large-scale dataset of 44406 images. To add new class of fruit in our pre-trained model, we need to train a new classifier which will be trained for scratch, on the top of pre-trained model so, that we can re- purpose the feature learned previously for the dataset. Transfer learning using our pre-trained model has been demonstrated to give the best classification accuracy of 95.00%. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CNN framework is superior to the previous state-of-the- art networks

Absolute Lymphocyte Count and its Correlation with Serum Ferritin Level: An early indicator of disease severity in COVID-19

Introduction: The massive number of cases with SARS-Cov-2 has put a tremendous pressure on healthcare systems all over the world. Most of the countries have declared health emergency. In these highly challenging times and also to reduce the risk of morbidity early warning signs may be helpful.6 Objective: To correlate lymphocyte count with serum ferritin levels in patients with COVID-19 admitted in the intensive care unit of a tertiary care hospital. Material and Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out at Fauji Foundation Hospital Rawalpindi from July 2020-December 2020. A positive COVID-19 patient was the one who had a positive real time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for SARS-CoV-2 by sampling through nasopharyngeal swabs. 3 ml of blood is taken for Blood CP in ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid containing vacutainers and was run on Sysmex-XN series. For serum ferritin 4 ml clotted blood was collected in plain test tube. Serum ferritin was performed on AXSYM system by immunoassay using AXSYM Ferritin reagent kit pack. Covid -19 disease severity classification proposed by WHO was used to categorise the patients. (WHO COVID 19 interim guidelines). 11 Results: A total of 91 patients diagnosed with covid-19 by RT-PCR testing admitted in intensive care units (severe and critical disease) were included in the study. Out of these 91 patients ;41 were males and 50 patients were females. Mean age of the patients was 61+/- 9 years. The age range was (28-75) years. The median nadir lymphocyte count was 0.2 X 10 9/L. Mean lymphocyte count was 1.1 +/- 0.2 SD. Mean Ferritin value was 1148.5 +/- 60 SD. The Pearson correlation coefficient showed an r value of -0.60 which shows a moderate negative correlation. Conclusion: There is a significant negative correlation between lymphocyte count and serum ferritin level

Simulation of optimized bolt tightening strategies for gasketed flanged pipe joints

This paper presents results of detailed non-linear finite element analysis (FEA) of gasketed bolted flange pipe joints (GBFJ) of different sizes (1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 20 inch) of 900# pressure class for achieving proper preload close to the target stress values with and without considering yielding at bolt and flange and gasket crushing recommended by ASME and industrial guidelines for optimized performance using customized optimization algorithm. In addition, two strategies TCM (torque control method) and SCM (stretch control method) are used which is a normal practice in the industry

Heterosis and inbreeding depression for yield and oil traits of sunflower genotypes under water stress conditions

The mean squares from analysis indicated significant differences was observed between treatments, inbred parents, F1 hybrids and F2 progenies for agronomic, oil and protein traits. The noteworthy variances between parents vs. hybrids indicated the importance of heterosis breeding. heterotic effects were found as potential hybrids for earliness, seed yield, oil and protein content in both the environments. The hybrids such as Thatta × UC-666, Mehran × Peshawar-93 and HO.1 × B-2 which have articulated high hybrid vigor in F1s for majority of the traits in normal and adverse conditions may be recommended for further commercial exploitation. The F2 progenies manifested high inbreeding depression for phenological traits and plant height signified that earlier maturing and dwarf plants resistant to lodging can achieved from filial generations

Evaluation of Deep Learning and Conventional Approaches for Image Recaptured Detection in Multimedia Forensics

Image recaptured from a high-resolution LED screen or a good quality printer is difficult to distinguish from its original counterpart. The forensic community paid less attention to this type of forgery than to other image alterations such as splicing, copy-move, removal, or image retouching. It is significant to develop secure and automatic techniques to distinguish real and recaptured images without prior knowledge. Image manipulation traces can be hidden using recaptured images. For this reason, being able to detect recapture images becomes a hot research topic for a forensic analyst. The attacker can recapture the manipulated images to fool image forensic system. As far as we know, there is no prior research that has examined the pros and cons of up-to-date image recaptured techniques. The main objective of this survey was to succinctly review the recent outcomes in the field of image recaptured detection and investigated the limitations in existing approaches and datasets. The outcome of this study provides several promising directions for further significant research on image recaptured detection. Finally, some of the challenges in the existing datasets and numerous promising directions on recaptured image detection are proposed to demonstrate how these difficulties might be carried into promising directions for future research. We also discussed the existing image recaptured datasets, their limitations, and dataset collection challenges.publishedVersio