Efficient in vitro

Efficient plant regeneration system has been developed from the nodal segments of chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium L). Nodal segments, after being sterilized with 1.0% mercuric chloride for three minutes, were inoculated in Murashige and Skoog (MS) media with varied concentrations of indole acetic acid (IAA), benzylaminopurine (BAP) and their combinations. Different parameters including shoot initiation percentage, average number of shoots per explant, length of shoots (cm), number of leaves per shoot and number of nodes per shoot were studied during the course of study. Intermediate level (0.3 mg/l) of IAA exceeded all the other concentrations of IAA by producing 80.0 % shoot initiation, an average of 4.0 shoots per explants, 5.1 cm long shoots, 11.3 leaves and 5.6 nodes per shoot, when used alone. Similarly, intermediate level of BAP (1.0 mg/l) showed its supremacy over all the other concentrations as it produced 100% shoot initiation, 4.9 shoots per explant, 5.8 cm long shoots, 13.4 leaves and 6.3 nodes per shoot, when used alone. When the combination of different concentrations of IAA and BAP were used, significant results regarding the regeneration of chrysanthemum plantlets were also achieved. MS media supplemented with lower concentrations of IAA (0.1 and 0.2 mg/l) along with intermediate levels of BAP (1.0 and 2.0 mg/l) had a favorable effect on the regeneration of chrysanthemum plantlets using nodal segments of chrysanthemum, as compared to other concentrations and combinations. Satisfactory rooting response was obtained in half strength MS media supplemented with 0.2 mg/l indole butyric acid (IBA), followed by 0.2 mg/l naphthalene acetic acid (NAA) and IAA, respectively.Key words: Chrysanthemum, Dendranthema morifolium, growth regulators, in vitro culture, nodal segments, auxins, rooting

Study protocol for a multicentre longitudinal mixed methods study to explore the Outcomes of ChildrEn and fAmilies in the first year after paediatric Intensive Care: the OCEANIC study.

INTRODUCTION: Annually in the UK, 20 000 children become very ill or injured and need specialist care within a paediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Most children survive. However, some children and their families may experience problems after they have left the PICU including physical, functional and/or emotional problems. It is unknown which children and families experience such problems, when these occur or what causes them. The aim of this mixed-method longitudinal cohort study is to understand the physical, functional, emotional and social impact of children surviving PICU (aged: 1 month-17 years), their parents and siblings, during the first year after a PICU admission. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: A quantitative study involving 300 child survivors of PICU; 300 parents; and 150-300 siblings will collect data (using self-completion questionnaires) at baseline, PICU discharge, 1, 3, 6 and 12 months post-PICU discharge. Questionnaires will comprise validated and reliable instruments. Demographic data, PICU admission and treatment data, health-related quality of life, functional status, strengths and difficulties behaviour and post-traumatic stress symptoms will be collected from the child. Parent and sibling data will be collected on the impact of paediatric health conditions on the family's functioning capabilities, levels of anxiety and social impact of the child's PICU admission. Data will be analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Concurrently, an embedded qualitative study involving semistructured interviews with 24 enrolled families at 3 months and 9 months post-PICU discharge will be undertaken. Framework analysis will be used to analyse the qualitative data. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study has received ethical approval from the National Health Services Research Ethics Committee (Ref: 19/WM/0290) and full governance clearance. This will be the first UK study to comprehensively investigate physical, functional, emotional and social consequences of PICU survival in the first-year postdischarge.Clinical Trials Registration Number: ISRCTN28072812 [Pre-results]

Lab scale studies on water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes Marts Solms) for biotreatment of textile wastewater

Textile wastewater contains substantial pollution loads in terms of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Total Suspended Solids (TSS), Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) and heavy metals. Phytoremediation used for removing heavy metals and other pollutants by aquatic macrophytes treatment systems (AMATS) is well established environmental protective technique. A lab scale study was conducted to test the feasibility of water hyacinth for treating textile wastewater. The pH was reduced from alkaline to nearly neutral in all cases studied with the introduction of water hyacinth. The maximum reduction in the conductivity was 55.71% while the BOD and COD reduction ranged from 40 to 70%. A great deal of reduction in the total solids was noted in all the waste samples with a maximum reduction of 50.64%. Water hyacinth has tremendous potential to absorb heavy metals from the textile wastewater as it resulted in 94.78% reduction of chromium, 96.88% in zinc and 94.44 % reduction in copper. ANOVA showed a significant (p<0.05) reduction in all the pollutants with the passage of time. Thus water hyacinth can be an efficient biological agent in reducing the pollution loads in textile industry wastewater

Cytological evidences of pollen abortion in Ornithogalum caudatum Ait

Ornithogalum caudatum Ait exhibits strong physiological adaptability; however, it suffers a serious menace of pollen abortion, as almost no seed is formed in the plants. In the current study, chromosome karyotype of root-tip cells (RTC) during mitosis, and chromosome behavior of pollen mother cells (PMC) during meiosis in O. caudatum were investigated. We recorded 18 euchromosomes with variable number (28~36) of B chromosomes in the somatic cells genome. In leptonema of meiotic prophase I, the synapsis between euchromosomes was normal, but there were several darker granular nodular bodies in the cells, which could be the precursor for B chromosomes. Some of the cells were observed as duplication loop in zygotene, indicating that the PMCs had gone through a chromosome structure variation with duplication, which could reduce the fertility of pollens. Numerous chromosome bridges, fragments and lagged chromosomes were observed in meiosis anaphase I. It reflects that these cells might have undergone paracentric inversion, which is one of the important reasons of pollen abortion. In meiosis anaphase II, the sister chromatids separate unusually forming the triad, which leads to gamete sterility. These findings conclude that pollen abortion in O. caudatum mainly results from the variation in chromosome structure, which could be related to the B chromosomes in somatic cells.Key words: Chromosome structure variation, B chromosome, root-tip cells, pollen mother cells, gamete sterility

A Robust Deep Model for Classification of Peptic Ulcer and Other Digestive Tract Disorders Using Endoscopic Images

Accurate patient disease classification and detection through deep-learning (DL) models are increasingly contributing to the area of biomedical imaging. The most frequent gastrointestinal (GI) tract ailments are peptic ulcers and stomach cancer. Conventional endoscopy is a painful and hectic procedure for the patient while Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a useful technology for diagnosing GI problems and doing painless gut imaging. However, there is still a challenge to investigate thousands of images captured during the WCE procedure accurately and efficiently because existing deep models are not scored with significant accuracy on WCE image analysis. So, to prevent emergency conditions among patients, we need an efficient and accurate DL model for real-time analysis. In this study, we propose a reliable and efficient approach for classifying GI tract abnormalities using WCE images by applying a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). For this purpose, we propose a custom CNN architecture named GI Disease-Detection Network (GIDD-Net) that is designed from scratch with relatively few parameters to detect GI tract disorders more accurately and efficiently at a low computational cost. Moreover, our model successfully distinguishes GI disorders by visualizing class activation patterns in the stomach bowls as a heat map. The Kvasir-Capsule image dataset has a significant class imbalance problem, we exploited a synthetic oversampling technique BORDERLINE SMOTE (BL-SMOTE) to evenly distribute the image among the classes to prevent the problem of class imbalance. The proposed model is evaluated against various metrics and achieved the following values for evaluation metrics: 98.9%, 99.8%, 98.9%, 98.9%, 98.8%, and 0.0474 for accuracy, AUC, F1-score, precision, recall, and loss, respectively. From the simulation results, it is noted that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art models in all the evaluation metrics

Yuck, This Biscuit Looks Lumpy! Neophobic Levels and Cultural Differences Drive Children’s Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) Descriptions and Preferences for High-Fibre Biscuits

Food neophobia influences food choice in school-aged children. However, little is known about how children with different degrees of food neophobia perceive food and to what extent different sensory attributes drive their liking. This paper explores liking and sensory perception of fibre-rich biscuits in school-aged children (n = 509, age 9–12 years) with different degrees of food neophobia and from five different European countries (Finland, Italy, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom). Children tasted and rated their liking of eight commercial biscuits and performed a Check-All-That-Apply task to describe the samples and further completed a Food Neophobia Scale. Children with a higher degree of neophobia displayed a lower liking for all tasted biscuits (p < 0.001). Cross-cultural differences in liking also appeared (p < 0.001). A negative correlation was found between degree of neophobia and the number of CATA-terms used to describe the samples (r = −0.116, p = 0.009). Penalty analysis showed that degree of food neophobia also affected drivers of biscuit liking, where particularly appearance terms were drivers of disliking for neophobic children. Cross-cultural differences in drivers of liking and disliking were particularly salient for texture attributes. Further research should explore if optimizing appearance attributes could be a way to increase liking of fibre-rich foods in neophobic children

Response of Poaceous Weeds in Wheat to Post-Emergence Herbicides

Poaceous weeds are prolific and competitive in winter crops, but they are more insidious in wheat due to their similar morphology and growing requirements. Herbicides are effective and efficient tools of weed management, however, they are vulnerable to resistance, and herbicides with different modes of action might check the dominance of a particular weed flora. The current study was undertaken to see the response of three poaceous weeds viz., Phalaris minor, Avena fatua and Lolium temulentum, to herbicides Isoproturon, Topik (Clodinafop-p) and Puma Super (Fenoxaprop-p). Completely randomized design with two factor treatments (weeds, herbicides) and eight replications was employed. Data were recorded on chlorotic and necrotic effects of herbicides on weeds, and percent mortality at the time interval of 14, 21 and 28 days after the application of herbicides. Dry biomass weight of weeds was recorded at 30 days after the treatments. Results indicated that all the parameters were affected significantly over the period of time. Maximum counts of chlorotic (2.16) and necrotic (2.97) weeds were observed at the 21st day of treatment. The highest mortality (31.1 %) was recorded at 21st day after the application of herbicides. Phalaris minor was the most resistant weed to herbicides showing the lowest mortality (only 17.7 %) compared to other two weeds. Maximum dry weight of weeds was recorded in control while a minimum of 0.456 g dry weight was observed where Topik (Clodinafop-p) was applied. For the effective control of P. minor, A. fatua and L. temulentum weeds in wheat crop, Topik (15 WP) @ 0.37 kg a.i. ha-1 was proved to be the most suitable herbicide applied at 3-4 foliar stage

Relative validity of a food and beverage preference questionnaire to characterize taste phenotypes in children adolescents and adults

To assess the relative validity of our food and beverage preference questionnaire we investigated the association between sweet and fatty taste preference scores (assessed using a food and beverage preference questionnaire) and sweet and fatty food propensity scores (derived from a food frequency questionnaire). In I.Family, a large European multi-country cohort study, 12, 207 participants from Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Sweden, including 5291 adults, 3082 adolescents, and 3834 children, completed a food and beverage preference questionnaire with 63 items. Cumulative preference scores for sweet and fatty taste were calculated from the single item ranking ranging from 1 to 5. The relative consumption frequency of foods classified as sweet and fatty was used to calculate the corresponding consumption propensities, a continuous variable ranging from 0 to 100. We conducted regression analyses to investigate the association between sweet and fatty taste preference scores and sweet and fatty food propensity scores, respectively, separately for adults, adolescents =12 years, and for children <12 years. The overall sweet taste preference score was positively associated with the sweet food consumption propensity score (ß = 2.4, 95% CI: 2.1;2.7) and the fatty taste preference score was positively associated with the fatty food consumption propensity score (ß = 2.0, 95% CI: 1.8;2.2). After stratification for age (children <12 years, adolescents =12 years, and adults), the effect remained significant in all age groups and was strongest in adolescents and adults. We conclude that our food and beverage preference questionnaire is a useful instrument for epidemiological studies on sensory perception and health outcomes and for the characterization of sensory taste phenotypes

Economical, environmental friendly synthesis, characterization for the production of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) nanoparticles with enhanced CO2 adsorption

Zeolitic imidazole framework 8 (ZIF-8) nanoparticles were successfully synthesized in an aqueous solution at the ambient condition with a relatively low molar ratio of zinc salt and an organic ligand, Zn+2/Hmim (1: 8). ZIF-8 has remarkable thermal and chemical stability, tunable microporous structure, and a great potential for absorption, adsorption, and separation. Various physicochemical characterization techniques like X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), attenuated total reflected infrared spectroscopy (ATR-IR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and surface area with pore textural properties by micromeritics gas adsorption equipment were performed to investigate the effect of base type additive triethylamine (TEA) on the morphology, crystallinity, yield, particle and crystal size, thermal stability and microporosity of ZIF-8 nanoparticles. The total quantity of basic sites and carbon dioxide (CO2) desorption aptitude was also calculated using CO2 temperature-programmed desorption (CO2-TPD) system. The pure ZIF-8 nanoparticles of 177 nm were formed at TEA/total mole ratio of 0.002. Furthermore, the size of ZIF-8 nanoparticles was decreased to 77 nm with increasing TEA/total mole ratio up to 0.004. The structures, particle sizes and textural properties of ammonia modified ZIF-8 particle can easily be tailored by the amount of aqueous ammonium hydroxide solution. The smallest ZIF-8 nanoparticles obtained were 75 nm after ammonia modification which shows excellent thermal stability and improved microporosity. The ZIF-8 basicity and uptakes of CO2 improved with TEA and ammonia modification which followed the order: A25ml–Z4 > Z4 > Z3 > Z5 > Z2 > A50ml–Z4. The proposed economical and efficient synthesis method has great potential for large-scale production of ZIF-8