Neglected Disease – African Sleeping Sickness: Recent Synthetic and Modeling Advances

Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) also called sleeping sickness is caused by subspecies of the parasitic hemoflagellate Trypanosoma brucei that mostly occurs in sub-Saharan Africa. The current chemotherapy of the human trypanosomiases relies on only six drugs, five of which have been developed more than 30 years ago, have undesirable toxic side effects and most of them show drug-resistance. Though development of new anti-trypanosomal drugs seems to be a priority area research in this area has lagged far behind. The given review mainly focus upon the recent synthetic and computer based approaches made by various research groups for the development of newer anti-trypanosomal analogues which may have improved efficacy and oral bioavailability than the present ones. The given paper also attempts to investigate the relationship between the various physiochemical parameters and anti-trypanosomal activity that may be helpful in development of potent anti-trypanosomal agents against sleeping sickness

Nutrient Composition and Flux in a Semi-Arid Grazing Land of Southern India

The distribution and cycling of minerals in various compartments of the ecosystem form one of the important aspects of ecosystem study. The uptake of nutrients through the root system and their release via litter and root decomposition depends upon a number of factors including the species, growth and stage of maturity. The semi-arid grazing land ecosystem at Madurai has developed under short evolutionary grazing histories and low moisture regimes, in which grazing pressure has had dramatic effects on the plant community and biomass (Karunaichamy 1992). The biological cycle includes circulation of nutrients between soil and biotic communities by the phenomena of uptake, retention and loss (Duvigneaud and Denacyer 1970). No systematic studies are available on the nutrient cycling of semiarid grazing land of southern India. Therefore, the present study aims to study the distribution of Ca, Mg and Na in vegetation and to estimate the annual nutrient budget in grazed and ungrazed lands dominated by Chrysopogon fulvus (Spreng) Chiov

Nutrient Dynamics and Inventory in Tropical Grassland Ecosystem in Southern India

The present study was to ascertain the distribution of calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg) and sodium (Na) in the different plant components and in the soil top 30 cm at Kalikesam in Western Ghats region of southern India. Magnesium concentration increased in the order: dead shoots \u3e belowground \u3e litter \u3e aboveground live. Sodium concentration in live shoots was maximum in February (0.51%) and minimum in August (0.05%). Annually 8.94 g/m2 Ca, 2.41g/ m2 Mg and 2.30g/ m2 Na was taken up by plants. The distribution of the three nutrients in plant/soil system indicated that the major portion of the nutrients in the system was retained in the soil, while small fraction of it stayed in plant components. Less than 0.4% of Mg entered the vegetation. Ca and Na entered 16% and 6% respectively

Hybrid Method For Image Watermarking Using 2 Level LWT-Walsh Transform-SVD in YCbCr Color Space

Due to tremendous development in technology in recent time and availability of abundant tool, it is very easy for an unauthorized person to imitate crucial information which is present on internet. Therefore to shield valuable information present on internet there are various advanced techniques for example watermarking technique, cryptography technique, steganography and many more. With pace of time analog techniques replaced by digital techniques due to various advantages and in current scenario every country moving towards digitalization. Digital watermarking is a technique through which digital information is embedded into an image and secret digital data can be extracted at receiver side with authentication otherwise impossible to fetch. Spatial domain and frequency are the two techniques through which secret digital information can be embedded. In this paper two level lifting wavelet transform (LWT), Walsh Hadamard transform and singular value decomposition (SVD) technique has been proposed in YCbCr color space. First of all cover image and watermark image converted into YCbCr color space from RGB color space after that one of channel is selected for embedded purpose. Now perform first level LWT on the Y channel of cover and watermark image so that image split into four groups. Now apply second level LWT on any one of four bands. Further Walsh hadamard transform technique applied with singular value decomposition (SVD) technique to get enhanced output. In base paper DWT-DFT-SVD used but in this paper DWT-DFT replaced by LWT-WHT due to various advantages. One disadvantage of DWT is that the use of larger DWT basis functions or wavelet filters produces blurring and also ringing noise near edges in images. This disadvantage of DWT is overcome in LWT. Other advantages of LWT are that it significantly reduces the computation time and speed up the computation process. This method provides better results in terms of enhanced PSNR values and is able to withstand a variety of image processing attacks and besides this processing time also reduced

Composition, productivity and impact of grazing on the biodiversity of a grazing land in Almora District

Biodiversity of Almora district is heavily affected in the areas with heavy grazing pressure, although moderate grazing enhanced the biodiversity of the area. In the present study site a total of 45 herbaceous species were present and therophytes were dominant among them. Live shoot biomass of plants varied from 175.0±3.5 to 1862.0±5.75 kg/ha and 87.0±3.25 to 1303.0±7.50 kg/ha in ungrazed and grazed plots respectively. Aboveground primary productivity was significantly higher on control plot (3082.2 kg/ha) over grazed plot (2644.0 kg/ha). The average bite frequency per hour was recorded maximum for goats (1106.5 bite/hr) and least for buffalos (920 bites/hr). The monthly dry matter consumption per animal was amounted to 157.15, 154.51, 68.66 and 61.34 kg for cow, buffalo, sheep and goat respectively under nomadic open grazing. The percent herbage exploitation was observed maximum by sheep (9.82%) and minimum by buffalo (8.75%)