Technical efficiency and production potential of selected cereal crops in Senegal

This study focused on the production outcomes for five crops cultivated in Senegal: upland rice, lowland rice, groundnut, maize, and pearl millet. Technical efficiency (TE) of the production of each crop was estimated using data envelopment analysis, and the determinants of TEs were assessed using generalised linear regression analyses. Data were collected in face-to-face interviews with 66 farmers in the Kaolack region of Central Senegal during November 2011–February 2012. Average TEs for upland rice, lowland rice, groundnut, maize, and pearl millet were estimated as 0.76, 0.88, 0.89, 0.94, and 0.90, respectively. The identified factors that had a positive impact on TE were years of cultivation experience, amount of nitrogen fertiliser applied, and participation in a farmers’ association. Weeding hours, seeding rate, size of the cultivated area, and delays in sowing time were negatively associated with TE. The factors that significantly affected TE differed among the crops. Optimising these factors could enable potential yield increase of upland rice, lowland rice, groundnut, maize, and pearl millet by 24, 12, 11, 6, and 10 %, respectively

Galectin-3 and N-acetylglucosamine promote myogenesis and improve skeletal muscle function in the mdx model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy

The muscle membrane, sarcolemma, must be firmly attached to the basal lamina. The failure of proper attachment results in muscle injury, which is the underlying cause of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), where mutations in the dystrophin gene disrupts the firm adhesion. In DMD patients, even moderate contraction causes damage, leading to progressive muscle degeneration. The damaged muscles are repaired through myogenesis. Consequently, myogenesis is highly active in DMD patients, and the repeated activation of myogenesis leads to the exhaustion of the myogenic stem cells. Therefore, approaches to reducing the risk of the exhaustion are to develop a treatment that strengthens the interaction between the sarcolemma and the basal lamina, and increases the efficiency of myogenesis. Galectin-3 is an oligosaccharide-binding protein and known to be involved in cell–cell interactions and cell–matrix interactions. Galectin-3 is expressed in myoblasts and skeletal muscle while its function in muscle remains elusive. In this study, we found evidence that galectin-3 and the monosaccharide N-acetylglucosamine, which increases the ligands (oligosaccharides) of galectin-3, promotes myogenesis in vitro. Moreover, in the mdx mouse model of DMD, treatment with N-acetylglucosamine increased the muscle force production. Our results demonstrate that treatment with N-acetylglucosamine can mitigate the burden of DMD

Field evolution of magnetic phases and spin dynamics in the honeycomb lattice magnet Na2_2Co2_2TeO6_6: 23^{23}Na NMR study

We report on the results of $^{23}$Na NMR in the honeycomb lattice magnet Na$_2$Co$_2$TeO$_6$ which has been nominated as a Kitaev material. Measurements of magnetic shift and width of the NMR line as functions of temperature and magnetic field show that a spin-disordered phase does not appear up to a field of 9 T. In the antiferromagnetic phase just below the N\'{e}el temperature $T_N$, we find a temperature region extending down to $\sim T_N/2$ where the nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate $1/T_1$ remains enhanced and is further increased by a magnetic field. This region crosses over to a low temperature region characterized by a thermally-activated $1/T_1$ with a field-robust energy gap. These observations suggest incoherent spin excitations with a large spectral weight at low energies in the intermediate temperature region that transform to a gapped spin-wave mode at low temperatures. The drastic change of low-energy spin dynamics is likely caused by strong damping of spin waves activated only in the intermediate temperature region, which may be realized for triple-$\mathbf{q}$ magnetic order possessing partially-disordered moments as scattering centers of spin waves. In the paramagnetic phase near $T_N$, dramatic field suppression of $1/T_1$ is observed. From analysis of the temperature dependence of $1/T_1$ based on the renormalized-classical description of a two-dimensional quantum antiferromagnet, we find the field-dependent spin stiffness constant that scales with $T_N$ as a function of magnetic field. This implies field suppression of the energy scale characterizing both two-dimensional spin correlations and three-dimensional long-range order, being associated with an increasing effect of frustration in magnetic fields.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure