A case report on pregnancy with uncorrected tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary hypertension managed uneventfully at a tertiary health care in India

Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF) is the most frequent kind of cyanotic congenital heart disease beyond the age of one year, accounting for around 10% of all congenital heart disease cases. Natural (non-corrective) survival into the fourth decade is quite unusual (3 %). There are various physiological and heamodynamic changes that occur in pregnancy, which makes causes complications in pregnancy and delivery in already compromised women, including women with uncorrected ToF. ToF is still a major source of maternal morbidity (62%) and even fatality (10%) in ToF patients, and it has a considerable impact on foetal outcome. Discussed below a case of pregnancy in a 26-year-old woman with uncorrected ToF, was diagnosed to have pulmonary hypertension, was admitted for safe confinement. She was taken up for elective LSCS with due risk and was later shifted to ICU for further management

Effect of elective cerclage versus rescue cerclage in pregnancy and its pregnancy outcome

Prolongation of the pregnancy in cases of incompetence of cervix or short cervix can be done by prompt diagnosis at the correct time with a decision on encirclage taken at the right time. An observational retrospective study conducted over a period of 6 months in a tertiary care centre enrolling 14 pregnant women who had various risk factors like multiple gestation, short cervix, cervical incompetence, bad obstetric history, anomalous uterus, in vitro fertilization technique, history of primary infertility ,recurrent abortions and mid-trimester losses or preterm delivery, and the results were interpreted with various tables and charts showing the benefits of elective versus emergency encirclage. Through the study, it was found that there wasn't any significant difference in the incidence of a patient who underwent cervical encirclage whether the patient had a prior antenatal registration or not. 71% of the patients enrolled for encirclage were primigravida and the most common gestation age was between 12-24 weeks. The most common age group was 21-30 years of age. Cervical incompetence and short cervix were the most important risk factor needed for cervical cerclage. Most of the patients delivered at around 34-37 weeks of gestation. 21.4% patient underwent rescue cerclage and delivered between 34-37 weeks of gestation. 57.14% underwent elective cerclage and delivered near term. Elective cerclage has a better outcome of pregnancy to reach near term than rescue cerclage.

Serum lactate dehydrogenase as a biochemical marker for maternal outcome in pre-eclampsia

Background: LDH is a cytoplasmic intracellular enzyme present in the heart, kidney, muscle, leukocytes and erythrocytes, of all major organ systems. The presence of LDH in extracellular space points towards cellular damage, endothelial dysfunction. Preeclampsia is a multisystem disorder during pregnancy causing cellular damage or death. Hence, serum LDH levels can be helpful in determining the extent of cell damage and the seriousness of this disease. The present study aimed to correlate the maternal serum lactate dehydrogenase levels with maternal and perinatal outcomes in women with pre-eclampsia.Methods: It was a prospective observational study. A total of 120 antenatal patients diagnosed with hypertensive disorder of pregnancy were included in this study. Serum LDH levels were estimated by enzymatic method on the autoanalyzer. Patients were grouped into 3 categories according to serum LDH levels: a) 800 IU/l. Clinical manifestation of development of complications of hypertensive disease and its relation with serum LDH in respective patients were analyzed.Results: An LDH level of more than 800 IU/l was seen in 19.2% while between 600 to 800 IU/l was seen in 16.7% cases. A significant association was observed between incidence of maternal complications with high LDH levels (p<0.01). High LDH levels were observed to be associated with development of ante-partum haemorrhage, eclampsia and requirement of ICU admission. No significant association was found between different categories of LDH and deep tendon reflexes, levels of proteinuria at the time of admission in these preeclamptic women.Conclusions: Close monitoring and early intervention of the preeclampsia patients with elevated serum LDH levels can help avoid adverse effects of the disease and thereby help improve maternal and perinatal outcomes in pregnant women with preeclampsia

Quantification of the plant terpenome: predicted versus actual emission potentials

Plant essential oils are complex mixtures of volatile organic compounds, which play indispensable roles in communication, defense, and adaptive evolution. The complete chemical library produced by a plant is referred to as its terpenome. The potential biological information stored in essential oil composition data can provide an insight into the silent language of plants, as well as roles of terpene emissions in direct and indirect defense, and for playing a crucial role in adaptive evolution. In this work, we have attempted to measure the plant terpenome from a global perspective. One way of measuring the terpenome is to observe and record actual emissions in natural conditions, and this has been in practice for over a century through variously evolving methods of comprehensive GC–MS and HPLC. An alternative method is a knowledge-based prediction of the terpenome, and this method has gained popularity in recent years, with the advent of large-scale genome sequencing technologies. Over the past decade, our laboratory has been involved in compilation and investigation of the plant terpenome using both these methods and this has offered us the opportunity to compare and contrast data from actual and potential emissions, in order to better understand the terpenome and its roles in primary, secondary and adaptive metabolism. We have used emission data in conjunction with genomic data in order to understand how a plant creates the so-called final terpenome, specific to itself, and whether or not plants tap the complete potential for terpene biosynthesis at their disposal according to their genomes. For measuring actual emissions, we have used EssOilDB (the ESSential OIL DataBase), the largest contextual web resource for phytochemicals and for measuring the total plant potential for emissions, we have used TERZYME, an automated algorithm for identification and analysis of genes and proteins involved in isoprenoid biosynthesis. (PDF) Quantification of the plant terpenome: predicted versus actual emission potentials. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310763919_Quantification_of_the_plant_terpenome_predicted_versus_actual_emission_potentials [accessed Jul 10 2018]

Cavity architecture based modulation of ligand binding tunnels in plant START domains

The Steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (StAR)-related lipid transfer (START) domain represents an evolutionarily conserved superfamily of lipid transfer proteins widely distributed across the tree of life. Despite significant expansion in plants, knowledge about this domain remains inadequate in plants. In this work, we explore the role of cavity architectural modulations in START protein evolution and functional diversity. We use deep-learning approaches to generate plant START domain models, followed by surface accessibility studies and a comprehensive structural investigation of the rice START family. We validate 28 rice START domain models, delineate binding cavities, measure pocket volumes, and compare these with mammalian counterparts to understand evolution of binding preferences. Overall, plant START domains retain the ancestral α/β helix-grip signature, but we find subtle variation in cavity architectures, resulting in significantly smaller ligand-binding tunnels in the plant kingdom. We identify cavity lining residues (CLRs) responsible for reduction in ancestral tunnel space, and these appear to be class specific, and unique to plants, providing a mechanism for the observed shift in domain function. For instance, mammalian cavity lining residues A135, G181 and A192 have evolved to larger CLRs across the plant kingdom, contributing to smaller sizes, minimal STARTs being the largest, while members of type-IV HD-Zip family show almost complete obliteration of lipid binding cavities, consistent with their present-day DNA binding functions. In summary, this work quantifies plant START structural &amp; functional divergence, bridging current knowledge gaps

HHSD: Hindi Hate Speech Detection Leveraging Multi-Task Learning

Hate speech is now a frequent occurrence on social media. Recently, the majority of study was devoted to identifying hate speech in languages with abundant resources (e.g., English). However, relatively few works are developed for languages with limited resources (e.g., Hindi, the third most widely used language on earth). In this study, Hindi Hate Speech Dataset (HHSD) is created following a novel hierarchical fine-grained four-layer annotation approach. The top layer separates the posts into hateful and non-hateful categories. The second layer further categorises hateful posts into explicit hateful and implicit hateful. The third layer is the multilabel tagging of the post into topics, such as political, religion, racism, or sexism. The fourth layer involves the identification of the targeted named entity, either explicitly or implicitly. Additionally, a thorough evaluation of the data annotation schema for trustworthy annotation is provided. The HHSD data is the largest multi-layer annotated corpora in Hindi compared with the existing multi-layer annotated data. Experiments on the dataset using the transformer-based approaches in single-task learning (STL) attain encouraging performances in accuracy and weighted-f1 score. The experiment leveraged multi-task learning (MTL) by including multiple related hate speech detection tasks from high-resource English and languages from the same linguistic family such as Urdu and Bangla with a transformer encoder as the shared layers to obtain a significant increment of 5.31&#x0025; and 5.35&#x0025; over STL in accuracy and weighted-f1 for layer A, 8.20&#x0025;, and 22.83&#x0025; for layer B. The MTL surpasses STL by 8.98&#x0025; and 4.07&#x0025; in exact match and hamming loss for layer C

Plant-parasitic nematodes of potential phytosanitary importance, their main hosts and reported yield losses

The potential phytosanitary importance of all named plant-parasitic nematode species was determined by evaluating available information on species characteristics, association with economically-important crop hosts, and ability to act as vectors of viruses or form disease complexes with other pathogens. Most named species of plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) are poorly known, recorded from a single location only, not associated with economically-important crops, and not known to be associated with other plant disease organisms. However, 250 species from 43 genera fulfilled one or more of the criteria to be considered to present a phytosanitary risk. The genera and number of species (in parentheses) considered as posing phytosanitary risk included: Achlysiella (1), Anguina (8), Aphasmatylenchus (1), Aphelenchoides (12), Aphelenchus (1), Belonolaimus (2), Bitylenchus (3), Bursaphelenchus (4), Cactodera (3), Ditylenchus (8), Dolichodorus (1), Globodera (3), Helicotylenchus (7), Hemicriconemoides (3), Hemicycliophora (3), Heterodera (25), Hirschmanniella (5), Hoplolaimus (5), Ibipora (3), Longidorus (10), Macroposthonia (2), Meloidogyne (38), Merlinius (3), Nacobbus (1), Neodolichodorus (2), Paralongidorus (2), Paratrichodorus (11), Paratylenchus (3), Pratylenchus (24), Punctodera (3), Quinisulcius (3), Radopholus (5), Rotylenchulus (3), Rotylenchus (1), Scutellonema (5), Sphaeronema (1), Subanguina (3), Trichodorus (5), Tylenchorhynchus (8), Tylenchulus (2), Vittatidera (1), Xiphinema (15) and Zygotylenchus (1). For each of the 250 species main hosts and yield loss estimates are provided with an extensive bibliography. Of the 250 species, only 126 species from 33 genera are currently listed as regulated pests in one or more countries worldwide. Almost all of these 250 species were also associated with economically important crops and some also acted as vectors for viruses. © 2013 The Authors. Journal compilatio