Report of the working party on Sardine and Mackerel Resources

Sardines and mackerels constitute 20 to 30 per cent or the total marine fish catch or India. Their behaviour has intrigued scientists and fisheries development officers, mainly because or the wide yearly Ouctuo.tions in the landings. It is" suspected that large stocks or 'hese fishes exist in !Orne parts of 'he Indian Ocean. However 'here is paucity or knowledge regarding theii breeding habits, breeding grounds and migrations. Considering these. groups as extremely important fOr adding to the fIsh landings with concomitant possibilities or establishment or industrial complexes based on fish as raw material, a Working Party was constituted in 1966 to colla,e inrormation relating to fisheries and biology, collect and compile a bibliography relating to sardines and mackerels, prepare maps and charts to indicate the occurrence of these fishes along the Indian coasts, and compile a list or active workers in the Hoe. The Working Party ha, now prepared a comprehensive report on 'he available inrormation and has indicated the further line or work to be carried out in this field. It is hoped that this would be a valuable contribution to the development or sardine and mackerel fisheries in India

A RECENT REVIEW ON NASAL MICROEMULSION FOR TREATMENT OF CNS DISORDER

Nasal route is found to be valuable for targeting drugs to CNS via a different mechanism. The advantages, disadvantages, various aspects of nasal anatomy and physiology, mechanism of drug transport from nose brain, drug selection criteria to cross BBB/Blood-CSF barrier are discussed briefly. Nowadays many drugs have better systemic bioavailability through nasal route as compared to oral administration. In addition, intranasal drug delivery enables dose reduction, rapid attainment of therapeutic blood levels, quicker onset of pharmacological activity, and fewer side effects. There are various approaches in delivering a therapeutic substance to the target site. One such approach is using microemulsion as a carrier for the drug. The main purpose of this study is the use of microemulsion technology in drug targeting to the brain along with mechanism of the nose to brain transport, formulation and formation of the microemulsion and its characterization

A genome scale metabolic network for rice and accompanying analysis of tryptophan, auxin and serotonin biosynthesis regulation under biotic stress

Background Functional annotations of large plant genome projects mostly provide information on gene function and gene families based on the presence of protein domains and gene homology, but not necessarily in association with gene expression or metabolic and regulatory networks. These additional annotations are necessary to understand the physiology, development and adaptation of a plant and its interaction with the environment. Results RiceCyc is a metabolic pathway networks database for rice. It is a snapshot of the substrates, metabolites, enzymes, reactions and pathways of primary and intermediary metabolism in rice. RiceCyc version 3.3 features 316 pathways and 6,643 peptide-coding genes mapped to 2,103 enzyme-catalyzed and 87 protein-mediated transport reactions. The initial functional annotations of rice genes with InterPro, Gene Ontology, MetaCyc, and Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers were enriched with annotations provided by KEGG and Gramene databases. The pathway inferences and the network diagrams were first predicted based on MetaCyc reference networks and plant pathways from the Plant Metabolic Network, using the Pathologic module of Pathway Tools. This was enriched by manually adding metabolic pathways and gene functions specifically reported for rice. The RiceCyc database is hierarchically browsable from pathway diagrams to the associated genes, metabolites and chemical structures. Through the integrated tool OMICs Viewer, users can upload transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic data to visualize expression patterns in a virtual cell. RiceCyc, along with additional species-specific pathway databases hosted in the Gramene project, facilitates comparative pathway analysis. Conclusions Here we describe the RiceCyc network development and discuss its contribution to rice genome annotations. As a case study to demonstrate the use of RiceCyc network as a discovery environment we carried out an integrated bioinformatic analysis of rice metabolic genes that are differentially regulated under diurnal photoperiod and biotic stress treatments. The analysis of publicly available rice transcriptome datasets led to the hypothesis that the complete tryptophan biosynthesis and its dependent metabolic pathways including serotonin biosynthesis are induced by taxonomically diverse pathogens while also being under diurnal regulation. The RiceCyc database is available online for free access at http://www.gramene.org/pathway

Efficient metallic spintronic emitters of ultrabroadband terahertz radiation

Terahertz electromagnetic radiation is extremely useful for numerous applications such as imaging and spectroscopy. Therefore, it is highly desirable to have an efficient table-top emitter covering the 1-to-30-THz window whilst being driven by a low-cost, low-power femtosecond laser oscillator. So far, all solid-state emitters solely exploit physics related to the electron charge and deliver emission spectra with substantial gaps. Here, we take advantage of the electron spin to realize a conceptually new terahertz source which relies on tailored fundamental spintronic and photonic phenomena in magnetic metal multilayers: ultrafast photo-induced spin currents, the inverse spin-Hall effect and a broadband Fabry-P\'erot resonance. Guided by an analytical model, such spintronic route offers unique possibilities for systematic optimization. We find that a 5.8-nm-thick W/CoFeB/Pt trilayer generates ultrashort pulses fully covering the 1-to-30-THz range. Our novel source outperforms laser-oscillator-driven emitters such as ZnTe(110) crystals in terms of bandwidth, terahertz-field amplitude, flexibility, scalability and cost.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure

Railway track component condition monitoring using optical fibre Bragg grating sensors

The use of optical fibre Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors to monitor the condition of safety critical rail components is investigated. Fishplates, switchblades and stretcher bars on the Stagecoach Supertram tramway in Sheffield in the UK have been instrumented with arrays of FBG sensors. The dynamic strain signatures induced by the passage of a tram over the instrumented components have been analysed to identify features indicative of changes in the condition of the components

Customer segmentation using machine learning

Customer segmentation has seen major growth in all sectors in the last decade. Several techniques have been devised to analyze customer behavior through loyalty, purchases, recency, frequency and monetary to develop efficient marketing strategies that cater to each client individually. As the availability of products and services increases, so does the competition. With the spiraling of automation accompanied by its cost-effectiveness and ease of availability, all businesses equip themselves with the required workforce and machinery to conduct experiments such as customer segmentation on an industrial scale. In the proposed work, the datasets are manipulated by extracting features from existing attributes. A widespread approach is RFM that calculates the Recency, Frequency and Monetary values for each customer tuple. This paper aims at laying out a new approach at every step of customer segmentation from pre-processing, clustering, validation and suggesting marketing strategies for customer retention. Two datasets- Online Retail II Set and Mall Customer Segmentation are modelled and the results from analysis of both the datasets are presented and compared to reach a generalized opinion

A Natural Language Processing Pipeline to extract phenotypic data from formal taxonomic descriptions with a focus on flagellate plants

Assembling large-scale phenotypic datasets for evolutionary and biodiversity studies of plants can be extremely difficult and time consuming. New semi-automated Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines can extract phenotypic data from taxonomic descriptions, and their performance can be enhanced by incorporating information from ontologies, like the Plant Ontology (PO) and the Plant Trait Ontology (TO). These ontologies are powerful tools for comparing phenotypes across taxa for large-scale evolutionary and ecological analyses, but they are largely focused on terms associated with flowering plants. We describe a bottom-up approach to identify terms from flagellate plants (including bryophytes, lycophytes, ferns, and gymnosperms) that can be added to existing plant ontologies. We first parsed a large corpus of electronic taxonomic descriptions using the Explorer of Taxon Concepts tool (http://taxonconceptexplorer.org/) and identified flagellate plant specific terms that were missing from the existing ontologies. We extracted new structure and trait terms, and we are currently incorporating the missing structure terms to the PO and modifying the definitions of existing terms to expand their coverage to flagellate plants. We will incorporate trait terms to the TO in the near future

Plant Reactome: a resource for plant pathways and comparative analysis

Plant Reactome (http://plantreactome.gramene.org/) is a free, open-source, curated plant pathway database portal, provided as part of the Gramene project. The database provides intuitive bioinformatics tools for the visualization, analysis and interpretation of pathway knowledge to support genome annotation, genome analysis, modeling, systems biology, basic research and education. Plant Reactome employs the structural framework of a plant cell to show metabolic, transport, genetic, developmental and signaling pathways. We manually curate molecular details of pathways in these domains for reference species Oryza sativa (rice) supported by published literature and annotation of well-characterized genes. Two hundred twenty-two rice pathways, 1025 reactions associated with 1173 proteins, 907 small molecules and 256 literature references have been curated to date. These reference annotations were used to project pathways for 62 model, crop and evolutionarily significant plant species based on gene homology. Database users can search and browse various components of the database, visualize curated baseline expression of pathway-associated genes provided by the Expression Atlas and upload and analyze their Omics datasets. The database also offers data access via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and in various standardized pathway formats, such as SBML and BioPAX

Amplification of Fluctuations in Unstable Systems with Disorder

We study the early-stage kinetics of thermodynamically unstable systems with quenched disorder. We show analytically that the growth of initial fluctuations is amplified by the presence of disorder. This is confirmed by numerical simulations of morphological phase separation (MPS) in thin liquid films and spinodal decomposition (SD) in binary mixtures. We also discuss the experimental implications of our results.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure