Nutritional value OF Bottle Gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) Seeds

Whole seeds, dehulled seeds and seed coats of bottle gourd seed (Lagenaria siceraria) were analysed for their proximate, amino acids and mineral compositions. The results of the analysis showed that, whole seed has highest content of moisture (17.5  0.21%) and ash (5.80  0.83%) while dehulled had highest amount of crude protein (35.0  0.48%) and crude lipid (39.22  1.48%) and seed coat contain highest amount of crude fiber (59.05  0.98%). The study showed a profile of seventeen amino acids (isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, cysteine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, threonine, valine, alanine, arginine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid, glycine, histidine, proline and serine) with glutamic acid, leucine and aspartic acid being the predominant amino acid. The percentages (%) of essential and non-essential amino acids in dehulled seeds, whole seeds and seed coats were 44 vs 56, 41 vs 59 and 51 vs 49 respectively. The dehulled seeds contained essential amino acids that were found to be higher than WHO/FAO/UNU requirement. In whole seeds, threonine, lysine and lysine were found to be the most limiting amino acids. Seed coats were deficient in all the essential amino acids except for valine. Generally, the mineral composition of the seed was found to be relatively high, indicating the seed to be a good source of dietary elements, except for Ca, Zn, Co and Cr where very low values were obtained. Finally, the results of the study indicate that, bottle gourd seed is a potential source of protein, lipid, micro and macronutrients, and if properly utilised, could contribute in solving the problem of malnutrition and also serve as raw material for agro-based industries Keywords: Bottle gourd seeds, seed coat, proximate analysis, minerals and Amino acid composition.Global Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences Vol. 14 (3) 2008: pp. 301-30

Impact of Meshed HVDC Grid Operation and Control on the Dynamics of AC/DC Systems

IEEE The efficacy of long-distance and bulk power transmission largely depends on the efficient control and reliable operation of a multiterminal high-voltage direct current (MT-HVdc) grid, more precisely, a meshed HVdc grid. The capability of enduring the dc grid fault eventually enhances the reliability and improves the dynamic performance of the grid. This article investigates the operation and control of an AC/multiterminal dc (MTDC) system with bipolar topology incorporating the dc grid protection schemes. Based on the scale of a circuit breaker's operating time, the performance of three different protection strategies is compared and analyzed using DIgSILENT PowerFactory. Simulation results explicitly reveal that the dynamic performance of the MTDC grid significantly deteriorates with the slow functioning of the protection schemes, followed by a dc grid fault. Besides, prolonged recovery time causes a substantial loss of power infeed and affects the ac/dc grid's stability. Finally, to assess the frailty of the MTDC grid, a transient energy stability index is proposed considering the voltage variation in the prestate and poststate fault clearing interval. Relevant case studies are performed on the MTDC grid using an analytical approach and nonlinear simulation studies to validate the effectiveness of the proposed index

Evaluating spring wheat cultivars for drought tolerance through yield and physiological parameters at booting and anthesis

Progress in wheat yields under drought conditions is rather a difficult task to achieve. The experiment was conducted in factorial design with 16 spring wheat cultivars grown under two irrigation regimes, non-stress and water-stress imposed at boot and anthesis growth stages. Water-stress significantly influenced the physiological and yield traits in both the growth stages, yet the reductions in most traits were pronounced at anthesis than at boot. Stomatal conductance, relative water content, leaf area (LA), seeds/spike, 1000-grain weight and grain yield/plant were the best drought tolerant indicators. On the basis of physiological and yield traits, the cultivars Moomal, Bhitai, TD-1, and Abadgar proved to be the best performing in water-stress conditions. Stomatal conductance, RWC% and LA were significantly and positively correlated with grain yield/plant. These results suggest that the stomatal conductance, relative water content and leaf area are the most important traits that should be considered while developing drought tolerant wheat genotypes.Keywords: Water stress, boot and anthesis, yield and physiological traits, wheat genotype

The Coulomb phase shift revisited

We investigate the Coulomb phase shift, and derive and analyze new and more precise analytical formulae. We consider next to leading order terms to the Stirling approximation, and show that they are important at small values of the angular momentum $l$ and other regimes. We employ the uniform approximation. The use of our expressions in low energy scattering of charged particles is discussed and some comparisons are made with other approximation methods.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Mining the Context of Citations in Scientific Publications

Recent advancements in information retrieval systems significantly rely on the context-based features and semantic matching techniques to provide relevant information to users from ever-growing digital libraries. Scientific communities seek to understand the implications of research, its importance and its applicability for future research directions. To mine this information, absolute citations merely fail to measure the importance of scientific literature, as a citation may have a specific context in full text. Thus, a comprehensive contextual understanding of cited references is necessary. For this purpose, numerous techniques have been proposed that tap the power of artificial intelligence models to detect important or incidental (non-important) citations in full text scholarly publications. In this paper, we compare and build upon on four state-of-the-art models that detect important citations using 450 manually annotated citations by experts - randomly selected from 20,527 papers from the Association for Computational Linguistics corpus. Of the total 64 unique features proposed by the four selected state-of-the-art models, the top 29 were chosen using the Extra-Trees classifier. These were then fed it to our supervised machine learning based models: Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine. The RF model outperforms existing selected systems by more than 10%, with 89% precision-recall curve. Finally, we qualitatively assessed important and non-important citations by employing and self-organizing maps. Overall, our research work supports information retrieval algorithms that detect and fetch scientific articles on the basis of both qualitative and quantitative indices in scholarly big data

Light and temperature effects on sprout yield and its proximate composition and vitamin C content in Lignosus and Mung beans

Bean sprout is used as vegetables. The present study investigated the effect of temperature and light on seed germination and sprout yield, and proximate (crude protein, crude fat, crude fibre, nitrogen free extract and ash) composition of sprout in Lignosus (Dipogon lignosus (L.) Verdc.) and Mung (Vigna radiata Wilczek) beans. Three temperatures (ambient, 25o and 30oC) and two light regimes; continuous dark, (CD) and continuous dark alternated by ½ hour light daily, (DAL) were used for seed germination and bean sprout yield. Data were collected 24, 48, 72, 96 and 120 hours after setting the presoaked seeds in the petri dishes. Of the temperature regimes, generally better seed germination and sprout fresh weight (yield) were observed at 25oC in Mung bean and 30oC in Lignosus bean. Germination and sprout yield were similar under CD and DAL. Both under CD and DAL, sprout yield was higher after 120 hours compared to 96 hrs after germination in both the beans. Proximate composition of dry seeds and their sprouts was also determined. Irrespective of species, crude protein content was significantly higher in sprout (average of 29.33%) than dry seed (average of 24.33%).Vitamin C was significantly higher in Lignosus bean sprout (20.93 mg 100g-1) compared to Mung bean sprout (9.52 mg 100g-1). This is the first world report on Lignosus bean sprout. It may be concluded that better sprout yield and good protein content were obtained at 25oC in Mung bean and 30oC in Lignosus bean after 120 hrs of germination irrespective of dark and light

Survival and hepatitis status among Asian Americans with hepatocellular carcinoma treated without liver transplantation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) are established causes of HCC. HCC patients are often diagnosed late and receive palliative therapies, however, the survival of Asian American patients with HCC treated without transplantation has not been well studied. We reviewed our institution's experience to determine predictors and rates of survival in Asian American HCC patients treated without transplantation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We identified Asian American patients with HCC referred to M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Patients were tested for HBV and HCV. Survival curves were generated by Kaplan-Meier method. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression was used to test the relationship between prognostic factors and survival.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of 82 Asian American HCC patients, most had advanced disease (65%) and received treatment (68%); however, only 11% had surgical resection. 94% had positive anti-HBc and 61% had positive HBsAg. 20% had positive anti-HCV. There were no significant changes in the rates of HBV and HCV over time. Male gender, high alpha-fetoprotein levels, and stage IV disease were associated with shorter survival Overall median survival was 9.2 months (95% CI 6.5–11.9), and the survival of HCV and HBV patients was not statistically different.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The survival rate of Asian American patients with advanced HCC, for whom transplantation was not available, was low. Timely hepatitis screening and interventions by primary care physicians may be the most logical solution to reduce the burden of hepatitis-associated HCC among Asian Americans.</p

Non-abelian T-duality, Ramond Fields and Coset Geometries

We extend previous work on non-abelian T-duality in the presence of Ramond fluxes to cases in which the duality group acts with isotropy such as in backgrounds containing coset spaces. In the process we generate new supergravity solutions related to D-brane configurations and to standard supergravity compactifications.Comment: 35 pages, Late

The effect of S-substitution at the O6-guanine site on the structure and dynamics of a DNA oligomer containing a G:T mismatch

The effect of S-substitution on the O6 guanine site of a 13-mer DNA duplex containing a G:T mismatch is studied using molecular dynamics. The structure, dynamic evolution and hydration of the S-substituted duplex are compared with those of a normal duplex, a duplex with Ssubstitution on guanine, but no mismatch and a duplex with just a G:T mismatch. The S-substituted mismatch leads to cell death rather than repair. One suggestion is that the G:T mismatch recognition protein recognises the S-substituted mismatch (GS:T) as G:T. This leads to a cycle of futile repair ending in DNA breakage and cell death. We find that some structural features of the helix are similar for the duplex with the G:T mismatch and that with the S-substituted mismatch, but differ from the normal duplex, notably the helical twist. These differences arise from the change in the hydrogen-bonding pattern of the base pair. However a marked feature of the S-substituted G:T mismatch duplex is a very large opening. This showed considerable variability. It is suggested that this enlarged opening would lend support to an alternative model of cell death in which the mismatch protein attaches to thioguanine and activates downstream damage-response pathways. Attack on the sulphur by reactive oxygen species, also leading to cell death, would also be aided by the large, variable opening

Systemic Treatments for Mesothelioma: Standard and Novel

Systemic therapy is the only treatment option for the majority of mesothelioma patients, for whom age, co-morbid medical illnesses, non-epithelial histology, and locally advanced disease often preclude surgery. For many years, chemotherapy had a minimal impact on the natural history of this cancer, engendering considerable nihilism. Countless drugs were evaluated, most of which achieved response rates below 20% and median survival of <1 year. Several factors have hampered the evaluation of systemic regimens in patients with mesothelioma. The disease is uncommon, affecting only about 2500 Americans annually. Thus, most clinical trials are small, and randomized studies are challenging to accrue. There is significant heterogeneity within the patient populations of these small trials, for several reasons. Since all of the staging systems for mesothelioma are surgically based, it is almost impossible to accurately determine the stage of a patient who has not been resected. Patients with very early stage disease may be lumped together with far more advanced patients in the same study. The disease itself is heterogenous, with many different prognostic factors, most notably three pathologic subtypes—epithelial, sarcomatoid, and biphasic—that have different natural histories, and varying responses to treatment. Finally, response assessment is problematic, since pleural-based lesions are difficult to measure accurately and reproducibly. Assessment criteria often vary between trials, making some cross-trial comparisons difficult to interpret. Despite these limitations, in recent years, there has been a surge of optimism regarding systemic treatment of this disease. Several cytotoxic agents have been shown to generate reproducible responses, improve quality of life, or prolong survival in mesothelioma. Drugs with single-agent activity include pemetrexed, raltitrexed, vinorelbine, and vinflunine. The addition of pemetrexed or raltitrexed to cisplatin prolongs survival. The addition of cisplatin to pemetrexed, raltitrexed, gemcitabine, irinotecan, or vinorelbine improves response rate. The combination of pemetrexed plus cisplatin is considered the benchmark front-line regimen for this disease, based on a phase III trial in 456 patients that yielded a response rate of 41% and a median survival of 12.1 months. Vitamin supplementation with folic acid is essential to decrease toxicity, though recent data suggests that there may be an optimum dose of folic acid that should be administered; higher doses may diminish the effectiveness of pemetrexed. There are also several unresolved questions about the duration and timing of treatment with pemetrexed that are the subject of planned clinical trials. It is essential to recognize that the improvements observed with the pemetrexed/cisplatin combination, though real, are still modest. Other active drugs or drug combinations may be more appropriate for specific individuals, and further research is still needed to improve upon these results. Since the majority of mesotheliomas in the United States occur in the elderly, non-cisplatin-containing pemetrexed combinations may be more appropriate for some patients. Now that effective agents have been developed for initial treatment, several classical cytotoxic drugs and many novel agents are being evaluated in the second-line setting. These include drugs targeted against the epidermal growth factor, platelet-derived growth factor, vascular endothelial growth factor, src kinase, histone deacetylase, the proteasome, and mesothelin. Given the progress made in recent years, there is reason to believe that more effective treatments will continue to be developed