Taxonomic studies of Bartramiaceae from district Mansehra (Pakistan)

This paper deals with the taxonomic studies of the family Bartramiaceae, Bryophyta, from Mansehra district, Khyber Pakhtoonkhaw province, Pakistan. Extensive field surveys were conducted from October 2012 to December 2014. Previously collected specimens hosted at Pakistan Museum of Natural History (PMNH) were also consulted. Keys (at generic and specific level), description, general distribution and foot notes have been provided. Six species were recognized in this study from the area

Check list of Anthocerophyta and Marchantiophyta of Pakistan and Kashmir

In the present study, a review of previously published literature regarding Anthocerophyta and Marchantiophyta of Pakistan and Kashmir has been done in order to know the diversity of these groups. Previous contributions collectively reveal 122 taxa distributed in 36 genera and 24 families. Of these 118 taxa (97.52%) are belonging to the Marchantiophyta, while the rest of 4 species (3.30%) members to Anthocerophyta. Aytoniaceae is the largest family with 16 species. Genera-wise, Riccia is the largest genus with 12 species. An average number of species/genera is c. 3.36. A major portion of Pakistan is still un-explored especially Sindh and Balochistan province of Pakistan, and on the basis of this study it can be said that many more taxa will be added to the list

Approaches to Enhance Salt Stress Tolerance in Wheat

Wheat is consumed as a staple food by more than 36% of world population. Wheat provides nearly 55% of the carbohydrates and 20% of the food calories consumed globally. The productivity of wheat is often adversely affected by salt stress which is associated with decreased germination percentage, reduced growth, altered reproductive behavior, altered enzymatic activity, disrupted photosynthesis, damage of ultrastructure of cellular components, hormonal imbalance, and oxidative stress. Different approaches have been adopted to improve plant performance under salt stress: introduction of genes, screening of better performing genotypes, and crop improvement through conventional breeding methods which are often not so successful and suitable due to time-consuming or reduction of plant vigor with the succession of time. Uses of exogenous phytoprotectants, seed priming, nutrient management, and application of plant hormone are convenient for improving plant performances. This chapter reviews the mechanism of damage of wheat plants under salt stress and also the recent approaches to improve growth and productivity of salt-affected wheat plants emphasizing the use of exogenous phytoprotectants from the available literature

Evaluation of Resistance in Local Five Pakistani Chickpea Varieties against Callosobruchus Spps

During this research morphological data was recorded 1st before starting labe.  Work. In free choice test, the response of both species of Callosobruchus on candidate variety for oviposition was different. The adult emergence of both species of Callosobruchus on candidate varieties shows no significant difference. Both species of Callosobruchus in free choice test have no significant difference for percent   adult’s emergence on candidate varieties. Percent damage of both species of Callosobruchus on candidate varieties was different. Keywords: Chickpea, Cicer arietinum L, Phytic acid, legumes, beetle, weevi

Effects of different media concentartions on callogensis in sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.)

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L) var. 668 was propagated through tissue culture technique: callogenesis at MS media supplemented with different concentrations of growth regulators. Explants were disinfected with 70% ethanol which was sprayed directly on outer most sheathe which covered the tender stem to be used as source of explants. After 15 days, those explants which survived turned into green leaves and were used for the aforementioned study. Different concentrations of growth regulators were applied. For callogensis response from the cultivated explant, combination of Murashige and Skoog (MS) + 2,4-dichlorophenoxy acetic acid (2,4.D) + benzylaminopurine (BAP) with different concentration was applied and were found best for the establishment of callus from shoot culture.Keywords: Saccharum officinarum L, callogenesis, growth regulators, explants, shoot cultureAfrican Journal of Biotechnology, Vol 13(11), 1219-122

Checklist of Lithophytic Mosses of Kaghan Valley, Mansehra-Pakistan

The present work is a preliminary compilation mostly based on the available literature and extensive recent field trips. Overall 46 lithophytic moss species have been reported in Kaghan valley, Mansehra-Pakistan. These species are distributed under 16 families and 28 genera. This study is very much significant regarding the diversity of mosses in the study area that proof the considerable, potential of the ambient environment for the luxurious growth of bryophytes.

A Hybrid Hand-Crafted and Deep Neural Spatio-Temporal EEG Features Clustering Framework for Precise Emotional Status Recognition

Human emotions are variant with time, non-stationary, complex in nature, and are invoked as a result of human reactions during our daily lives. Continuously detecting human emotions from one-dimensional EEG signals is an arduous task. This paper proposes an advanced signal processing mechanism for emotion detection from EEG signals using continuous wavelet transform. The space and time components of the raw EEG signals are converted into 2D spectrograms followed by feature extraction. A hybrid spatio-temporal deep neural network is implemented to extract rich features. A differential-based entropy feature selection technique adaptively differentiates features based on entropy, based on low and high information regions. Bag of Deep Features (BoDF) is applied to create clusters of similar features and computes the features vocabularies for reduction of feature dimensionality. Extensive experiments are performed on the SEED dataset, which shows the significance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the proposed model achieved 96.7%, 96.2%, 95.8%, and 95.3% accuracy with the SJTU SEED dataset, for SVM, ensemble, tree, and KNN classifiers, respectively