Japanese encephalitis: pathogenesis, prophylactics and therapeutics

Japanese encephalitis (JE) is one of the most dreaded mosquito-borne viral encephalitis known to afflict humans. The Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) is a neurotropic flavivirus that affects the CNS, causing extensive damage that may lead to fatality in about one third of patients. Half of the survivors suffer from severe neuropshychiatric sequelae. With nearly 3 billion people living under the current JE-endemic region, recurring incidents of epidemic are being reported at regular intervals. With no established antiviral therapies against JE available, vaccination has been the only way of preventing JE. Two types of JE vaccines are currently in vogue although the safety of administering them is questionable, in certain individuals. Thus, there is a need to develop a safe, affordable and potent JE vaccine and this review addresses the current efforts in this direction. This review also focuses on the pathophysiology of JE and efforts towards a possible breakthrough in anti-JEV therapy

PERCEIVED SOURCES OF STRESS AMONG BIOALLIED SCIENCE STUDENTS OF SOUTH INDIA

Health care profession is considered a stressful occupation. Stress in these professions is not just confined to their practice, but is experienced by students within the same academic environment. Stress among students of bioallied sciences (Dental, Nursing, Pharmacy & Ayurvedic) is associated with cognitive impairment and is detrimental to health. Objective: To know the sources of stress among bioallied science students. Methods: A cross sectional study design using a modified version of Dental Environment Stress questionnaire (DESQ) was used to assess the stress among Dental, Pharmacy, Ayurvedic and Nursing students. Results: Dental students showed higher stress domains, followed by Nursing, Pharmacy students being the least. Conclusion: The findings of this study do not support that student of dental, & allied sciences experience high stress levels overall but, they have important issues and stress level vary according to that for each profession

Immune associated LncRNAs identify novel prognostic subtypes of renal clear cell carcinoma

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148402/1/mc22949_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148402/2/mc22949.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148402/3/mc22949-sup-0001-SuppData-S1.pd

A study on coronary dominance and luminal diameters of major coronary arteries in cadaveric human hearts of the Maharashtra population

The study was undertaken to assess the coronary dominance and variations in luminal diameters of major coronary arteries and to compare the relation between the coronary dominance and variation in luminal diameter and between coronary dominance and number of vessels measuring less than 2.5 mm in diameter, in 75 cadaveric human hearts obtained from the Department of Anatomy from the various medical colleges of western Maharashtra, India. Out of 75 hearts, 58 (77.33%) showed right dominance, 14 (18.67%) showed left dominance and 3 (4%) showed codominant pattern. No significant difference was noted in the luminal diameters of coronary arteries (right coronary artery, marginal artery, posterior interventricular artery, left coronary artery, anterior interventricular branch, circumflex branch) among the dominance type. It was also observed that 63 hearts (84%) showed more than 2 arteries measuring less than 2.5mm in diameter. To conclude, a majority of the population has a right predominance and hence the chances of suffering from coronary artery disease are relatively less, but howe ver 84% of the sample under study had more than two coronary arteries measuring less than 2.5 mm in diameter out of the 6 arteries studied, thus increasing susceptibility of thrombosis in these arteries and therefore increasing the chances of myocardial infarction

Variations in host genes encoding adhesion molecules and susceptibility to falciparum malaria in India

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Host adhesion molecules play a significant role in the pathogenesis of <it>Plasmodium falciparum </it>malaria and changes in their structure or levels in individuals can influence the outcome of infection. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of SNPs of three adhesion molecule genes, <it>ICAM1</it>, <it>PECAM1 </it>and <it>CD36</it>, with severity of falciparum malaria in a malaria-endemic and a non-endemic region of India.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The frequency distribution of seven selected SNPs of <it>ICAM1</it>, <it>PECAM1 </it>and <it>CD36 </it>was determined in 552 individuals drawn from 24 populations across India. SNP-disease association was analysed in a case-control study format. Genotyping of the population panel was performed by Sequenom mass spectroscopy and patient/control samples were genotyped by SNaPshot method. Haplotypes and linkage disequilibrium (LD) plots were generated using PHASE and Haploview, respectively. Odds-ratio (OR) for risk assessment was estimated using EpiInfo™ version 3.4.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Association of the ICAM1 rs5498 (exon 6) G allele and the CD36 exon 1a A allele with increased risk of severe malaria was observed (severe versus control, OR = 1.91 and 2.66, P = 0.02 and 0.0012, respectively). The CD36 rs1334512 (-53) T allele as well as the TT genotype associated with protection from severe disease (severe versus control, TT versus GG, OR = 0.37, P = 0.004). Interestingly, a SNP of the <it>PECAM1 </it>gene (rs668, exon 3, C/G) with low minor allele frequency in populations of the endemic region compared to the non-endemic region exhibited differential association with disease in these regions; the G allele was a risk factor for malaria in the endemic region, but exhibited significant association with protection from disease in the non-endemic region.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The data highlights the significance of variations in the <it>ICAM1</it>, <it>PECAM1 </it>and <it>CD36 </it>genes in the manifestation of falciparum malaria in India. The <it>PECAM1 </it>exon 3 SNP exhibits altered association with disease in the endemic and non-endemic region.</p

Analyses for Service Interaction Networks with applications to Service Delivery

One of the distinguishing features of the services industry is the high emphasis on people interacting with other people and serving customers rather than transforming physical goods like in the traditional manufacturing processes. It is evident that analysis of such interactions is an essential aspect of designing effective and efficient services delivery. In this work we focus on learning individual and team behavior of different people or agents of a service organization by studying the patterns and outcomes of historical interactions. For each past interaction, we assume that only the list of participants and an outcome indicating the overall effectiveness of the interaction are known. Note that this offers limited information on the mutual (pairwise) compatibility of different participants. We develop the notion of service interaction networks which is an abstraction of the historical data and allows one to cast practical problems in a formal setting. We identify the unique characteristics of analyzing service interaction networks when compared to traditional analyses considered in social network analysis and establish a need for new modeling and algorithmic techniques for such networks. On the algorithmic front, we develop new algorithms to infer attributes of agents individually and in team settings. Our first algorithm is based on a novel modification to the eigen-vector based centrality for ranking the agents and the second algorithm is an iterative update technique that can be applied for subsets of agents as well. One of the challenges of conducting research in this setting is the sensitive and proprietary nature of the data. Therefore, there is a need for a realistic simulator for studying service interaction networks. We present the initial version of our simulator that is geared to capture several characteristics of service interaction networks that arise in real-life

Multicolor Surface Photometry of Lenticulars I. The Data

We present in this paper multicolor surface and aperture photometry in the B, V, R and K' bands for a sample of 34 lenticular galaxies from the UGC catalogue. From surface photometric analysis, we obtain radial profiles of surface brightness, colors, ellipticity, position angle and the Fourier coefficients which describe the departure of isophotal shapes from purely elliptical form and find the presence of dust lanes, patches and ring like structure in several galaxies in the sample. We obtain total integrated magnitudes and colors and find that these are in good agreement with the values from the RC3 catalogue. Isophotal colors are correlated with each other, following the sequence expected for early-type galaxies. The color gradients in lenticulars are more negative than the corresponding gradients in ellipticals. There is a good correlation between B-V and B-R color gradients, and the mean gradient in the B-V, B-R and V-K' colors are -0.13+/-0.06, -0.18+/-0.06, -0.25+/-0.11 magnitude per dex in radius respectively.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, uses emulateapj.cls. Accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal, scheduled for February 200

Participatory evaluation guides the development and selection of farmers’ preferred rice varieties for salt- and flood-affected coastal deltas of South and Southeast Asia

Rice is the staple food and provides livelihood for smallholder farmers in the coastal delta regions of South and Southeast Asia. However, its productivity is often low because of several abiotic stresses including high soil salinity and waterlogging during the wet (monsoon) season and high soil and water salinity during the dry season. Development and dissemination of suitable rice varieties tolerant of these multiple stresses encountered in coastal zones are of prime importance for increasing and stabilizing rice productivity, however adoption of new varieties has been slow in this region. Here we implemented participatory varietal selection (PVS) processes to identify and understand smallholder farmers’ criteria for selection and adoption of new rice varieties in coastal zones. New breeding lines together with released rice varieties were evaluated in on-station and on-farm trials (researcher-managed) during the wet and dry seasons of 2008–2014 in the Indian Sundarbans region. Significant correlations between preferences of male and female farmers in most trials indicated that both groups have similar criteria for selection of rice varieties. However, farmers’ preference criteria were different from researchers’ criteria. Grain yield was important, but not the sole reason for variety selection by farmers. Several other factors also governed preferences and were strikingly different when compared across wet and dry seasons. For the wet season, farmers preferred tall (140–170cm), long duration (160–170 d), lodging resistant and high yielding rice varieties because these traits are required in lowlands where water stagnates in the field for about four months (July to October). For the dry season, farmers’ preferences were for high yielding, salt tolerant, early maturing (115–130 d) varieties with long slender grains and good quality for better market value. Pest and disease resistance was important in both seasons but did not rank high. When farmers ranked the two most preferred varieties, the ranking order was sometimes variable between locations and years, but when the top four varieties that consistently ranked high were considered, the variability was low. This indicates that at least 3–4 of the best-performing entries should be considered in succeeding multi-location and multi-year trials, thereby increasing the chances that the most stable varieties are selected. These findings will help improve breeding programs by providing information on critical traits. Selected varieties through PVS are also more likely to be adopted by farmers and will ensure higher and more stable productivity in the salt- and flood-affected coastal deltas of South and Southeast Asia

Technology Pipeline for Large Scale Cross-Lingual Dubbing of Lecture Videos into Multiple Indian Languages

Cross-lingual dubbing of lecture videos requires the transcription of the original audio, correction and removal of disfluencies, domain term discovery, text-to-text translation into the target language, chunking of text using target language rhythm, text-to-speech synthesis followed by isochronous lipsyncing to the original video. This task becomes challenging when the source and target languages belong to different language families, resulting in differences in generated audio duration. This is further compounded by the original speaker's rhythm, especially for extempore speech. This paper describes the challenges in regenerating English lecture videos in Indian languages semi-automatically. A prototype is developed for dubbing lectures into 9 Indian languages. A mean-opinion-score (MOS) is obtained for two languages, Hindi and Tamil, on two different courses. The output video is compared with the original video in terms of MOS (1-5) and lip synchronisation with scores of 4.09 and 3.74, respectively. The human effort also reduces by 75%