Cultivation planning application to enhance decision making among Sri Lankan farmers

As part of a larger project to develop a Mobile Based Information System (MBIS) to enhance livelihood activities of Sri Lankan farmers, we investigated how farmers access agricultural knowledge and apply the knowledge to do their tasks. As farmers found it difficult to access and find the required information among published knowledge currently available, crop ontology has been developed to query the factual knowledge in the context specific to a farmer. In the interviews that we conducted, we found that providing factual knowledge alone is not sufficient as farmers also lack the procedural knowledge to make use of the factual knowledge. Therefore, we developed a Cultivation Planning Application that has procedural knowledge embedded into several modules that allow farmers to perform tasks that help them in their decision making process

CCR6 mediates dendritic cell localization, lymphocyte homeostasis, and immune responses in mucosal tissue

Chemokine-directed migration of leukocyte subsets may contribute to the qualitative differences between systemic and mucosal immunity. Here, we demonstrate that in mice lacking the chemokine receptor CCR6, dendritic cells expressing CD11c and CD11b are absent from the subepithelial dome of Peyer's patches. These mice also have an impaired humoral immune response to orally administered antigen and to the enteropathic virus rotavirus. In addition, CCR6(-/-) mice have a 2-fold to 15-fold increase in cells of select T lymphocyte populations within the mucosa, including CD4+ and CD8+ alphabeta-TCR T cells. By contrast, systemic immune responses to subcutaneous antigens in CCR6(-/-) mice are normal. These findings demonstrate that CCR6 is a mucosa-specific regulator of humoral immunity and lymphocyte homeostasis in the intestinal mucosa