Barriers in health seeking behaviour among tribal pregnant women in a hilly tribal area of Kashmir: a qualitative study

Background: Maternal health is of paramount concern all over the world and has been a priority in India as well with the maternal health programs evolving over the time, addressing new arenas and overcoming challenges to reach the Maternal mortality ratio (MMR) target with quality. (1) In tribal areas various barriers in health seeking behavior are impediments towards maternal health.Methods: An explorative qualitative study was undertaken in a tribal area of Srinagar, Kashmir, which is a rural field practice area of the Department of Community Medicine Government Medical College, Srinagar. Focus group discussion (FGD) and in-depth interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the FGD and in-depth interview data.Results: The data analysis generated following five themes: Theme 1: Perceptions and practices among tribal pregnant women in Faqir Gujree area. Theme 2: Socio-cultural influences, attitude and beliefs. Theme 3: Health system related barriers. Theme 4: Community related barriers. Theme 5: Cultural barriers among the pregnant women.Conclusions: There is a need of continuous behaviour change communication (BCC) with pregnant women and community members. In addition to addressing these issues, the health system related issues need to be addressed and improved in order to improve access to health care facilities by these pregnant women. Thus, a comprehensive tribal-sensitive health care system incorporating the above cultural issues is required to improve the health care access among these vulnerable ANC patients

Preparation and quality characterization of soy milk based non-dairy ice cream

Soy milk made from soybean has prospective to be used as a substitute of milk due to its health benefits. It is a rich source of iso-flavones, omega-3-fatty acid, dietary fiber, vitamin C, carotenoids, protein and oligosaccharides. The current study was designed to examine the effects of galacto-manan on ice cream by using commercially available (silk) and locally prepared soy milk. Galacto-mannan (guar gum) was used in different concentration (0.3, 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6%) for the preparation of ice cream. Ice cream was analyzed for physico-chemical and sensory characteristics at 0, 30 and 60 days of storage interval. Overrun, meltdown, viscosity, total solids, pH and acidity were affected significantly by ice cream samples as well as storage. While non-significant effects of stabilizer and storage were found on fat, protein, and ash contents of ice cream. On organoleptic evaluation, the highest scores were awarded to the ice cream sample prepared with 0.5% of guar gum. Ice cream manufactured with locally prepared soy milk and guar gum revealed comparable quality with lower cost

Social Touch Gesture Recognition using Random Forest and Boosting on Distinct Feature Sets

Touch is a primary nonverbal communication channel used to communicate emotions or other social messages. Despite its importance, this channel is still very little explored in the affective computing field, as much more focus has been placed on visual and aural channels. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to automatically discriminate between different social touch types. We propose five distinct feature sets for describing touch behaviours captured by a grid of pressure sensors. These features are then combined together by using the Random Forest and Boosting methods for categorizing the touch gesture type. The proposed methods were evaluated on both the HAART (7 gesture types over different surfaces) and the CoST (14 gesture types over the same surface) datasets made available by the Social Touch Gesture Challenge 2015. Well above chance level performances were achieved with a 67% accuracy for the HAART and 59% for the CoST testing datasets respectively

Data from: Comprehensive transcriptome analysis of Crocus sativus for discovery and expression of genes involved in apocarotenoid biosynthesis

Background: Crocus sativus stigmas form rich source of apocarotenoids like crocin, picrocrocin and saffranal which besides imparting color, flavour and aroma to saffron spice also have tremendous pharmacological properties. Inspite of their importance, the biosynthetic pathway of Crocus apocarotenoids is not fully elucidated. Moreover, the mechanism of their stigma specific accumulation remains unknown. Therefore, deep transcriptome sequencing of Crocus stigma and rest of the flower tissue was done to identify the genes and transcriptional regulators involved in the biosynthesis of these compounds. Results: Transcriptome of stigma and rest of the flower tissue was sequenced using Illumina Genome Analyzer IIx platform which generated 64,604,402 flower and 51,350,714 stigma reads. Sequences were assembled de novo using trinity resulting in 64,438 transcripts which were classified into 32,204 unigenes comprising of 9853 clusters and 22,351 singletons. A comprehensive functional annotation and gene ontology (GO) analysis was carried out. 58.5 % of the transcripts showed similarity to sequences present in public databases while rest could be specific to Crocus. 5789 transcripts showed similarity to transcription factors representing 76 families out of which Myb family was most abundant. Many genes involved in carotenoid/apocarotenoid pathway were identified for the first time in this study which includes zeta-carotene isomerase and desaturase, carotenoid isomerase and lycopene epsilon-cyclase. GO analysis showed that the predominant classes in biological process category include metabolic process followed by cellular process and primary metabolic process. KEGG mapping analysis indicated that pathways involved in ribosome, carbon and starch and sucrose metabolism were highly represented. Differential expression analysis indicated that key carotenoid/apocarotenoid pathway genes including phytoene synthase, phytoene desaturase and carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase 2 are enriched in stigma thereby providing molecular proof for stigma to be the site of apocarotenoid biosynthesis. Conclusions: This data would provide a rich source for understanding the carotenoid/apocarotenoid metabolism in Crocus. The database would also help in investigating many questions related to saffron biology including flower development

Phylogeny

the folder contains files which contains sequences of CCD genes and their accession numbers. it also contains alignment file and the resulting phylogenetic tre

Chromium Toxicity in Plants: Signaling, Mitigation, and Future Perspectives

Plants are very often confronted by different heavy metal (HM) stressors that adversely impair their growth and productivity. Among HMs, chromium (Cr) is one of the most prevalent toxic trace metals found in agricultural soils because of anthropogenic activities, lack of efficient treatment, and unregulated disposal. It has a huge detrimental impact on the physiological, biochemical, and molecular traits of crops, in addition to being carcinogenic to humans. In soil, Cr exists in different forms, including Cr (III) “trivalent” and Cr (VI) “hexavalent”, but the most pervasive and severely hazardous form to the biota is Cr (VI). Despite extensive research on the effects of Cr stress, the exact molecular mechanisms of Cr sensing, uptake, translocation, phytotoxicity, transcript processing, translation, post-translational protein modifications, as well as plant defensive responses are still largely unknown. Even though plants lack a Cr transporter system, it is efficiently accumulated and transported by other essential ion transporters, hence posing a serious challenge to the development of Cr-tolerant cultivars. In this review, we discuss Cr toxicity in plants, signaling perception, and transduction. Further, we highlight various mitigation processes for Cr toxicity in plants, such as microbial, chemical, and nano-based priming. We also discuss the biotechnological advancements in mitigating Cr toxicity in plants using plant and microbiome engineering approaches. Additionally, we also highlight the role of molecular breeding in mitigating Cr toxicity in sustainable agriculture. Finally, some conclusions are drawn along with potential directions for future research in order to better comprehend Cr signaling pathways and its mitigation in sustainable agriculture