The Impact of Pandemic COVID -19 in Workplace

COVID-19 has become a huge worry for the Globe. The social and economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic will be far reaching and devastating for all. In this globally connected world, every country will get impacted by the devastation caused by the pandemic. The COVID-19 is likely to lead to certain permanent or long-lasting. By the time, when the pandemic ends, we will probably see a new world, a new lexicon, a new social norm with far reaching economic and social destruction. When COVID-19 outbreak started spreading across the world, thousands of people started facing severe health issues and death rates increased. The only way to stop the spread of the pandemic was to stop all social and economic activities in the affected countries for indefinite period of time. This led many countries to impose complete lock-down all across the globe which is still going on going on. In such a scenario all business activities, across all industries were completely stopped. The lockdown impacted various sectors in varied degree. For example, the airlines, hospitality, hotel, manufacturing industry is totally stopped and will take a long time to come out of this situation, if at all. Millions of people in these sectors are likely to lose jobs in these sectors. COVID-19 pandemic caused enormous disruption in businesses, which will take years to recover, if at all. The disruption is likely to lead to permanent shut down of many businesses, unable to bear the financial losses and disruptions caused by the pandemic. To get over the current situation, companies are trying to run offices and administration jobs through “Work from Home” mode. Companies are trying to cope up with economic turbulence caused due to COVID 19 through the usage of disruptive technology by working from home concept. Earlier work from home was an acceptable business practice only in IT and Technology sectors. However, other industry sectors were reluctant to adopt WFH as a good business practice. The biggest business change that we can see today, forced by the global spread the pandemic, is that many companies have been forced to implementing Work from Home mode for their employees. During the last 2 months, companies have found significant benefit in the WFH. Most companies, going forward, are looking at WFH as an integral business model. The WFH mode is helping some industries and functions in keeping its operations going, in a limited way. This research paper analyses the positives and negatives aspects of work from home concept as during this COVID-19 crisis, people working on WFH, are compelled to live in social isolation and emotional distancing. One can balance the responsibilities of work-life domains, especially when life domain needs as much attention as to work, during these difficult times. The study has focused on the impact of COVID-19 virus pandemic on working life of employees. This research paper also emphasizes that how employers as well as HR managers are required to think out of the box and bring forth best practices as well as redefining HR roles  during any adversity .This research paper will also give light on few important issues  such as People-Connect , adoption of a system of  Skilling, re-skilling, Up-skilling and multi-skilling people about technology, design thinking, storytelling, analytics, Artificial intelligence  to prepare our workforce to become more competent and talented by enhancing their skill set. Keywords: Work from Home, COVID-19, social distancing, lockdown, people-connect, re-skilling, multi-skilling, up-skilling, technology disruption. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-15-02 Publication date:May 31st 202

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF MODIFIED AODV AGAINST BLACK HOLE ATTACK IN MANET

A mobile ad-hoc network is an infrastructure less network which consists of a number of mobile nodes that dynamically form a temporary network for the transmission of data from source to destination. They are composed of nodes that relay on each other to manage and for secure transmission of traffic due to lack of centralized administration. As MANETs become widely used, the security issue has become one of the primary concerns for all the times. One of the well known attack is the Black Hole attack which is most common in the on-demand routing protocols such as AODV.In this paper, the proposed solution is to modify the AODV routing protocol in such a way that it can combat the cooperative Black Hole attack. The results show an effective increase in throughput and PDR and decrease in average end-to-end delay with a slight increase in routing overhead

Risk of prostate cancer and its correlation with different biochemical parameters in non diabetic men

Background: It has been hypothesized that men with long term diabetes have a lower risk of prostate cancer then non-diabetic men. Whether diabetes influences level of biomarkers such as prostate specific antigen (PSA), which is involved in the detection of prostate cancer is, unknown. In view of the aforementioned controversial literature, it was decided to evaluate this relation-ship in non-diabetic men. We evaluated the correlation between fasting glucose, prostate specific antigen and different biochemical lipid profile parameters with serum uric acid and serum creatinine in non-diabetic male between age group 40-61 years.Methods: Association between fasting serum glucose , different lipid parameters, serum uric acid, serum creatinine and prostate specific antigen in 83 non-diabetic males aged 40 to 61years were studied retrospectively. Glucose and lipid parameters and serum creatinine, serum uric acid were measured on fully automated analyser using standard reagent kits. Serum prostate specific antigen was measured by TOSOH-AIA-360, immunoassay method.Results: Correlations between different biochemical parameters were determined. Prostate specific antigen were negatively correlated with HDL (r= -0.22, p= 0.03) in age group 40-61 years. At the same fasting blood sugar were correlated positively(r= 0.34, p= 0.02 ) with prostate specific antigen in age group 51-60 years , but not in age group 40-50 years.Conclusion: We concluded that serum HDL (high density lipoprotein) was negatively associated and FBS (fasting blood sugar) was positively associated with risk of prostate cancer. We also suggest that in men of this age group a low HDL level should not be ignored while assessing prostate cancer risk especially if accompanied with an elevated FBS level even in the upper normal range.

Plasma‐treated flammulina velutipes‐derived extract showed anticancer potential in human breast cancer cells

Natural products with medicinal properties are among alternative therapies of interest due to their high body tolerance. We aimed to determine whether nonthermal gas plasma could enhance the medicinal value of Flammulina velutipes mushrooms. Generated gas plasma was characterized by its emission spectrum in ambient air, pH, temperature, and H2O2 and NOx concentrations after exposure for various periods. Phenolic and flavonoid contents in the extracts were measured using antioxidant assays and Fourier transform infrared and ultraviolet‐visible spectroscopy. We analyzed the effects of the plasma‐treated mushroom‐derived extracts against breast carcinoma using the MCF7 and MDA‐MB231 cell lines. The extracts significantly and concentration dependently inhibited the growth of breast cancer cells without inducing toxicity in normal MCF10A cells, and induced apoptosis via oxidative stress, evidenced by DNA damage (γ‐ H2AX foci formation), and increased the population of MCF7 breast cancer cells arrested in the G2/M phase of the cell cycle. The extracts also induced mitochondrion‐mediated apoptosis of MCF7 cells through cytochrome c release and caspase cleavage activity. The plasma improved the biological activity of mushrooms by increasing their phenolic compounds that prevented the growth of breast cancer cells in vitro. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Brief communication: The northwest Himalaya towns slipping towards potential disaster

The NW Himalaya (India) has been one of the most affected terrains of the Himalaya, subject to frequent disastrous landslides owing to active tectonics and multiple precipitation sources. This article focuses on two towns (Joshimath and Bhatwari) of Uttarakhand in the NW Himalaya, which have been witnessing subsidence for decades. Up until 9 January 2023, Joshimath had witnessed widespread cracks in more than 500 houses, which has prompted social unrest in the region. The hillslopes surrounding both towns comprise highly jointed gneisses with schistose interlayer rock mass. Both towns have subsidences and holes in the road, broken retaining walls, and displaced boulders, and the houses have cracks in the walls and holes. Recently, such slope instability phenomena have increased, which is leading to social movements in the region seeking government action such as possible evacuation and rehabilitation. The present study used a continuum-modelling-based slope stability simulation to determine the response of these hillslopes under various loading conditions: gravity, rainfall, building load, domestic discharge, and seismic load. Results revealed that the displacement in these hillslopes might reach up to 20–25 m, which will further aggravate the situation. The occurrence of frequent extreme rainfall in these towns and three major earthquakes, which occurred on 1 September 1803 (Mw 7.8), 20 October 1991 (Mw 6.8), and 29 March 1999 (Mw 6.6), having a hypocentral distance less than 30 km makes such a study more viable for decision making

Website Redesign with Animation

To analyse the previous website which means the original website. Trying to make more attractive and interesting. Methods: Analyse the old website. A website redesign shouldn’t just change the overall look of your website. It should enhance the ways in which it functions. Find out what is working on the current website. Building the website design plan. Added strong visual features and elements. Findings: website overall feels outdated i.e., make it more attractive and add some animated clip. Applications: the study highlighted various issues, redesign a IBM company website and you’re going to see that with very small tweaks to the layout and composition and have a dramatic impact on the webs design. The first thing notice is I’m overwhelmed, right in terms of graphic design terms of hierarchies there are so many things here they just try to grab attention, there is a image, styling so that grab my attention so many things are competing for my attention that just overwhelmed so, this is not a good user experience. First thing that that we were thinking about even before trying to get into what we do they even do here on the website is how can we simplify what’s going on here how can we create very clear hierarchies. We were thinking about how we can simplify this visually. A lot of times there’s so many things we can do here such as illustration, 3D rendering of this, do custom photography there’s so many ways to approach this. We can present it in a very interesting wa

Casamino acids facilitate the secretion of recombinant dengue virus serotype-3 envelope domain III in Pichia pastoris

Background: Dengue is a viral disease spread to humans by mosquitoes. Notably, there are four serotypes of Dengue Viruses (DENV) that places ∼40% of the global population at risk of infection. However, lack of a suitable drug or a preventive vaccine exacerbates the matter further. Envelope Domain-III (EDIII) antigen of Dengue Virus (DENV) has garnered much attention as a promising vaccine candidate for dengue, in addition to its use as a diagnostic intermediate. Hence developing a method for efficient production of high quality recombinant EDIII is important for research and industrial purpose. Results: In this work, a Pichia pastoris system was optimized for the secretory over-expression of DENV serotype-3 EDIII under the control of methanol inducible AOX1 promoter. Temperature alone had a significant impact upon the amount of secretory EDIII, with 2.5-fold increase upon reducing the induction temperature from 30 to 20 °C. However surprisingly, supplementation of culture media with Casamino Acids (CA), further augmented secretory EDIII titer, with a concomitant drop of intracellular EDIII levels at both temperatures. Though, reduction in intracellular retention of EDIII was more prominent at 20°C than 30°C. This suggests that CA supplementation facilitates overexpressing P. pastoris cells to secrete more EDIII by reducing the proportion retained intracellularly. Moreover, a bell-shaped correlation was observed between CA concentration and secretory EDIII titer. The maximum EDIII expression level of 187 mg/L was achieved under shake flask conditions with induction at 20°C in the presence of 1% CA. The overall increase in EDIII titer was ∼9-fold compared to un-optimized conditions. Notably, mouse immune-sera, generated using this purified EDIII antigen, efficiently neutralized the DENV. Conclusions: The strategy described herein could enable fulfilling the mounting demand for recombinant EDIII as well as lay direction to future studies on secretory expression of recombinant proteins in P. pastoris with CA as a media supplement

Enhanced cell density cultivation and rapid expression-screening of recombinant Pichia pastoris clones in microscale

Cultivation of yeast Pichia pastoris in the microtiter plate, for optimisation of culture conditions, and expression screening of transformants has gained significance in recent years. However, in the microtiter plate, it has been challenging to attain cell densities similar to well-aerated shake-flask culture, due to the poor mixing resulting in oxygen limitation. To solve this problem, we investigated the influence of multiple cultivation parameters on P. pastoris cell growth, including the architecture of 96-deepwell plate (96-DWP), shaking throw diameter, shaking frequency, culture volume/well, and media composition. In the optimised conditions, a cell density of OD600 ~50 (dry cell weight ~13 g/L) with >99% cell viability was achieved in the casamino acids supplemented buffered-minimal-media in 300 to 1000 μl culture volume/well. We have devised a simplified method for coating of the culture supernatant on the polystyrene surface for immunoassay. Clones for secretory expression of envelope domain III of dengue virus serotype-1 under the control of inducible and constitutive promoter were screened using the developed method. Described microscale cultivation strategy can be used for rapid high-throughput screening of P. pastoris clones, media optimization, and high-throughput recombinant protein production. The knowledge gained through this work may also be applied, to other suspension cultures, with some modifications.</p

A Review of Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome

Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome (VHL) is a familial neoplastic condition seen in approximately 1 in 36,000 live births. It is caused by germline mutations of the tumor suppressor gene VHL, located on the short arm of chromosome 3. While the majority of the affected individuals have a positive family history, up to 20% of cases arise from de novo mutations. VHL syndrome is characterized by the presence of benign and malignant tumors affecting the central nervous system, kidneys, adrenals, pancreas, and reproductive organs. Common manifestations include hemangioblastomas of the brain, spinal cord, and retina; pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma; renal cell carcinoma; pancreatic cysts and neuroendocrine tumors; and endolymphatic sac tumors. Diagnosis of VHL is prompted by clinical suspicion and confirmed by molecular testing. Management of VHL patients is complex and multidisciplinary. Routine genetic testing and surveillance using various diagnostic techniques are used to help monitor disease progression and implement treatment options. Despite recent advances in clinical diagnosis and management, life expectancy for VHL patients remains low at 40–52 years. This article provides an overview of the major clinical, histological, and radiological findings, as well as treatment modalities