Development of Broodlac Placement-cum-Removal Tool

Lac cultivation involves six major operations viz., pruning of lac host tree, selection of broodlac and bundle making, broodlac placement on host tree, used up broodlac removal, lac crop harvesting and lac scraping. The broodlac placement on the lac host tree is one of the important operations in lac cultivation, In traditional method, farmers use bamboo pole to hang broodlac stick on the branch of lac host trees. When broodlac stick hangs on the branch of the host tree, very small area of broodlac stick comes in contact with the branch of lac host tree. As a result tiny lac insects emerging from the broodlac gets narrow path for travel to the branches of the host tree in search of suitable shoot to settle down and start new life cycle. In improved method, farmers climb on the tree and tie prepared broodlac bundle on the branch of the host tree, just below pruning point. This method is laborious and time consuming. Therefore, a simple, easy to fabricate and low cost, broodlac placement-cum-removal tool was developed

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Not AvailableCharacterization of New MHC (Bubu) -DQB Allele in BuffaloNot Availabl

Development of Modified Power Operated Lac Scraper

Lac is the hardened resin secreted by the tiny lac insect (Kerria lacca Kerr). It is the only resin of animal origin. Lac insect S thrive only on certain trees called lac hosts. Butea monospenna (Fa/as), Zizyphus mauritiana (Ber) and Schleichera oleosa (Kusum) are the major lac hosts used for lac cultivation in India. India is the largest producer of lac. Indian lac is considered to be the best in quality. Apart from India, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam and China also produce lac. In India about 3 million farmers mostly tribal are involved in the lac cultivation spread over states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattishgarn, Maharastra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Orissa. Lac cultivation involves five major operations i.e., pruning, inoculation, used up broodlac (phunki) removal, harvesting and lac scraping. Mostly lac cultivation operations are carried out manually with the aid of locally manufactured traditional tools. Manual lac scraping is very slow and a tedious process. In one of the method farmers sit on the ground in a group and scrap lac with the traditional tools like small scraping knife (dauli) and sickle. In other method, farmers remove lac encrustation by beating lac sticks with bamboo stick. One person scrapes, 10-15kg of lac in a day. As scraping is done on the ground, unwanted foreign materials like sand, soil, wooden twigs etc. find their way into scraped lac, fetching less price to farmers and creating problems during lac processing in industry. In order to increase the output and reduce the drudgery of lac farmers a simple power operated lac scraper was designed and developed modifying the earlier developed machine. In the earlier machine V-belt and V-pulley type speed reduction mechanism in two steps was used, which made machine voluminous. To make the machine compact, a gearbox instead of V-belt and V-pulley was used to reduce the 1450 rpm speed at motor shaft to 30-40 rpm at scraping roller shaft. Machine consisted of scraping rollers, separating screen, feed hopper, drive mechanism and machine frame. The machine scrapes lac under action of shear and compressive forces. One person operates the machine and scrapes 10.6 kg lac stick in an hour with scraping efficiency of 92 per cent. The machine gets power from 0.5 H.P. single phase AC motor. The capacity of the developed machine is more than the capacity of earlier developed Hand Operated and Pedal Operated Lac Scraper and at par as compared with Power Operated Lac Scraper. It is suitable for villages having electricity

Craniofacial Computerized Tomography Analysis of the midface of patients with repaired complete unilateral cleft lip and palate

Introduction: Computerized tomography (CT) makes regional anatomy available as a series of cross-sectional axial images that can be analyzed unobstructed by other anatomic features. In this study, we aimed to analyze the maxillary dentoalveolar and deeper structures in patients with surgically repaired complete unilateral cleft lip and palate (CLP) and to investigate whether significant asymmetry existed in the deeper midfacial structures, using axial CT. Methods: Axial CT scans of 15 children (7 boys, 8 girls; mean age, 11.59 ± 1.34 years) with repaired complete unilateral CLP were acquired parallel to Reid's base line. Specific landmarks applicable for CT were defined and plotted to undertake a comprehensive Craniofacial CT Analysis of the midface. Twenty-six pairs of transverse and sagittal measurements made to a cranial base midsagittal construct and interspinosum fit line, respectively, were compared by using the paired t test. Results: Significant reduction of 19.05% in the nasal chamber width (2.54 ± 1.49 mm; P <0.001), more distal position of the bony alar base (2.28 ± 1.71 mm; P <0.001), and the sagittal position of the most prominent anterolateral point on the maxillary alveolar process (1.62 ± 1.85 mm; P <0.01) were noted on the cleft side. The lower half of the bony nasal septum was consistently deviated toward the cleft side, and the nasal tip was deviated to the noncleft side in 60% of the subjects. The anterior nasal spine was deviated to the noncleft side in 73.3% of the subjects and a mean deviation of the anterior nasal spine of 2.84 ± 3.90 mm toward the noncleft side was measured. Significant sagittal and transverse asymmetry in deeper midfacial regions was not observed. Unilateral dental-arch collapse was observed in 73.3% of the sample, bilateral collapse in 20%, and no collapse in 6.7%. The soft-tissue support of the alveolar margins of the cleft did not show significant differences between the cleft and noncleft sides. Conclusions: CT is an excellent method for quantifying surface and deep craniofacial structures. Most asymmetries and deformities in the 10- to 14-year-old patients with repaired complete unilateral CLP we studied were in the dentoalveolar area near the cleft and the nasal chamber and not in the deeper regions of the maxillary complex

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Recent Advances in Pharmacotherapy of Glaucoma

Glaucoma is a slow progressive degeneration of the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) and the optic nerve axons, leading to irreversible blindness if left undiagnosed and untreated. Although increased intraocular pressure is a major risk factor of glaucoma, other factors include increased glutamate levels, alterations in nitric oxide (NO) metabolism, vascular alterations and oxidative damage caused by reactive oxygen species. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness globally, accounting for 12.3% of the total blindness. Glaucoma has been broadly classified as primary or secondary open-angle or angle-closure glaucoma. The primary goal in management of glaucoma is to prevent the risk factor, especially elevated intraocular pressure (IOP), using medications, laser therapy or conventional surgery. The first-line treatment of glaucoma usually begins with the use of a topical selective or nonselective blocker or a prostaglandin analog. Second-line drugs of choice include alpha-agonists and topical carbonic anhydrase inhibitors. Cholinergic agonists are considered third-line treatment options. When a single therapy is not sufficient to lower the IOP, a combination therapy is indicated. To enhance the patient compliance, drug delivery systems like electronic devices, ocular inserts, tansdermal and mechanical drug delivery systems have been developed. Use of viscoelastic agents in ophthalmic formulations, emulsions and soluble ophthalmic drug inserts (SODI) enhance patience compliance and ocular drug delivery in patients in long-term glaucoma therapy. For patients who do not respond to antiglaucoma medications, laser trabeculoplasty and incisional surgery are recommended. Several nutrients and botanicals hold promise for the treatment of glaucoma, but most studies are preliminary, and larger, controlled studies are required. Future directions for the development of a novel therapy glaucoma may target glutamate inhibition, NMDA receptor blockade, exogenously applied neurotrophins, open channel blockers, antioxidants, protease inhibitors and gene therapy

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Not AvailableEvaluation of geostatistical tools was used for assessing top soil variability in Gopalapur micro-watershed, Gundlupet taluk, Chamarajanagar district, Karnataka, India to explore a scientific basis for predicting soil properties from unknown locations and to derive site-specific nutrient management strategies. The study area is a part of Central Karnataka Plateau, have hot, moist semi-arid with medium to deep Red loamy soils, low AWC and LGP 120-150 days. The Grid survey at 250 × 250 m interval was carried out and collected 97 georeferenced surface soil samples (0-15 cm) from five land use systems such as agriculture, scrubland, forest, grassland and fallow land. Three interpolation methods such as ordinary kriging, inverse distance weighting (IDW) and spline were used to generate spatial distribution of eleven soil variables viz. pH, EC, organic carbon, available K2O, P2O5, sulphur/boron and DTPA extractable Cu, Fe, Mn and Zn. Experimental variograms were fitted with the exponential, spherical, Gaussian and linear models using weighted least squares. The model with the smallest residual sum of squares (RSS) was further interrogated to find the number of neighbours that returned the best cross-validation result. The choice of the exponent value for IDW and splines as well as the number of the closest neighbours was decided from the root mean squared error (RMSE) statistic, obtained from a cross-validation procedure. On this experimental field, ordinary kriging performed best for topsoil and exponential method of kriging gave the best results of interpolation with the smallest residual sum of squares (RSS). We conclude that ordinary kriging is a superior method with the least RMSE and lowest RSS value for interpolation of topsoil spatial distribution.Not Availabl

Polymorphism in Exon-40 of FASN Gene in Lesser known Buffalo breeds of India

Present study was aimed to discover the single nucleotide variation present in exon 40 region of the Fatty Acid Synthase (FASN) gene. FASN plays a central role in de novo lipogenesis in mammals and variation in this enzyme may affect economic traits including fatty acid composition of buffalo milk. A total of 80 DNA samples in two riverine buffalo breeds namely, Gojri and Chhattisgarhi were screened using Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP). FASN gene was found to be polymorphic with an adenine to guanine transition. Three types of genotypes, viz. AA, AG and GG were observed in the studied breeds. Allele A was found to be more frequent than G allele. All the genotypes showed almost the same frequency across the breeds, indicating that there is absence of selection for FASN gene in lesser known buffalo breeds of India. The study will augment the information available and can be applied in future studies to determine the role of bovine FASN gene as a candidate gene marker for a milk-fat content

Single-cell transcriptional analysis to uncover regulatory circuits driving cell fate decisions in early mouse development

Motivation: Transcriptional regulatory networks controlling cell fate decisions in mammalian embryonic development remain elusive despite a long time of research. The recent emergence of single-cell RNA profiling technology raises hope for new discovery. Although experimental works have obtained intriguing insights into the mouse early development, a holistic and systematic view is still missing. Mathematical models of cell fates tend to be concept-based, not designed to learn from real data. To elucidate the regulatory mechanisms behind cell fate decisions, it is highly desirable to synthesize the data-driven and knowledge-driven modeling approaches.Results: We propose a novel method that integrates the structure of a cell lineage tree with transcriptional patterns from single-cell data. This method adopts probabilistic Boolean network (PBN) for network modeling, and genetic algorithm as search strategy. Guided by the ‘directionality’ of cell development along branches of the cell lineage tree, our method is able to accurately infer the regulatory circuits from single-cell gene expression data, in a holistic way. Applied on the single-cell transcriptional data of mouse preimplantation development, our algorithm outperforms conventional methods of network inference. Given the network topology, our method can also identify the operational interactions in the gene regulatory network (GRN), corresponding to specific cell fate determination. This is one of the first attempts to infer GRNs from single-cell transcriptional data, incorporating dynamics of cell development along a cell lineage tree.Availability and implementation: Implementation of our algorithm is available from the authors upon request

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Not AvailableGenetic parameters for body weight (BW) at day old (0), 2,4,6 weeks and shank length (SL) at 6 weeks of age were estimated in a population of 2989 full sib progenies of Vanaraja male line. Pooled least square means for BW at 0 day, 2, 4 and 6 weeks and SL at 6 weeks of age were 38.74±0.001, 133.32±0.006, 316.72±0.02 and 565.67±0.03 g and 70.85±0.002 mm, respectively. The heritability estimates for all the traits are low in magnitude irrespective of variance component of estimation. Genetic correlation from S+D component of variance and co variance were positive and moderate to high in magnitude for BW0 with other traits. Genetic correlation between BW4 and BW6 was positive and high in magnitude, irrespective of variance component used for the estimation. Correlation between SL and BW 4 and BW6 were positive and high in magnitude. The high correlation co-efficient of BW6 with SL suggest that selection for SL may simultaneously improve the six weeks body weight in the pure line.Not Availabl