Dietary Diversity and Its Relationship with Nutritional Status among Adolescents and Adults in Rural India

Dietary diversity is associated with household or individual food availability and intake of nutrients from different food groups and is an important component of nutritional outcome. This study examined the Nutrient Adequacy Ratio (NAR) and the Mean Adequacy Ratio (MAR) of three dietary diversity indices and their relationship with the nutritional status of adolescents and adults in rural regions of two states in India, Wardha district in Maharashtra and Koraput district in Odisha, in 2014. Individual dietary diversity was calculated using 24-hour diet recall (FS24hr) data and household dietary diversity was measured with food frequency data using Berry’s index (DDI) and food scores (FSFFQ). The nutritional status of individuals was assessed using anthropometric indices. The diets in both locations were cereal dominated. It was observed that 51% of adolescent boys and 27% of adolescent girls had ‘thinness’ and stunting. The prevalence of undernutrition was higher among adult women (48%) than adult men (36%). The mean diversity indices were FS24hr of 8, DDI of 89–90 and FSFFQ of 64–66 in the two locations. The FS24hr was found to be positively correlated with the NAR of all nutrients while DDI and FSFFQ were correlated with seven and six nutrients, respectively. The DDI and FS24hr showed an association with MAR if the two locations were combined together. Sensitivity and specificity analysis showed that FS24hr gave more true positives than false positives and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve was 0.68, implying that this measure truly differentiates individuals having low dietary diversity with low MAR from those with low dietary diversity and a high MAR. All three measures of dietary diversity showed a linear association with the nutritional outcomes of adults, while in the adolescent group only DDI showed a relationship. It is concluded that 24-hour diet recall is a good measure for studying the relationship between dietary diversity and nutritional status in adults

Structural basis for the cooperative DNA recognition by Smad4 MH1 dimers

Smad proteins form multimeric complexes consisting of the ‘common partner’ Smad4 and receptor regulated R-Smads on clustered DNA binding sites. Deciphering how pathway specific Smad complexes multimerize on DNA to regulate gene expression is critical for a better understanding of the cis-regulatory logic of TGF-β and BMP signaling. To this end, we solved the crystal structure of the dimeric Smad4 MH1 domain bound to a palindromic Smad binding element. Surprisingly, the Smad4 MH1 forms a constitutive dimer on the SBE DNA without exhibiting any direct protein–protein interactions suggesting a DNA mediated indirect readout mechanism. However, the R-Smads Smad1, Smad2 and Smad3 homodimerize with substantially decreased efficiency despite pronounced structural similarities to Smad4. Therefore, intricate variations in the DNA structure induced by different Smads and/or variant energetic profiles likely contribute to their propensity to dimerize on DNA. Indeed, competitive binding assays revealed that the Smad4/R-Smad heterodimers predominate under equilibrium conditions while R-Smad homodimers are least favored. Together, we present the structural basis for DNA recognition by Smad4 and demonstrate that Smad4 constitutively homo- and heterodimerizes on DNA in contrast to its R-Smad partner proteins by a mechanism independent of direct protein contacts

Are Foreign Firms Privileged By Their Host Governments? Evidence From The 2000 World Business Environment Survey

Using the data from World Business Environment Survey (WBES) on over 10,000 firms across eighty one countries, this paper finds preliminary evidence that foreign firms enjoy significant regulatory advantages - as perceived by the firms themselves - over domestic firms. The findings on regulatory advantages of foreign firms hold with a variety of alternative measures of regulations and with or without firm- and country-level attributes and industry and country controls. There is also evidence that foreign firms' regulatory advantages are especially substantial vis-a-vis the politically weak domestic firms. Furthermore, the regulatory advantages of foreign firms appear stronger in corrupt countries than in non-corrupt countries

Clocked Latch

This paper enumerates low power design of BILBO(Built-In- Logic-Block-Observer) using Basic 5T-TSPC clocked latch and 5T-TSPC(MTCMOS) clocked latch.The clocked latches are basic building block to design the BILBO.The clocked latches consumes more power in the total power consumption of the BILBO.The power efficient 5T-TSPC(MTCMOS) clocked latch is designed from the Basic 5T-TSPC clocked latch. The BILBO is designed by using both Basic 5T-TSPC clocked latch and 5T-TSPC(MTCMOS) clocked latch.The design of BILBO by using 5T-TSPC(MTCMOS) consumes less power.The performance of BILBO is analyzed in terms of NumberofTransistors(NT),NumberOfClockedTransistors(NC),Power(P),Area(A)

Tetracycline-controlled (TetON) gene expression system for the smut fungus Ustilago maydis

Ustilago maydis is a biotrophic phytopathogenic fungus that causes corn smut disease. As a well-established model system, U. maydis is genetically fully accessible with large omics datasets available and subject to various biological questions ranging from DNA-repair, RNA-transport, and protein secretion to disease biology. For many genetic approaches, tight control of transgene regulation is important. Here we established an optimised version of the Tetracycline-ON (TetON) system for U. maydis. We demonstrate the Tetracycline concentration-dependent expression of fluorescent protein transgenes and the system’s suitability for the induced expression of the toxic protein BCL2 Associated X-1 (Bax1). The Golden Gate compatible vector system contains a native minimal promoter from the mating factor a-1 encoding gene, mfa with ten copies of the tet-regulated operator (tetO) and a codon optimised Tet-repressor (tetR*) which is translationally fused to the native transcriptional corepressor Mql1 (UMAG_05501). The metabolism-independent transcriptional regulator system is functional both, in liquid culture as well as on solid media in the presence of the inducer and can become a useful tool for toxin-antitoxin studies, identification of antifungal proteins, and to study functions of toxic gene products in Ustilago maydis

Enhancing network lifespan in wireless sensor networks using deep learning based Graph Neural Network

peer reviewedInadequate energy of sensors is one of the most significant challenges in the development of a reliable wireless sensor network (WSN) that can withstand the demands of growing WSN applications. Implementing a sleep-wake scheduling scheme while assigning data collection and sensing chores to a dominant group of awake sensors while all other nodes are in a sleep state seems to be a potential way for preserving the energy of these sensor nodes. When the starting energy of the nodes changes from one node to another, this issue becomes more difficult to solve. The notion of a dominant set-in graph has been used in a variety of situations. The search for the smallest dominant set in a big graph might be time-consuming. Specifically, we address two issues: first, identifying the smallest possible dominant set, and second, extending the network lifespan by saving the energy of the sensors. To overcome the first problem, we design and develop a deep learning-based Graph Neural Network (DL-GNN). The GNN training method and back-propagation approach were used to train a GNN consisting of three networks such as transition network, bias network, and output network, to determine the minimal dominant set in the created graph. As a second step, we proposed a hybrid fixed-variant search (HFVS) method that considers minimal dominant sets as input and improves overall network lifespan by swapping nodes of minimal dominating sets. We prepared simulated networks with various network configurations and modeled different WSNs as undirected graphs. To get better convergence, the different values of state vector dimensions of the input vectors are investigated. When the state vector dimension is 3 or 4, minimum dominant set is recognized with high accuracy. The paper also presents comparative analyses between the proposed HFVS algorithm and other existing algorithms for extending network lifespan and discusses the trade-offs that exist between them. Lifespan of wireless sensor network, which is based on the dominant set method, is greatly increased by the techniques we have proposed