U.S. Patent Literature Survey of Agrobacterium-Mediated Transformation of Sweet Potato (Ipomoea Batatas)

A team of researchers and patent information scientists at Franklin Pierce Law Center were asked to evaluate the patent and literature landscape related to the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation in sweet potato with respect to the U.S. patents and patent applications. This report provides a patent landscape of the Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of sweet potato. The report includes the applicable methods of transformation and has also included certain patents and patent applications which claim a transformed plant by virtue of these methods. In certain cases, the claim structure covers Agrobacterium-mediated transformation technology via system and composition of matter claims and not the more prevalent method claims. Sweet potato plant (Ipomoea batatas) is adaptable to a broad range of agroecological conditions and fits in low input agriculture. It is highly productive even under adverse farming conditions. Sweet potato is grown in more than 100 countries as a valuable source of food, animal feed and industrial raw material. It is a staple crop in many South East Asian and African countries. Traditional plant breeding has contributed to the improvement of sweet potato, especially in developed countries such as the U.S.A. and Japan. Because of the biological complexities of sweet potato, sexual hybridization strategies have not been very effective in developing improved cultivars. Confidential Therefore, biotechnological tools, such as gene transfer, are very attractive in sweet potato improvement, as they enable direct introduction of desirable genes from other sources into preadapted cultivars

ISOLATION OF POTENT HYDROCARBON DEGRADING MICRO-ORGANISMS AND ITS APPLICATION IN BIOREMEDIATION

Objective: Oil spillage has become a global environmental problem as its constituents are toxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic. Natural bioremediation is the only eco-friendly solution to resist its devastating environmental and economic damage. Microbes are used to change harmful substances to non-toxic substances. The current work focuses on the performance of different bacterial species in degrading the oil components like benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)s.Methods: Sample was collected from different areas affected by the oil spill in Mumbai that is from the shore of Juhu, Dadar and Manori in form of tar balls and was enriched and isolated on Bushnell and Hass's media containing 1% crude oil as a sole source of carbon. The potent isolates were then identified by standard biochemical tests referring to Bergey's Manual.Results: Two partially identified strains were Pseudomonas flavescens and Bacillus sp. biofilms of Pseudomonas spp. was prepared on glass matrix to determine its oil degrading efficiency. An indigenous consortium was developed by the assembly of seven isolates of oil-degrading bacteria.Conclusion: The developed consortium was able to degrade crude oil completely within 4 d. The obtained isolates seemed to have the potential for bioremediation of oil contaminated soil and tar balls which was justified by setting up of a bioreactor

Luminance contrast has little influence on the spread of object-based attention

AbstractWe direct our attention to those visual stimuli that are relevant to our behavioral goals. Some of the visual stimuli that surround us are represented more strongly, because they have a higher luminance contrast. However, selective attention also boosts the representation of visual stimuli. It is not yet well understood how attention and contrast interact. Some previous theories proposed that attentional effects are strongest at low contrast, others that they are strongest at high contrast and yet others that the effects of selective attention are largely independent of contrast. In the present study, we investigated the interaction between selective attention and luminance contrast with a contour-grouping task that provides a sensitive measure of the spread of object-based attention, with delays of several hundreds of milliseconds. We find that the spread of object-based attention is largely independent of contrast, and that subjects experience little difficulty in grouping low-contrast contour elements in the presence of other contour elements with a much higher contrast. The results imply that object-based attention and contrast have largely independent effects on visual processing

EFFECT OF FORCED EXERCISE (TAP STRESS) ON DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER AND EFFICACY OF ABHRAK BHASMA AS DIETARY SUPPLEMENT.

 Objective: Generation of reactive oxygen species and other oxidants as an outcome of aerobic respiration has been well documented. During boosted muscular activities/exercise, there is an increase in the rate of respiration and subsequent generation of oxidants; for which, organisms possess various defense systems. There is, however, paucity of reports on the effect of forced exercise in Drosophila melanogaster.Methods: The present investigation reports a method for inducing forced exercise, the tap stress,†in D. melanogaster. This method takes advantage of the natural tendency of Drosophila flies to climb/fly upward in a cylindrical tube. Simplicity of assembly, ease of experimentation and cost effectiveness are some of the key advantages of this method. Tap stress has been assumed to manifest through the generation of oxidative stress, thus, parameters indicative of oxidative stress have been evaluated.Results: The results indicate that tap stress induces oxidative stress mainly by influencing the non-catalytic components; total reduced glutathione (GSH), GSH: oxidized glutathione ratio, and free radical scavenging capacity. The catalytic components (superoxide dismutase, and catalase), on the contrary, remain largely unaffected. Abhrak bhasma (AB) influences total GSH content with an increase by about 38±21%, while flies on control diet register a decrease in total GSH content by 34±7% during tap stress. Feeding flies on AB, specifically, show a prominent increase in the transcription levels of cap n†collar C, heat shock protein 70 and catalase genes (>1.5 fold).Conclusion: Overall, dietary supplement of AB and ascorbic acid benefits Drosophila flies in the management of oxidative stress induced through tap stress.Â

Effects of Dietary Protein and Lipid Levels on Growth and Body Composition of Silver Dollar (Metynnis schreitmuelleri) Fry

Abstract The aims of this study were to determine the effects of different levels of protein and lipid on the growth and body composition of fry of the silver dollar, Metynnis schreitmuelleri (Ahl). The fry were first fed diets containing 25, 35, 45, or 55% protein to determine the optimum protein level. The best growth, body composition, protein efficiency ratio, and food conversion ratio were obtained with the 35% protein diet. The fry were next fed diets containing 35% protein and 0, 3, 6, 9, or 12% lipid. The best growth, body composition, protein efficiency ratio, and food conversion ratio occurred with the diet containing 35% protein and 6% lipid

Vamsa: Automated Provenance Tracking in Data Science Scripts

There has recently been a lot of ongoing research in the areas of fairness, bias and explainability of machine learning (ML) models due to the self-evident or regulatory requirements of various ML applications. We make the following observation: All of these approaches require a robust understanding of the relationship between ML models and the data used to train them. In this work, we introduce the ML provenance tracking problem: the fundamental idea is to automatically track which columns in a dataset have been used to derive the features/labels of an ML model. We discuss the challenges in capturing such information in the context of Python, the most common language used by data scientists. We then present Vamsa, a modular system that extracts provenance from Python scripts without requiring any changes to the users' code. Using 26K real data science scripts, we verify the effectiveness of Vamsa in terms of coverage, and performance. We also evaluate Vamsa's accuracy on a smaller subset of manually labeled data. Our analysis shows that Vamsa's precision and recall range from 90.4% to 99.1% and its latency is in the order of milliseconds for average size scripts. Drawing from our experience in deploying ML models in production, we also present an example in which Vamsa helps automatically identify models that are affected by data corruption issues

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

Measurement of the t t-bar production cross section in the dilepton channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The t t-bar production cross section (sigma[t t-bar]) is measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV in data collected by the CMS experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.3 inverse femtobarns. The measurement is performed in events with two leptons (electrons or muons) in the final state, at least two jets identified as jets originating from b quarks, and the presence of an imbalance in transverse momentum. The measured value of sigma[t t-bar] for a top-quark mass of 172.5 GeV is 161.9 +/- 2.5 (stat.) +5.1/-5.0 (syst.) +/- 3.6(lumi.) pb, consistent with the prediction of the standard model.Comment: Replaced with published version. Included journal reference and DO

Combined search for the quarks of a sequential fourth generation

Results are presented from a search for a fourth generation of quarks produced singly or in pairs in a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011. A novel strategy has been developed for a combined search for quarks of the up and down type in decay channels with at least one isolated muon or electron. Limits on the mass of the fourth-generation quarks and the relevant Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix elements are derived in the context of a simple extension of the standard model with a sequential fourth generation of fermions. The existence of mass-degenerate fourth-generation quarks with masses below 685 GeV is excluded at 95% confidence level for minimal off-diagonal mixing between the third- and the fourth-generation quarks. With a mass difference of 25 GeV between the quark masses, the obtained limit on the masses of the fourth-generation quarks shifts by about +/- 20 GeV. These results significantly reduce the allowed parameter space for a fourth generation of fermions.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO