Relationship between high temperature and formation of chalkiness and their effects on quality of rice

Occurrence of chalkiness in rice is attributed to genetic and environmental factors, especially high temperature (HT). Te HT induces heat stress, which in turn compromises many grain qualities, especially transparency. Chalkiness in rice is commonly studied together with other quality traits such as amylose content, gel consistency, and protein storage. In addition to the fundamental QTLs, some other QTLs have been identifed which accelerate chalkiness occurrence under HT condition. In this review, some of the relatively stable chalkiness, amylose content, and gel consistency related QTLs have been presented well. Genetically, HT efect on chalkiness is explained by the location of certain chalkiness gene in the vicinity of high-temperature responsive genes. With regard to stable QTL distribution and availability of potential material resources, there is still feasibility to find out novel stable QTLs related to chalkiness under HT condition. A better understanding of those achievements is essential to develop new rice varieties with a reduced chalky grain percentage. Therefore, we propose the pyramiding of relatively stable and nonallelic QTLs controlling low chalkiness endosperm into adaptable rice varieties as pragmatic approach to mitigate HT effec

Natural law, non-voluntary euthanasia, and public policy

© 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited. Natural Law philosophy asserts that there are universally binding and universally evident principles that can be determined to guide the actions of persons. Moreover, many of these principles have been enshrined in both statute and common law, thus ensuring their saliency for staff and institutions charged with palliative care. The authors examine the often emotive and politicized matter of (non-voluntary) euthanasia – acts or omissions made with the intent of causing or hastening death – with reference to Natural Law philosophy. This leads us to propose a number of important public policy remedies to ensure dignity in dying for the patient, and their associates

Deep learning for clustering of multivariate clinical patient trajectories with missing values

BACKGROUND: Precision medicine requires a stratification of patients by disease presentation that is sufficiently informative to allow for selecting treatments on a per-patient basis. For many diseases, such as neurological disorders, this stratification problem translates into a complex problem of clustering multivariate and relatively short time series because (i) these diseases are multifactorial and not well described by single clinical outcome variables and (ii) disease progression needs to be monitored over time. Additionally, clinical data often additionally are hindered by the presence of many missing values, further complicating any clustering attempts. FINDINGS: The problem of clustering multivariate short time series with many missing values is generally not well addressed in the literature. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based method to address this issue, variational deep embedding with recurrence (VaDER). VaDER relies on a Gaussian mixture variational autoencoder framework, which is further extended to (i) model multivariate time series and (ii) directly deal with missing values. We validated VaDER by accurately recovering clusters from simulated and benchmark data with known ground truth clustering, while varying the degree of missingness. We then used VaDER to successfully stratify patients with Alzheimer disease and patients with Parkinson disease into subgroups characterized by clinically divergent disease progression profiles. Additional analyses demonstrated that these clinical differences reflected known underlying aspects of Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease. CONCLUSIONS: We believe our results show that VaDER can be of great value for future efforts in patient stratification, and multivariate time-series clustering in general

Increased yield performance of mutation induced soybean genotypes at varied agro-ecological conditions

In soybean breeding program, continuous selection pressure on traits response to yield created a genetic bottleneck for improvements of soybean through hybridization breeding technique. Therefore an initiative was taken to developed high yielding soybean variety applying mutation breeding techniques at Plant Breeding Division, Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture (BINA), Bangladesh. Locally available popular cultivar BARI Soybean-5 was used as a parent material and subjected to five different doses of Gamma ray using Co60. In respect to seed yield and yield attributing characters, twelve true breed mutants were selected from M4 generation. High values of heritability and genetic advance with high genotypic coefficient of variance (GCV) for plant height, branch number and pod number were considered as favorable attributes for soybean improvement that ensure expected yield. The mutant SBM-18 obtained from 250Gy provided stable yield performance at diversified environments. It provided maximum seed yield of 3056 kg ha-1 with highest number of pods plant-1 (56). The National Seed Board of Bangladesh (NSB) eventually approved SBM-18 and registered it as a new soybean variety named ‘Binasoybean-5’ for largescale planting because of its superior stability in various agro-ecological zones and consistent yield performance

Antidepressant, anxiolytic, antipyretic, and thrombolytic profiling of methanol extract of the aerial part of Piper nigrum

Piper nigrum L. also called black pepper is popular for its numerous uses. The present research is designed to investigate the pharmacological potential of methanol extract of Piper nigrum (MEPN). The antidepressant investigation was performed by using both in vivo forced swimming test (FST) and tail suspension test (TST) methods while the anxiolytic research by hole-board test (HBT) method. Again, the antipyretic analysis was conducted through yeast-induced pyrexia method, whereas clot lysis activity was employed by the thrombolytic method. Furthermore, in silico studies followed by molecular docking analysis of several secondary metabolites, pass prediction, and ADME/T were evaluated with AutoDock Vina, Discovery Studio 2020, UCSF Chimera software PASS online, and ADME/T online tools. The plant extract demonstrated dose-dependent potentiality in antidepressant, anxiolytic, antipyretic, and thrombolytic activities. Induction of MEPN produced a significant (p < .5, p < .001) increase of mobility in FST and TST, and increased the head dipping and decreased the latency of time (p < .01, p < .001) in HBT. MEPN 400 (mg/kg; b.w.; p.o.) lowered the rectal temperature of yeast-induced pyrexia substantially (p < .001). Besides, MEPN produced promising (p < .001) clot lysis activity. In the computational approach, among all the proteins, a docking score was found ranging from −1.0 to −7.90 kcal/mol. Besides, all the compounds were found safe in ADME/T study. The results of our scientific research validate the suitability of this plant as an alternative source of novel therapeutics

Relationship between High Temperature and Formation of Chalkiness and Their Effects on Quality of Rice

Occurrence of chalkiness in rice is attributed to genetic and environmental factors, especially high temperature (HT). The HT induces heat stress, which in turn compromises many grain qualities, especially transparency. Chalkiness in rice is commonly studied together with other quality traits such as amylose content, gel consistency, and protein storage. In addition to the fundamental QTLs, some other QTLs have been identified which accelerate chalkiness occurrence under HT condition. In this review, some of the relatively stable chalkiness, amylose content, and gel consistency related QTLs have been presented well. Genetically, HT effect on chalkiness is explained by the location of certain chalkiness gene in the vicinity of high-temperature-responsive genes. With regard to stable QTL distribution and availability of potential material resources, there is still feasibility to find out novel stable QTLs related to chalkiness under HT condition. A better understanding of those achievements is essential to develop new rice varieties with a reduced chalky grain percentage. Therefore, we propose the pyramiding of relatively stable and nonallelic QTLs controlling low chalkiness endosperm into adaptable rice varieties as pragmatic approach to mitigate HT effect

Relationship between High Temperature and Formation of Chalkiness and Their Effects on Quality of Rice

Occurrence of chalkiness in rice is attributed to genetic and environmental factors, especially high temperature (HT). The HT induces heat stress, which in turn compromises many grain qualities, especially transparency. Chalkiness in rice is commonly studied together with other quality traits such as amylose content, gel consistency, and protein storage. In addition to the fundamental QTLs, some other QTLs have been identified which accelerate chalkiness occurrence under HT condition. In this review, some of the relatively stable chalkiness, amylose content, and gel consistency related QTLs have been presented well. Genetically, HT effect on chalkiness is explained by the location of certain chalkiness gene in the vicinity of high-temperature-responsive genes. With regard to stable QTL distribution and availability of potential material resources, there is still feasibility to find out novel stable QTLs related to chalkiness under HT condition. A better understanding of those achievements is essential to develop new rice varieties with a reduced chalky grain percentage. Therefore, we propose the pyramiding of relatively stable and nonallelic QTLs controlling low chalkiness endosperm into adaptable rice varieties as pragmatic approach to mitigate HT effect