Micropropagation and conservation of selected endangered anticancer medicinal plants from the Western Ghats of India

Globally, cancer is a constant battle which severely affects the human population. The major limitations of the anticancer drugs are the deleterious side effects on the quality of life. Plants play a vital role in curing many diseases with minimal or no side effects. Phytocompounds derived from various medicinal plants serve as the best source of drugs to treat cancer. The global demand for phytomedicines is mostly reached by the medicinal herbs from the tropical nations of the world even though many plant species are threatened with extinction. India is one of the mega diverse countries of the world due to its ecological habitats, latitudinal variation, and diverse climatic range. Western Ghats of India is one of the most important depositories of endemic herbs. It is found along the stretch of south western part of India and constitutes rain forest with more than 4000 diverse medicinal plant species. In recent times, many of these therapeutically valued herbs have become endangered and are being included under the red-listed plant category in this region. Due to a sharp rise in the demand for plant-based products, this rich collection is diminishing at an alarming rate that eventually triggered dangerous to biodiversity. Thus, conservation of the endangered medicinal plants has become a matter of importance. The conservation by using only in situ approaches may not be sufficient enough to safeguard such a huge bio-resource of endangered medicinal plants. Hence, the use of biotechnological methods would be vital to complement the ex vitro protection programs and help to reestablish endangered plant species. In this backdrop, the key tools of biotechnology that could assist plant conservation were developed in terms of in vitro regeneration, seed banking, DNA storage, pollen storage, germplasm storage, gene bank (field gene banking), tissue bank, and cryopreservation. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to critically review major endangered medicinal plants that possess anticancer compounds and their conservation aspects by integrating various biotechnological tool

Search for Long-Lived Particles Decaying in the CMS End Cap Muon Detectors in Proton-Proton Collisions at s\sqrt{s} =13 TeV

A search for long-lived particles (LLPs) produced in decays of standard model (SM) Higgs bosons is presented. The data sample consists of 137 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$=13  TeV, recorded at the LHC in 2016–2018. A novel technique is employed to reconstruct decays of LLPs in the end cap muon detectors. The search is sensitive to a broad range of LLP decay modes and to masses as low as a few GeV. No excess of events above the SM background is observed. The most stringent limits to date on the branching fraction of the Higgs boson to LLPs subsequently decaying to quarks and τ$^{+}$τ$^{-}$ are found for proper decay lengths greater than 6, 20, and 40 m, for LLP masses of 7, 15, and 40 GeV, respectively

A cost-effectiveness analysis of rhDNase in children with cystic fibrosis.

OBJECTIVES: This study compared the relative cost-effectiveness of daily recombinant human deoxyribonuclease (rhDNase), with alternate day rhDNase and hypertonic saline (HS) for treating children with cystic fibrosis (CF). METHODS: A randomized controlled trial with a crossover design allocated 40 CF children consecutively to 12 weeks of daily rhDNase, alternate day rhDNase, or HS. The primary outcome measure was forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1), a measure of lung function. All health resource use was prospectively documented for each patient and multiplied by unit costs to give a total health service cost for each 12-week treatment period. The nonparametric bootstrap method was used to present cost-effectiveness acceptability curves and net benefit statistics for each treatment comparison, for various hypothetical levels of the decision maker's ceiling ratio. RESULTS: Compared with HS, there was a 14% improvement in FEV1 for daily rhDNase (95% Cl, 5% to 23%), and a 12% improvement (95% Cl, 2% to 22%) for alternate day rhDNase. For a ceiling ratio of 200 pounds sterling per 1% gain in FEV1, the mean net benefits of daily and alternate day rhDNase compared with HS were 1,158 pounds sterling (95% Cl, -621pounds sterling to 2,842) and 1,188 pounds sterling (95% Cl, -847 to 3,343), respectively; the mean net benefit of daily compared with alternate day rhDNase was -30 pounds sterling (95% Cl, -2,091 pounds sterling to 1,576). CONCLUSIONS: If decision makers are prepared to pay 200 pounds sterling for a 1% gain in FEV1 over a 12-week period, then on average either rhDNase strategy is cost-effective

Assessing the usefulness of outcomes measured in a cystic fibrosis treatment trial

SummaryForced expiratory volume in 1s (FEV1) is the usual primary outcome variable in clinical trials in cystic fibrosis (CF). Usually, several secondary outcomes are also measured. We assessed which secondary outcomes are likely to give additional clinically useful information about treatment effects, in order to inform the design of future studies.The study was performed as part of a trial comparing daily rhDNase with alternate day rhDNase and hypertonic saline in CF. The primary outcome was FEV1. Secondary outcomes were forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory flow at 25–75% of forced vital capacity (FEF25−75), number of pulmonary exacerbations, weight gain, quality of life (QOL), and exercise tolerance. The usefulness of each secondary outcome was investigated by assessing if the change in that outcome over the treatment period could be predicted from the primary outcome.Change in FEV1 correlated with changes in FVC (r2=0.76, P=0.001), FEF25–75 (r2=0.64, P=0.001), weight (r2=0.08, P=0.001), and change in oxygen saturation with exercise (r2=0.08, P=0.001). However, it did not correlate with changes in visual analogue score (VAS) with exercise, QOL, nor with the occurrence of pulmonary exacerbations.Only the outcomes QOL and VAS with exercise actually provided additional information to FEV1 in this study

Transient variability in SOI-based LIF Neuron and impact on unsupervised learning

Variability is an integral part of biology. A biological neural network performs efficiently despite variability and sometimes its performance is facilitated by the variability. Hence, the study of variability on its electronic analog is essential for constructing biomimetic neural networks. We have recently demonstrated a compact leaky integrate and fire (LIF) neuron on PD-silicon on insulator (SOI) MOSFET. In this paper, we have studied impact ionization (II)-induced variability both device-to-device (D2D) and cycle-to-cycle (C2C) in the SOI neuron. The C2C variability is attributed to the fluctuation in the II-generated charge storage and it is enhanced by at least 2.5x as compared to the no-II case. The D2D variability, on the other hand, is related to the II-induced sharp subthreshold slope (~ 40 mV/decade), which enhanced the variability by ~20x compared to the no-II case. The impact of the enhanced variability in SOI neurons on an unsupervised classification task was evaluated by simulating a spiking neural network (SNN) with both analog and binary synapses. For analog synapse-based SNN, the C2C variability improved the performance by ~ 5% relative to ideal LIF neurons. However, the D2D variability, as well as combined D2D and C2C variability, degrades learning by -~ 10%. For binary synapses, we observe that performance drastically degrades for ideal LIF neurons as the synaptic weight initialization becomes nonrandom. However, neurons with the experimentally demonstrated variability (C2C and D2D) mitigate this challenge. Therefore, this enables binary synapses to perform at par with analog synapses, which allows for deterministic weight initialization. This makes RNG circuits for random weight initialization redundant.by Sangya Dutta, Tinish Bhattacharya, Nihar R. Mohapatra, Manan Suri and Udayan Gangul