Hydro-chemical Survey and Quantifying Spatial Variations in Groundwater Quality in Coastal Region of Chennai, Tamilnadu, India – a case study

The good quality of groundwater is important for the purpose of future planning and management. The present study has been undertaken to provide an overview on the status of groundwater quality through physicochemical parameters namely pH, alkalinity, total hardness, total dissolved solids, chloride, fluoride, nitrate, phosphate and iron through laboratory analysis. Samples have been collected from seven wells located in Chennai costal region of state Tamilnadu, India. The laboratory-based results shows that the mean value of pH is 7.29, alkalinity (308.57 mg/l), total hardness (285.71 mg/l), chloride (175.71 mg/l), iron (0.71 mg/l), nitrate (13.57 mg/l), phosphorus (2.71 mg/l) and total dissolved solids (924 mg/l), respectively. The geo-database water quality parameters were created in Geographical an Information System. Further, the kriging a geo-statistical method of interpolation is applied to know the health of groundwater in the then-sampled area. This interpolation method has been used to predict spatial distribution physicochemical parameters in the form of contour. Local planners and policy makers may utilize these results for efficient management of groundwater resources in this area

VLSI Implementation of Fixed-Point Lattice Wave Digital Filters for Increased Sampling Rate

Low complexity and high speed are the key requirements of the digital filters. These filters can be realized using allpass filters. In this paper, design and minimum multiplier implementation of a fixed point lattice wave digital filter (WDF) based on three port parallel adaptor allpass structure is proposed. Here, the second-order allpass sections are implemented with three port parallel adaptor allpass structures. A design-level area optimization is done by converting constant multipliers into shifts and adds using canonical signed digit (CSD) techniques. The proposed implementation reduces the latency of the critical loop by reducing the number of components (adders and multipliers). Three design examples are included to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach. These are implemented in verilog HDL language and mapped to a standard cell library in a 0.18 μm CMOS process. The functionality of the implementations have been verified by applying number of different input vectors. Results and simulations demonstrate that the proposed design method leads to an efficient lattice WDF in terms of maximum sampling frequency. The cost to pay is small area overhead. The postlayout simulations have been done by HSPICE with CMOS transistors

Novel Design of Recursive Differentiator Based on Lattice Wave Digital Filter

In this paper, a novel design of third and fifth order differentiator based on lattice wave digital filter (LWDF), established on optimizing L_1-error approximation function using cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) is proposed. We present a novel realization of minimum multiplier differentiator using LWD structure leading to requirement of optimizing only N coefficients for Nth order differentiator. The gamma coefficients of lattice wave digital differentiator (LWDD) are computed by minimizing the L_1-norm fitness function leading to a flat response. The superiority of the proposed LWDD is evident by comparing it with other differentiators mentioned in the literature. The magnitude response of the designed LWDD is found to be of high accuracy with flat response in a wide frequency range. The simulation and statistical results validates that the designed minimum multiplier LWDD circumvents the existing one in terms of minimum absolute magnitude error, mean relative error (dB) and efficient structural realization, thereby making the proposed LWDD a promising approach to digital differentiator design

Barcoding Genetically Distinct Plasmodium falciparum Strains for Comparative Assessment of Fitness and Antimalarial Drug Resistance

The repeated emergence of antimalarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum, including to the current frontline antimalarial artemisinin, is a perennial problem for malaria control. Next-generation sequencing has greatly accelerated the identification of polymorphisms in resistance-associated genes but has also highlighted the need for more sensitive and accurate laboratory tools to profile current and future antimalarials and to quantify the impact of drug resistance acquisition on parasite fitness. The interplay of fitness and drug response is of fundamental importance in understanding why particular genetic backgrounds are better at driving the evolution of drug resistance in natural populations, but the impact of parasite fitness landscapes on the epidemiology of drug resistance has typically been laborious to accurately quantify in the lab, with assays being limited in accuracy and throughput. Here we present a scalable method to profile fitness and drug response of genetically distinct P. falciparum strains with well-described sensitivities to several antimalarials. We leverage CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing and barcode sequencing to track unique barcodes integrated into a nonessential gene (pfrh3). We validate this approach in multiplex competitive growth assays of three strains with distinct geographical origins. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this method can be a powerful approach for tracking artemisinin response as it can identify an artemisinin resistant strain within a mix of multiple parasite lines, suggesting an approach for scaling the laborious ring-stage survival assay across libraries of barcoded parasite lines. Overall, we present a novel high-throughput method for multiplexed competitive growth assays to evaluate parasite fitness and drug response

Enriched transcriptome analysis of laser capture microdissected populations of single cells to investigate intracellular heterogeneity in immunostained FFPE sections

To investigate intracellular heterogeneity, cell capture of particular cell populations followed by transcriptome analysis has been highly effective in freshly isolated tissues. However, this approach has been quite challenging in immunostained formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) sections. This study aimed at combining the standard pathology techniques, immunostaining and laser capture microdissection, with whole RNA-sequencing and bioinformatics analysis to characterize FFPE breast cancer cell populations with heterogeneous expression of progesterone receptor (PR). Immunocytochemical analysis revealed that 60% of MCF-7 cells admixture highly express PR. Immunocytochemistry-based targeted RNA-seq (ICC-RNAseq) and in silico functional analysis revealed that the PR-high cell population is associated with upregulation in transcripts implicated in immunomodulatory and inflammatory pathways (e.g. NF-κB and interferon signaling). In contrast, the PR-low cell population is associated with upregulation of genes involved in metabolism and mitochondrial processes as well as EGFR and MAPK signaling. These findings were cross-validated and confirmed in FACS-sorted PR high and PR-low MCF-7 cells and in MDA-MB-231 cells ectopically overexpressing PR. Significantly, ICC-RNAseq could be extended to analyze samples captured at specific spatio-temporal states to investigate gene expression profiles using diverse biomarkers. This would also facilitate our understanding of cell population-specific molecular events driving cancer and potentially other diseases

Synthesis of some new phenothiazinothiadiazoles and their azetidinones: Antifungal agents

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Enhancement of Jc by Hf -Doping in the Superconductor MgB2: A Hyperfine Interaction Study

Measurements of the critical current density (Jc) by magnetization and the upper critical field (Hc2) by magnetoresistance have been performed for hafnium-doped MgB2. There has been a remarkable enhancement of Jc as compared to that by ion irradiation without any appreciable decrease in Tc, which is beneficial from the point of view of applications. The irreversibility line extracted from Jc shows an upward shift. In addition, there has been an increase in the upper critical field which indicates that Hf partially substitutes for Mg. Hyperfine interaction parameters obtained from time differential perturbed angular correlation (TDPAC) measurements revealed the formation of HfB and HfB2 phases along with the substitution of Hf. A possible explanation is given for the role of these species in the enhancement of Jc in MgB2 superconductor