Biochar: A Sustainable Approach for Improving Plant Growth and Soil Properties

Soil is the most important source and an abode for many nutrients and microflora. Due to rapid depletion of agricultural areas and soil quality by means of ever-increasing population and an excessive addition of chemical fertilizers, a rehabilitated attention is a need of the hour to maintain sustainable approaches in agricultural crop production. Biochar is the solid, carbon-rich material obtained by pyrolysis using different biomasses. It has been widely documented in previous studies that, the crop growth and yield can be increased by using biochar. This chapter exclusively summarizes the properties of biochar, its interaction with soil microflora, and its role in plant growth promotion when added to the soil

Performance Comparison of Latency for RSC-RSC and RS-RSC Concatenated Codes

In this paper, we compare the latency of serially concatenated convolutional codes. In particular, we compare RSC-RSC   concatenated codes using non-iterative concatenated Viterbi decoding to RS-RSC concatenated codes using concatenation of Viterbi & Berklelamp-Massey decoding. We have also used puncturing to obtain different code rates & analyzed the effect of code rate on latency. On the basis of simulations, it is shown that RSC-RSC code is better than RS-RSC codes for low latency applications. It is also shown that a trade-off is needed between BER & latency for concatenated codes

Digital herbarium database of some rainy season weeds of Khadar area of Hastinapur District, Meerut (U.P.), India

Digital herbarium database includes virtual images of plant specimens in digital format. This form of digital database herbarium is quite different from the traditional herbarium. In this form, the herbarium data is stored and made available to the taxonomists electronically.The modern database includes the actual herbarium specimens as digital images with all relevant informations available on the herbarium sheet label.The study of digital herbarium database reduces the time and efforts required for collection, identification and study of plants. This form of Floweringoral study reduces the cost of large herbarium maintenance. Very large information of plants can be stored in a small space. Digitization replaces the loan methods of herbarium from one institute to another for researches.Digital herbarium database is helpful in maintaining the wealth of plants. Digitized Floweringora can be represented in a compact form, this is very useful for use of forest department, ecological workers and for institutions carrying plant researches in all disciplines. The digital form of Floweringora is very useful as corrections and modifications can be made from time to time as Floweringora is never constant and undergoes changes over a period of time. The stretches of the Upper Ganges Canal is called Khadar. The present paper deals with some rainy season weeds of Khadar area of Hastinapur , district – Meerut (UP), India

Image Compression Using Run Length Encoding (RLE)

The goal of image compression is to remove the redundancies by minimizing the number of bits required to represent an image. It is used for reducing the redundancy that is nothing but avoiding the duplicate data. It also reduces the storage memory to load an image. Image Compression algorithm can be Lossy or Lossless. In this paper, DCT and DWT based image compression algorithms have been implemented using MATLAB platform. Then, the improvement of image compression through Run Length Encoding (RLE) has been achieved. The three images namely Baboon, Lena and Pepper have been taken as test images for implementing the techniques. Various image objective metrics namely compression ratio, PSNR and MSE have been calculated. It has been observed from the results that RLE based image compression achieves higher compression ratio as compared with DCT and DWT based image compression algorithms

Energy Efficient Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Network using Genetic Algorithm

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of sensor nodes which sense, process and transmit data regarding any sensing area. Various energy-efficient protocols are of great importance in order to increase network lifetime during data gathering. The parameter that is important for protocols in a sensor network is its energy awareness. The factors that are causing unequal energy dissipation among the nodes are the distance of nodes from base station and inter nodal distances in the network. Thus the protocol designed should be energy efficient and robust to deal with. PEGASIS which forms chain using greedy algorithm provide elegant solutions to the problem. In this paper, first we implement PEGASIS using greedy chain and then we use Genetic Algorithm to construct data routing chain, which uses its crossover and mutation operators and find an optimized routing path for data gathering. Genetic Algorithm increases the network lifetime for same number of nodes. Extensive simulations are done and the results of PEGASIS and GA are compared with each other on the basis of energy consumption and number of rounds. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15079

Description of six new species of the genus Cornudiscoides Kulkarni, 1969 (Monogenoidea: Dactylogyridae) from two catfish, Mystus, Scopoli, 1777 and Sperata Holly, 1939, with a note on its biodiversity

The genus Cornudisoides Kulkarni, 1969 is a specialist monogenoid reported from two fish host, Mystus and Sperata. Despite their ecological importance, Cornudiscoides diversity remains unexplored, and the taxonomic description of nominal species is inadequate. The present study was performed to chart the biodiversity of the genus Cornudiscoides and defined the characters to identify their species quickly and efficiently using unambiguous characters. Examination of fish hosts collected from different localities of Uttar Pradesh revealed 12 known and 6 new species of Cornudiscoides. Since the original description of known species lacked some salient features, the present study has redescribed them and added new host records. The new species are described: C. tripathii sp. nov., C. lucknowensis sp. nov., C. speratai sp. nov., C. indicus sp. nov., C. kulkarnii sp. nov. and C. falcatum sp. nov. They have distinct copulatory complexes and vaginal armatures. A detail of the species diversity of Cornudisoides, their type host, new host record type locality, additional localities and major distinguishable characters would be helpful to understand the diversity of these parasites

Identification and characterization of psychrotrophic strain of Planococcus maritimus for glucosylated C30 carotenoid production

190-197Cold-adapted bacteria produce various pigments as their adaptive strategy. Here, we studied an aerobic, gram-positive motile coccoid bacterial strain KK21, isolated from the Siachen, Himalayas and characterized the major pigments present in it. The KK21 strain is capable of growth in a broad range of temperature (-4 to 37°C), pH (6.0-13.0) and salinity (0.5-8%). Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequence showed that it belongs to the genus Planococcus and closely related to P. maritimus. Total pigment extraction was best found in polar methanol. Alanine among amino acids, NaCl among inorganic salts and evening primrose amongst oils best supported the pigment production at 10°C after 6 days in BHI at neutral pH of 7.0. Maximum pigment production was recorded at 3% of NaCl concentration. In photoprotection activity, radiation exposed plates showed increased colony forming units and more than 3.5 times of total carotenoid production after 15 min exposure compared to the control group. Detailed characterization of orange pigment was done systematically by TLC, HPLC and MALDI-TOF. Chromatographic and MALDI-TOF data have revealed the exclusive presence of glycosylated C30-carotenoid in P. maritimus KK21 with m/z of 655.871

Prediction of metabolic syndrome by visceral adiposity index, lipid accumulation product and model of adiposity index amongst infertile women with and without polycystic ovary syndrome

Background: This study was conducted to compare visceral adiposity index (VAI), lipid accumulation product (LAP) and model of adiposity index (MAOD) for prediction of metabolic syndrome (MS) amongst infertile women with and without PCOS. Methods: It was a case control, retrospective study performed in gynecology outpatient department of a tertiary care center. Total 143 infertile women with PCOS and 367 infertile women without PCOS were recruited in the study. Waist circumference (WC), BMI, waist hip ratio (WHR), insulin resistance, VAI, LAP, MOAD were assessed in both groups. Results: Significantly higher values of WC, WHR, systolic BP, insulin postprandial and all 3 adiposity indices were found among infertile women with PCOS as compared to women without PCOS. In hormonal profile, testosterone, AMH, FSH, prolactin, estradiol was found to be significantly higher in PCOS group. For predicting MS in PCOS women, VAI had the highest AUC 0.878 with a cut off value of 3.1, highest sensitivity of 88.9%, specificity of 90.7%, positive and negative predictive value of 76.2% and 96% respectively followed by LAP and MOAD. Conclusions: To conclude, all three adiposity indexes VAI, LAP and MOAD were significantly raised in PCOS women. VAI followed by LAP were the best indicators to predict metabolic syndrome in women with PCOS

Lipase production from a wild (LPF-5) and a mutant (HN1) strain of Aspergillus niger

In this study, a wild (LPF-5) and a mutant (HN1) strain of A. niger were compared for lipase production. Several physical parameters (carbon source, nitrogen source, pH, temperature and incubation period) were optimized for maximization of lipase production. Lipase activity between wild type and mutant strain were compared. Among all carbon sources, mixture of glucose (1%, w/v) and olive oil (1%, v/v) exhibited maximum increase in the production of lipases by both the wild (94.91 ± 0.60 U mL-1 min-1) and mutant (118.23 ± 0.73 U mL-1 min-1) strain. Addition of glucose into the production medium (containing olive oil) increased the production of lipase up to 20% in case of both the strains. The production of lipase by both the strains was higher in the medium of pH 7.0 containing peptone (1%, w/v) as nitrogen source after 3 days of incubation at 28°C. The activity of lipase from HN1 strain in optimized medium was 40% higher (147.65 ± 1.14 U mL-1 min-1) than in un-optimized medium (105.19 ± 0.91 U mL-1 min-1), while it was 38% higher for LPF-5 strain in optimized medium. Therefore the mutant strain (A. niger HN1) is prospective for the development of industrial biotechnology for production of extracellular lipase. Lipase enzyme was partially purified by ammonium sulfate precipitation and 70% precipitate showed highest specific activity of 66.12 U mg-1 for mutant strain as compared to specific activity of 29.88 U mg-1 in crude lysate.Keywords: Wild strain, mutant strain, Aspergillus niger, lipase activity, specific activity, ammonium sulfat