Biotechnological potential of natural food grade biocolorants

Color becomes the most sensitive part of any commodity not only for its appeal but also it enhances consumer acceptability. In addition, the color of a food substance is important to indicate its freshness and safety that are also indices of good aesthetic and sensorial values. For natural color and additives, adherence to the norms of biosafety protocol, are limited. The demand for natural source of such compounds is increasing day by day because of awareness of positive health benefit out of natural compounds. It therefore, necessitates looking into natural sources of food grade colorants and their use potentials. It is found more justified to use the term biocolorant instead of biopigment. Since pigments are mostly water insoluble with exceptions of certain pigments of biological origin. This article includes the advancements of process development and other biotechnological aspects of natural food grade colorants

Isolation of antibacterial pentahydroxy flavones from the seeds of Mimusops elengi Linn

In order to search for antimicrobial phytochemicals, two antibacterial compounds were detected from the seeds of Mimusops elengi Linn. The compounds were extracted by ethyl acetate and purified bycolumn chromatography. Their structures were elucidated through IR, 1H NMR and GC-EL-MS spectral analyses. After characterization, the compounds were identified as 2,3-dihyro-3,3’4’5,7- pentahydroxyflavone and 3,3’,4’,5,7-pentahydroxyflavone. The compounds showed strong inhibitory activity against Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria

Entropy of the Kerr-Sen Black Hole

We study the entropy of Kerr-Sen black hole of heterotic string theory beyond semiclassical approximations. Applying the properties of exact differentials for three variables to the first law thermodynamics we derive the corrections to the entropy of the black hole. The leading (logarithmic) and non leading corrections to the area law are obtained.Comment: 8 pages. Corrected references

The cost and effective analysis of health care management of very low birth weight babies in rural areas of West Bengal, India

Background: Low birth weight (LBW) is prevalent in low-income countries. Level II neonatal intensive care at SCNUs is cost intensive. Rational use of SCNU services by targeting its utilization for the VLBW neonates and maintenance of community based newborn care is required.  Even though the economic evaluation of interventions to reduce this burden is essential to guide health care policy making for low resource setting, data on low cost outcome study associated with LBW in Indian setup are scarce.  Methods: This study aims to estimate the costs to the health system in the management of LBW in rural setting where affordability of parents for healthcare facility comparatively less. The cost of management was cut off by minimum investigations, more supervision by working health care personnel’s. A prospective observational study was conducted to see outcome of estimate the costs to the health system in the management of LBW or VLBW babies.Results: The mortality and survival rate among the evaluated LBW under this low cost health care setting was 6.66% and 86.6% respectively.Conclusions: Results of this unique cost and effectiveness evaluation of LBW healthcare management in a low resource setting are very relevant in Indian context where healthcare facility is almost out of reach and affordability in majority rural populations. These results are of relevance for similar settings and should serve to promote interventions aimed at improving maternal care in rural settings. Further larger research is required on cost effectiveness of level II neonatal intensive care.

Knowledge, attitudes and practice of adverse drug reaction monitoring among physicians in India

Background: Underreporting of ADRs still remains a major obstacle in the complete success of pharmacovigilance programs. In order to improve ADR monitoring, it is thus imperative to assess the current knowledge, attitude, and practices of doctors. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to evaluate the knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) of the healthcare professionals about pharmacovigilance in various tertiary care government teaching hospital vis-a-vis private clinics in West Bengal.Methods: A cross sectional, questionnaire based survey was conducted among healthcare practitioners in several tertiary care government set-ups and private set-ups in the state of West Bengal (India). The study instrument was a pre-validated structured questionnaire designed to obtain information on the knowledge of the ADRs reporting, the attitudes towards the reporting, and the factors that in practice could hinder the reporting among the doctors.Results: About 89.62% public practitioners correctly spotted the WHO definition for pharmacovigilance, while 77.5% of the private practitioners did the same. Only 19.81% of the public practitioners documented a suspected ADR in any surveillance form, while there were only 3.75% private practitioners who documented it. About 59.43% of the physicians in government hospitals published an ADR case report in any medical journal, while 81.25% private practitioners did no.Conclusions: Study revealed lack of time, incentive less extra work load being major factors responsible for ADR underreporting. In order to improve ADR reporting, continuous medical education, training and proper sensitization of healthcare professionals can help combating the existing scenario and promising an improved tomorrow. The PvPI should be widely publicized in the visual and print media to make health professionals, as well as the general population at large aware of its presence and scope. Pharmacovigilance should be integrated in undergraduate and postgraduate medical courses

Author Identification from Literary Articles with Visual Features: A Case Study with Bangla Documents

Author identification is an important aspect of literary analysis, studied in natural language processing (NLP). It aids identify the most probable author of articles, news texts or social media comments and tweets, for example. It can be applied to other domains such as criminal and civil cases, cybersecurity, forensics, identification of plagiarizer, and many more. An automated system in this context can thus be very beneficial for society. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based author identification system from literary articles. This system uses visual features along with a five-layer convolutional neural network for the identification of authors. The prime motivation behind this approach was the feasibility to identify distinct writing styles through a visualization of the writing patterns. Experiments were performed on 1200 articles from 50 authors achieving a maximum accuracy of 93.58%. Furthermore, to see how the system performed on different volumes of data, the experiments were performed on partitions of the dataset. The system outperformed standard handcrafted feature-based techniques as well as established works on publicly available datasets

Sustainable Generation of Ni(OH)2 Nanoparticles for the Green Synthesis of 5-Substituted 1 H-Tetrazoles:A Competent Turn on Fluorescence Sensing of H2O2

A mutually correlated green protocol has been devised that originates from a sustainable production of β-Ni(OH)2 nanoparticles which is used for an efficient catalytic synthesis of versatile substituted tetrazoles, under mild reaction conditions in water via a simple, one-pot, eco-friendly method. The synthesis is followed by derivatization into a highly fluorescence active compound 9-(4-(5-(quinolin-2-yl)-1H-tetrazol-1-yl)phenyl)-9H-carbazole that can be used at tracer concentrations (0.1 μM) to detect as well as quantify hydrogen peroxide down to 2 μM concentration. The nanocatalyst was synthesized by a simple, proficient, and cost-effective methodology and characterized thoroughly by UV-vis absorption and Fourier transform infrared spectra, N2 adsorption/desorption, high resolution transmission electron microscopy, powder X-ray diffraction pattern, field emission scanning electron microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis. Broad substrate scope, easy handling, higher efficiency, low cost, and reusability of the catalyst are some of the important features of this heterogeneous catalytic system. The strong analytical performance of the resultant derivative in low-level quantification of potentially hazardous hydrogen peroxide is the key success of the overall green synthesis procedure reported here

Ferroelectric and Dielectric Properties of ZnFe2O4-Pb(ZrTi)O-3 Multiferroic Nanocomposites

Magnetoelectric composites of zinc ferrite and soft lead zirconate titanate (PZT) having formula 0.5 ZnFe2O4-0.5 PZT were synthesized by sol-gel technique. X-ray diffraction analysis was carried out to confirm the coexistence of individual phase. TEM micrographs were taken to confirm the formation of nanosized powders and SEM micrographs were taken to study the morphology of the sintered pellets. Dielectric and P-E hysteresis loops were recorded, respectively, to confirm the ferroelectric properties of the composites

Microbial transformation of xenobiotics for environmental bioremediation

The accumulation of recalcitrant xenobiotic compounds is due to continuous efflux from population and industrial inputs that have created a serious impact on the pristine nature of our environment. Apart from this, these compounds are mostly carcinogenic, posing health hazards which persist over a long period of time. Metabolic pathways and specific operon systems have been found in diverse but limited groups of microbes that are responsible for the transformation of xenobiotic compounds.Distinct catabolic genes are either present on mobile genetic elements, such as transposons and plasmids, or the chromosome itself that facilitates horizontal gene transfer and enhances the rapid microbial transformation of toxic xenobiotic compounds. Biotransformation of xenobiotic compounds in natural environment has been studied to understand the microbial ecology, physiology and evolution for their potential in bioremediation. Recent advance in the molecular techniques including DNA fingerprinting, microarrays and metagenomics is being used to augment the transformation of xenobiotic compounds. The present day understandings of aerobic, anaerobic and reductive biotransformation by co-metabolic processes and an overview of latest developments in monitoring the catabolic genes of xenobiotic-degrading bacteria are discussed elaborately in this work. Till date, several reviews have come up, highlighting the problem of xenobiotic pollution, yet a comprehensiveunderstanding of the microbial biodegradation of xenobiotics and its application is in nascent stage. Therefore, this is an attempt to understand the microbial role in biotransformation of xenobiotic compounds in context to the modern day biotechnology