Analysis of allelic variation in HMW-Glu-1 gene blocks in Iranian wheat cultivars using ALP molecular marker

In order to study the allelic variation of Glu-1 gene (High molecular weight glutenin), 100 Iranian wheat cultivars including imported and domestic genotypes were analyzed using ALP-PCR technique. Four specific primer pairs were used based on the genetic loci of Glu-A1, Glu-B1, and Glu-D1 to perform the chain polymerase reactions. PCR reaction products were resolved on 2% agarose gel. Since allele “a” had the largest relative frequency (0.707), two alleles (a 344bp; b 362bp) were identified by P1-P2 primer for Glu-A1 locus. Three alleles (a 800bp; b 500bp; c 300bp) were detected for Glu-B1 locus by P5-P6 primer, and allele “b” was assumed as the highest relative frequency (0.618). Two primer pairs were applied for Glu-D1 locus. Ultimately, four alleles were identified, where allele “c” had the highest relative frequency (0.525). The observed genetic variation value for Glu-D1 locus (H=0.648) exhibits the maximal polymorphism. Using cluster analysis, the relationship between the observed polymorphism and geographical variation was investigated. The results indicated that there exists a remarkable variation in Glu- A1 locus between the Iranian wheat cultivars

Water Flooding and Viscous Fingering in Fracture and Porous Media by Lattice Boltzmann Method

The study of fluid front in porous media in enhanced oil recovery is important. The purpose of this study is to simulate water flooding, and investigate the factors affecting the fluid front across a microfracture and simple porous media using Shan-Chen type of the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM). Various factors, including velocity and dynamic viscosity that define the capillary number and wettability are considered. Independently, the increase in velocity and dynamic viscosity ratio results in viscous fingering and its narrowness. Increasing the wettability of the displacing fluid decreases viscous fingering, and as a result, it makes the fluid move in piston form. The lowest sweep efficiency occurs when the displacing fluid has a neutral wettability. Simulation results show the strength and accuracy of Shan-Chen type of LBM in fluid front tracking in porous media in pore scale. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

The Quantum Socket: Three-Dimensional Wiring for Extensible Quantum Computing

Quantum computing architectures are on the verge of scalability, a key requirement for the implementation of a universal quantum computer. The next stage in this quest is the realization of quantum error correction codes, which will mitigate the impact of faulty quantum information on a quantum computer. Architectures with ten or more quantum bits (qubits) have been realized using trapped ions and superconducting circuits. While these implementations are potentially scalable, true scalability will require systems engineering to combine quantum and classical hardware. One technology demanding imminent efforts is the realization of a suitable wiring method for the control and measurement of a large number of qubits. In this work, we introduce an interconnect solution for solid-state qubits: The quantum socket. The quantum socket fully exploits the third dimension to connect classical electronics to qubits with higher density and better performance than two-dimensional methods based on wire bonding. The quantum socket is based on spring-mounted micro wires the three-dimensional wires that push directly on a micro-fabricated chip, making electrical contact. A small wire cross section (~1 mmm), nearly non-magnetic components, and functionality at low temperatures make the quantum socket ideal to operate solid-state qubits. The wires have a coaxial geometry and operate over a frequency range from DC to 8 GHz, with a contact resistance of ~150 mohm, an impedance mismatch of ~10 ohm, and minimal crosstalk. As a proof of principle, we fabricated and used a quantum socket to measure superconducting resonators at a temperature of ~10 mK.Comment: Main: 31 pages, 19 figs., 8 tables, 8 apps.; suppl.: 4 pages, 5 figs. (HiRes figs. and movies on request). Submitte

Investigating the Physicochemical Properties of Healthy Yogurt Containing Bitter Gourd Powder

Introduction  Yogurt is one of the most widely consumed fermented milk products, which, like any other dairy products, is prone to spoilage and poor quality. On the other hand consumers have become more cautious about their diet and health. Their is an increasing demand for food products with higher nutritional values and health benefits. The continuous improvement of the production process and the quality of yogurt is at the heart of manufacturers’ concerns. Also, finding a safe, cheap and affordable solution that, in addition to controlling blood sugar and preventing the complications of diabetes, relieves the pain of diabetic patients; has always been of interest to researchers. The medicinal plant Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) from the cucurbitaceae family is used in traditional medicine to control blood sugar. Carla fruit is a rich source of phytochemical compounds such as proteins, steroids, alkaloids, mineral compounds, lipids, triterpenoids and polyphenols. Functional yogurt is one of the dairy products that can contain bioactive compounds in order to increase its acceptability and improve its nutritional and medicinal properties. Therefore, this study was carried out with the aim of producing colored yogurt containing Carla fruit powder in order to increase the variety of appearance, marketability of the product and improve the nutritional characteristics of yogurt with emphasis on the consumption of novel product.   Materials and Methods  In this study, the effects of adding Carla powder to yogurt were investigated with the aim of producing a beneficial food for diabetics. Carla fruit was collected from the medicinal plants collection of the Agriculture Institute, Research Institute of Zabol, Zabol, Iran. Then it was washed with water and cut into thin layers. These parts were completely dried in an electric oven at 40 ºC for 48 hours and pulverized with an electric mill. Carla fruit powder was added to the samples in four levels of 0 (control), 0.2, 0.4 and 0.6%. Physicochemical properties of samples such as pH, acidity, viscosity (using Brookfield spindle viscometer) and water holding capacity were measured. Total phenol content was measured by Folin Ciocalteu reagent method. Antioxidant properties were investigated by scavenging rate of DPPH free radicals. The results were analyzed by SPSS version 21 statistical software at the probability level of 5% (P˂ 0.05). Duncan's multiple range test was performed to determine the statistically significant difference between the means.   Results and Discussion  The results of this study showed that the highest pH (4.17) was detected in the control and the addition of Carla fruit powder led to a decrease in pH. Storage time also lower the pH in yogurt samples. The highest acidity (1.3%) was measured in the treatment containing 0.6% Carla fruit powder and the lowest (0.59%) was in the control. It means that adding Carla powder to yogurt leads to an increase in acidity. The highest amount of phenolic compounds (475.63 μg equivalent of gallic acid/ml yogurt), was calculated in a sample containing 0.6% of Carla fruit powder. However, extended storage time, decreases the amount of phenolic compounds. By increasing the percentage of Carla fruit powder in yogurt samples, the amount of antioxidant activity increased. So that the highest antioxidant activity (93%) was related to the treatment containing 0.6% Carla powder on the 28th day of the storage. In the present study, the highest percentage of water holding capacity (84%) was observed in samples containing 0.6% Carla powder. The lowest water holding capacity (57.61%) was measured in the control sample at the first day of storage.   Conclusion  According to the results of this study, adding Carla powder to yogurt at the level of 0.6%, in addition to maintaining appearance properties, can increase its physicochemical properties and produce a novel food. In general, Carla powder can play a significant role in improving the textural properties of yogurt, and by increasing the viscosity and the water holding capacity, can reduce the negative effects of the storage period.   Acknowledgement  This research was conducted with the financial support by Research Institute of Zabol (Grant code: IR-RIOZ-GR-9027)

Science Models as Value-Added Services for Scholarly Information Systems

The paper introduces scholarly Information Retrieval (IR) as a further dimension that should be considered in the science modeling debate. The IR use case is seen as a validation model of the adequacy of science models in representing and predicting structure and dynamics in science. Particular conceptualizations of scholarly activity and structures in science are used as value-added search services to improve retrieval quality: a co-word model depicting the cognitive structure of a field (used for query expansion), the Bradford law of information concentration, and a model of co-authorship networks (both used for re-ranking search results). An evaluation of the retrieval quality when science model driven services are used turned out that the models proposed actually provide beneficial effects to retrieval quality. From an IR perspective, the models studied are therefore verified as expressive conceptualizations of central phenomena in science. Thus, it could be shown that the IR perspective can significantly contribute to a better understanding of scholarly structures and activities.Comment: 26 pages, to appear in Scientometric

Comparative study of goldfish growth and survival rate feeding by fairy shrimp (Phallocryptus spinosa), Artemia and concentrate diet

The diet quality and type has a great role in aquatic animals and leads to increase of resistance against diseases and good growth. Cultured andornamental fish do not access to live and selected food due to captivity condition. Threfore, they should be provided with complete diet similar to natural food in captive condition. Carotenoid pigments are responsible of flesh pigmentation of edible fish and skin color of ornamental fish. The accumulation of this pigments in fish tissue has a greate importance in marketing and hence due to lack of its synthesis, carotenoids shoud be added to diet of cultured fish. As the synthetic carotenoids are harmful to the environment , there is a greate interest to use natural carotenoids in ornamental fish diets to obtain bright color. This study was carried out to compare the effects of diets containing Artemia urmiana and Phallocryptus spinosa supplements and commercial feed on growth and survival of goldfish fingerlings, quality of skin color, amounts of total carotenoids, Astaxantin, Canthaxantin and beta-carotene inCultured Carassius auratus during 90 days. The culture medium were contained glass aquaria in controlled condition and suitable for goldfish growth with 12 L: 12 D photoperiod and water temperature of 28±1 oC 3 test groups were included: treatment 1 fed with concentrate diet , treatment 2 fed with concentrate and frizzed Phallocryptus spinosa with tha same concentrations and treatment 3 fed with concentrate and frizzed Artemia urmiana with the same concentrations . Each treatment contains 2 replications and each replication consisted of 30 goldfish. In this study, The amounts of total carotenoids using spectrophotometer modelWPA, astaxantin, canthaxantin and beta-carotene using HPLC model Younglin, UK, were determined in the skin of Carassius auratus at the end of the exprement period. The results revealed that the most growth rate (GR), specific growth rate and condition factor (CF) were 0.11 ±0.006, 0.34 ± 0.015 and 3.96 ± 0.10, respectively which due to treatment 3 and the most weight gain and length gain including 8.57± 1.18g and 31.54± 3.33 mm, respectively due to treatment 2 .During rearing period, there was not any significant difference among treatments (p>0.05). The analysis of obtained data showed that there was a significant difference between diets containing live food and concentrate diet (p<0.05). The results revealed that live food enhanced skin color of Carassius auratus compared to concentrate diet. Also, the most pigmentation obtained from the diet contained fairy shrimp. As, in concentrate, concentrate and fairy shrimps, concentrate and Artemia diets amounts of total carotenoids at 450 nm wave length were 1.09, 3.90 and 2.07 mg/100, asthaxantin were 84.57, 205.82 and 102.24 ng/g and canthaxanthin were 0.24, 35.79 and 30.64 ng/g and carotenoid were 34.73, 138.78 and 69.77 ng/g, respectively. The use of fairy shrimp compared to Artemia in the diet can be significantly increased the amounts of carotenoids especially asthaxanthin in the skin of goldfish (p<0.05). Therefore fairy shrimps can be used as a suitable for artemia and high cost synthetic pigments to enhance color of ornamental fish

A cycle-consistent adversarial network for brain PET partial volume correction without prior anatomical information

Purpose: Partial volume effect (PVE) is a consequence of the limited spatial resolution of PET scanners. PVE can cause the intensity values of a particular voxel to be underestimated or overestimated due to the effect of surrounding tracer uptake. We propose a novel partial volume correction (PVC) technique to overcome the adverse effects of PVE on PET images. Methods: Two hundred and twelve clinical brain PET scans, including 50 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG), 50 18F-Flortaucipir, 36 18F-Flutemetamol, and 76 18F-FluoroDOPA, and their corresponding T1-weighted MR images were enrolled in this study. The Iterative Yang technique was used for PVC as a reference or surrogate of the ground truth for evaluation. A cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) was trained to directly map non-PVC PET images to PVC PET images. Quantitative analysis using various metrics, including structural similarity index (SSIM), root mean squared error (RMSE), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), was performed. Furthermore, voxel-wise and region-wise-based correlations of activity concentration between the predicted and reference images were evaluated through joint histogram and Bland and Altman analysis. In addition, radiomic analysis was performed by calculating 20 radiomic features within 83 brain regions. Finally, a voxel-wise two-sample t-test was used to compare the predicted PVC PET images with reference PVC images for each radiotracer. Results: The Bland and Altman analysis showed the largest and smallest variance for 18F-FDG (95% CI: − 0.29, + 0.33 SUV, mean = 0.02 SUV) and 18F-Flutemetamol (95% CI: − 0.26, + 0.24 SUV, mean = − 0.01 SUV), respectively. The PSNR was lowest (29.64 ± 1.13 dB) for 18F-FDG and highest (36.01 ± 3.26 dB) for 18F-Flutemetamol. The smallest and largest SSIM were achieved for 18F-FDG (0.93 ± 0.01) and 18F-Flutemetamol (0.97 ± 0.01), respectively. The average relative error for the kurtosis radiomic feature was 3.32%, 9.39%, 4.17%, and 4.55%, while it was 4.74%, 8.80%, 7.27%, and 6.81% for NGLDM_contrast feature for 18F-Flutemetamol, 18F-FluoroDOPA, 18F-FDG, and 18F-Flortaucipir, respectively. Conclusion: An end-to-end CycleGAN PVC method was developed and evaluated. Our model generates PVC images from the original non-PVC PET images without requiring additional anatomical information, such as MRI or CT. Our model eliminates the need for accurate registration or segmentation or PET scanner system response characterization. In addition, no assumptions regarding anatomical structure size, homogeneity, boundary, or background level are required. © 2023, The Author(s)

Modulation of extracellular matrix by nutritional hepatotrophic factors in thioacetamide-induced liver cirrhosis in the rat

Nutritional substances associated to some hormones enhance liver regeneration when injected intraperitoneally, being denominated hepatotrophic factors (HF). Here we verified if a solution of HF (glucose, vitamins, salts, amino acids, glucagon, insulin, and triiodothyronine) can revert liver cirrhosis and how some extracellular matrices are affected. Cirrhosis was induced for 14 weeks in 45 female Wistar rats (200 mg) by intraperitoneal injections of thioacetamide (200 mg/kg). Twenty-five rats received intraperitoneal HF twice a day for 10 days (40 mL·kg-1·day-1) and 20 rats received physiological saline. Fifteen rats were used as control. The HF applied to cirrhotic rats significantly: a) reduced the relative mRNA expression of the genes: Col-&#945;1 (-53%), TIMP-1 (-31.7%), TGF-&#946;1 (-57.7%), and MMP-2 (-41.6%), whereas Plau mRNA remained unchanged; b) reduced GGT (-43.1%), ALT (-17.6%), and AST (-12.2%) serum levels; c) increased liver weight (11.3%), and reduced liver collagen (-37.1%), regenerative nodules size (-22.1%), and fibrous septum thickness. Progranulin protein (immunohistochemistry) and mRNA (in situ hybridization) were found in fibrous septa and areas of bile duct proliferation in cirrhotic livers. Concluding, HF improved the histology and serum biochemistry of liver cirrhosis, with an important reduction of interstitial collagen and increased extracelullar matrix degradation by reducing profibrotic gene expression

Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990-2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

SummaryBackground The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2015 provides an up-to-date synthesis of the evidence for risk factor exposure and the attributable burden of disease. By providing national and subnational assessments spanning the past 25 years, this study can inform debates on the importance of addressing risks in context. Methods We used the comparative risk assessment framework developed for previous iterations of the Global Burden of Disease Study to estimate attributable deaths, disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), and trends in exposure by age group, sex, year, and geography for 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks from 1990 to 2015. This study included 388 risk-outcome pairs that met World Cancer Research Fund-defined criteria for convincing or probable evidence. We extracted relative risk and exposure estimates from randomised controlled trials, cohorts, pooled cohorts, household surveys, census data, satellite data, and other sources. We used statistical models to pool data, adjust for bias, and incorporate covariates. We developed a metric that allows comparisons of exposure across risk factors—the summary exposure value. Using the counterfactual scenario of theoretical minimum risk level, we estimated the portion of deaths and DALYs that could be attributed to a given risk. We decomposed trends in attributable burden into contributions from population growth, population age structure, risk exposure, and risk-deleted cause-specific DALY rates. We characterised risk exposure in relation to a Socio-demographic Index (SDI). Findings Between 1990 and 2015, global exposure to unsafe sanitation, household air pollution, childhood underweight, childhood stunting, and smoking each decreased by more than 25%. Global exposure for several occupational risks, high body-mass index (BMI), and drug use increased by more than 25% over the same period. All risks jointly evaluated in 2015 accounted for 57·8% (95% CI 56·6–58·8) of global deaths and 41·2% (39·8–42·8) of DALYs. In 2015, the ten largest contributors to global DALYs among Level 3 risks were high systolic blood pressure (211·8 million [192·7 million to 231·1 million] global DALYs), smoking (148·6 million [134·2 million to 163·1 million]), high fasting plasma glucose (143·1 million [125·1 million to 163·5 million]), high BMI (120·1 million [83·8 million to 158·4 million]), childhood undernutrition (113·3 million [103·9 million to 123·4 million]), ambient particulate matter (103·1 million [90·8 million to 115·1 million]), high total cholesterol (88·7 million [74·6 million to 105·7 million]), household air pollution (85·6 million [66·7 million to 106·1 million]), alcohol use (85·0 million [77·2 million to 93·0 million]), and diets high in sodium (83·0 million [49·3 million to 127·5 million]). From 1990 to 2015, attributable DALYs declined for micronutrient deficiencies, childhood undernutrition, unsafe sanitation and water, and household air pollution; reductions in risk-deleted DALY rates rather than reductions in exposure drove these declines. Rising exposure contributed to notable increases in attributable DALYs from high BMI, high fasting plasma glucose, occupational carcinogens, and drug use. Environmental risks and childhood undernutrition declined steadily with SDI; low physical activity, high BMI, and high fasting plasma glucose increased with SDI. In 119 countries, metabolic risks, such as high BMI and fasting plasma glucose, contributed the most attributable DALYs in 2015. Regionally, smoking still ranked among the leading five risk factors for attributable DALYs in 109 countries; childhood underweight and unsafe sex remained primary drivers of early death and disability in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Interpretation Declines in some key environmental risks have contributed to declines in critical infectious diseases. Some risks appear to be invariant to SDI. Increasing risks, including high BMI, high fasting plasma glucose, drug use, and some occupational exposures, contribute to rising burden from some conditions, but also provide opportunities for intervention. Some highly preventable risks, such as smoking, remain major causes of attributable DALYs, even as exposure is declining. Public policy makers need to pay attention to the risks that are increasingly major contributors to global burden. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation