Bangladeshi Medicinal Plants: Ethnopharmacology, Phytochemistry and Anti-Staphylococcal Activity

Antibacterial resistance is a major concern. Due to its new resistance mechanism, it is spreading and emerging globally and thereby threatening the treatment of common infectious diseases. There is no doubt to develop new antibiotic from natural sources to tackle antimicrobial resistance. This study involves, (1) ethnopharmacological survey in Bangladesh and (2) bioassay directed phytochemical investigation to explore antibacterial compounds against MRSA. In 2016, an ethnopharmacological survey conducted in Bangladesh led to the recommendation of 71 medicinal plants by 71 Ayurvedic/Unani practitioners, 21 Ayurvedic patients and 35 local inhabitants for the treatment of infectious diseases. Based on the review of literature, data analysis and ease of availability of the plants, 18 plants were initially selected and collected from Bangladesh. After initial antibacterial screening of 18 plants, five plants (MIC 32-512 μg/ml) were chosen based on potential antibacterial activity. These are (Zingiber montanum, Uraria picta, Diospyros malabarica, Cynometra namiflora, Swertia chirayita). Extensive phytochemical work using different chromatographic (VLC, Coloumn chromatography, SPE, TLC, PTLC) and spectroscopic (NMR, Mass spectromentry, IR) techniques on five Bangladeshi medicinal plants led to the isolation and identification of 25 compounds. Eight terpenes (zerumbol, zerumbone, buddledone A, germacrone, furanodienone, (-) borneol, camphor and 8(17), 12-labdadiene-15, 16-dial) were isolated from Zingiber montanum with the MIC (32- >128 μg/ml). Eugenol and steriods were isolated from Uraria picta (MIC 64- >128 μg/ml). Lupane type triterpenoids (Lupeol, botulin, betulinaldehyde, betulone and messagenin) were isolated and identified from Diospyros malabarica with the MIC (64- >128 μg/ml) while pentacyclic triterpene (glutinol, glutinone), simple phenolic (ethyl 4-ethoxybenzoate) and steroids were isolated from Cynometra ramiflora with MIC (64- >128 μg/ml). A series of xanthones (swerchirin, swertiaperenin, belidifolin and decussatin) were identified from Swertia chirayita with MIC (>128 μg/ml). Among these compounds, 4-ethoxybenzoate, messagenin were identified as new natural compounds. In terms of activity, 8(17), 12-labdadiene-15, 16-dial (32 μg/ml against ATCC 5941) and zerumbol (32 μg/ml against EMRSA 15) showed potential antibacterial activity

Replacement of fish meal by plant protein sources in Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) diet: growth performance and utilization

The nutritional suitability and cost effectiveness of rice polish and mustard oil cake as protein sources in the diet of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) were studied. This study introduced rice polish as a plant protein source for Nile tilapia and three diets were formulated using rice polish (0, 10 and 20%) and mustard oil cake (10.0, 17.6 and 22.0%) for a feeding trial of eight weeks to observe the growth performance and feed utilization. The result was indicated that growth performance tended to decrease with increase in inclusion level of rice polish and mustard oil cake. The control diet (FM35) recorded the highest body weight gain (BWG) (363.79±59.32%) and the least (330.24±32.32%) was in diet FM25. Specific growth rate (SGR) was followed the same trend and no significant differences of SGR was observed among the diets (P>0.05). Feed intake (FI) of different diets was ranged between 30.33 g and 35.08 g per fish at the end of this experiment. Feed intake was also declined with the increase in inclusion level of rice polish, though the feed conversion ratio (FCR) and protein efficiency ratio (PER) were not significantly different (P>0.05) among the diets. The results of this study revealed that partial replacement of fish meal by rice polish and mustard oil cake would be cost effective without any significant change in growth performance

Internet-based Framework to Support Integration of Customer in the Design of Customizable Products

A necessary element to design and produce customer-centric products is the integration of customers in the design process. Challenges faced during customer integration into the design process include generating models of the customized product, performing analysis of these to determine feasibility, and optimizing to increase the performance. These tasks have to be performed relatively quickly, if not in real time, to provide feedback to the customer. The focus of this article is to present a framework that utilizes CAD, finite element analysis (FEA), and optimization to integrate the customer into the design process via the Internet for delivering user customized products. The design analysis, evaluation, and optimization need to be automated and enhanced to enable operation over the Internet. A product family CAD/FEA template has been developed to perform analysis, along with a general formulation to optimize the customized product. The CAD/FEA template generalizes the geometry building and analysis of each configuration developed using a product platform approach. The proposed setup is demonstrated through the use of a bicycle frame family. In this study, the focus is on the application of optimization and FEA to facilitate the design of customer-centric products.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The chickpea book : a technical guide to chickpea production

The area of chickpea production in Australia has expanded rapidly in recent years especially in south-western Australia. This has been partly brought about by the keen interest of farmers and a concerted research effort and industry development by Agriculture Western Australia, The Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture (CLIMA) and other institutions, in partnership with the Grains Research and Development Corporation and other industry funding bodies. Private consultants, grain traders and other industry groups have also contributed to the expansion of the industry. Much of the local knowledge generated by these research and development projects has been published in various experimental summaries, Tech notes, Farm notes, magazine articles, \u27On the Pulse\u27 newsletters, conference and workshop proceedings, and scientific papers. This book collates much of this research and development in the one document, together with experience and knowledge from the eastern states and overseas. It is a comprehensive publication, much more than simply how to grow the crop in Western Australia. It describes much of the scientific data behind our recommendations and highlights the role of chickpea production in maximising whole farm profits.https://researchlibrary.agric.wa.gov.au/bulletins/1212/thumbnail.jp

Zero-Shot Generalizable End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog System using Context Summarization and Domain Schema

Task-oriented dialog systems empower users to accomplish their goals by facilitating intuitive and expressive natural language interactions. State-of-the-art approaches in task-oriented dialog systems formulate the problem as a conditional sequence generation task and fine-tune pre-trained causal language models in the supervised setting. This requires labeled training data for each new domain or task, and acquiring such data is prohibitively laborious and expensive, thus making it a bottleneck for scaling systems to a wide range of domains. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel Zero-Shot generalizable end-to-end Task-oriented Dialog system, ZS-ToD, that leverages domain schemas to allow for robust generalization to unseen domains and exploits effective summarization of the dialog history. We employ GPT-2 as a backbone model and introduce a two-step training process where the goal of the first step is to learn the general structure of the dialog data and the second step optimizes the response generation as well as intermediate outputs, such as dialog state and system actions. As opposed to state-of-the-art systems that are trained to fulfill certain intents in the given domains and memorize task-specific conversational patterns, ZS-ToD learns generic task-completion skills by comprehending domain semantics via domain schemas and generalizing to unseen domains seamlessly. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation on SGD and SGD-X datasets that span up to 20 unique domains and ZS-ToD outperforms state-of-the-art systems on key metrics, with an improvement of +17% on joint goal accuracy and +5 on inform. Additionally, we present a detailed ablation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed components and training mechanis

Re: Efficacy and Safety of Vildagliptin and Remogliflozin as Add-on Therapy to Metformin in Patients of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

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Case studies of six CBFM-2 water bodies

The case studies report on how CBFM-2 interventions have affected aquatic productivity, income, employment and livelihoods in six case study sites, Beelbhora beel cluster (Kishoreganj), Sholuar beel (Narail), Chapundaha beel (Rangpur), Hamil beel (Tangail), Kutir beel (Kishoreganj) and Dikshi beel (Pabna).