Factors Affecting the Productivity of Coffee in Gulmi and Arghakhanchi Districts of Nepal

Coffee is one of the major potential cash crops with lucrative export value grown in mid-hills of Nepal. Nepalese coffee production has suffered long by low productivity. Research was conducted from February to May, 2019 to analyze the factors affecting the productivity of coffee in Arghakhanchi and Gulmi districts of Nepal. These two districts were, purposively selected for this study taking account of comparative advantage and past studies recommendations for coffee sector. Altogether, 100 coffee growing households 50 from each, Arghakhanchi and Gulmi, were sampled by using multistage sampling technique. A pre-tested semi-structured interview schedule was used to collect the primary information while secondary information was collected reviewing the relevant publications. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression model was used to determine the factors affecting the productivity of coffee. The study revealed that the number of active family members involved in coffee production (0.000), adoption of income diversification through intercropping (0.005), training (0.072) and technical assistance (0.021) had positive and significant effect on coffee productivity. Encouraging the household to have coffee production as their primary occupation, providing technical assistance on rational land utilization and intercropping and strengthening the skill and knowledge of farmers through trainings could significantly support in increasing the productivity of coffee

Imaging biomarker roadmap for cancer studies.

Imaging biomarkers (IBs) are integral to the routine management of patients with cancer. IBs used daily in oncology include clinical TNM stage, objective response and left ventricular ejection fraction. Other CT, MRI, PET and ultrasonography biomarkers are used extensively in cancer research and drug development. New IBs need to be established either as useful tools for testing research hypotheses in clinical trials and research studies, or as clinical decision-making tools for use in healthcare, by crossing 'translational gaps' through validation and qualification. Important differences exist between IBs and biospecimen-derived biomarkers and, therefore, the development of IBs requires a tailored 'roadmap'. Recognizing this need, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) assembled experts to review, debate and summarize the challenges of IB validation and qualification. This consensus group has produced 14 key recommendations for accelerating the clinical translation of IBs, which highlight the role of parallel (rather than sequential) tracks of technical (assay) validation, biological/clinical validation and assessment of cost-effectiveness; the need for IB standardization and accreditation systems; the need to continually revisit IB precision; an alternative framework for biological/clinical validation of IBs; and the essential requirements for multicentre studies to qualify IBs for clinical use.Development of this roadmap received support from Cancer Research UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant references A/15267, A/16463, A/16464, A/16465, A/16466 and A/18097), the EORTC Cancer Research Fund, and the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking (grant agreement number 115151), resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) companies' in kind contribution

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Nations within a nation: variations in epidemiological transition across the states of India, 1990–2016 in the Global Burden of Disease Study

18% of the world's population lives in India, and many states of India have populations similar to those of large countries. Action to effectively improve population health in India requires availability of reliable and comprehensive state-level estimates of disease burden and risk factors over time. Such comprehensive estimates have not been available so far for all major diseases and risk factors. Thus, we aimed to estimate the disease burden and risk factors in every state of India as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2016

Phylogenetic analysis of “rose witches'-broom” phytoplasma from cultivated Rosa damascena in India representing a new subgroup V-B1 in 16S rRNA gene group V

AbstractDamask Rose (Rosa damascena; Family Rosaceace) is one of the most expensive essential oil bearing crops of many countries including India. A previously undescribed “rose witches'-broom” infestation was detected and exhibited symptoms of little leaf, apical proliferation and chlorosis during winter season in the experimental farms of CSIR-CIMAP, Lucknow (India). Samples from the healthy and infected plants were collected and indexed by PCR using the generic primer pairs P1/P6 and R16F2n/R16R2. The nested PCR product was cloned, sequenced and phytoplasma detected. The 16S rRNA gene sequence revealed that present phytoplasma showed maximum similarity of 97–98% with Candidatus Phytoplasma balanitae (HG937644), Balanites triflora' witches'-broom phytoplasma (BltWB) (AB689678) and Periwinkle yellows phytoplasma (EU375835), as well as other members of 16SrV group. Phylogenetic analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences of phytoplasma from Damask rose clustered with 16SrV phytoplasma group. However, computer-simulated RFLP analysis revealed unique profile of the phytoplasma sequence from rose with BamHI, HpaI and MseI and distinguished it from Periwinkle phytoplasma, Ca. P. Balanitae, Balanites triflora' witches'-broom phytoplasma and all previously described ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma’ of 16SrV groups. Further, the pattern similarity coefficient value was 0.55, lower than 0.85 with the representative phytoplasmas classified previously in 16SrV groups. Taking into consideration the unique plant host, RFLP profile and the restricted geographical occurrence in addition to the 16S rRNA gene sequence, the present phytoplasma is proposed to be rose witches'-broom phytoplasma representing a novel taxon 16SrV-B1. This is the first record of phytoplasma infection on Damask Rose from India