Mycorrhizal symbiosis and bioavailability of micronutrients in maize grain

Field experiments were conducted in calcareous and non-calcareous soils in order to study the biofortification of Fe and Zn in maize grain using arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) symbiosis. Treatments consisted of two levels of FeSO4 (12.5 and 25 kg ha-1), two levels of ZnSO4 (12.5 and 25 kg ha-1) and two mycorrhizal treatments [with (M+) or without (M-)] inoculum carrying Glomus intraradices) replicated four times in a factorial RBD. The results revealed that AMF colonization significantly increased soil available Fe (M- 1.9; M+ 2.1 mg kg-1) and Zn (M- 4.16; M+ 4.50 mg kg-1). Siderophore production in M+ plants (51.4 μmol cm-3 hr) were higher than M- plants (39.5 μmol cm-3 hr) and the increase observed irrespective of levels of Fe and Zn. Increased availability of Fe and Zn in soil in combination with enhanced concentrations in plants assisted M+ plants to maintain higher micronutrient contents in grains (Fe M- 31.2, M+ 35.3; Zn M- 45.1, M+ 52.4 mg kg-1). Mycorrhizal plants produced grains with had 10- 15% higher Fe and Zn contents while anti-nutritional factor “phytic acid” had decreased (M- 1.13; M+ 1.07 mg g-1). Overall, the data suggest that mycorrhizal fungal inoculation assists in biofortification kernels with Fe and Zn besides circumventing the impact of anti-nutritional factors

Computational identification and analysis of neurodegenerative disease associated protein kinases in hominid genomes

AbstractProtein kinases play an important role in the incidence of neurodegenerative diseases. However their incidence in non-human primates is found to be very low. Small differences among the genomes might influence the disease susceptibilities. The present study deals with finding the genetic differences of protein kinases in humans and their three closest evolutionary partners chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan for three neurodegenerative diseases namely, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. In total 47 human protein kinases associated with three neurodegenerative diseases and their orthologs from other three non-human primates were identified and analyzed for any possible susceptibility factors in humans. Multiple sequence alignment and pairwise sequence alignment revealed that, 18 human protein kinases including DYRK1A, RPS6KB1, and GRK6 contained significant indels and substitutions. Further phosphorylation site analysis revealed that eight kinases including MARK2 and LTK contained sites of phosphorylation exclusive to human genomes which could be particular candidates in determining disease susceptibility between human and non-human primates. Final pathway analysis of these eight kinases and their targets revealed that these kinases could have long range consequences in important signaling pathways which are associated with neurodegenerative diseases

An Enhanced Cuckoo Search for Optimization of Bloom Filter in Spam Filtering

Bloom Filter BF is a simple but powerful data structure that can check membership to a static set The tradeoff to use Bloom filter is a certain configurable risk of false positives The odds of a false positive can be made very low if the hash bitmap is sufficiently large Spam is an irrelevant or inappropriate message sent on the internet to a large number of newsgroups or users A spam word is a list of well-known words that often appear in spam mails The proposed system of Bin Bloom Filter BBF groups the words into number of bins with different false positive rates based on the weights of the spam words An Enhanced Cuckoo Search ECS algorithm is employed to minimize the total membership invalidation cost of the BFs by finding the optimal false positive rates and number of elements stored in every bin The experimental results have demonstrated for CS and ECS for various numbers of bin

Copper undercoats on the corrosion resistance of bright nickel-chromium and of nickel-iron-chromium electrodeposits on steel substrates

The present paper deals with the testing of the newly developed nickel-iron plating process with regard to the corrosion performance of coatings produced. Aceticacid saltspray method he6 been used as the test method.The results show that mild steel plated with nickel iron-chromium systems with iron contents up to 35 %are suitable for indoor applications though slightly inferior to nickelchromium systems. Uterature reports suggest that nickelchromium systems for outdoor applications are to be modified by inducing microporosity in the chromium top layer and by giving suitable undercoats. The use of a microporous chromium topcoat in improving the performance of nickel and nickel iron coatings are tested. The effect of copper undercoats on the corrosion performance of nickel and nickel iron-chromium systems are compared and it is concluded that a copper undercoat is more beneficial for a nickel ironchromium system than a ni~ekhromium system

Statistics of Advective Stretching in Three-dimensional Incompressible Flows

We present a method to quantify kinematic stretching in incompressible, unsteady, isoviscous, three-dimensional flows. We extend the method of Kellogg and Turcotte (J. Geophys. Res. 95:421–432, 1990) to compute the axial stretching/thinning experienced by infinitesimal ellipsoidal strain markers in arbitrary three-dimensional incompressible flows and discuss the differences between our method and the computation of Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent (FTLE). We use the cellular flow model developed in Solomon and Mezic (Nature 425:376–380, 2003) to study the statistics of stretching in a three-dimensional unsteady cellular flow. We find that the probability density function of the logarithm of normalised cumulative stretching (log S) for a globally chaotic flow, with spatially heterogeneous stretching behavior, is not Gaussian and that the coefficient of variation of the Gaussian distribution does not decrease with time as $t^{-\frac{1}{2}}$ . However, it is observed that stretching becomes exponential log S∼t and the probability density function of log S becomes Gaussian when the time dependence of the flow and its three-dimensionality are increased to make the stretching behaviour of the flow more spatially uniform. We term these behaviors weak and strong chaotic mixing respectively. We find that for strongly chaotic mixing, the coefficient of variation of the Gaussian distribution decreases with time as $t^{-\frac{1}{2}}$ . This behavior is consistent with a random multiplicative stretching process

Subword-based Stochastic Segment Modeling for Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition

In this paper, we describe several experiments in which we use a stochastic segment model (SSM) to improve offline handwriting recognition (OHR) performance. We use the SSM to re-rank (re-score) multiple decoder hypotheses. Then, a probabilistic multi-class SVM is trained to model stochastic segments obtained from force aligning transcriptions with the underlying image. We extract multiple features from the stochastic segments that are sensitive to larger context span to train the SVM. Our experiments show that using confidence scores from the trained SVM within the SSM framework can significantly improve OHR performance. We also show that OHR performance can be improved by using a combination of character-based and parts-of-Arabic-words (PAW)-based SSMs

Multifunctional magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles: diverse synthetic approaches, surface modifications, cytotoxicity towards biomedical and industrial applications

Magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (MIONPs) play a major role in the emerging fields of nanotechnology to facilitate rapid advancements in biomedical and industrial platforms. The superparamagnetic properties of MIONPs and their environment friendly synthetic methods with well-defined particle size have become indispensable to obtain their full potential in a variety of applications ranging from cellular to diverse areas of biomedical science. Thus, the broadened scope and need for MIONPs in their demanding fields of applications required to be highlighted for a comprehensive understanding of their state-of-the-art. Many synthetic methods, however, do not entirely abolish their undesired cytotoxic effects caused by free radical production and high iron dosage. In addition, the agglomeration of MIONPs has also been a major problem. To alleviate these issues, suitable surface modification strategies adaptive to MIONPs has been suggested not only for the effective cytotoxicity control but also to minimize their agglomeration. The surface modification using inorganic and organic polymeric materials would represent an efficient strategy to utilize the diagnostic and therapeutic potentials of MIONPs in various human diseases including cancer. This review article elaborates the structural and magnetic properties of MIONPs, specifically magnetite, maghemite and hematite, followed by the important synthetic methods that can be exploited for biomedical approaches. The in vivo cytotoxic effects and the possible surface modifications employed to eliminate the cytotoxicity thereby enhancing the nanoparticle efficacy are also critically discussed. The roles and applications of surface modified MIONPs in medical and industrial platforms have been described for the benefits of global well-being.This work was supported by Department of Science and Technology Nano‑ mission, Government of India [Grant No. DST/NM/NB-2018/10(G)], Science and Engineering Research Board, Department of Science and Technology, India [Grant No. YSS/2014/00026] and University Grants Commission, India [Grant No. F. 4-5(24-FRP)/2013(BSR)]. This article is a result of the project NORTE-010145-FEDER-000012, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Pro‑ gramme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This work was also fnanced by FEDER-Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional funds through the COMPETE 2020-Operacional Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (POCI), Portugal 2020, and by Portuguese funds through FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia/Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior in the framework of the project “Institute for Research and Innovation in Health Sciences” (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007274).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio