Changing Land use Pattern around Kolaghat Thermal Power Plant

Land use is a dynamic component which changes with time. The pattern and rate of this change vary from place to place depending on the location of the place and nature of changing agent. A coal based power plant change the local landuse directly or indirectly through acquisition of land to different types of activities performed during generation of electricity. It requires vast amount of land for the development of plant, township, rehabilitation colony, ash disposal pond, rail track etc. Later on, new railway, road way, market complex, educational institution, ancillary industry like cement manufacturing plant, brick fields come up centering the plant. All these lead to changes in land use pattern. In this paper an attempt has been done to find out the changes in the main landuse pattern around the Kolaghat Thermal Power Plant that was developed at the bank of Rupnarayan River in Medinipur District (West Bengal) during 1980s

Assessing the Role of Potential Biomarkers in Antimony Susceptible and Resistant Clinical Isolates of L. donovani from India

Failure of antimonial drugs, the mainstay therapy for leishmaniasis has become an escalating problem in the treatment of Indian leishmaniasis. Using 14 clinical isolates from both visceral (VL) and post-kala-azar dermal leismaniasis (PKDL) patients, we have examined the role of ATP-binding cassette transporter (ABC transporter) gene, multidrug resistant protein A (MRPA) and two building blocks of the major thiol, trypanothione namely, ornithine decarboxylase gene (ODC) (a rate limiting enzyme in the polyamine biosynthesis) and γ-glutamylcysteine synthetase (γ-GCS) (a rate limiting enzyme in glutathione biosynthesis) in antimony resistance. Amplification of these three genes was observed in some but not all clinical isolates. Increased expression of the three RNAs as determined by real-time PCR was observed in all SAG-R clinical isolates. Significant increase in cysteine and glutathione levels was observed in the resistant isolates. Our studies report the underlying mechanism of antimony resistance in the clinical isolates

Assessing aquaglyceroporin gene status and expression profile in antimony-susceptible and -resistant clinical isolates of Leishmania donovani from India

Objectives: Clinical resistance to pentavalent antimonials results from an interplay between uptake, efflux and sequestration in Leishmania. Aquaglyceroporins (AQPs) have been shown to facilitate uptake of trivalent metalloids. Down-regulation of AQP1 in Leishmania results in resistance to trivalent antimony, whereas overexpression of AQP1 in drug-resistant parasites can reverse the resistance. The present work investigates the role of AQP1 in monitoring antimonial resistance in Indian leishmaniasis. Methods and results: Susceptibility to trivalent antimony as determined in vitro with intracellular amastigotes from both visceral leishmaniasis (VL) and post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL) patients correlated well with the clinical response. Higher accumulation of trivalent antimony (SbIII) was observed in all susceptible isolates compared with resistant isolates. Reduced accumulation of SbIII correlated, with a few exceptions, with down-regulation of AQP1 RNA as determined by real-time PCR. Cloning and sequencing of the AQP1 gene from both VL and PKDL isolates showed sequence variation in four of the clinical isolates. None of the isolates had an alteration of Glu152 and Arg230, which have been previously shown to affect metalloid transport. Transfection of the AQP1 gene in a sodium antimony gluconate-resistant field isolate conferred susceptibility to the resistant isolate. Conclusions: Our studies indicate genetic variation in VL and PKDL isolates. Down-regulation of AQP1 correlates well with clinical drug resistance in a majority of Indian VL and PKDL isolates. AQP1 gene expression at both the genetic and transcriptional level showed positive correlation with SbIII accumulation, with some exceptions

Analysis of Flow Fields in a Flexible Tube with Periodic Constriction

Numerical techniques based on pressure-velocity formulation have been adopted to solve approximately, the governing equations for viscous flows through a tube (simulating an artery) with a periodic constriction. The effect of the constriction as well as the rigid of the tube, on the flow characteristics, and its consequences for arterial disease is the focus of this investigation. The unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved by using the finite-difference technique in staggered grid distribution. The haemodynamic factors like wall shear stress, pressure and velocity are analyzed through their graphical representations. Maximum resistance is attained in case of rigid stenosed tube rather than the flexible one. The main result is to contribute that the recirculating region is larger in case of a rigid tube than that of flexible one

Characterization of Leishmania donovani Aquaporins Shows Presence of Subcellular Aquaporins Similar to Tonoplast Intrinsic Proteins of Plants

Leishmania donovani, a protozoan parasite, resides in the macrophages of the mammalian host. The aquaporin family of proteins form important components of the parasite-host interface. The parasite-host interface could be a potential target for chemotherapy. Analysis of L. major and L. infantum genomes showed the presence of five aquaporins (AQPs) annotated as AQP9 (230aa), AQP putative (294aa), AQP-like protein (279aa), AQP1 (314aa) and AQP-like protein (596aa). We report here the structural modeling, localization and functional characterization of the AQPs from L. donovani. LdAQP1, LdAQP9, LdAQP2860 and LdAQP2870 have the canonical NPA-NPA motifs, whereas LdAQP putative has a non-canonical NPM-NPA motif. In the carboxyl terminal to the second NPA box of all AQPs except AQP1, a valine/alanine residue was found instead of the arginine. In that respect these four AQPs are similar to tonoplast intrinsic proteins in plants, which are localized to intracellular organelles. Confocal microscopy of L. donovani expressing GFP-tagged AQPs showed an intracellular localization of LdAQP9 and LdAQP2870. Real-time PCR assays showed expression of all aquaporins except LdAQP2860, whose level was undetectable. Three-dimensional homology modeling of the AQPs showed that LdAQP1 structure bears greater topological similarity to the aquaglyceroporin than to aquaporin of E. coli. The pore of LdAQP1 was very different from the rest in shape and size. The cavity of LdAQP2860 was highly irregular and undefined in geometry. For functional characterization, four AQP proteins were heterologously expressed in yeast. In the fps1Δ yeast cells, which lacked the key aquaglyceroporin, LdAQP1 alone displayed an osmosensitive phenotype indicating glycerol transport activity. However, expression of LdAQP1 and LdAQP putative in a yeast gpd1Δ strain, deleted for glycerol production, conferred osmosensitive phenotype indicating water transport activity or aquaporin function. Our analysis for the first time shows the presence of subcellular aquaporins and provides structural and functional characterization of aquaporins in Leishmania donovani

Hand Gesture Recognition Using Fusion of Features

As the world proceeds with an increase in digitization, Human-computer interface has a wide variety of scope in this digital world. Hand gesture recognition is one such domain which has a number of applications in Human-computer interface(HCI). Hand gestures recognition can be used in application such as automobile interface, medicine industries, gaming zones, public services etc. Among several gestures based recognition system, Hand Gesture is one of the easiest and convenient ways to communicate with the computer. Hand gestures are basically used by deaf and dumb people, so various sign languages are used. In this project, American Sign Language is used. This work is carried out in three steps: i) preprocessing, ii) Feature Extraction, iii) Classification. In the preprocessing step the input image which is exposed to illumination, rotation, and scaling is dealt with. The extraction of hand region out of the entire image is a challenging task, in this work YCbCr color space based skin color detection is done for hand gesture image for both uniform background and complex background. Various Morphological operations are also performed on the binary image for removing the unwanted redundancies from the image. For feature extraction, Edge Orientation Histogram (EOH), Block Based features (BBF), and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT)is used. The former is a contour based feature extraction approach in which only hand gesture boundary is considered for extraction of features. The second one is the block based feature extraction algorithm; in this, the shape of the gesture image is taken for generating the feature vector. The later one is Scale-invariant feature transform, this algorithm is mainly used in object and scene recognition due to its flexibility towards images which are prone to scaling and rotation variance. Fusion of edge orientation histogram and block based features are also done to make the system more efficient. The third step in hand gesture recognition is the Classification stage. In this part, the feature extracted from all the feature extraction algorithms are used. The two classifiers used in this project are Dynamic time warping(DTW)inspired by the time sequence matching and multi-class Support vector Machine(SVM).The dataset is divided into two equal parts for training and testing of the classifier. The system is made real time applicable by taking gesture database of multiple users under varying light conditions. The proposed work shows that the scale-invariant feature transform shows better results as compared to other two features extraction algorithm. For classifiers, the Support Vector Machine shows to be the better classifier as compared to dynamic time warping due to its time constraints

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) mixed convection slip flow and heat transfer over a vertical porous plate

The effects of velocity slip and thermal slip on MHD boundary layer mixed convection flow and heat transfer of an incompressible fluid past a plate in presence of suction/blowing are presented. Using similarity transformations the governing partial differential equations are reduced to ordinary differential equations and the nonlinear equations are then solved numerically with the help of shooting method. The present analysis reveals that by reducing the boundary layer thickness, the increasing velocity slip parameter makes the fluid velocity to increase whereas non-dimensional temperature decreases for increasing values of velocity slip parameter. The rate of heat transfer decreases with the increasing values of thermal slip. With increasing values of suction (blowing) parameter the surface temperature decreases (increases)

Heat transfer analysis for fluid flow over an exponentially stretching porous sheet with surface heat flux in porous medium

The aim of the present paper is to study the boundary layer flow and heat transfer towards an exponentially stretching porous sheet embedded in a porous medium with variable surface heat flux. Similarity transformations are used to convert the partial differential equations corresponding to the momentum and heat equations into highly non-linear ordinary differential equations. Numerical solutions of these equations are obtained. It is found that the skin-friction coefficient increases with increasing the permeability parameter as well as with the suction parameter. Momentum and thermal boundary layer thickness decrease with increasing exponential parameter

Genome-Wide Analyses and Functional Classification of Proline Repeat-Rich Proteins: Potential Role of eIF5A in Eukaryotic Evolution

<div><p>The eukaryotic translation factor, eIF5A has been recently reported as a sequence-specific elongation factor that facilitates peptide bond formation at consecutive prolines in <i>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</i>, as its ortholog elongation factor P (EF-P) does in bacteria. We have searched the genome databases of 35 representative organisms from six kingdoms of life for PPP (Pro-Pro-Pro) and/or PPG (Pro-Pro-Gly)-encoding genes whose expression is expected to depend on eIF5A. We have made detailed analyses of proteome data of 5 selected species, <i>Escherichia coli</i>, <i>Saccharomyces cerevisiae</i>, <i>Drosophila melanogaster</i>, <i>Mus musculus</i> and <i>Homo sapiens</i>. The PPP and PPG motifs are low in the prokaryotic proteomes. However, their frequencies markedly increase with the biological complexity of eukaryotic organisms, and are higher in newly derived proteins than in those orthologous proteins commonly shared in all species. Ontology classifications of <i>S. cerevisiae</i> and human genes encoding the highest level of polyprolines reveal their strong association with several specific biological processes, including actin/cytoskeletal associated functions, RNA splicing/turnover, DNA binding/transcription and cell signaling. Previously reported phenotypic defects in actin polarity and mRNA decay of eIF5A mutant strains are consistent with the proposed role for eIF5A in the translation of the polyproline-containing proteins. Of all the amino acid tandem repeats (≥3 amino acids), only the proline repeat frequency correlates with functional complexity of the five organisms examined. Taken together, these findings suggest the importance of proline repeat-rich proteins and a potential role for eIF5A and its hypusine modification pathway in the course of eukaryotic evolution.</p></div