Allelopathy and Agricultural Sustainability: Implication in weed management and crop protection—an overview

Crop plants have defined roles in agricultural production and feeding the world. They are affected by several environmental and biological stresses, which range from soil salinity, drought, and climate change to exposure to diverse plant pathogens. These stresses pose risk to agricultural sustainability. To avoid the increasing biotic and abiotic pressure on crop plants, agrochemicals are extensively used in agriculture for attaining desirable yield and production of crops. However, the use of agrochemicals is also challenging the integrity of ecosystems. Thus, to maintain the integrity of ecosystem, sustainable measures for elevated crop production are required. Allelopathy, a process of chemical interactions between plants and other organisms, could be used in the management of several biotic and abiotic stresses if the basic mechanisms of the phenomena and plants with allelopathic potentials are known. Allelopathy has a promising future for its application in agriculture for natural weed management, improving soil health and suppressing plant diseases. The aim of this review is to discuss the importance of allelopathy in agriculture and its role in sustainability with a specific focus on weed management and crop protection

Co-movement between Exchange Rate Fluctuations and Economic Factors in Pakistan’s Economy (1990-2013)

Prior to 1976, business community of the world followed gold as a stable standard exchange rate for international business. After flexible exchange rate system implemented in the world in 1976, different solutions for stabilizing the exchange rate system were introduced to reduce the effects of exchange rate fluctuations on business. Pakistan and US Economy relies on trade for improving its GDP, lowering inflation rate and enhancing the economy of the Country. However if the trade balance is sufficient but the exchange rate fluctuation is significant then GDP would decrease instead of increasing and the economy might be negatively affected. It is understandable that imports of Pakistan are more than its exports and if exchange rate also fluctuates between Pakistan and the imported country then the country economy would disturb. Due to this imbalance in import/export, Pakistan relies on different institutions like IMF, World Bank, etc. These loans many help in balance of payment, partial stability but on the same time depreciate the economy if Pakistan. These loans are in the form of US dollars and Pakistani rupees are mostly associated with US dollars. Pakistan economy suffers a setback when these loans are returned. This paper looks as to how exchange rate fluctuations between Pakistan and USA and affects Pakistan’s economy and what are the factors which are disturbed due to exchange rate fluctuations between the two countries

IMPACT OF MICROFINANCE ON POVERTY: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL PAKISTAN

This study aims at finding out the socio-economic impact of micro finance services, offered by MFIs, in one of the poorest districts of Pakistan. A sample of 344 respondents has been selected for this purpose. The study takes children's nutrition and education expenditures, savings of clients and investment of loan as explained variables. Our findings show that microfinance services have myriad influences on subsistence of the poor. Though respondents have concerns over the performance of MFIs, the overall impact goes in concord with results of previous studies. This study validates the relationship between microfinance and poverty alleviation

IMPACT OF MICROFINANCE ON POVERTY: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL PAKISTAN

This study aims at finding out the socio-economic impact of micro finance services, offered by MFIs, in one of the poorest districts of Pakistan. A sample of 344 respondents has been selected for this purpose. The study takes children's nutrition and education expenditures, savings of clients and investment of loan as explained variables. Our findings show that microfinance services have myriad influences on subsistence of the poor. Though respondents have concerns over the performance of MFIs, the overall impact goes in concord with results of previous studies. This study validates the relationship between microfinance and poverty alleviation

Efficient Leading Zero Count (LZC) Implementations for Xilinx FPGAs

Leading zero count (LZC) is a fundamental building block in floating-point arithmetic and data sketches. These applications are increasingly being implemented on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), however, existing architectures for LZC target application-specific integrated circuits and to the best of our knowledge specific LZC implementations tailored to FPGA structures have not been presented. In this letter, the implementation of LZC on Xilinx FPGA is considered and it is shown that by carefully adapting the LZC design to the FPGA structure, more efficient implementations can be obtained. In more detail, LZC designs for different bit widths are presented and evaluated. The results show that significant reductions in the FPGA resources needed are obtained that reach 33% lookup tables (LUTs) saving for 32-bit vectors and 20% LUTs saving for 64-bit vectors.The work of Pedro Reviriego was supported in part by the ACHILLES Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant PID2019-104207RB-I00; and in part by the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid-Spain) through the Multiannual Agreement with Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in the line of Excellence of University Professors under Grant EPUC3M21 in the Context of the V Plan Regional de Investigación Científica e Innovación Tecnológica (V PRICIT).Publicad

Biological efficacy of phyto-synthetic silver nanoparticles using ethanol extract of Euphorbia wallichii Hook Rhizome as bio-reductant and surfactant

Purpose: To synthesize silver nanoparticles using rhizome extract (RE) of E. wallichii as a bioreductant and surfactant.Method: RE was used as a bio-reductant for the reduction of Ag+1 (aq.) and as a stabilizing agent for silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). The AgNPs were then characterized by UV-visible spectrophotometer, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), dynamic light scattering spectroscopy (DLS), x-ray diffraction (XRD), energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and infrared (IR) spectroscopy. The antinociceptive potential of AgNPs was evaluated using Eddy’s hot plate. Spasmolytic bioassay was measured in mice via GI charcoal movement test. Anti-leishmanial potency was examined against promastigotes of Leishmania tropica, while antioxidant bioassay was determined using DPPH reduction method.Results: UV-Vis results showed characteristic surface plasmon resonance band from 440 – 460 nm, thus confirming the reducing ability of RE. SEM analysis showed spherical AgNPs with a typical face center cubic (fcc) structure as evidence by their x-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern. The role of RE as a stabilizing agent towards AgNPs was supported by IR and electronic absorption spectral data. Phytochemical investigation of RE confirmed the presence of alkaloids, flavonoids, phenols and glycosides etc. Mice treated with RE-AgNPs exhibited dose-dependent analgesic and spasmolytic effects. RE functionalized AgNPs exhibited promising antileishmanial and antioxidant effects (p < 0.05).Conclusions: RE-AgNPs exhibit substantial spasmolytic and antinociceptive activity, indicating central and peripheral analgesic effects. Thus, the formulation’s antileishmanial and antioxidative effects, indicate that it might be useful for preventing infectious and oxidative stress disorders.Keywords: Euphorbia wallichii, Silver nanoparticles, Antioxidant, Analgesic, Antispasmodic, Antileishmania

VR-ZYCAP: A versatile resourse-level ICAP controller for ZYNQ SOC

This article belongs to the Special Issue Architecture and CAD for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)Hybrid architectures integrating a processor with an SRAM-based FPGA fabric—for example, Xilinx ZynQ SoC—are increasingly being used as a single-chip solution in several market segments to replace multi-chip designs. These devices not only provide advantages in terms of logic density, cost and integration, but also provide run-time in-field reconfiguration capabilities. However, the current reconfiguration capabilities provided by vendor tools are limited to the module level. Therefore, incremental run-time configuration memory changes require a lengthy compilation time for off-line bitstream generation along with storage and reconfiguration time overheads with traditional vendor methodologies. In this paper, an internal configuration access port (ICAP) controller that provides a versatile fine-grain resource-level incremental reconfiguration of the programmable logic (PL) resources in ZynQ SoC is presented. The proposed controller implemented in PL, called VR-ZyCAP, can reconfigure look-up tables (LUTs) and Flip-Flops (FF). The run-time reconfiguration of FF is achieved through a reset after reconfiguration (RAR)-featured partial bitstream to avoid the unintended state corruption of other memory elements. Along with versatility, our proposed controller improves the reconfiguration time by 30 times for FFs compared to state-of-the-art works while achieving a nearly 400-fold increase in speed for LUTs when compared to vendor-supported software approaches. In addition, it achieves competitive resource utilization when compared to existing approaches.This research was funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the ACHILLES project, grant number PID2019-104207RB-I00 and by Taif University Researchers Supporting fund, grant number (TURSP-2020/144), Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia