Internet of Things based Wireless Plant Sensor for Smart Farming

About 10% of the world’s workforce is directly dependent on agriculture for income and about 99% of food consumed by humans comes from farming. Agriculture is highly climate dependent and with global warming and rapidly changing weather it has become necessary to closely monitor the environment of growing crops for maximizing output as well as increasing food security while minimizing resource usage. In this study, we developed a low cost system which will monitor the temperature, humidity, light intensity and soil moisture of crops and send it to an online server for storage and analysis, based on this data the system can control actuators to control the growth parameters. The three tier system architecture consists of sensors and actuators on the lower level followed by an 8-bit AVR microcontroller which is used for data acquisition and processing topped by an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module which communicates with the internet server. The system uses relay to control actuators such as pumps to irrigate the fields; online weather data is used to optimize the irrigation cycles. The prototyped system was subject to several tests, the experimental results express the systems reliability and accuracy which accentuate its feasibility in real-world applications

Recent Trends in In-silico Drug Discovery

A Drug designing is a process in which new leads (potential drugs) are discovered which have therapeutic benefits in diseased condition. With development of various computational tools and availability of databases (having information about 3D structure of various molecules) discovery of drugs became comparatively, a faster process. The two major drug development methods are structure based drug designing and ligand based drug designing. Structure based methods try to make predictions based on three dimensional structure of the target molecules. The major approach of structure based drug designing is Molecular docking, a method based on several sampling algorithms and scoring functions. Docking can be performed in several ways depending upon whether ligand and receptors are rigid or flexible. Hotspot grafting, is another method of drug designing. It is preferred when the structure of a native binding protein and target protein complex is available and the hotspots on the interface are known. In absence of information of three Dimensional structure of target molecule, Ligand based methods are used. Two common methods used in ligand based drug designing are Pharmacophore modelling and QSAR. Pharmacophore modelling explains only essential features of an active ligand whereas QSAR model determines effect of certain property on activity of ligand. Fragment based drug designing is a de novo approach of building new lead compounds using fragments within the active site of the protein. All the candidate leads obtained by various drug designing method need to satisfy ADMET properties for its development as a drug. In-silico ADMET prediction tools have made ADMET profiling an easier and faster process. In this review, various softwares available for drug designing and ADMET property predictions have also been listed

Effect of STAT3 inhibitor in chronic myeloid leukemia associated signaling pathway: a mathematical modeling, simulation and systems biology study

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a hematopoietic stem-cell disorder which proliferates due to abnormal growth of basophil cells. Several proangiogenic molecules have been reported to be associated in CML progression, including the hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). However, detail mechanism about the cellular distribution and function of HGF in CML is yet to be revealed. The proliferation of hematopoietic cells are regulated by some of the growth factors like interleukin 3 (IL-3), IL-6, erythropoietin, thrombopoietin, etc. In this study IL-6 pathways have been taken into consideration which induces JAK/STAT and MAPK pathways to decipher the CML progression stages. An attempt has been made to model these pathways with the help of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and estimating unknown parameters through fminsearch optimization algorithm. Some of the specific component like STAT3, of the pathway has been analyzed in detail and their role in CML progression has been elucidated. The roles of STAT3 inhibitors into the treatment of CML have been thoroughly studied and optimum concentration of the inhibitors have been predicted. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13205-015-0357-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Concept of Operations for a Neptune System Mission

The Arcanum mission is a proposed L-class mother-daughter spacecraft configuration for the Neptunian system, the mass and volume of which have been maximised to highlight the wide-ranging science the next generation of launch vehicles will enable. The spacecraft is designed to address a long-neglected but high-value region of the Solar System, showing that current advances make such a mission more feasible than ever before. This paper adds to a series on Arcanum and specifically provides progress on the study of areas identified as critical weaknesses by the 2013 – 2022 Decadal Survey and areas relevant to the recently published Voyage 2050 recommendations to ESA

An L-class multirole observatory and science platform for Neptune

A coming resurgence of super heavy-lift launch vehicles has precipitated an immense interest in the future of crewed spaceflight and even future colonisation efforts. While it is true that a bright future awaits this sector, driven by commercial ventures and the reignited interest of old space-faring nations, and the joining of new ones, little of this attention has been reserved for the science-centric applications of these launchers. The Arcanum mission is a proposal to use these vehicles to deliver an L-class observatory into a highly eccentric orbit around Neptune, with a wideranging suite of science goals and instrumentation tackling Solar System science, planetary science, Kuiper Belt Objects and exoplanet systems