High efficiency phytoextraction of barium using Amaranthus viridis L.

Heavy metal pollutants in the environment are emerging global concern. Barium is one of the heavy metal abundantly used in the manufacture of firecrackers and match industries. This work is aim to eradicate barium from these industrial sites; the new-flanged phytoextraction technology is used to mitigate the metal pollution through hyperaccumulators. Plant used in phytoextraction should accumulate and translocate  specific pollutants especially heavy metals. This work aims to assess the tolerance mechanism of Amaranthus viridis L. a selective native hyperaccumulator under barium chloride stress. Morphometric, biochemical, enzymatic activity, accumulation, translocation and mobility of barium form soil to root and leaves were studied in co-cultivated hyperaccumulator (Amaranthus viridis) and hypoaccumulator (Abelmuscus esculentus) at various concentration levels of barium. Amaranthus viridis accumulated fourfold to fivefold barium in roots, shoots and leaves than Abelmuscus esculentusL. This is well understand that Amaranthus viridis showing higher accumulation of barium, more translocation of barium from root to shoot and good mobility. The mobility of barium was increased form level 1 to level 3. It was revealed that the accumulation of barium was more in root and shoot of Amaranthus viridis. It is inferred from the present study that A.esculentus is a hypoaccumulator and is sensitive to barium. When co-cultivated with Amaranthus viridis showing less of metal toxicity because Amaranthus viridis being hyperaccumulator of barium, accumulate more metal and save Abelmuscus esculentus. It is strongly suggest that the hyperaccumulator Amaranthus viridis L. should grown in the barium polluted sites and make the environment sans heavy metal pollution

Hydrostatic pressure effect on Tc of new BiS2 based Bi4O4S3 and NdO0.5F0.5BiS2 layered superconductors

We investigate the external hydrostatic pressure effect on the superconducting transition temperature (Tc) of new layered superconductors Bi4O4S3 and NdO0.5F0.5BiS2. Though the Tc is found to have moderate decrease from 4.8 K to 4.3 K (dTconset/dP = -0.28 K/GPa) for Bi4O4S3 superconductor, the same increases from 4.6 K to 5 K (dTconset/dP = 0.44 K/GPa) upto 1.31 GPa followed by a sudden decrease from 5 K to 4.7 K upto 1.75 GPa for NdO0.5F0.5BiS2 superconductor. The variation of Tc in these systems may be correlated to increase or decrease of the charge carriers in the density of states under externally applied pressure.Comment: 3 pages text +Fig

Ecology of benthic ostracoda from off Rameswaram, southeast coast of india

Ostracoda are bivalve crustacean that live in marine through brackish environment. The study area is off Rameswaram in the Palk Bay. The latitude and longitude are N 9°17' and from E 79º19' to 79º25'. As Rameswaram and its environ experiences four types of seasons in a year, namely, Winter (January - March), Summer (April - June), Southwest monsoon (July - September) and Northeast monsoon (October - December), ten sediment and bottom water samples were collected during every season, totaling to forty in a year. The Depth, Temperature, pH, Salinity, Dissolved oxygen and Nutrients regarding water samples and CaC03 and Organic matter in sediments were determined apart from the type of sediment. A portion of the sediment sample from each location during every season were preserved in the field using 10% formalin and latter processed in the laboratory for determining and counting of living and total population of benthic Ostracoda. Individual species of Ostracoda were identified and their living and total population were determined from every samples for all seasons. Based on the size of the population, widespread and abundantly occurring nature, the ecology of six species were computed. The six species are 1) Loxoconcha lilljeborgii Brady, 2) Mutilus pentoekensis (Kingma), 3) Neocytheretta murilineata Zhao and Whatley, 4) Neomonoceratina iniqua Brady, 5) Tanella gracilis Kingma, and 6) Xestoleberis variegata Brady. The population size of all these six species exceeds 62% of the total population size during all the seasons

Efficient Detection Technique for Image Forgery

Image forgery is a real time issue in this present era and causes a lot of tribulations to the society. The forgery in an image includes object addition, object removal, changing color etc.  The overture of our work is to find the type of forgery present in an image i.e. whether the image is retouched or copy move forgery. While comparing to copy move forgery, Retouching is not a major kind of forgery because it is used only for clarification purpose and also in this paper we are going to propose a fuzzy logic algorithm for segmentation of an image to improve the accuracy rate of detecting the cloned region in an image. Initially the image was segmented into patches and a keypoint was extracted in each patches. The detection of cloned region is done in two stages. In first stage, an affine transform matrix was built by finding the suspicious pairs in an image. In second stage, the detection of cloned region can be accurately detected using Fuzzy technique

Computational studies on new Leishmanial drug targets against Quercetin

Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease caused by Leishmania parasite which resides in the infected sand flies. Control of Leishmaniasis remains a source of grave concern worldwide. Studies on Leishmaniasis triggered because of its outbreak in tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, East Africa and South America. There is an urgent need for new therapeutic interventions such as vaccine and new drug targets as it develops resistance towards the available drugs. Quercetin, a derivative of polyphenolic flavonoid exhibits various biological activities by interacting with proteins and nucleic acids. In this study, computational analysis was performed to identify the potential drug target of Quercetin in Leishmania species by molecular docking. The newly predicted targets were subjected for subcellular localization prediction and determined the protein-protein interaction networks that would aid in the development of anti-Leishmanial drugs. This study helps in the identification of targets and development of anti-Leishmanial drugs

The conserved C-terminus of the PcrA/UvrD helicase interacts directly with RNA polymerase

Copyright: © 2013 Gwynn et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by a Wellcome Trust project grant to MD (Reference: 077368), an ERC starting grant to MD (Acronym: SM-DNA-REPAIR) and a BBSRC project grant to PM, NS and MD (Reference: BB/I003142/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Cooperation of RAD51 and RAD54 in regression of a model replication fork

DNA lesions cause stalling of DNA replication forks, which can be lethal for the cell. Homologous recombination (HR) plays an important role in DNA lesion bypass. It is thought that Rad51, a key protein of HR, contributes to the DNA lesion bypass through its DNA strand invasion activity. Here, using model stalled replication forks we found that RAD51 and RAD54 by acting together can promote DNA lesion bypass in vitro through the ‘template-strand switch’ mechanism. This mechanism involves replication fork regression into a Holliday junction (‘chicken foot structure’), DNA synthesis using the nascent lagging DNA strand as a template and fork restoration. Our results demonstrate that RAD54 can catalyze both regression and restoration of model replication forks through its branch migration activity, but shows strong bias toward fork restoration. We find that RAD51 modulates this reaction; by inhibiting fork restoration and stimulating fork regression it promotes accumulation of the chicken foot structure, which we show is essential for DNA lesion bypass by DNA polymerase in vitro. These results indicate that RAD51 in cooperation with RAD54 may have a new role in DNA lesion bypass that is distinct from DNA strand invasion

Current trends in leather science

Abstract In preparing the second edition of ‘Tanning Chemistry. The Science of Leather.’, the literature was updated and the content was revised and reviewed. Here, the new findings are presented and discussed. Notable developments include the necessary rethinking of the mechanism of sulfide unhairing because of new understanding of the aqueous chemistry of sulfide species. Revision upwards of the value of the second pKa for sulfide species ionisation means that S2− cannot exist in an aqueous medium, so the unhairing species in hair burn reactions is HS−. Although the technology remains the same, this means the mechanisms of associated reactions such as immunisation must be revised. Rawstock preservation has benefitted from studies of the potential role of materials from plants which accumulate salt, but which also contribute terpene compounds. There is also further discussion on the continuing issue of chromium (VI) in the leather industry. The application to processing of new solvents, ionic liquids and deep eutectics, is the coming technology, which offers transforming options for new chemistries and products. Renewed interest in vegetable tanning and methods of wet white processing are current trends. Also, within the topic of reagent delivery is processing in a solid medium of plastic beads. Graphical abstrac

Processing of leather using deep eutectic solvents

Processing of leather has an historical reputation as a chemically and energetically intensive process that produces large volumes of aqueous waste. Saline pollution combined with heavy-metal, dyes and acid and base streams make leather production an ecologically sensitive industry. The current study shows that a variety of deep eutectic solvents (DESs) may be used for the tanning, fatliquoring and dyeing of animal hides, being particularly useful for mineral (chromium) and vegetable tanning processes. The tanning agents are able to penetrate rapidly into the hide, driven by lyotropic swelling due to their high ionic strength. The samples are shown to have similar tanning agent content to the currently used aqueous chromium(III) sulfate solution; however, the waste metal content is shown to be significantly reduced. Incorporation of the DES Ethaline into the leather significantly alters the swelling properties of the leather increasing the flexibility and ductility of the material, therefore acting in the same manner as a fatliquor that lubricates or plasticizes the fibrous structure of the collagen. Ethaline was also used to transport a lysochromic dye throughout the cross section of the leather, and the hydrophobicity of the dye prevents leaching into the aqueous wash solution. Physical measurements show that leather processed using DESs have similar mechanical properties to that processed using conventional aqueous systems