A robust and forward-Looking industrial production indicator

Against the backdrop of growing criticism of the index of industrial production, which provides information only about the past and sometimes fl uctuates wildly, this article seeks to provide a more robust and forward-looking economic indicator of industrial growth. Such an indicator, based on past IIP numbers, can also serve as a benchmark for future IIP numbers when they are released. Using data on the IIP's three sub-series - manufacturing, mining, and electricity - it seeks to isolate the "noise" from the "signal" in two steps, enabling predictions for the two past months and four months into the future using the latest available IIP numbers in any given month

Antifungal acetylinic thiophenes from Tagetes minuta: potential biopesticide

Apart from thiophenes, which possess wide range of biocidal activity, aerial parts of Tagetes sp. contain essential oil. Oil components were reported to have antifungal activity, thus making whole plant of Tagetes very useful for exploiting as natural fungistatic agent. In the present study, Tagetes minuta grown in north western Himalayan condition were evaluated for its potential for use as antifungal agent. Flower essential oil showed minimal antifungal activity. Whereas, leaf essential oil was found signifi cant antifungal activity against three phytopathogenic fungi out of eight tested fungi. ED50 values were 165, 175 and 110 μg mL-1 against Rhizoctonia solani, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Sclerotium rolfsii, respectively. Thiophene rich extract of Tagetes minuta was found comparatively lesser active (ED50: 233-484 μg mL-1) than leaf essential oil against the same fungi. The present study shows that essential oil from leaves and thiophene rich extracts from marigold roots have signifi cantly good antifungal activity against a number of soil borne and foliar plant pathogens. The easy availability of these plants makes it an attractive potential candidate for development of natural fungicide

Variability assessment and construction of infectious clone of Indian Apple Scar Skin Viroid

Apple scar skin viroid (ASSVd) is widely distributed and economically important pome-fruit infecting viroid belonging to the genus Apscaviroid. It causes huge economic losses to the apple industry. Apple fruits with dappling, scarring, cracking and deformation symptoms were noticed during survey of apple growing regions of Himachal Pradesh, India. ASSVd was detected from four isolates showing dappled fruits. Molecular characterization of the viroid was done. Ten clones each from five isolates were sequenced out of which seven new sequence variants of ASSVd were found. Four of the clones were 330 nucleotides (nt) long and the other eight had an additional nucleotide. The clones showed significant sequence variability (94-100%) with each other. Variability was more common in the pathogenic domain of the viroid genome. Present isolates grouped with some Chinese and Korean isolates in phylogenetic analysis. The study reports seven new sequence variants of ASSVd and also gives a first molecular evidence of a viroid infection (ASSVd) in apple from India. Infectious clone of ASSVd were constructed for in vitro mutagenic studies. Keywords: Apple scar skin viroid, cloning, DNA sequencing, phylogenetic analysi

Gastrin-Releasing Peptide and Glucose Metabolism Following Pancreatitis

Background Gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP) is a pluripotent peptide that has been implicated in both gastrointestinal inflammatory states and classical chronic metabolic diseases such as diabetes. Abnormal glucose metabolism (AGM) after pancreatitis, an exemplar inflammatory disease involving the gastrointestinal tract, is associated with persistent low-grade inflammation and altered secretion of pancreatic and gut hormones as well as cytokines. While GRP is involved in secretion of many of them, it is not known whether GRP has a role in AGM. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the association between GRP and AGM following pancreatitis. Methods Fasting blood samples were collected to measure GRP, blood glucose, insulin, amylin, glucagon, pancreatic polypeptide (PP), somatostatin, cholecystokinin, gastric-inhibitory peptide (GIP), gastrin, ghrelin, glicentin, glucagon-like peptide-1 and 2, oxyntomodulin, peptide YY (PYY), secretin, vasoactive intestinal peptide, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1, and interleukin-6. Modified Poisson regression analysis and linear regression analyses were conducted. Four statistical models were used to adjust for demographic, metabolic, and pancreatitis-related risk factors. Results A total of 83 individuals after an episode of pancreatitis were recruited. GRP was significantly associated with AGM, consistently in all four models (P -trend < 0.05), and fasting blood glucose contributed 17% to the variance of GRP. Further, GRP was significantly associated with glucagon (P < 0.003), MCP-1 (P < 0.025), and TNF-α (P < 0.025) - consistently in all four models. GRP was also significantly associated with PP and PYY in three models (P < 0.030 for both), and with GIP and glicentin in one model (P = 0.001 and 0.024, respectively). Associations between GRP and other pancreatic and gut hormones were not significant. Conclusion GRP is significantly increased in patients with AGM after pancreatitis and is associated with increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, as well as certain pancreatic and gut hormones. Detailed mechanistic studies are now warranted to investigate the exact role of GRP in derangements of glucose homeostasis following pancreatitis

Activation of PTHrP-cAMP-CREB1 signaling following p53 loss is essential for osteosarcoma initiation and maintenance

Mutations in the P53 pathway are a hallmark of human cancer. The identification of pathways upon which p53-deficient cells depend could reveal therapeutic targets that may spare normal cells with intact p53. In contrast to P53 point mutations in other cancer, complete loss of P53 is a frequent event in osteosarcoma (OS), the most common cancer of bone. The consequences of p53 loss for osteoblastic cells and OS development are poorly understood. Here we use murine OS models to demonstrate that elevated Pthlh (Pthrp), cAMP levels and signalling via CREB1 are characteristic of both p53-deficient osteoblasts and OS. Normal osteoblasts survive depletion of both PTHrP and CREB1. In contrast, p53-deficient osteoblasts and OS depend upon continuous activation of this pathway and undergo proliferation arrest and apoptosis in the absence of PTHrP or CREB1. Our results identify the PTHrP-cAMP-CREB1 axis as an attractive pathway for therapeutic inhibition in OS.Mannu K Walia, Patricia MW Ho, Scott Taylor, Alvin JM Ng, Ankita Gupte, Alistair M Chalk, Andrew CW Zannettino, T John Martin, Carl R Walkle

Dual-Camera Joint Deblurring-Denoising

Recent image enhancement methods have shown the advantages of using a pair of long and short-exposure images for low-light photography. These image modalities offer complementary strengths and weaknesses. The former yields an image that is clean but blurry due to camera or object motion, whereas the latter is sharp but noisy due to low photon count. Motivated by the fact that modern smartphones come equipped with multiple rear-facing camera sensors, we propose a novel dual-camera method for obtaining a high-quality image. Our method uses a synchronized burst of short exposure images captured by one camera and a long exposure image simultaneously captured by another. Having a synchronized short exposure burst alongside the long exposure image enables us to (i) obtain better denoising by using a burst instead of a single image, (ii) recover motion from the burst and use it for motion-aware deblurring of the long exposure image, and (iii) fuse the two results to further enhance quality. Our method is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on synthetic dual-camera images from the GoPro dataset with five times fewer training parameters compared to the next best method. We also show that our method qualitatively outperforms competing approaches on real synchronized dual-camera captures.Comment: Project webpage: http://shekshaa.github.io/Joint-Deblurring-Denoising