Intracellular Acidification in Brain Tumors Induced by Topiramate : In-Vivo Detection Using Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) is the most aggressive and malignant form of primary brain tumor. In many tumors, increased intracellular pH (pHi) is a hallmark of aggressiveness. This increased pHi has been shown to be related to cell proliferation and evasion of apoptosis as well as resistance to chemotherapy. As such, monitoring pHi and the tumor pHi response to pharmacologic challenge, may aid in treatment planning and patient management for this deadly cancer. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method called Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) has been used to detect changes in pHi. Our group has recently developed a CEST technique called amine and amide concentration independent detection (AACID), which was shown to be sensitive to pHi changes induced by the anticancer drug, lonidamine (LND). However, LND is not currently approved for use in humans. Our objective was to demonstrate that topiramate (TPM), an antiepileptic drug that is well tolerated in humans, could also induce tumor acidification. The goal this thesis was to quantify the changes in pHi induced by a single dose of TPM in a mouse model of brain tumor. CEST spectra were acquired using a 9.4T MRI scanner, before and 75 minutes after administration of TPM (dose: 120 mg/kg). A significant increase in the AACID CEST effect was observed within brain tumors with no change observed in contralateral tissue. The increase in AACID CEST corresponds to tumor acidification as expected. Therefore TPM induced a rapid measurable metabolic change in tumors that could provide valuable insight into cancer aggressiveness and aid in tumor detection

Energy current magnification in coupled oscillator loops

Motivated by studies on current magnification in quantum mesoscopic systems we consider sound and heat transmission in classical models of oscillator chains. A loop of coupled oscillators is connected to two leads through which one can either transmit monochromatic waves or white noise signal from heat baths. We look for the possibility of current magnification in this system due to some asymmetry introduced between the two arms in the loop. We find that current magnification is indeed obtained for particular frequency ranges. However the integrated current shows the effect only in the presence of a pinning potential for the atoms in the leads. We also study the effect of anharmonicity on current magnification.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Documentation of Wild Edible Plants of Melghat Forest, Dist. Amravati, Maharashtra State, India

An ethnobotanical survey with respect to food plants showed that tribals depend much upon forest products for their various daily needs. Wild edible plants play a significant role in the sustenance of rural life in Melghat. The paper deals with documentation of 42 plant species belonging to 23 families consumed by the tribal and other locals of Melghat area, Dist. Amravati, Maharashtra, India. Plant name, Family, along with their part used, and method of preparation is discussed

Particle current in symmetric exclusion process with time-dependent hopping rates

In a recent study, (Jain et al 2007 Phys. Rev. Lett. 99 190601), a symmetric exclusion process with time-dependent hopping rates was introduced. Using simulations and a perturbation theory, it was shown that if the hopping rates at two neighboring sites of a closed ring vary periodically in time and have a relative phase difference, there is a net DC current which decreases inversely with the system size. In this work, we simplify and generalize our earlier treatment. We study a model where hopping rates at all sites vary periodically in time, and show that for certain choices of relative phases, a DC current of order unity can be obtained. Our results are obtained using a perturbation theory in the amplitude of the time-dependent part of the hopping rate. We also present results obtained in a sudden approximation that assumes large modulation frequency.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Quinolone resistance mutations in the faecal microbiota of Swedish travellers to India

Background: International travel contributes to the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria over the world. Most studies addressing travel-related changes in the faecal flora have focused on specific mobile resistance genes, or depended on culturing of individual bacterial isolates. Antibiotic resistance can, however, also spread via travellers colonized by bacteria carrying chromosomal antibiotic resistance mutations, but this has received little attention so far. Here we aimed at exploring the abundance of chromosomal quinolone resistance mutations in Escherichia communities residing in the gut of Swedish travellers, and to determine potential changes after visiting India. Sweden is a country with a comparably low degree of quinolone use and quinolone resistance, whereas the opposite is true for India. Methods: Massively parallel amplicon sequencing targeting the quinolone-resistance determining region of gyrA and parC was applied to total DNA extracted from faecal samples. Paired samples were collected from 12 Swedish medical students before and after a 4-15 week visit to India. Twelve Indian residents were included for additional comparisons. Methods known resistance mutations were common in Swedes before travel as well as in Indians, with a trend for all mutations to be more common in the Indian sub group. There was a significant increase in the abundance of the most common amino acid substitution in GyrA (S83L, from 44 to 72 %, p = 0.036) in the samples collected after return to Sweden. No other substitution, including others commonly associated with quinolone resistance (D87N in GyrA, S80I in ParC) changed significantly. The number of distinct genotypes encoded in each traveller was significantly reduced after their visit to India for both GyrA (p = 0.0020) and ParC (p = 0.0051), indicating a reduced genetic diversity, similar to that found in the Indians. Conclusions: International travel can alter the composition of the Escherichia communities in the faecal flora, favouring bacteria carrying certain resistance mutations, and, thereby, contributes to the global spread of antibiotic resistance. A high abundance of specific mutations in Swedish travellers before visiting India is consistent with the hypothesis that these mutation have no fitness cost even in the absence of an antibiotic selection pressure

Standardization of organic manure application in pomegranate (Punica granatum) orchards grown in semi-arid regions

An experiment was conducted at ICAR - National Research Centre on Pomegranate during 2011-12 and 2012-13 on pomegranate (Punica granatum L) cv. Bhagwa plants. The experiment comprises of application of raw and well decomposed farmyard manure in the form of slurry (liquid form, manures mixed with water in 1:10 ratio and kept for 10 to 15 days with intermittent stirring) as a sole or in combination with micronutrients and/or various microbial inoculants. It was compared with normally practiced method of organic manure application in the soil. The results revealed that application of farmyard manure in slurry form decreased electrical conductivity (0.94 to 0.72 dS/m) and increased organic carbon content (0.55 to 1.45 %) in the soil. Combined application of FYM in the form of slurry along with micronutrients and microbial inoculants significantly increased available N (339.7 kg/ha) and P (34.8 kg/ha) and micronutrients content in the soil. Substantially increased plant height (20.8%), plant spread (22.8 %) and produced maximum number of fruits (39.0/ plant). Population of soil microbes, viz. Aspergillus niger, Pseudomonas fluorescence and potash solubilising organisms were significantly highest with the combined application of FYM in slurry form and microbial inoculants. While, Azotobacter population was more in raw FYM slurry along with microbial inoculants. It is recommended that on light textured soils, farmyard manures should be applied in the form of slurry. It reaches in the active root zone of the plants along with percolating water

Comparing Effectiveness of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies in Containing Influenza

This research compares the performance of bottom-up, self-motivated behavioral interventions with top-down interventions targeted at controlling an “Influenza-like-illness”. Both types of interventions use a variant of the ring strategy. In the first case, when the fraction of a person's direct contacts who are diagnosed exceeds a threshold, that person decides to seek prophylaxis, e.g. vaccine or antivirals; in the second case, we consider two intervention protocols, denoted Block and School: when a fraction of people who are diagnosed in a Census Block (resp., School) exceeds the threshold, prophylax the entire Block (resp., School). Results show that the bottom-up strategy outperforms the top-down strategies under our parameter settings. Even in situations where the Block strategy reduces the overall attack rate well, it incurs a much higher cost. These findings lend credence to the notion that if people used antivirals effectively, making them available quickly on demand to private citizens could be a very effective way to control an outbreak

The Search for Fast Transients with CZTI

The Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager on AstroSat has proven to be a very effective all-sky monitor in the hard X-ray regime, detecting over three hundred GRBs and putting highly competitive upper limits on X-ray emissions from gravitational wave sources and fast radio bursts. We present the algorithms used for searching for such transient sources in CZTI data, and for calculating upper limits in case of non-detections. We introduce CIFT: the CZTI Interface for Fast Transients, a framework used to streamline these processes. We present details of 88 new GRBs detected by this framework that were previously not detected in CZTI.Comment: Accepted in the "AstroSat - 5 years" special issue of the Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy; revised to add referee suggestions, results unchange

Twitter-based analysis of the dynamics of collective attention to political parties

Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by the collective attention to the action of political parties. Not surprisingly, researchers and stakeholders tried to correlate parties' presence on social media with their performances in elections. Despite the many efforts, results are still inconclusive since this kind of data is often very noisy and significant signals could be covered by (largely unknown) statistical fluctuations. In this paper we consider the number of tweets (tweet volume) of a party as a proxy of collective attention to the party, identify the dynamics of the volume, and show that this quantity has some information on the elections outcome. We find that the distribution of the tweet volume for each party follows a log-normal distribution with a positive autocorrelation of the volume over short terms, which indicates the volume has large fluctuations of the log-normal distribution yet with a short-term tendency. Furthermore, by measuring the ratio of two consecutive daily tweet volumes, we find that the evolution of the daily volume of a party can be described by means of a geometric Brownian motion (i.e., the logarithm of the volume moves randomly with a trend). Finally, we determine the optimal period of averaging tweet volume for reducing fluctuations and extracting short-term tendencies. We conclude that the tweet volume is a good indicator of parties' success in the elections when considered over an optimal time window. Our study identifies the statistical nature of collective attention to political issues and sheds light on how to model the dynamics of collective attention in social media.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Published in PLoS ON