Turbulence Generation in Inhomogeneous Magnetized Plasma Pertaining to Damping Effects on Wave Propagation

The damping phenomenon is studied due to the collisions of ions and neutral particles and Landau approach on the turbulent spectra of kinetic Alfvén wave (KAW) in magnetized plasma which is inhomogeneous as well. The localization of waves is largely affected by inhomogeneities in plasma which are taken in transverse as well as parallel directions to the ambient magnetic field. There is significant effect of damping on the wave localization and turbulent spectra. Numerical solutions of the equations governing kinetic Alfvén waves in the linear regime give the importance of wave damping phenomena while retaining the effects of Landau (collisionless) damping and ion-neutral collisional damping. A comparative study of the two damping effects reveals that the Landau damping effect is more profound under similar plasma conditions

Ferromagnetism in Multiferroic BaTiO₃, Spinel MFe₂O₄ (M = Mn, Co, Ni, Zn) Ferrite and DMS ZnO Nanostructures

Multiferroic magnetoelectric material has significance for new design nano-scale spintronic devices. In single-phase multiferroic BaTiO3, the magnetism occurs with doping of transition metals, TM ions, which has partially filled d-orbitals. Interestingly, the magnetic ordering is strongly related with oxygen vacancies, and thus, it is thought to be a source of ferromagnetism of TM:BaTiO3. The nanostructural MFe2O4 (M = Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, etc.) ferrite has an inverse spinel structure, for which M2+ ions in octahedral site and Fe3+ ions are equally distributed between tetrahedral and octahedral sites. These antiparallel sub-lattices (cations M2+ and Fe3+ occupy either tetrahedral or octahedral sites) are coupled with O2- ion due to superexchange interaction to form ferrimagnetic structure. Moreover, the future spintronic technologies using diluted magnetic semiconductors, DMS materials might have realized ferromagnetic origin. A simultaneous doping from TM and rare earth ions in ZnO nanoparticles could increase the antiferromagnetic ordering to achieve high-Tc ferromagnetism. The role of the oxygen vacancies as the dominant defects in doped ZnO that must involve bound magnetic polarons as the origin of ferromagnetism

The Plant-Rhizobial Symbiotic Interactions Provide Benefits to the Host beyond Nitrogen Fixation That Promote Plant Growth and Productivity

Rhizobial symbiotic interactions are known for nitrogen fixation, providing commercial crops and other plants with self-sufficiency in nitrogen requirements. An enormous contribution from nitrogen fixation is vital to the global nitrogen cycle. The symbiotic nitrogen reduces the carbon footprint of crop cultivation, which underlines its importance in agricultural sustainability. Extensive research efforts have been made to understand the symbiotic relationship at molecular, physiological, and ecological levels. This led to the isolation and modification of symbiotic strains for enhanced nitrogen efficiency. During the evaluation of strains for nitrogen fixation in exchange for supporting the bacterium in terms of space and resources, it has been observed that the accrued benefits to the host plants extend well beyond the nitrogen fixation. The symbiotic interaction has been advantageous to the host for better growth and development, tolerating a stressful environment, and even keeping the pathogenic microbial enemies at bay. Additionally, it enabled the availability of the mineral nutrients, which otherwise were inaccessible to the host. In this chapter, we bring together the information with a focus on the role of rhizobial symbiotic interactions that promote plant growth and productivity through phytohormone synthesis, by facilitating the availability of mineral nutrients, and by improving the plant tolerance to sub-optimal growth conditions

Physical mapping of wheat and rye expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeats on wheat chromosomes

Six hundred and seventy two loci belonging to 275 expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeats [EST-SSRs, including 93 wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and 182 rye (Secale cereale L.) EST-SSRs] were physically mapped on 21 wheat chromosomes. The mapping involved two approaches, the wet-lab approach involving use of deletion stocks and the in silico approach involving matching with ESTs that were previously mapped. The number of loci per EST-SSR mapped using the in silico approach was almost double the number of loci mapped using the wet-lab approach (using deletion stocks). The distribution of loci on the three subgenomes, on the seven homoeologous groups and on the 21 individual chromosomes was nonrandom (P « 0.01). Long arms had disproportionately (relative to the difference in DNA content) higher number of loci, with more loci mapped to the distal regions of chromosome arms. A fairly high proportion of EST-SSRs had multiple loci, which were largely (81%) homoeoloci. Rye EST-SSRs showed a high level of transferability (≈77%) to the wheat genome. Putative functions were assigned to 216 SSR-containing ESTs through homology searches against the protein database. As many as 104 SSR-containing ESTs (a subset of the above ESTs) were also mapped to the 12 rice chromosomes, which corresponded with the known homology between wheat and rice chromosomes. These physical maps of EST-SSRs should prove useful for comparative genomics, gene tagging, fine mapping, and cloning of genes and QTLs. Dna-based molecular markers, particularly SSRs, have been developed and mapped on chromosomes in a variety of crop plants. In bread wheat, genetic and physical mapping of SSRs has been an ongoing exercise, and, to date, ≈2450 SSRs (1 SSR 1.63 cM-1) have been genetically mapped (for details see Torada et al., 2006) and ≈1320 SSRs (62 SSRs chromosome-1) have been physically mapped (for details see Goyal et al., 2005). With a genome size of ≈16 000 Mbp, it is evident that despite concerted efforts, the density of mapped SSRs in bread wheat remains relatively low and continued efforts are needed to increase the density of these SSRs on available genetic and physical maps. In recent years, emphasis has also shifted from genomic SSRs to EST-SSRs due to the availability of very large databases of ESTs from all of the cereals including bread wheat. Consequently, the number of EST-SSRs in cereals now includes 43 598 from bread wheat (Peng and Lapitan, 2005), 16 917 from rice and 184 from rye (La Rota et al., 2005; Hackauf and Wehling, 2002). The genetic mapping of these EST-SSRs is difficult due to a low level of polymorphism, as a result of their conserved nature. Physical mapping of these EST-SSRs in wheat is equally difficult due to the occurrence of homoeoloci exhibiting no polymorphism. This has discouraged wheat researchers from undertaking a large-scale project to genetically or physically map wheat EST-SSRs although genetic mapping of 325 EST-SSRs (Gao et al., 2004; Nicot et al., 2004; Yu et al., 2004) and physical mapping of 305 EST-SSRs was recently undertaken (Yu et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2005; Peng and Lapitan, 2005). We previously reported genetic mapping of 58 and physical mapping of 270 genomic SSRs (Gupta et al., 2002; Goyal et al., 2005). The present study is an extension of our earlier studies on physical mapping of SSRs and involved both wet-lab and in silico approaches, leading to the successful mapping of as many as 672 loci. The in silico approach allowed mapping of twice the number of loci (per EST-SSR) mapped using wet-lab analysis

Thermal performance evaluation of cellulose fibre as building insulation material

Space cooling has utilized lots of electricity in summers which has to be reduced by insulating inside of buildings. Thishas potential to reduce the environment pollution caused by higher expenditure of energy. The present work has the scope toevaluate thermal performance of a test model house providing cellulose fibre based cardboard insulation and compare theperformance with an uninsulated model. The addition of heat through roof, walls and net heat gain during the day hasremained lesser for insulated test model than uninsulated test model. The temperature of indoor air has stayed lesser in caseof insulated test model than the uninsulated test model during the day particularly in the interval from 12 hrs to 19 hrs Theindoor air temperature for the insulated test model has remained lesser by 7°C from 14 hrs till 16 hrs in comparison touninsulated test model. The energy and financial savings obtainable for summers has value of 144 kWh and Rs 864respectively for insulated test model. The carbon dioxide emitted has reduced for summers by 226 kg for insulated testmodel. Hence better thermal comfort conditions have existed in the insulated buildings

A field-grown transgenic tomato line expressing higher levels of polyamines reveals legume cover crop mulch-specific perturbations in fruit phenotype at the levels of metabolite profiles, gene expression, and agronomic characteristics

Genetic modification of crop plants to introduce desirable traits such as nutritional enhancement, disease and pest resistance, and enhanced crop productivity is increasingly seen as a promising technology for sustainable agriculture and boosting food production in the world. Independently, cultural practices that utilize alternative agriculture strategies including organic cultivation subscribe to sustainable agriculture by limiting chemical usage and reduced tillage. How the two together affect fruit metabolism or plant growth in the field or whether they are compatible has not yet been tested. Fruit-specific yeast S-adenosylmethionine decarboxylase (ySAMdc) line 579HO, and a control line 556AZ were grown in leguminous hairy vetch (Vicia villosa Roth) (HV) mulch and conventional black polyethylene (BP) mulch, and their fruit analysed. Significant genotype×mulch-dependent interactions on fruit phenotype were exemplified by differential profiles of 20 fruit metabolites such as amino acids, sugars, and organic acids. Expression patterns of the ySAMdc transgene, and tomato SAMdc, E8, PEPC, and ICDHc genes were compared between the two lines as a function of growth on either BP or HV mulch. HV mulch significantly stimulated the accumulation of asparagine, glutamate, glutamine, choline, and citrate concomitant with a decrease in glucose in the 556AZ fruits during ripening as compared to BP. It enables a metabolic system in tomato somewhat akin to the one in higher polyamine-accumulating transgenic fruit that have higher phytonutrient content. Finally, synergism was found between HV mulch and transgenic tomato in up-regulating N:C indicator genes PEPC and ICDHc in the fruit

Development of a facile antibody–drug conjugate platform for increased stability and homogeneity† †Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available: Synthetic schemes and characterization data, experimental procedures, Fig. S1 and S2. See DOI: 10.1039/c6sc05149a Click here for additional data file.

Despite the advances in the design of antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs), the search is still ongoing for novel approaches that lead to increased stability and homogeneity of the ADCs. We report, for the first time, an ADC platform technology using a platinum(ii)-based linker that can re-bridge the inter-chain cysteines in the antibody, post-reduction. The strong platinum–sulfur interaction improves the stability of the ADC when compared with a standard maleimide-linked ADC thereby reducing the linker–drug exchange with albumin significantly. Moreover, due to the precise conserved locations of cysteines, both homogeneity and site-specificity are simultaneously achieved. Additionally, we demonstrate that our ADCs exhibit increased anticancer efficacy in vitro and in vivo. The Pt-based ADCs can emerge as a simple and exciting proposition to address the limitations of the current ADC linker technologies

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Thermal performance evaluation of cellulose fibre as building insulation material

345-354Space cooling has utilized lots of electricity in summers which has to be reduced by insulating inside of buildings. This has potential to reduce the environment pollution caused by higher expenditure of energy. The present work has the scope to evaluate thermal performance of a test model house providing cellulose fibre based cardboard insulation and compare the performance with an uninsulated model. The addition of heat through roof, walls and net heat gain during the day has remained lesser for insulated test model than uninsulated test model. The temperature of indoor air has stayed lesser in case of insulated test model than the uninsulated test model during the day particularly in the interval from 12 hrs to 19 hrs The indoor air temperature for the insulated test model has remained lesser by 7°C from 14 hrs till 16 hrs in comparison to uninsulated test model. The energy and financial savings obtainable for summers has value of 144 kWh and Rs 864 respectively for insulated test model. The carbon dioxide emitted has reduced for summers by 226 kg for insulated test model. Hence better thermal comfort conditions have existed in the insulated buildings

Emergence of non-albicans Candida species and antifungal resistance in intensive care unit patients

Objective: To evaluate the epidemiology of candidiasis and the antifungal susceptibility profile of Candida species isolated from the intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Methods: The study used a qualitative descriptive design. Relevant samples depending on organ system involvement from 100 ICU patients were collected and processed. Identification and speciation of the isolates was conducted by the biochemical tests. Antifungal susceptibility testing was carried out as per CLSI-M27-A3 document. Results: Ninety Candida isolates were isolated from the different clinical samples: urine (43.3%), tracheal aspirate (31.1%), urinary catheter (12.2%), endotracheal tube (7.8%), abdominal drains (3.3%), sputum (2.2%). The incidence of candidiasis caused by non-albicans Candida (NAC) species (63.3%) was higher than Candida albicans (36.7%). The various NAC species were isolated as: Candida tropicalis (41.1%), Candida glabrata (10%), Candida parapsilosis (6.7%), Candida krusei (3.3%) and Candida kefyr (2.2%). The overall isolation rate of Candida species from samples was 53.3%. Antifungal susceptibility indicated that 37.8% and 7.8% of the Candida isolates were resistant to fluconazole and amphotericin B, respectively. Conclusions: Predominance of NAC species in ICU patients along with the increasing resistance being recorded to fluconazole which has a major bearing on the morbidity and management of these patients and needs to be further worked upon