Ameliorative and protective effects of prebiotic, microbial levan in common carp, (Cyprinus carpio) fry under experimental exposure to fipronil

This study investigated the immuno-toxicological effect of the insecticide fipronil at sublethal concentration (10% of LC50) and the potential ameliorative effects of dietary microbial levan in Cyprinus carpio fry. Fish were randomly distributed into five treatments in triplicate for 60 days. Five different treatment groups were: levan control L0F0 (basal feed + 0% levan without exposure to fipronil), pesticide control L0F (basal feed + 0% levan with exposure to fipronil), other three dietary supplemented groups exposed to fipronil with different inclusion levels of levan at 0.25% (L0.25F), 0.50% (L0.50F) and 0.75% (L0.75F), respectively. The results revealed that feeding common carp with 0.75% dietary levan significantly reduced (P<0.05) glutathione-S-transferase and glutathione peroxidase levels in various tissues. Lipid peroxidation and heat shock protein level was significantly (P<0.05) reduced with supplementation of levan at 0.75% compared to other groups. Higher glycogen content was observed in high levan fed groups. Although fipronil exposure had no signficiant effect on lipid profile levels, dietary levan supplementation decreased lipid profile level in the fish exposed to fipronil stress. Total immunoglobulin and myeloperoxidase content of common carp showed an increasing trend with the concomitant increase in the level of levan administration in the diet. Overall, results revlealed that microbial levan at 0.75% in the fipronil induced C. carpio fry mitigated the stress due to its potent nutraceutical properties, thus presenting a promising immuno-additive for aquaculture

Challenges for Assessing Toxicity of Nanomaterials

On the development of nano-world, nanotechnology provides enormous opportunities in daily routine products and further future sustainable innovations. The nanotechnology extends its benefits to various fields such as engineering, medical, biological, environmental, and communication. However, the exponential growth of nanomaterials production would lead to severe complications related to their hazardous effects to the human health and environment. Moreover, negative impact of nanomaterials toxicity on human health is one of the significant issues on exhausting nano-products. The most vulnerable situation is associated with the use of nanomaterials in the biomedical application. The several efforts have been ongoing to study the nanotoxicity and its interaction with the biomolecules. Nevertheless, it is hard to assess and validate the nanotoxicity in a biological system. This chapter aims to study the challenges in determining the toxicity of nanomaterials. The toxicity assessment and hurdles in determining the impact on biological systems are epoch making. In-vitro, in-vivo, and in-silico studies are summarized in this chapter in assessing the toxicity of engineered nanomaterials. The different approaches of toxicity assessment have their difficulties faced by researchers while characterizing nanomaterials in powder form, solution-based, and interacting with biological systems. The assessment tools and characterization techniques play a vital role in overcoming the challenges, while the cytotoxic assays involve nanoparticle shape, morphology, and size consideration

Squeezing function corresponding to polydisk

In the present article, we define squeezing function corresponding to polydisk and study its properties. We investigate relationship between squeezing fuction and squeezing function corresponding to polydisk.Comment: Published in Complex Analysis and its Synergie

A note on squeezing function and its generalizations

This note investigates the relation between squeezing function and its generalizations. Using the relation obtained, we present an alternate method to find expression of generalized squeezing function of unit ball corresponding to the generalized complex ellipsoids.Comment: 9 page

THE DETERMINANTS OF REVERSE MORTGAGE CHOICE OF INDIAN ELDERLY HOMEOWNERS FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOOD: A LOGIT ANALYSIS

Purpose: In the regime of stretched old-age social security, federals and policymakers are presuming housing wealth as a means of sustainable livelihood for elderly homeowners.&nbsp; The current study attempts to discover which demographic and financial factors are significant determinants of home equity liquidation through reverse mortgage of Indians in later life. Methodology: Binary logistic regression is applied to survey-based primary data of 410 elderly homeowners through SPSS software. Main Findings: Results of binary logistic regression model depicts that elderly considering an RM likely to be female, older, having poor health, childless or having girl child only, long life expectancy, resident of metro, employed, cash-constrained, not having any kind of insurance cover and those children are financially well are significantly more willing to opt for RM scheme. Implication: Study renders implications for Government and NHB, to provide refinancing facility to commercial banks so that home equity liquidation product like Reverse Mortgage can be able to fulfill income needs of greying India. Novelty/Originality: Length of research in European and western countries have been carried out to explore the attitude of older homeowner for housing wealth liquidation but Indian context, is largely untapped that how Indian older homeowner perceive their housing wealth and which factor influences them to delete it. In this way, current study attempts to bridge the research gap

Squeezing function for dd-balanced domains

We introduce the notion of squeezing function corresponding to $d$-balanced domains motivated by the concept of generalized squeezing function given by Rong and Yang. In this work we study some of its properties and its relation with Fridman invariant.Comment: 11 pages, comments are welcom

In Vitro Antioxidant and Anti-rhizopus Activity of Methanolic Seed Extract of Camelina Sativa L.

The antifungal efficacy of seed extracts (propanol, ethanol, methanol and sterile deionised water) of Camelina sativa cv. Calena (EC643910) against Rhizopus stolonifer was investigated by agar disc diffusion method. Among all extracts, methanolic seed extract (Disc 3) showed significant activity against R. stolonifer. However, no activity was observed against rest of the extracts (Disc 1, 2 and 4). The inhibition zones were ~35 mm for methanolic extract and ~41 mm for standard drug, respectively. The total phenol content was observed 13.5 μmol, 23.3 μmol, 42.9 μmol and 3.4 μmol gDW-1 in propanolic, ethanolic, methanolic and sterile deionised water extracts of Camelina, respectively. Likewise, the ascorbate peroxidase (APX) activity was observed highest in methanolic extract that was ~10.2, ~2.4 and ~5.7-folds higher as compared to propanolic, ethanolic and sterile deionised water extracts, respectively. Similarly, guaiacol peroxidase (GPX) activity was also observed highest in methanolic extract as compared to other extracts, which is ~7.3, ~1.9 and ~6.6-folds higher as compared to propanolic, ethanolic and sterile deionised water extracts, respectively. The findings of the study clearly speculate that the possibility of using methanolic seed extract of Camelina as a potential control measure against R. stolonifer, which may be used for the development of future herbal drug formulations

Adaptive Grey Wolf Optimization Technique for Stock Index Price Prediction on Recurring Neural Network Variants

In this paper, we propose a Long short-term memory (LSTM) and Adaptive Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO)--based hybrid model for predicting the stock prices of the Major Indian stock indices, i.e., Sensex. The LSTM is an advanced neural network that handles uncertain, nonlinear, and sequential data. The challenges are its weight and bias optimization. The classical backpropagation has issues of dangling on local minima or overfitting the dataset. Thus, we propose a GWO-based hybrid approach to evolve the weights and biases of the LSTM and the dense layers. We have made the GWO more robust by introducing an approach to improve the best possible solution by using the optimal ranking of the wolves. The proposed model combines the GWO with Adam Optimizer to train the LSTM. Apart from the LSTM, we have also implemented the Adaptive GWO on other variants of Recurring Neural Networks (RNN) like LSTM, Bi-Directional LSTM, Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and Bi-Directional GRU and computed the corresponding results. The Adaptive GWO here evolves the initial weights and biases of the above-discussed neural networks. In this research, we have also compared the forecasting efficiency of our proposed work with a particle-warm optimization (PSO) based hybrid LSTM model, simple Grey-wolf Optimization (GWO), and Adaptive PSO. According to the experimental findings, the suggested model has effectively used the best initial weights, and its results are the best overall

Isolation and Identification of Fungal Species and Scientific Preservation of World Heritage: Case of Fatehpur Sikri, Uttar Pradesh, India

Fungi play a considerable role for the deterioration and widely recognized as major bio-deteriogens of cultural heritage depending on climatic conditions, humidity level and surface material for fungal colonization. The weathering of stone monuments is significantly increased by endolitic fungi. Fungi can deteriorate different substrates via various physical and chemical mechanisms. Hyphal growth and penetration into the substrate can cause symptoms like discoloration, bio-pitting, cricketing, exfoliation and patina formation. On the other hand, chemical mechanism includes acid secretion, release of extracellular enzymes, pigment production, oxidation/reduction reaction reactions and secondary mycogenic minerals formation. These process can lead to serious, both esthetic and structural alterations which may be irreversible and could permanently impair artwork. Proper isolation and identification of fungi by different microscopic technique and in vitro biodegradation tests are pivotal in understanding complex bio-deterioration mechanism caused by fungal deteriogens. Bio-deterioration and bio-degradation studies require multidisciplinary approach and close collaboration of microbiologists, chemists and different personnel responsible for safeguarding of cultural property and artifacts, especially restorers and conservators. This article provides information on fungi infesting historical monument of Fatehpur Sikri and their management by biocidal compounds. Present investigation was conducted to evaluate the status of fungal decay of stone monuments of Fatehpur Sikri. A total of 06 fungal species were isolated from colored stains, patinas and biofilms produced on the surfaces of monuments of Fatehpur Sikri due to mechanism of bio-deterioration. The fungal species Alternaria alternata, Aspergillus fumigatus, Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus niger, Cladosporium herbarum, and Rhizopus oryzae were prevalent.Acknowledgement Authors are gratitude to thanks Dr. Alok Tripathi, Director General, NRLC, Lucknow and Additional Director General, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi & Dr. M.K. Bhatnager, Director (Scientific Preservation), Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi & Shri Mangey Ram Superintending Archaeological Chemist, Archaeological Survey of India, Science Branch, Agra for their encouragement and guidance

ANALYSIS OF HEAT TRANSFER RATE OF IC ENGINE CYLINDER

The main object of the present work toenhance the heat transfer rate from existingdesign of engine cylinder block by changingits design and also with new material. Forthat two cad models have been created withthe help of CATIA software and thentransient thermal analysis where performedusing ANSYS at two different ambienttemperatures for both winter and summerseasons. For the winter season the ambienttemperature 22oC is used and for summerseason 45oC for actual as well as proposeddesign of IC engine one by one to optimizegeometrical parameters and enhanced heattransfer rate. it has been observed from theresults of transient thermal analysis theproposed design of engine cylinder blockhas better performance and heat transferrate as compared to actual design of enginecylinder block