Risk Factors Associated with First-Year College Dropout

Previous research has shown that a variety of factors can impact college student’s academic performance, including healthy nutrition, physical activity, substance use, smoking, early sexual activity, bullying, excessive television watching, internet use, and playing video games. The purpose of the current study was to explore possible predictors of dropout in students after their first year of college. Data came from the Spit for Science sample and were limited to individuals in the first three cohorts that answered the survey during the fall of their freshmen year (N=6105). Logistic regression was used to test a variety of risk factors, including mental/behavior risk factors, familial risk factors, stress/trauma exposure, and personality factors, in order to see whether or not there was a correlation between risk factors and dropout rates. Initially, multiple risk factors were found to be significantly associated with dropout. However, depression (OR = 1.04, p \u3c 0.05) was the only factor associated with dropout after we included GPA (OR = 0.395, p \u3c 0.001) as a covariate. Supplementary analyses revealed that many of the factors that were found to be significantly associated with dropout rates were significantly related to GPA, suggesting that these risk factors may influence dropout through their effect on GPA.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1203/thumbnail.jp

Computer Aided Diagnosis and Smart Video Validation on IoT Enabled Portable Ultrasound System

This thesis mainly focused on implementation of computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) on Kidney ultrasound images and ultrasound video validation based on organ information as a part of back end processing in ultrasound imaging system

SOLUBILITY ENHANCEMENT OF NORFLOXACIN BY HYDROTROPY TECHNIQUE

The objective of this study is to improve the solubility of poorly water soluble anti-bacterial drug Norfloxacin by hydrotropic solubilization technique. For the present study sodium benzoate was used as hydrotropic agent. By using this hydrotropic agent as water soluble carrier, hydrotropic solid dispersions of Norfloxacin were prepared.in 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4 ratios (drug: hydrotropic agent). Equilibrium solubilization of pure drug and hydrotropic solid dispersions of Norfloxacin in distilled water by excess solute method and solubility enhancement ratios were calculated by measuring the absorbance of the solutions at 274.80 nm using UV spectrophotometer. The hydrotropic agent did not interfere in analysis. The results showed that there was an increase in the solubility of Norfloxacin with hydrotropic solid dispersions compared to pure drug in distilled water. There was 9.56 fold enhancement in aqueous solubility of Norfloxacin with hydrotropic solid dispersion of 1:4 ratio compared to 1:1 (6.29), 1:2 (7.09) and 1:3 (8.59) ratios

CRISPR/Cas9: an advanced platform for root and tuber crops improvement

Root and tuber crops (RTCs), which include cassava, potato, sweet potato, and yams, principally function as staple crops for a considerable fraction of the world population, in addition to their diverse applications in nutrition, industry, and bioenergy sectors. Even then, RTCs are an underutilized group considering their potential as industrial raw material. Complexities in conventional RTC improvement programs curb the extensive exploitation of the potentials of this group of crop species for food, energy production, value addition, and sustainable development. Now, with the advent of whole-genome sequencing, sufficient sequence data are available for cassava, sweet potato, and potato. These genomic resources provide enormous scope for the improvement of tuber crops, to make them better suited for agronomic and industrial applications. There has been remarkable progress in RTC improvement through the deployment of new strategies like gene editing over the last decade. This review brings out the major areas where CRISPR/Cas technology has improved tuber crops. Strategies for genetic transformation of RTCs with CRISPR/Cas9 constructs and regeneration of edited lines and the bottlenecks encountered in their establishment are also discussed. Certain attributes of tuber crops requiring focus in future research along with putative editing targets are also indicated. Altogether, this review provides a comprehensive account of developments achieved, future lines of research, bottlenecks, and major experimental concerns regarding the establishment of CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing in RTCs

Pathogenic and Molecular Variability of Aspergillus niger Isolates Causing Collar Rot Disease in Groundnut

Pathogenic variability studies of 26 isolates of collar rot pathogen (Aspergillus niger) of groundnut collected from different districts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states were conducted under greenhouse conditions by using two groundnut cultivars TMV-2 and JL-24. The mean seedling mortality ranged from 29.7 per cent (MBNRAn-1 (Palkapally)) to 94.4 per cent (ATPAn-1 (Jogannapet)). All the isolates of A. niger showed differential reaction with regard to seedling mortality on JL-24 and TMV-2 cultivars. Similarly genetic relatedness among eight virulent isolates (two isolates from each district) of A. niger from groundnut was assessed by using RAPD analysis. The similarity index values among the A. niger isolates varied from 0.571 (between WGL An-2 and CHT An-3) to 0.229 (between MBNR An-3 and WGL An-2)

Resistance Screening of Groundnut Advanced Breeding Lines against Collar Rot and Stem Rot Pathogens

Forty groundnut advanced breeding lines along with susceptible checks JL-24, J-11 and TMV-2 were used for collar rot (Aspergillus niger) and stem rot (Sclerotium rolfsii) disease screening. Based on the per cent number of plants affected by the collar rot pathogen, the advanced breeding lines were categorized into four groups. The lines present in group I (Resistant) having < 15% incidence, group II (Moderately resistant) having 15.1 to 30%, group III (Susceptible) having 30.1 to 45 % and group IV (Highly susceptible) having > 45% incidence. Similarly among 40 breeding lines only three lines (ICGV86699, ICGV91114 and ICGV 89280) have shown stem rot disease reaction below 3 (up to 25 % plants were symptomatic) and considered to be moderately resistant to stem rot pathogen. The advanced breeding line ICGV99058 has recorded a disease reaction of 5 scale (> 50 % of the plants symptomatic) equal to the susceptible checks which is considered to be highly susceptible to stem rot pathogen

FPGA-Based Portable Ultrasound Scanning System with Automatic Kidney Detection

Bedsides diagnosis using portable ultrasound scanning (PUS) offering comfortable diagnosis with various clinical advantages, in general, ultrasound scanners suffer from a poor signal-to-noise ratio, and physicians who operate the device at point-of-care may not be adequately trained to perform high level diagnosis. Such scenarios can be eradicated by incorporating ambient intelligence in PUS. In this paper, we propose an architecture for a PUS system, whose abilities include automated kidney detection in real time. Automated kidney detection is performed by training the Viola–Jones algorithm with a good set of kidney data consisting of diversified shapes and sizes. It is observed that the kidney detection algorithm delivers very good performance in terms of detection accuracy. The proposed PUS with kidney detection algorithm is implemented on a single Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, integrated with a Raspberry Pi ARM processor running at 900 MHz

The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hospitalizations, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at county, state, and national, levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The Advancement of Biomaterials in Regulating Stem Cell Fate.

Stem cells are well-known to have prominent roles in tissue engineering applications. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can differentiate into every cell type in the body while adult stem cells such as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can be isolated from various sources. Nevertheless, an utmost limitation in harnessing stem cells for tissue engineering is the supply of cells. The advances in biomaterial technology allows the establishment of ex vivo expansion systems to overcome this bottleneck. The progress of various scaffold fabrication could direct stem cell fate decisions including cell proliferation and differentiation into specific lineages in vitro. Stem cell biology and biomaterial technology promote synergistic effect on stem cell-based regenerative therapies. Therefore, understanding the interaction of stem cell and biomaterials would allow the designation of new biomaterials for future clinical therapeutic applications for tissue regeneration. This review focuses mainly on the advances of natural and synthetic biomaterials in regulating stem cell fate decisions. We have also briefly discussed how biological and biophysical properties of biomaterials including wettability, chemical functionality, biodegradability and stiffness play their roles