Decoding Plant–Environment Interactions That Influence Crop Agronomic Traits

To ensure food security in the face of increasing global demand due to population growth and progressive urbanization, it will be crucial to integrate emerging technologies in multiple disciplines to accelerate overall throughput of gene discovery and crop breeding. Plant agronomic traits often appear during the plants’ later growth stages due to the cumulative effects of their lifetime interactions with the environment. Therefore, decoding plant–environment interactions by elucidating plants’ temporal physiological responses to environmental changes throughout their lifespans will facilitate the identification of genetic and environmental factors, timing and pathways that influence complex end-point agronomic traits, such as yield. Here, we discuss the expected role of the life-course approach to monitoring plant and crop health status in improving crop productivity by enhancing the understanding of plant–environment interactions. We review recent advances in analytical technologies for monitoring health status in plants based on multi-omics analyses and strategies for integrating heterogeneous datasets from multiple omics areas to identify informative factors associated with traits of interest. In addition, we showcase emerging phenomics techniques that enable the noninvasive and continuous monitoring of plant growth by various means, including three-dimensional phenotyping, plant root phenotyping, implantable/injectable sensors and affordable phenotyping devices. Finally, we present an integrated review of analytical technologies and applications for monitoring plant growth, developed across disciplines, such as plant science, data science and sensors and Internet-of-things technologies, to improve plant productivity

Disposable sensors in diagnostics, food and environmental monitoring

Disposable sensors are low‐cost and easy‐to‐use sensing devices intended for short‐term or rapid single‐point measurements. The growing demand for fast, accessible, and reliable information in a vastly connected world makes disposable sensors increasingly important. The areas of application for such devices are numerous, ranging from pharmaceutical, agricultural, environmental, forensic, and food sciences to wearables and clinical diagnostics, especially in resource‐limited settings. The capabilities of disposable sensors can extend beyond measuring traditional physical quantities (for example, temperature or pressure); they can provide critical chemical and biological information (chemo‐ and biosensors) that can be digitized and made available to users and centralized/decentralized facilities for data storage, remotely. These features could pave the way for new classes of low‐cost systems for health, food, and environmental monitoring that can democratize sensing across the globe. Here, a brief insight into the materials and basics of sensors (methods of transduction, molecular recognition, and amplification) is provided followed by a comprehensive and critical overview of the disposable sensors currently used for medical diagnostics, food, and environmental analysis. Finally, views on how the field of disposable sensing devices will continue its evolution are discussed, including the future trends, challenges, and opportunities

Microfluidic Based Optical Microscopes on Chip

Last decade's advancements in optofluidics allowed obtaining an ever increasing integration of different functionalities in lab on chip devices to culture, analyze, and manipulate single cells and entire biological specimens. Despite the importance of optical imaging for biological sample monitoring in microfluidics, imaging is traditionally achieved by placing microfluidics channels in standard bench-top optical microscopes. Recently, the development of either integrated optical elements or lensless imaging methods allowed optical imaging techniques to be implemented in lab on chip systems, thus increasing their automation, compactness, and portability. In this review, we discuss known solutions to implement microscopes on chip that exploit different optical methods such as bright-field, phase contrast, holographic, and fluorescence microscopy

Globose basal cells for spinal cord regeneration

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition with loss of motor and sensory functions below the injury level. Cell based therapies are experimented in pre-clinical studies around the world. Neural stem cells are located intra-cranially in subventricular zone and hippocampus which are highly invasive sources. The olfactory epithelium is a neurogenic tissue where neurogenesis takes place throughout the adult life by a population of stem/progenitor cells. Easily accessible olfactory neuroepithelial stem/progenitor cells are an attractive cell source for transplantation in SCI. Globose basal cells (GBCs) were isolated from rat olfactory epithelium, characterized by flow cytometry and immunohistochemically. These cells were further studied for neurosphere formation and neuronal induction. T10 laminectomy was done to create drop-weight SCI in rats. On the 9th day following SCI, 5 × 105 cells were transplanted into injured rat spinal cord. The outcome of transplantation was assessed by the Basso, Beattie and Bresnahan (BBB) locomotor rating scale, motor evoked potential and histological observation. GBCs expressed neural stem cell markers nestin, SOX2, NCAM and also mesenchymal stem cell markers (CD29, CD54, CD90, CD73, CD105). These cells formed neurosphere, a culture characteristics of NSCs and on induction, differentiated cells expressed neuronal markers βIII tubulin, microtubule-associated protein 2, neuronal nuclei, and neurofilament. GBCs transplanted rats exhibited hindlimb motor recovery as confirmed by BBB score and gastrocnemius muscle electromyography amplitude was increased compared to controls. Green fluorescent protein labelled GBCs survived around the injury epicenter and differentiated into βIII tubulin-immunoreactive neuron-like cells. GBCs could be an alternative to NSCs from an accessible source for autologous neurotransplantation after SCI without ethical issues

PR controller-based droop control strategy for AC microgrid using Ant Lion Optimization technique

Microgrids are now an integral part of the modern power system to maintain the stability of the power distribution process. Ensuring the frequency and voltage stability in the autonomous mode is quite a challenging task indeed. These have now reached the extent of utilizing evolutionary intelligence techniques leading to the concept of intelligent microgrids. In this work, a novel droop control strategy is implemented with a proportional resonant controller, whose proportional gain is optimized by the Ant Lion Optimization algorithm (A.L.O). The efficacy of the A.L.O algorithm for its application in the primary level droop control for voltage stability is investigated in this work. The superiority of the A.L.O optimized PR controller over the conventional PI controller is compared in terms of error indices, timed domain specifications, speed of response, voltage regulation and T.H.D levels. It could ensure a higher speed of response, better voltage stability and higher power quality as against its PI counterpart. The performance of the proposed A.L.O optimized PR controller is validated by comparing it with the performance achieved by controllers tuned with two other algorithms namely, particle swarm optimization (P.S.O) and Satin bower bird optimization (S.B.O). The proposed controller could ensure better steady-state stability compared to the other two

Decoupler-Based Feedback Control Strategy for Interlinking Converter in a Hybrid Microgrid

In a hybrid microgrid with AC and DC subgrids, the interlinking converter (IC) is the key element connecting the two subgrids. The performance of the interlinking converter is adversely affected by the d- and q-axis impedance interaction between the inner control loops. This interaction is highly undesirable since it adversely affects both the dynamic and the steady-state performance of the IC. Based on this, a novel feedback-based decoupling strategy is developed to overcome the cross-coupling effect in the mathematical model of the interlinking converter. This is a novel concept since the feed-forward compensation techniques are utilized to address the cross-coupling effect in prior related works, which has an inherent disadvantage of additional disturbance due to the addition of the compensating terms. In this study, a complete decoupling of the d and q axes was achieved, and the first-order transfer functions were obtained for the control loops using systematic block-reduction algebra and direct synthesis approaches. With this model, computational complexities are reduced and the inner control loops are free from impedance interaction effects, thereby achieving enhanced transient stability. Perfect decoupling of the voltage vectors is achieved by the matrix diagonalization method. Furthermore, the novelty of the proposed control is that the decoupled model is integrated with a normalization-based coordinate control strategy for effective bidirectional power transfer via the interlinking converter. Additionally, the proposed controller’s validity was tested for its performance under different transients in the MATLAB Simulink platform. The simulation results validated the proposed control strategy by showing that a faster response is ensured. A high-quality reference signal is generated due to the effective decoupling achieved. This observation was also validated by comparing the T.H.D. levels of a decoupled model’s reference power signal to one without a decoupling strategy

Immunohistological and electrophysiological characterization of Globose basal stem cells

Objective(s): In the past few decades, variety of foetal, embryonic and adult stem and progenitor cells have been tried with conflicting outcome for cell therapy of central nervous system injury and diseases. Cellular characteristics and functional plasticity of Globose basal stem cells (GBCs) residing in the olfactory epithelium of rat olfactory mucosa have not been studied in the past by the neuroscientists due to unavailability of specific markers for GBCs. In the present research, we standardized some techniques to isolate GBCs from rat olfactory epithelium in pure form using a highly selective GBC-III antibody passaged through fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS). We also characterized these cells immunohistologically using various pluripotent stem cell markers. This work also throws some light on ionic channels present on these stem cells which are responsible for their neuron induction potential. Materials and methods:Globose basal stem cells were isolated from rat olfactory epithelium using GBC-III antibody and were characterized as multipotent stem cells using various neural progenitor markers. Ionic channels on GBCs were studied with voltage clamping. Results:GBCs could be isolated in pure (99% purity) form and were found to be stained positive for all neural progenitor cell markers. Voltage gated Na+ channels were completely absent, which proves the unexcitable nature of GBCs. Leaky K+ channels were found to be present on the GBC which was of no significance. Conclusion: This research work can be helpful in understanding the nature [T1] of these stem cells and utilising them in future as potent candidates for neuro-regenerative therapies