ICT Support for Disabled Persons

New hopes are streaming with the advent of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Apart from its increasing importance in bringing the hemispheres close ICT has paved the way for the challenged people—physically or mentally—to ameliorate their life by providing appropriate educational environment and equipments suitable for them. But to avail facilities as much as possible through this booming technology international cooperation for copious provisions in respect to ICT, issues in standards and legislations at various levels, universal access to ICT and its challenges and the principles involved in creating standard technological products etc are to be taken care of. This article aims at capturing some of those provisions the exploitation of which can be optimized through organizational and governmental enterprise to help out the challenged people more and more

Screening of bacterial strains for pectate lyase production and detection of optimal growth conditions for enhanced enzyme activity

In the present study, the pectatelyase production by fifty two bacterial strains isolated from ramie grown soils were studied and the strain RDSM01 showed maximum pectate lyase activity. According to sequence homology of Genbank, the strain RDSM01 was identified as Bacillus subtilis (Genbank Accession No. KX035109). Maximum pectate lyase activity of the strain was observed when 1.5% (v/v) inoculum was added to the growth medium and was incubated for 48 hours at 34-370C and at pH 7.0. The relative activity of the strain was 19% higher when apple pectin was used as carbon source compared to citrus pectin. Maximum enzyme production (149.1 – 153.4 IU/ml) was recorded when ammonium chloride or ammonium sulphate at 0.4% concentration was used as nitrogen source. Thus, B. subtilis strain RDSM01 possessing high pectate lyase activity may be effectively utilized for removal of gum from ramie fibre, which is primarily made of pectin and hemicellulose

Neighbor-Dependent Ramachandran Probability Distributions of Amino Acids Developed from a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Model

Distributions of the backbone dihedral angles of proteins have been studied for over 40 years. While many statistical analyses have been presented, only a handful of probability densities are publicly available for use in structure validation and structure prediction methods. The available distributions differ in a number of important ways, which determine their usefulness for various purposes. These include: 1) input data size and criteria for structure inclusion (resolution, R-factor, etc.); 2) filtering of suspect conformations and outliers using B-factors or other features; 3) secondary structure of input data (e.g., whether helix and sheet are included; whether beta turns are included); 4) the method used for determining probability densities ranging from simple histograms to modern nonparametric density estimation; and 5) whether they include nearest neighbor effects on the distribution of conformations in different regions of the Ramachandran map. In this work, Ramachandran probability distributions are presented for residues in protein loops from a high-resolution data set with filtering based on calculated electron densities. Distributions for all 20 amino acids (with cis and trans proline treated separately) have been determined, as well as 420 left-neighbor and 420 right-neighbor dependent distributions. The neighbor-independent and neighbor-dependent probability densities have been accurately estimated using Bayesian nonparametric statistical analysis based on the Dirichlet process. In particular, we used hierarchical Dirichlet process priors, which allow sharing of information between densities for a particular residue type and different neighbor residue types. The resulting distributions are tested in a loop modeling benchmark with the program Rosetta, and are shown to improve protein loop conformation prediction significantly. The distributions are available at http://dunbrack.fccc.edu/hdp

Non-Circular beam correction to the CMB power spectrum

In the era of high precision CMB measurements, systematic effects are beginning to limit the ability to extract subtler cosmological information. The non-circularity of the experimental beam has become progressively important as CMB experiments strive to attain higher angular resolution and sensitivity. The effect of non-circular beam on the power spectrum is important at multipoles larger than the beam-width. For recent experiments with high angular resolution, optimal methods of power spectrum estimation are computationally prohibitive and sub-optimal approaches, such as the Pseudo-Cl method, are used. We provide an analytic framework for correcting the power spectrum for the effect of beam non-circularity and non-uniform sky coverage (including incomplete/masked sky maps). The approach is perturbative in the distortion of the beam from non-circularity allowing for rapid computations when the beam is mildly non-circular. When non-circular beam effect is important, we advocate that it is computationally advantageous to employ `soft' azimuthally apodized masks whose spherical harmonic transform die down fast with m.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures; Proceedings of the Fundamental Physics With CMB workshop, UC Irvine, March 23-25, 2006, to be published in New Astronomy Review

CMB power spectrum estimation with non-circular beam and incomplete sky coverage

Over the last decade, measurements of the CMB anisotropy has spearheaded the remarkable transition of cosmology into a precision science. However, addressing the systematic effects in the increasingly sensitive, high resolution, `full' sky measurements from different CMB experiments pose a stiff challenge. The analysis techniques must not only be computationally fast to contend with the huge size of the data, but, the higher sensitivity also limits the simplifying assumptions which can then be invoked to achieve the desired speed without compromising the final precision goals. While maximum likelihood is desirable, the enormous computational cost makes the suboptimal method of power spectrum estimation using Pseudo-C_l unavoidable for high resolution data. We provide a (semi)analytic framework to estimate bias in the power spectrum due to the effect of beam non-circularity and non-uniform sky coverage including incomplete/masked sky maps and scan strategy. The approach is perturbative in the distortion of the beam from non-circularity, allowing for rapid computations when the beam is mildly non-circular. We advocate that it is computationally advantageous to employ `soft' azimuthally apodized masks whose spherical harmonic transform die down fast with m. We numerically implement our method for non-rotating beams. We present preliminary estimates of the computational cost to evaluate the bias for the upcoming CMB anisotropy probes l_max~3000, with angular resolution comparable to the Planck surveyor mission. We further show that this implementation and estimate is applicable for rotating beams on equal declination scans and possibly can be extended to simple approximations to other scan strategies.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures. Revised presentation to highlight significance of extended results. Matches version accepted to the MNRA

Genome editing and cancer: How far has research moved forward on CRISPR/Cas9?

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade de Vigo/CISUGCancer accounted for almost ten million deaths worldwide in 2020. Metastasis, characterized by cancer cell invasion to other parts of the body, is the main cause of cancer morbidity and mortality. Therefore, understanding the molecular mechanisms of tumor formation and discovery of potential drug targets are of great importance. Gene editing techniques can be used to find novel drug targets and study molecular mechanisms. In this review, we describe how popular gene-editing methods such as CRISPR/Cas9, TALEN and ZFNs work, and, by comparing them, we demonstrate that CRISPR/Cas9 has superior efficiency and precision. We further provide an overview of the recent applications of CRISPR/Cas9 to cancer research, focusing on the most common cancers such as breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer. We describe how these applications will shape future research and treatment of cancer, and propose new ways to overcome current challengesKing Khalid University in Abha, Saudi Arabia | Ref. RGP: 52/2/144

Pectin: A Bioactive Food Polysaccharide with Cancer Preventive Potential

Pectin is an acidic heteropolysaccharide found in the cell walls and the primary and middle lamella of land plants. To be authorized as a food additive, industrial pectins must meet strict guidelines set forth by the Food and Agricultural Organization and must contain at least 65% polygalacturonic acid to achieve the E440 level. Fruit pectin derived from oranges or apples is commonly used in the food industry to gel or thicken foods and to stabilize acid-based milk beverages. It is a naturally occurring component and can be ingested by dietary consumption of fruit and vegetables. Preventing long-term chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease is an important role of dietary carbohydrates. Colon and breast cancer are among the diseases for which data suggest that modified pectin (MP), specifically modified citrus pectin (MCP), has beneficial effects on the development and spread of malignancies, in addition to its benefits as a soluble dietary fiber. Cellular and animal studies and human clinical trials have provided corroborating data. Although pectin has many diverse functional qualities, this review focuses on various modifications used to develop MP and its benefits for cancer prevention, bioavailability, clinical trials, and toxicity studies. This review concludes that pectin has anti-cancer characteristics that have been found to inhibit tumor development and proliferation in a wide variety of cancer cells. Nevertheless, further clinical and basic research is required to confirm the chemopreventive or therapeutic role of specific dietary carbohydrate molecules.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Therapeutic potential of marine macrolides: An overview from 1990 to 2022

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade de Vigo/CISUGThe sea is a vast ecosystem that has remained primarily unexploited and untapped, resulting in numerous organisms. Consequently, marine organisms have piqued the interest of scientists as an abundant source of natural resources with unique structural features and fascinating biological activities. Marine macrolide is a top-class natural product with a heavily oxygenated polyene backbone containing macrocyclic lactone. In the last few decades, significant efforts have been made to isolate and characterize macrolides’ chemical and biological properties. Numerous macrolides are extracted from different marine organisms such as marine microorganisms, sponges, zooplankton, molluscs, cnidarians, red algae, tunicates, and bryozoans. Notably, the prominent macrolide sources are fungi, dinoflagellates, and sponges. Marine macrolides have several bioactive characteristics such as antimicrobial (antibacterial, antifungal, antimalarial, antiviral), anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, cytotoxic, and neuroprotective activities. In brief, marine organisms are plentiful in naturally occurring macrolides, which can become the source of efficient and effective therapeutics for many diseases. This current review summarizes these exciting and promising novel marine macrolides in biological activities and possible therapeutic applications

Angular power spectrum of CMB anisotropy from WMAP

The remarkable improvement in the estimates of different cosmological parameters in recent years has been largely spearheaded by accurate measurements of the angular power spectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. This has required removal of foreground contamination as well as detector noise bias with reliability and precision. Recently, a novel model-independent method for the estimation of CMB angular power spectrum from multi-frequency observations has been proposed and implemented on the first year WMAP (WMAP-1) data by Saha et al.~2006. We review the results from WMAP-1 and also present the new angular power spectrum based on three years of the WMAP data (WMAP-3). Previous estimates have depended on foreground templates built using extraneous observational input to remove foreground contamination. This is the first demonstration that the CMB angular spectrum can be reliably estimated with precision from a self contained analysis of the WMAP data. The primary product of WMAP are the observations of CMB in 10 independent difference assemblies (DA) distributed over 5 frequency bands that have uncorrelated noise. Our method utilizes maximum information available within WMAP data by linearly combining DA maps from different frequencies to remove foregrounds and estimating the power spectrum from the 24 cross power spectra of clean maps that have independent noise. An important merit of the method is that the expected residual power from unresolved point sources is significantly tempered to a constant offset at large multipoles (in contrast to the ~l^2 contribution expected from a Poisson distribution) leading to a small correction at large multipoles. Hence, the power spectrum estimates are less susceptible to uncertainties in the model of point sources.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures; Proceedings of the Fundamental Physics With CMB workshop, UC Irvine, March 23-25, 2006, to be published in New Astronomy Review

Systemic risk management in India: An analytics perspective

The rapid changes in socio-economic and environmental factors worldwide have resulted in natural and man-made disasters becoming increasingly difficult to manage. The emergence of systemic threats that are cross-border, complex, ambiguous, and uncertain in nature, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has made traditional risk management methods inadequate. Many countries, including India, are struggling to address the challenges posed by these systemic vulnerabilities, leading to unresolved policy and governance problems.This research emphasises the need for comprehensive and proactive risk management methods that can address the challenges posed by systemic vulnerabilities, rather than reactive and fragmented approaches. The research identifies crucial turning points in India's disaster management history and explores the prospects for improved disaster risk governance in the country. The report underlines good advances in disaster administration in India, but it also emphasises the need for more systemic development in overall disaster risk management. The research identifies key design principles for India's systemic risk management that can help improve disaster risk management. This understanding can aid in developing effective frameworks, policies, and strategies to control systemic disaster risks and align with major international objectives such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction