Expressive Color Visual Secret Sharing with Color to Gray & Back and Cosine Transform

Color Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) is an essential form of VSS. It is so because nowadays, most people like to share visual data as a color image. There are color VSS schemes capable of dealing with halftone color images or color images with selected colors, and some dealing with natural color images, which generate low quality of recovered secret. The proposed scheme deals with a color image in the RGB domain and generates gray shares for color images using color to gray and back through compression. These shares are encrypted into an innocent-looking gray cover image using a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to make meaningful shares. Reconstruct a high-quality color image through the gray shares extracted from an innocent-looking gray cover image. Thus, using lower bandwidth for transmission and less storage

Biochemical and Molecular-Genetic Characterization of SFD1’s Involvement in Lipid Metabolism and Defense Signaling

The Arabidopsis thaliana SFD1 (suppressor of fatty acid desaturase deficiency1) gene (also known as GLY1) is required for accumulation of 34:6 (i.e., 18:3–16:3) monogalactosyldiacylglycerol (MGDG) and for the activation of systemic acquired resistance (SAR), an inducible defense mechanism that confers resistance against a broad spectrum of pathogens. SFD1, which has been suggested to be involved in lipid-based signaling in SAR, contains a putative chloroplast transit peptide and has glycerol-3-phosphate synthesizing dihydroxyacetone phosphate (DHAP) reductase (also referred as glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase) activity. The goals of this study were to determine if the DHAP reductase activity and chloroplast localization are required for SFD1’s involvement in galactolipid metabolism and SAR signaling. The crystal structure of a Leishmania mexicana glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase was used to model SFD1 structure and identify Lys194, Lys279, and Asp332 as potential catalytic site residues in SFD1. Mutational analysis of SFD1 confirmed that Lys194, Lys279, and Asp332 are critical for SFD1’s DHAP reductase activity, and its involvement in SAR. SFD1 proteins with these residues individually substituted by Ala lacked DHAP reductase activity and were unable to complement the SAR defect of the sfd1 mutant. The SFD1–Ala279 protein was also unable to restore 34:6-MGDG content when expressed in the sfd1 mutant. In vivo imaging of a green fluorescent protein-tagged SFD1 protein demonstrated that SFD1 is targeted to the chloroplast. The N-terminal 43 amino acids, which are required for proper targeting of SFD1 to the chloroplast, are also required for SFD1’s function in lipid metabolism and SAR. Taken together, these results demonstrate that SFD1’s DHAP reductase activity is required in the chloroplast for lipid metabolism and defense signaling

Release of insecticidal transgenic crops and gap areas in developing approaches for more durable resistance

Transgenic cultivars expressing d-endotoxin coding genes of Bacillus thuringiensis are beinggrown globally on about 12 million hectares this year. Agriculture in India can benefit substan-tially by adopting transgenic insecticidal cultivars since, in contrast to the world average of 30%,of the total chemical pesticides used in India 75% are employed against insects. No other bio-logical approach, as safe as and yet as effective as the Bt technology is presently known to con-trol agricultural pests. The question at the center stage is to expedite the commercial release ofBt transgenics and also make a parallel effort to devise knowledge-based strategies aimed atachieving longer durability of crop resistance to insect pests. Plant breeders have encounteredsimilar situations in the past for improving crops against insects and other diseases. This articleidentifies the gap areas where research efforts are needed to develop strategies for enhancing thedurability of crop resistance

The δ-endotoxin proteins accumulate in Escherichia coli as a protein-DNA complex that can be dissociated by hydrophobic interaction chromatography

The insecticidal protein CryIAc accumulated to form inclusion bodies in Escherichia coli upon overexpression of the cloned gene. The solubilized inclusion bodies contained the δ-endotoxin in association with DNA fragments of about 25 kb. The protein-DNA complex could be dissociated and the δ-endotoxin purified by hydrophobic interaction chromatography on phenyl-sepharose. The DNA was washed out in the high-salt buffer while the δ-endotoxin was bound to the matrix and was eluted at 4°C by a stepwise decreasing potassium chloride gradient. The DNA-protein complex also contained plasmids harbored by the host strain. The plasmid DNA associated with the complex became competent to transform E. coli only after it was dissociated from the δ-endotoxin. The hydrophobic interaction chromatography provides an efficient method for the purification of DNA-free activated toxin

Color Image Visual Secret Sharing with Expressive Shares using Color to Gray & Back and Cosine Transform

Color Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) is an essential form of VSS. It is so because nowadays, most people like to share visual data as a color image. There are color VSS schemes capable of dealing with halftone color images or color images with selected colors, and some dealing with natural color images, which generate low quality of recovered secret. The proposed scheme deals with a color image in the RGB domain and generates gray shares for color images using color to gray and back through compression. These shares are encrypted into an innocent-looking gray cover image using a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to make meaningful shares. Reconstruct a high-quality color image through the gray shares extracted from an innocent-looking gray cover image. Thus, using lower bandwidth for transmission and less storage

Effect of light intensity on <i>in vitro </i>multiple shoot induction and regeneration of cotton (<i>Gossypium hirsutum </i>L. cv Khandawa-2)

399-401Cotyledonary nodes taken alongwith shoot apex from seedlings of cotton (G. hirsutum) proliferated into shoots on nutrient agar medium supplemented with cytokinins. In the presence of optimal plant growth regulators, low light intensity enhanced the number of shoots initiated per explant in cotton. An average of 33.5±2.9 shoots were obtained from a single explant cultured for 8 weeks which is about four fold higher than the values reported in earlier protocols. The isolated shoots were rooted on nutrient agar medium supplemented with α-naphthalene acetic acid and transferred to soil after acclimatization. Regenerated plants were morphologically identical to the seed-germinated plants and were fertile