Chemical Composition of Salvia plebeian R.Br. Essential Oil and its Larvicidal Activity against Aedes aegypti L

Purpose: To evaluate the larvicidal activity of the essential oil of Salvia plebeian R.Br. (Labiatae) aerial parts against the larvae of Aedes aegypti L.Methods: The essential oil of S. plebeian aerial parts was obtained by hydro-distillation and analyzed by gas chromatography (GC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The essential oil was evaluated for larvicidal activity using World Health Organization (WHO) procedures, against the fourth larvae of A. aegypti within 24 h, and activity was recorded for various concentrations of the ranging from 12.5 – 200.0 μg/mL.Results: A total of 33 components of the essential oil of S. plebeian were identified. The major compounds of the essential oil were caryophyllene oxide (15.54 %), γ-eudesmol (14.03 %), τ-cadinol (10.21 %), calamenene (9.63 %), copaene (5.70 %), γ-cadinene (5.30 %), cadalene (5.28 %), α- muurolene (5.19 %), ledol (5.14 %) and α-cadinol (5.08 %). The essential oil exhibited larvicidal activity against A. aegypti at a median lethal concentration (LC50) of 46.26 μg/mL.Conclusion: The findings indicate that the essential oil of S. plebeian aerial parts has potentials for use in the control of A. aegypti larvae and may be useful in the search for newer, safer and more effective natural compounds as larvicides.Keywords: Salvia plebeian, Essential oil, Larvicidal activity, Aedes aegypti, Caryophyllene oxide, γ- Eudesmol, τ-Cadinol, Calamenen

Electronic Raman Scattering On Individual Semiconducting Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes

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Histamine increases neuronal excitability and sensitivity of the lateral vestibular nucleus and promotes motor behaviors via HCN channel coupled to H2 receptor

published_or_final_versio

Effect of additional food waste slurry generated by mesophilic acidogenic fermentation on nutrient removal and sludge properties during wastewater treatment

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Fermentation slurry from food waste (FSFW) generated by acidogenic fermentation at mesophilic temperature was utilized to improve the nutrients removal from wastewater. Organic acids (such as lactate and volatile fatty acids) in the FSFW behaved as readily biodegradable carbon sources, while the particulate and macromolecular organics acted as slowly biodegradable carbon sources during denitrification processes. The FSFW dosage significantly influenced the nitrogen removal performance, and a C/N ratio (in terms of chemical oxygen demand to nitrogen ratio) of 8 could achieve complete denitrification in the batch tests. In a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) using FSFW for long-term wastewater treatment, extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) gradually accumulated, sludge particle size significantly increased, and microbial communities were selectively enriched, which contributed to promoting the nitrogen (>80%) and phosphate (90.1%) removal efficiencies. Overall, the FSFW produced by acidogenic fermentation under mesophilic temperature served as an excellent intermediary between FW valorization and wastewater treatment

Synthetically Supervised Feature Learning for Scene Text Recognition

We address the problem of image feature learning for scene text recognition. The image features in the state-of-the-art methods are learned from large-scale synthetic image datasets. However, most meth- ods only rely on outputs of the synthetic data generation process, namely realistically looking images, and completely ignore the rest of the process. We propose to leverage the parameters that lead to the output images to improve image feature learning. Specifically, for every image out of the data generation process, we obtain the associated parameters and render another “clean” image that is free of select distortion factors that are ap- plied to the output image. Because of the absence of distortion factors, the clean image tends to be easier to recognize than the original image which can serve as supervision. We design a multi-task network with an encoder-discriminator-generator architecture to guide the feature of the original image toward that of the clean image. The experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on standard scene text recognition benchmarks in the lexicon-free cate- gory. Furthermore, we show that without explicit handling, our method works on challenging cases where input images contain severe geometric distortion, such as text on a curved path

Apparent non-canonical trans-splicing is generated by reverse transcriptase in vitro

Trans-splicing, the in vivo joining of two RNA molecules, is well characterized in several groups of simple organisms but was long thought absent from fungi, plants and mammals. However, recent bioinformatic analyses of expressed sequence tag (EST) databases suggested widespread trans-splicing in mammals^1-2^. Splicing, including the characterised trans-splicing systems, involves conserved sequences at the splice junctions. Our analysis of a yeast non-coding RNA revealed that around 30% of the products of reverse transcription lacked an internal region of 117 nt, suggesting that the RNA was spliced. The junction sequences lacked canonical splice-sites but were flanked by direct repeats, and further analyses indicated that the apparent splicing actually arose because reverse transcriptase can switch templates during transcription^3^. Many newly identified, apparently trans-spliced, RNAs lacked canonical splice sites but were flanked by short regions of homology, leading us to question their authenticity. Here we report that all reported categories of non-canonical splicing could be replicated using an in vitro reverse transcription system with highly purified RNA substrates. We observed the reproducible occurrence of ostensible trans-splicing, exon shuffling and sense-antisense fusions. The latter generate apparent antisense non-coding RNAs, which are also reported to be abundant in humans^4^. Different reverse transcriptases can generate different products of template switching, providing a simple diagnostic. Many reported examples of splicing in the absence of canonical splicing signals may be artefacts of cDNA preparation

Thermal Contraction of Electrodeposited Bi/BiSb Superlattice Nanowires

The lattice parameter of Bi/BiSb superlattice nanowire (SLNW) has been measured using in situ high-temperature X-ray diffraction method. The single crystalline Bi/BiSb SLNW arrays with different bilayer thicknesses have been fabricated within the porous anodic alumina membranes (AAMs) by a charge-controlled pulse electrodeposition. Different temperature dependences of the lattice parameter and thermal expansion coefficient were found for the SLNWs. It was found that the thermal expansion coefficient of the SLNWs with a large bilayer thickness has weak temperature dependence, and the interface stress and defect are the main factors responsible for the thermal contraction of the SLNWs

Quantum Hall effect and Landau level crossing of Dirac fermions in trilayer graphene

We investigate electronic transport in high mobility (\textgreater 100,000 cm$^2$/V$\cdot$s) trilayer graphene devices on hexagonal boron nitride, which enables the observation of Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations and an unconventional quantum Hall effect. The massless and massive characters of the TLG subbands lead to a set of Landau level crossings, whose magnetic field and filling factor coordinates enable the direct determination of the Slonczewski-Weiss-McClure (SWMcC) parameters used to describe the peculiar electronic structure of trilayer graphene. Moreover, at high magnetic fields, the degenerate crossing points split into manifolds indicating the existence of broken-symmetry quantum Hall states.Comment: Supplementary Information at http://jarilloherrero.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Supplementary_Taychatanapat.pd

Development of specific PCR assays for the detection of Cryptocaryon irritans

Cryptocaryon irritans is one of the most important protozoan pathogens of marine fish, causing the “white spot” disease and posing a significant problem to marine aquaculture. In the present study, a C. irritans-specific reverse primer (S15) was designed based on the published sequence of the second internal transcribed spacer (ITS-2) of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) of C. irritans and used together with the conserved forward primer P1 to develop a specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay for direct, rapid, and specific detection of C. irritans. The specificity of these primers was tested with both closely and distantly related ciliates (Pseudokeroronpsis rubra, Pseudokeroronpsis carnae, Euplotes sp. 1, Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, Pseudourostyla cristata, and Paramecium caudaium), and only C. irritans was detected and no product was amplified from any other ciliates examined in this study using the specific primer set P1-S15. The specific PCR assay was able to detect as low as 45 pg of C. irritans DNA and a nested PCR assay using two primer sets (P1/NC2, P1/S15) increased the sensitivity, allowing the detection of a single C. irritans. The species-specific PCR assays should provide useful tools for the diagnosis, prevention, and molecular epidemiological investigations of C. irritans infection in marine fish