Little is known about the factors affecting the relative influences of stochastic and deterministic processes that govern the assembly of microbial communities in successional soils. Here, we ...conducted a meta-analysis of bacterial communities using six different successional soil datasets distributed across different regions. Different relationships between pH and successional age across these datasets allowed us to separate the influences of successional age (i.e., time) from soil pH. We found that extreme acidic or alkaline pH conditions lead to assembly of phylogenetically more clustered bacterial communities through deterministic processes, whereas pH conditions close to neutral lead to phylogenetically less clustered bacterial communities with more stochasticity. We suggest that the influence of pH, rather than successional age, is the main driving force in producing trends in phylogenetic assembly of bacteria, and that pH also influences the relative balance of stochastic and deterministic processes along successional soils. Given that pH had a much stronger association with community assembly than did successional age, we evaluated whether the inferred influence of pH was maintained when studying globally distributed samples collected without regard for successional age. This dataset confirmed the strong influence of pH, suggesting that the influence of soil pH on community assembly processes occurs globally. Extreme pH conditions likely exert more stringent limits on survival and fitness, imposing strong selective pressures through ecological and evolutionary time. Taken together, these findings suggest that the degree to which stochastic vs. deterministic processes shape soil bacterial community assembly is a consequence of soil pH rather than successional age.
The Enigma of Endothelium in COVID-19 Kaur, Savneet; Tripathi, Dinesh M.; Yadav, Angeera
Frontiers in physiology,
08/2020, Letnik:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has affected millions of people globally. Clinically, it presents with mild ...flu-like symptoms in most cases but can cause respiratory failure in high risk population. With the aim of unearthing newer treatments, scientists all over the globe are striving hard to comprehend the underlying mechanisms of COVID-19. Several studies till date have indicated a dysregulated host immune response as the major cause of COVID-19 induced mortality. In this Perspective, we propose a key role of endothelium, particularly pulmonary endothelium in the pathogenesis of COVID-19. We draw parallels and divergences between COVID-19-induced respiratory distress and bacterial sepsis-induced lung injury and recommend the road ahead with respect to identification of endothelium-based biomarkers and plausible treatments for COVID-19.
Groundwater management requires a systematic approach since it is crucial to the long-term viability of livelihoods and regional economies all over the world. There is insufficient groundwater ...management and difficulties in storage plans as a result of increased population, fast urbanisation, and climate change, as well as unpredictability in rainfall frequency and intensity. Groundwater exploration using remote sensing (RS) data and geographic information system (GIS) has become a breakthrough in groundwater research, assisting in the assessment, monitoring, and conservation of groundwater resources. The study region is the Mand catchment of the Mahanadi basin, covering 5332.07 km
and is located between 21°42'15.525″N and 23°4'19.746″N latitude and 82°50'54.503″E and 83°36'1.295″E longitude in Chhattisgarh, India. The research comprises the generation of thematic maps, delineation of groundwater potential zones and the recommendation of structures for efficiently and successfully recharging groundwater utilising RS and GIS. Groundwater Potential Zones (GPZs) were identified with nine thematic layers using RS, GIS, and the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method. Satty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to rank the nine parameters that were chosen. The generated GPZs map indicated regions with very low, low to medium, medium to high, and very high groundwater potential encompassing 962.44 km
, 2019.92 km
, 969.19 km
, and 1380.42 km
of the study region, respectively. The GPZs map was found to be very accurate when compared with the groundwater fluctuation map, and it is used to manage groundwater resources in the Mand catchment. The runoff of the study area can be accommodated by the computing subsurface storage capacity, which will raise groundwater levels in the low and low to medium GPZs. According to the study results, various groundwater recharge structures such as farm ponds, check dams and percolation tanks were suggested in appropriate locations of the Mand catchment to boost groundwater conditions and meet the shortage of water resources in agriculture and domestic use. This study demonstrates that the integration of GIS can provide an efficient and effective platform for convergent analysis of various data sets for groundwater management and planning.
Chromium contamination in the aquatic environment is an urgent and serious issue due to its mutagenic and carcinogenic effects against living organisms. The present study demonstrates the capability ...of biogenic sulfur nanoparticles (SNPs) for the reduction of hexavalent chromium into a less toxic state. A green approach was adapted for the synthesis of SNPs using
leaf extract which acts as a reducing and capping agent. The biosynthesized SNPs were characterized by UV-Vis spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). TEM micrographs revealed that the zero-valent sulfur nanoparticles were in the range of 2-15 nm and the average size of 5.1 nm. The conversion rate of Cr(vi) into Cr(iii) in the presence of SNPs was 88.7% in 80 min. The optimum concentration ratio between SNPs and formic acid was 10 ppm : 480 mM.
Introduction
The response to conventional antiparkinsonian medications is elusive in atypical parkinsonian disorders. Improvement in parkinsonian symptoms in atypical parkinsonian disorders has been ...reported with anecdotal use of Amantadine. The role of serotonergic control over the nigrostriatal pathway led to the use of Escitalopram.
Objectives
To examine the efficacy of low dose Amantadine and Escitalopram combination treatment in atypical parkinsonian disorder
Methods
A retrospective chart review of Atypical Parkinsonian disorder patients who received the combination of low dose Amantadine and Escitalopram and had follow up assessment available for a minimum of four months were studied. The primary outcome measure was change in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy rating scale, Unified Multiple System Atrophy rating scale score and Clinical Global Improvement Scale Change score in follow up visits.
Results
A total of 8 patients with a mean age of 68.5 years, 6 with a diagnosis of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy(PSP) and 2 with a diagnosis of Multiple System Atrophy(MSA) met the selection criteria for the study. Patients were treated with the dose of Amantadine 50mg twice daily and Escitalopram 5mg once daily. The symptom domain to respond first was autonomic symptoms followed by gait, mentation, limb and bulbar symptoms. Amantadine has unique dopaminergic and NMDA antagonist properties. Serotonin has a role in modulation of the autonomic functions and nigrostriatal circuitry. Thus, combining Escitalopram with Amantadine can help ameliorate the array of symptoms in atypical parkinsonian disorders.
Conclusions
The PSP and MSA patients responded to the combination of low dose Amantadine and Escitalopram as evidenced by objective rating scales and subjective clinician assessment. Further prospective trials for longer duration are needed to establish the effect size and stability of response.
KEYWORDS: steele richardson olszewski disease, shy dragger syndrome, antidepressants
Disclosure of Interest
None Declared
Glucosinolates (Gls) are secondary plant metabolites that occur in all Brassica-originated feeds and fodders. Content and composition of Gls vary due to plant species, agronomic practices and ...climatic conditions. The Gls content is generally higher in rapeseed meal (RSM) varieties grown under tropical environment than those occur in temperate regions. The RSM from Indian sub-continent contain primarily 3-butenyl, 2-propenyl and 4-pentenyl glucosinolates. But 2-propenyl glucosinolate accounts more than 0.95 of their total glucosinolates present in RSM of European and other temperate countries, and did not contain 4-pentenyl glucosinolates. Depending on the pH, cofactors and Gls content and composition of RSM, major metabolites of glucosinolates are thiocyanates (SCN), isothiocyanates (ITC), nitriles, 5-vinyl-2-oxazolidinethione (VOT) and 5-vinyl-1,3-oxyzolodine-2-thione (5-VOT). Apart from total glucosinolate (TGls) content SCN, nitriles and VOT estimates are the chief attribute of RSM quality as these are produced upon hydrolysis of Gls following the processing of RSM. Major deleterious effects of glucosinolates ingestion in animals are reduced palatability, decreased growth and production. Progoitrin and epi-progoitrin impair palatability at a level between 2.3 and 4.65
μmol
g
−1 diet, while at higher levels feed intake decreases. Nitriles are known to affect liver and kidney functions. The thiocyanates interfere with iodine availability, whereas VOT is responsible for the morphological and physiological changes of thyroid. Difference in Gls profile among the RSM induces varying levels of glucosinolates metabolites in animal tissues. Rapeseed meal feeding did not impair quality traits of carcass and increased unsaturated fatty acids (C
22:2 and
trans C
18:1) content in carcass and milk fat. Ruminants are less sensitive to dietary glucosinolates. Pigs are more severely affected by dietary glucosinolate compared to rabbit, poultry and fish. The tolerance level (μmol
g
−1 diet) of TGls in ruminants, pig, rabbits, poultry and fish is 1.5–4.22, 0.78, 7.0, 5.4 and 3.6
μmol, respectively. Water extraction, heat and CuSO
4 treatments were found suitable for RSM quality improvement. Iodine supplementation in the diet of pigs (1.0
mg
kg
−1) and ruminants (500
mg I each kg RSM) seems promising because of economic and easiness compared to other treatments. Therefore, a desired amount of RSM can be used for animal feed formulation adopting a suitable technology to minimize or remove Gls-related deleterious effects on animals.
With the restructuring of formerly vertically integrated utilities, the energy market behaves like a competitive market, which has resulted in an increased focus on the formulation of forecasting ...techniques. The contribution of this work is twofold. Firstly, we analyze and evaluate the impact of renewable sources on price forecasts and use them in model training. Next, we propose a bootstrap aggregated-stack generalized architecture for very short-term electricity price forecasting to facilitate market participants in formulating strategies in real time. The stacking phase integrates extreme gradient boosting and random forest, which is then bagged to obtain a computationally efficient model. The final combination of feature engineering and ensemble architecture is observed to outperform the existing techniques.
•Novel ensemble for very-short term electricity price forecasting proposed.•Feature selection analyzing renewable energy and metrological parameters performed.•Methodology compared to six state-of-the-art models for next hour forecasting.•Proposed model validated to be superior in terms of accuracy with a MAE of 1.38.•Model suitable for online training with a cheap computation time of 136s.
Penetration of renewable energy resources into grid is necessary to meet the elevated demand of electricity. In view of this penetration of solar and wind power increasing immensely across the ...globe. Solar energy is widely expanding in terms of generation and capacity addition due its better predictability over wind energy. Electricity pricing is one of the important aspects for power system planning and it felicitates information for the electricity bidder for accurate electricity generation and resource allocation. The important task is to forecast the electricity price accurately in grid interactive environment. This task is tedious in renewable integrated market due to intermittency issue. In this paper, investigation has been done on the effect of solar energy generation on electricity price forecasting. Different state of the art Machine learning (ML) models have been applied and compared with LSTM model for electricity price forecasting and the evaluation of the impact of solar energy generation on electricity price has been done. During the investigation it was found from the results that the LSTM model outperform all other models and impact of solar energy generation on electricity price is evaluated using forecasting metrics. The forecasted electricity price considering the factor of solar energy generation was lower as compared with the forecast without solar energy generation. The reliability test of the MAPE values has been performed by calculating confidence interval for proposed model.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Dual-phase xenon detectors are widely used in dark matter direct detection experiments, and have demonstrated the highest sensitivities to a variety of dark matter interactions. However, a key ...component of the dual-phase detector technology-the efficiency of charge extraction from liquid xenon into gas-has not been well characterized. In this paper, we report a new measurement of the electron extraction efficiency (EEE) in a small xenon detector using two monoenergetic decay features of Ar37. By achieving stable operation at very high voltages, we measured the EEE values at the highest extraction electric field strength reported to date. For the first time, an apparent saturation of the EEE is observed over a large range of electric field; between 7.5 and 10.4 kV/cm extraction field in the liquid xenon the EEE stays stable at the level of 1% (kV/cm)−1. In the context of electron transport models developed for xenon, we discuss how the observed saturation may help calibrate this relative EEE measurement to the absolute EEE values. In addition, we present the implications of this result not only to current and future xenon-based dark matter searches, but also to xenon-based searches for coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scatters.
This work presents, the modeling of small signal parameters for Gallium Nitride (GaN) based Buffered Trench Gate (BTG) MOSFET for wireless applications. To improve the device’s performance, hafnium ...dioxide (HfO
2
) and silicon dioxide (SiO
2
) are stacked and placed in the trenched region and simultaneously compared with BTG-MOSFET and its conventional counterpart. The small signal modeling has been performed in terms of Y-parameters (admittance parameters) and S-parameters (scattering parameters) for all three devices and also compared the results. The main aim for selecting small signal parameters is to analyze the behavior of the device for wireless applications at microwave frequencies. Small signal modeling on the proposed device shows the improved results as compared to its conventional counterparts. Thus, results validate the suitable candidature of GaN-BTG MOSFET for high performance wireless application at microwave frequencies.
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