The present study was conducted to evaluate the genetic variability for morphological and qualitative traits of Coccinia for development of trait specific lines at ICAR-Central Horticultural ...Experiment Station (CIAH-RS), Panchmahals (Godhra), Gujarat during 2020-2022. In this study, we evaluated 26 gynoecious accessions to assess the genetic divergence through principal component and cluster analysis. The experiment was carried out in a randomized complete block design with three replications under rainfed semi-arid conditions. High values of PCV and GCV were observed for variables such as NFFP (25.13 and 22.20), PL (23.14 and 20.69), FD (24.01 and 21.46), AFW (22.98 and 20.13), NFPY (26.38 and 24.40), FYP (37.57 and 31.29), FY (35.55 and 33.20), AsC (28.65 and 27.73), Ac (24.32 and 21.06), TSS (37.23 and 35.94), DPPHL (20.71 and 20.38), FRAPL (21.08 and 20.92), TPF(20.81 and 20.45) respectively. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance as per cent of mean was observed for vine length (VL), internodal length (IL), number of female flowers per plant (NFFP), fruit length (FL), peduncle length (PL), fruit diameter (FD), average fruit weight (AFW), number of fruit per plant per year (NFPY), fruit yield per plant (FYP), fruit yield (FY), ascorbic acid (AsC), acidity (Ac), total soluble solids (TSS), total phenols in leaves TPL), total flavonoids in leaves TFL, CUPRAC in leaves (CUPRACL), DPPH in leaves (DPPHL), FRAP in leaves (FRAPL), Total phenols in fruits (TPF), Total flavonoids in fruits (TFF), CUPRAC in fruits (CUPRACF) and DPPH in fruits (DPPHF). The FYP exhibited a significant positive correlation with variables like VL (0.6833), IL (0.2991), NFFP (0.8107), FD (0.5245), AFW (0.6766), NFPY (0.7659), ASC (0.4611), TSS (0.5004) and TPF (0.4281). The estimates of genetic parameters revealed scope for further improvement of fruit yield by selection. Of the eight principal components, PC-I through PC-VIII had eigen values greater than 1 and it accounts 85.02% of the total variation for 26 gynoecious accessions of Ivy gourd. The eigen values of PC-I comprised 5.775% of total variation followed by PC-II (4.250%), PC-III (3.175%), PC-IV (2.588%), PC-V (1.828%), PC-VI (1.447%), PC-VII (1.179%) and PC-VIII (1.013%).The cluster VI and cluster I having highest mean values for most of traits under study. Thus, genotypes from the distinct cluster like cluster VI and I for should be used for selection of parents and varietal improvement for further breeding programme in ivy gourd.
Rampant pasture burning has lead to various forest fires taking their toll over the health of many forests. Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, located in the northern part of India, witnessed a majority ...of these incidents in the recent past, though, it remains comprehensively untouched from research studies. The scale of these wildfires has led to an immense requirement of preventive measures to be taken for recuperating from such events. This requires for an in-depth analysis of the study area, its history of wildfires and their causes. These efforts would assist in laying a blueprint for a contingency plan in the event of a wildfire. This work proposes an evolutionary optimized gradient boosted decision trees for preparing wildfire susceptibility maps for the study area that would aid in the government’s forest preservation and disaster management activities. The study took 18 ignition factors of elevation, slope, aspect, plan curvature, topographic position index, topographic water index, normalized difference vegetation index, soil texture, temperature, rainfall, aridity index, potential evapotranspiration, relative humidity, wind speed, land cover and distance from roads, rivers and habitations into consideration. The study revealed that approximately 1432.025 km
2
of area was very highly susceptible to forest fires while 1202.356 km
2
was highly susceptible to forest fires. The proposed model was compared against various machine learning models such as random forest, neural networks and support vector machines, and it outperformed them by achieving an overall accuracy of 95.5%. The proposed model demonstrated good prospects for application in the field of hazard susceptibility mappings.
Little is known about biological significance of effects of dietary Boron (B) and Calcium (Ca) interaction on health and production of farm animals. This is a preliminary investigation to evaluate ...the effects of B supplementation in lambs fed diets with (normal) or without adequate (low) levels of Ca. Twenty-four crossbred ram lambs were randomly distributed into four groups with six animals each in a 2x2 factorial design namely, normal-Ca diet (NCa) and low-Ca diet (LCa) fed without or with 40 ppm B (NCaB-40 and LCaB-40). The lambs were fed paddy straw and hybrid napier hay-based total mixed ration (60 roughage: 40 concentrate) during 180 days experimental period. Compared to control, the LCa diet lowered (P<0.01) average daily gain of lambs, but B-supplementation (LCaB-40) of the same nullified the effect. The lowered (P<0.05) total antioxidant activity and humoral immune response in lambs fed LCa diet were restored (P>0.05) to become at par with the control (NCa) upon supplementation of B (LCaB-40). The mRNA expression of SOD1 was lowered (P<0.05) due to LCa diet feeding which too was normalized on B-supplementation to become at par (P>0.05) with the control (NCa). Further, B-supplementation restored lowered (P<0.05) SOD1 gene expression on LCa diet, but enhanced (P<0.05) that in NCaB-40 group, when compared to the control (NCa) diet fed animals. However, these variations were not reflected in the SOD activity in the erythrocytes. The cell-mediated immune response was higher (P<0.05) in lambs fed LCa and LCaB-40 groups and there was no significant interaction between the levels of either Ca or B in diets with the period of immune response measurement. B- supplementation of LCa diet ameliorated tissue degenerative changes in liver and kidney. It was concluded that feeding LCa diet to lambs resulted in reduced growth rate, total antioxidant activity, humoral immune response along with degenerative changes in liver and kidney tissues, but B-supplementation of such diet restored most of these changes and ameliorated histopathological alterations.
The present study introduces "rock slope instability score (RSIS)" a novel classification system for assessing rock slope stability. It takes into account geological and geotechnical parameters, as ...well as the impact of human activities and triggering parameters, which have become more frequent due to climate change and few of them have been ignored in existing classifications. The study focuses on rock slopes of various lithologies from the Indian Himalayas. The development of this new classification system is based on the examination of 81 different rock slopes from various states of the Indian Himalayas. Extensive field surveys, rock sampling, geotechnical laboratory tests, and ground measurements have been conducted at the various slope sites to establish a comprehensive scoring system for the stability assessment. The distributions of weightage to each parameter have been considered, corresponding to its degree of impact in causing slope instability. Sensitivity analysis of all defined parameters of RSIS system has revealed that the majority of the parameters exhibit a strong positive correlation, with Pearson correlation coefficients ranging from 0.74 to 0.61. However, two parameters, namely discontinuity dip and the relationship between slope & discontinuity direction, gives moderate relationship with correlation coefficient values of 0.48 and 0.41, respectively. To avoid any designer biasness in the system, several individuals gathered data set at different times. The proposed classification system has demonstrated a strong correlation with the actual slope condition, and it is quite promising. The outcome of RSIS classification for studied 81 slopes classified 2 slopes under stable condition, 21 slopes as partially stable, 44 as unstable, and 14 as completely unstable.
The industrial advancement has promoted the development of deep learning (DL)-based intelligent fault diagnosis methods for condition-based maintenance (CBM). Though these methods rely on large ...dataset for training, the collection of large number of fault samples is not practically feasible. For this purpose, generative adversarial networks (GANs) are capable to generate high-quality synthetic samples. However, the problem still persists with the training of GAN using limited fault samples that are present in practical conditions. This article proposes a novel conditional auxiliary classifier GAN framework coupled with model agnostic meta learning (MAML) to resolve this problem. The objective is to initialize and update the network parameters using MAML instead of regular stochastic gradient learning. This modification enables GAN to learn the task of synthetic sample generation using the limited training dataset. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been compared with several famous state-of-the-art intelligent fault diagnosis methods existing in the literature. The comparative performance has been validated on benchmarked datasets, i.e., air compressor and bearing datasets collected from a single-stage reciprocating air compressor. The proposed framework is able to achieve the classification accuracy of 99.26% and 98.55% for bearing and air compressor datasets, respectively, with only ten samples per class. Moreover, a real-time case study is performed to validate the proposed method in real time.
A 60day growth trial was carried out to evaluate biofloc based rearing system for Labeo rohita fingerlings. The C/N ratio of 15 was maintained in four biofloc treatments (T1, T2, T3 and T4) using ...indirect and long-lasting carbon sources (tapioca, wheat, corn and sugar bagasse) along with one control (C). Each group consisted of triplicate tanks and each tank was stocked with 50 fingerlings (4.80g±0.12) of L. rohita. Fishes were challenged with A. hydrophila 60days post rearing and relative percentage survival (RPS) was recorded over 14days post challenge. Serum samples were collected on 20, 40 and 60days interval of sampling for the evaluation of non-specific immune and stress parameters. The results revealed that fishes reared in tapioca based biofloc system showed significantly (p<0.05) higher serum protein, serum albumin, total immunoglobulin, respiratory burst activity, myeloperoxidase activity and lower serum glucose and serum cortisol when compared to wheat, corn, sugar bagasse based biofloc system and control. Growth, feed conversion ratio (FCR), feed efficiency ratio (FER), and specific growth rate (SGR) of fishes in the biofloc treatments were significantly better (p<0.05) than control. Tapioca based biofloc treatment showed significantly (p<0.05) higher RPS (66.66%) than other treatments. The study suggests that the fishes reared using in-situ biofloc produced by tapioca can enhance growth and non-specific immune responses under zero water exchange system and hence ensures sustainability.
•Zero water exchange reduces water scarcity and pollution problems•Improves welfare of the animals by stimulating immunity and protection against diseases•In-situ production of valuable microbial protein thus reducing dependence on fishmeal.
•Biofloc technology using organic carbon sources to study growth and immunity of Labeo rohita under zerowater exchange.•Tapioca biofloc system showed improved non-specific immune response and biochemical parameters.•Higher resistance against Aeromonas hydrophila infection in terms of relative percentage survival was recorded in Tapioca biofloc.
The current knowledge of Mercury’s orbit has mainly been gained by direct radar ranging obtained from the 60s to 1998 and by five Mercury flybys made with Mariner 10 in the 70s, and with MESSENGER ...made in 2008 and 2009. On March 18, 2011, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The radioscience observations acquired during the orbital phase of MESSENGER drastically improved our knowledge of the orbit of Mercury. An accurate MESSENGER orbit is obtained by fitting one-and-half years of tracking data using GINS orbit determination software. The systematic error in the Earth-Mercury geometric positions, also called range bias, obtained from GINS are then used to fit the INPOP dynamical modeling of the planet motions. An improved ephemeris of the planets is then obtained, INPOP13a, and used to perform general relativity tests of the parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism. Our estimations of PPN parameters (γ and β) are more stringent than previous results.
Traditional fault tree (FT) analysis is widely used for reliability and safety assessment of complex and critical engineering systems. The behavior of components of complex systems and their ...interactions such as sequence- and functional-dependent failures, spares and dynamic redundancy management, and priority of failure events cannot be adequately captured by traditional FTs. Dynamic fault tree (DFT) extend traditional FT by defining additional gates called dynamic gates to model these complex interactions. Markov models are used in solving dynamic gates. However, state space becomes too large for calculation with Markov models when the number of gate inputs increases. In addition, Markov model is applicable for only exponential failure and repair distributions. Modeling test and maintenance information on spare components is also very difficult. To address these difficulties, Monte Carlo simulation-based approach is used in this work to solve dynamic gates. The approach is first applied to a problem available in the literature which is having non-repairable components. The obtained results are in good agreement with those in literature. The approach is later applied to a simplified scheme of electrical power supply system of nuclear power plant (NPP), which is a complex repairable system having tested and maintained spares. The results obtained using this approach are in good agreement with those obtained using analytical approach. In addition to point estimates of reliability measures, failure time, and repair time distributions are also obtained from simulation. Finally a case study on reactor regulation system (RRS) of NPP is carried out to demonstrate the application of simulation-based DFT approach to large-scale problems.
Antibiotics, often supplemented in feed, used as a growth promoter, may cause their residual effect in animal produce and also trigger antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which is of serious concern ...among swine farming entrepreneurs. As an alternative, supplementing probiotics gained interest in recent years. Lactobacillus being the most commonly used probiotic agent improves growth performance, feed conversion efficiency, nutrient utilization, intestinal microbiota, gut health and regulates immune system in pigs. The characteristics of Lactobacillus spp. and their probiotic effects in swine production are reviewed here under.
β-Glucosidases are diverse group of enzymes with great functional importance to biological systems. These are grouped in multiple glycoside hydrolase families based on their catalytic and sequence ...characteristics. Most studies carried out on β-glucosidases are focused on their industrial applications rather than their endogenous function in the target organisms. β-Glucosidases performed many functions in bacteria as they are components of large complexes called cellulosomes and are responsible for the hydrolysis of short chain oligosaccharides and cellobiose. In plants, β-glucosidases are involved in processes like formation of required intermediates for cell wall lignification, degradation of endosperm’s cell wall during germination and in plant defense against biotic stresses. Mammalian β-glucosidases are thought to play roles in metabolism of glycolipids and dietary glucosides, and signaling functions. These enzymes have diverse biotechnological applications in food, surfactant, biofuel, and agricultural industries. The search for novel and improved β-glucosidase is still continued to fulfills demand of an industrially suitable enzyme. In this review, a comprehensive overview on detailed functional roles of β-glucosidases in different organisms, their industrial applications, and recent cloning and expression studies with biochemical characterization of such enzymes is presented for the better understanding and efficient use of diverse β-glucosidases.
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