Waterlogging causes extensive damage to maize crops in tropical and subtropical regions. The identification of tolerance genes and their interactions at the molecular level will be helpful to ...engineer tolerant genotypes. A whole-genome transcriptome assay revealed the specific role of genes in response to waterlogging stress in susceptible and tolerant genotypes. Genes involved in the synthesis of ethylene and auxin, cell wall metabolism, activation of G-proteins and formation of aerenchyma and adventitious roots, were upregulated in the tolerant genotype. Many transcription factors, particularly ERFs, MYB, HSPs, MAPK, and LOB-domain protein were involved in regulation of these traits. Genes responsible for scavenging of ROS generated under stress were expressed along with those involved in carbohydrate metabolism. The physical locations of 21 genes expressed in the tolerant genotype were found to correspond with the marker intervals of known QTLs responsible for development of adaptive traits. Among the candidate genes, most showed synteny with genes of sorghum and foxtail millet. Co-expression analysis of 528 microarray samples including 16 samples from the present study generated seven functional modules each in the two genotypes, with differing characteristics. In the tolerant genotype, stress genes were co-expressed along with peroxidase and fermentation pathway genes.
Highly transparent, low resistive pure and Sb, Zn doped nanostructured SnO2 thin films have been successfully prepared on glass substrates at 400°C by spray pyrolysis method. Structural, electrical ...and optical properties of pure and Sb, Zn doped SnO2 thin films are studied in detail. Powder X-ray diffraction confirms the phase purity, increase in crystallinity, size of the grains (90–45nm), polycrystalline nature and tetragonal rutile structure of thin films. The scanning electron microscopy reveals the continuous change in surface morphology of thin films and size of the grains decrease due to Sb, Zn doping in to SnO2. The optical transmission spectra of SnO2 films as a function of wavelength confirm that the optical transmission increases with Sb, Zn doping remarkably. The optical band gap of undoped film is found to be 4.27eV and decreases with Sb, Zn doping to 4.19eV, 4.07eV respectively. The results of electrical measurements indicate that the sheet resistance of the deposited films improves with Sb, Zn doping. The Hall measurements confirm that the films are degenerate n-type semiconductors.
Silver nanoparticles are gaining importance as an antimicrobial agent in wound dressings. Chitin is a biopolymer envisioned to promote rapid dermal regeneration and accelerate wound healing. This ...study was focused on the evaluation of chitin membranes containing silver nanoparticles for use as an antimicrobial wound dressing. Silver nanoparticles were synthesised by gamma irradiation at doses of 50 kGy in the presence of sodium alginate as stabiliser. The UV–Vis absorption spectra of nanoparticles exhibited an absorption band at 415–420 nm, which is the typical plasmon resonance band of silver nanoparticles. The peaks in the X‐ray diffraction (XRD) pattern are in agreement with the standard values of the face‐centred cubic silver. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images indicate silver nanoparticles with spherical morphology and small particle size in the range of 3–13 nm. In vitro antimicrobial tests were performed using Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus to determine the antimicrobial efficiency of the chitin membranes containing 30, 50, 70 and 100 ppm nanosilver. No viable counts for P. aeruginosa were detected with 70 ppm silver nanoparticles dressing after 1‐hour exposure. A 2‐log reduction in viable cell count was observed for S. aureus after 1 hour and a 4‐log reduction after 6 hours with 100 ppm nanosilver chitin membranes. This study demonstrates the antimicrobial capability of chitin membranes containing silver nanoparticles. The chitin membranes with 100 ppm nanosilver showed promising antimicrobial activity against common wound pathogens.
UDP-N-acetylglucosamine 1-carboxyvinyltransferase (MurA) catalyses the biosynthesis of peptidoglycans in Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) cell wall by adding enolpyruvyl to UDP-N-acetylglucosamine ...through an addition and elimination process. In this study, novel inhibitors of MurA were identified using an in silico approach. The three dimensional (3D) structure of MurA was determined based upon the principle of homology modelling, using a template (3SG1) obtained from Bacillus anthracis. Structural analysis revealed that three residues (Arg93, Asp305, and Val327) were involved in the UDP-N-acetylglucosamine binding site and one residue (Asp117) was involved in the direct catalysis. These residues were utilized as a prime target for the inhibitors during virtual screening and molecular docking analysis. A total of seven thousand five hundred and twenty-nine (7529) ligands were obtained from public databases, capable of binding to MurA. These compounds were further filtered for physicochemical properties (Lipinski rule of five), molecular docking analysis, and pharmacokinetic properties. Eleven (11) ligands with good binding energies ranging between ─10.73 and ─8.17 kcal/mol were obtained. Further, four compounds with good binding energies (ZINC20256175 = ─10.66 kcal/mol, ZINC12283251 = ─10.58 kcal/mol, ZINC14538153 = ─9.90 kcal/mol and ZINC12217441 = ─9.73 kcal/mol) out of the 11, were selected and used for Molecular Dynamic (MD) Simulation and Molecular Generalized Born Surface Area (MM-GBSA) analyses. The results of the analyses revealed that all four compounds achieved a differing level of stability during the 50ns MD simulation. Therefore, these compounds could be considered as potential inhibitors for MTB after successful experimental validation.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects motor neurons and causes speech and respiration dysfunctions. Current diagnostic methods are complicated, thus ...motivating the development of an efficient and objective diagnostic aid. We hypothesize that analyses of features capturing the essential characteristics of the biomechanical process of voice production can distinguish ALS patients from non-ALS controls. In this paper, we represent voices with algorithmically estimated vocal fold dynamics from physical models of phonation. To validate our hypothesis, we explore 2 sets of features: simple statistical measurements (Set 1) and phase-space characterizations (Set 2) of estimated vocal fold displacements and range of displacements. Random Forest Classifiers based on Set 1 and Set 2 features yield average AUC-ROC of 99.6% and 82.3%, respectively, in 10-way cross-validation experiments. These results demonstrate the potential of using vocal fold dynamics for detecting ALS from voice recordings.
Summary
Four mungbean products namely, whole fried namkeen, dehusked fried namkeen, roasted namkeen and salad were formulated using three different cultivars of mungbean viz. UPM 98‐1, Pant Mung‐5 ...and Pant Mung‐2 and the effect of different processing methods on texture and nutrient composition were studied. All the products were found to be acceptable by the panel. Salad was found to be the most acceptable product with overall acceptability of 8.31 out of 10 followed by dehusked fried namkeen (7.80), whole fried namkeen (7.61) and roasted namkeen (7.02). Moisture and protein content increased significantly after germination for 24 h. Fat content increased significantly for deep fried products. Total ash, crude fibre and mineral content decreased significantly after processing whereas in‐vitro iron bioavailability and in‐vitro protein digestibility increased significantly after processing. Texture analysis revealed that dehusked fried namkeen of Pant Mung‐5 and roasted namkeen of Pant Mung‐2 had maximum crispness and hardness, respectively, which are preferred attributes.
This paper addresses the deep face recognition problem under an open-set protocol, where ideal face features are expected to have smaller maximal intra-class distance than minimal inter-class ...distance under a suitably chosen metric space. To this end, hyperspherical face recognition, as a promising line of research, has attracted increasing attention and gradually become a major focus in face recognition research. As one of the earliest works in hyperspherical face recognition, SphereFace explicitly proposed to learn face embeddings with large inter-class angular margin. However, SphereFace still suffers from severe training instability which limits its application in practice. In order to address this problem, we introduce a unified framework to understand large angular margin in hyperspherical face recognition. Under this framework, we extend the study of SphereFace and propose an improved variant with substantially better training stability - SphereFace-R. Specifically, we propose two novel ways to implement the multiplicative margin, and study SphereFace-R under three different feature normalization schemes (no feature normalization, hard feature normalization and soft feature normalization). We also propose an implementation strategy - "characteristic gradient detachment" - to stabilize training. Extensive experiments on SphereFace-R show that it is consistently better than or competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
Objectives
To investigate the seroprevalence of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) in pregnant women and possible risk factors for perinatal hepatitis B virus (HBV) transmission.
Methods
Four ...thousand pregnant women were evaluated using history, examination, and test for serum HBsAg using commercial enzyme immunoassay kits. For HBsAg positive women, liver function tests and a test for hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) was done. HBV DNA analysis was done by polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
Results
Of 4,000 women studied, 37 (0.9%) tested positive for HBsAg. Of these 37 women, 6 (16%) presented with acute hepatitis and 31 (84%) were asymptomatic. The highest HBsAg positivity rate was seen in the age group of 21–25 years (1.15%) followed by 26–30 years (0.86%). Assessment of risk factors revealed history of tattooing in 29/37 (78.4%) women. HBeAg was positive in 21 of 37 (56.8%) women. Of the 16 HBeAg negative women, 5 were positive for HBV DNA and anti-HBe antibody, 6 had only anti-HBe antibody and 5 had neither HBV DNA nor anti-HBe. Vertical transmission was seen in 65% (13/20) of babies born to mothers who were positive for HBeAg and HBV DNA. In contrast, it was only 9.1% (1/11) for babies born to mothers who were negative for both HBeAg and HBV DNA. Of the 25 babies delivered vaginally, 15 (60%) developed vertical transmission. None of the four babies delivered by elective cesarean section had evidence of vertical transmission.
Conclusions
Seroprevalence of HBsAg in antenatal women was found to be 0.9%. HBe-antigen and HBV DNA positivity was associated with a higher chance of vertical transmission
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