We present here the experimental setup and standardization of a newly acquired stable isotope ratio mass-spectrometer (
Isoprime 100,
Isoprime
®
UK) coupled with elemental analyzer (
Pyrocube,
...Elementar
®
-Germany) in a continuous flow mode, for the measurements of C, N and S isotopes in a variety of natural as well as synthetic organics and sulfur containing solid samples. We have calibrated our instrument using a suite of certified international standards supplied by
International Atomic Energy Agency Vienna
and cross-checked against several
in
-
house
laboratory standards used by other institutions of international repute. A synthetic organic compound
Sulfanilamide
was continuously used along with international standards to develop an
in
-
house
internal laboratory standard for the accurate and precise isotopic measurements. Important components contributing to the overall uncertainty of the isotopic measurements such as blank contributions, amount effect and response of mass-spectrometric current against thermal conductivity detector were performed using several aliquots of ε-Amino-
n
-
caproic acid
and
sulfanilamide
(
in
-
house
) standards. Both short and long term variabilities in the measure isotopic data were assessed using our
in
-
house
laboratory standard
Sulfanilamide.
Overall estimated uncertainties of C, N and S isotopic measurements are better than 0.2, 0.2 and 0.3 ‰, respectively; which are well within the recommended limits of aforementioned isotopic data.
A hernia surgeon may encounter unexpected intraoperative findings. It is important to be prepared to detect them and apply the appropriate treatment. We retrospectively studied twenty patients with ...inguinal swellings who were admitted to our surgical department over a 2-year period including patients without a definitive diagnosis of inguinal hernia upon admission. Our aim was to present our experience with the unexpected findings during inguinal hernia surgery, either unusual hernial contents or pathologic entities, such as neoplastic masses, masquerading as a hernia.
To assess the scope for enhancing productivity of groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) in India, well-calibrated and validated CROPGRO-Peanut model was used to assess potential yields (water non-limiting ...and water limiting) and yield gaps of groundnut for 18 locations representing major groundnut growing regions of India. The average simulated water non-limiting pod yield of groundnut for the locations was 5440 kg ha⁻¹, whereas the water limiting yield was 2750 kg ha⁻¹ indicating a 49 % reduction in yield because of deficit soil moisture conditions. As against this, the actual pod yields of the locations averaged 1020 kg ha⁻¹, which was 4420 and 1730 kg ha⁻¹ less than the simulated water non-limiting and water limiting yields, respectively. Across locations, the simulated water non-limiting yields were less variable than water limited and actual yields, and strongly correlated with solar radiation during the crop season (R² = 0.62, P less-than or equal to 0.01). Simulated water limiting yield showed a significant positive, but curvilinear relationship (R² = 0.73, P less-than or equal to 0.01) with mean crop season rainfall across locations. The relationship between actual yield and the mean crop season rainfall across locations was not significant, whereas across seasons for some of the locations, the association was found to be significant. Total yield gap (water non-limiting minus actual yields) ranged from 3100 to 5570 kg ha⁻¹, and remained more or less unaffected by the quantity of rainfall received across locations. The gap between simulated water non-limiting and water limiting yields, which ranged from 710 to 5430 kg ha⁻¹, was large at locations with low crop season rainfall, and narrowed down at locations with increasing quantum of crop season rainfall. On the other hand, the gap between simulated water limiting yield and actual farmers yield ranged from 0 to 3150 kg ha⁻¹. It was narrow at locations with low crop season rainfall and increased considerably at locations with increasing amounts of rainfall indicating that type of interventions to abridge the yield gap will vary with the rainfall regimes. It is suggested that improved agronomic management (such as high yielding cultivars, balance crop nutrition and control of pest and diseases) in high rainfall regimes and rainfall conservation and supplemental irrigations in low rainfall regimes will be essential components of the improved technologies aimed at abridging the yield gaps of groundnut.
Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the ...importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there's currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners' intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) - a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.
A measurement of direct photon production in {sup 208}Pb+ {sup 208}Pb collisions at 158A GeV has been carried out in the CERN WA98 experiment. The invariant yield of direct photons in central ...collisions is extracted as a function of transverse momentum in the interval 0.5<p{sub T}<4 GeV/c . A significant direct photon signal, compared to statistical and systematical errors, is seen at p{sub T}>1.5 GeV/c . The result constitutes the first observation of direct photons in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. It could be significant for diagnosis of quark-gluon-plasma formation.
The biosynthetic activity of yeast Pichia etchellsii beta-glucosidase II (BglII) expressed in recombinant Escherichia coli was utilized for synthesis of cellooligosaccharides, alkyl and terpene ...glucosides. Cellooligosaccharides with a degree of polymerization of 3 and greater were resolved by thin-layer chromatography (TLC) using an ethyl acetate:1-propanol:2-propanol:water (8:5:1:1) solvent system followed by visualization with 0.2% naphthoresorcinol reagent. Using 2M cellobiose and 15 IU of partially purified BglII, 57 mmol/L of oligosaccharides (comprising mostly cellotriose and cellopentaose) was synthesized in 16 h. Similarly, alkyl glucosides with chain lengths from 6 to 10 carbons were synthesized and products extracted to near purity by ethyl acetate extraction. The same extraction method was employed to separate, to near purity, various monoterpenyl (nerol, geraniol, citronellol) glucosides. A reliable and simple method for separation of cellooligosaccharides using a combination of Bio-Gel P-2 gel filtration and charcoal celite adsorption chromatography was developed. The cellooligosaccharides were separated to purity as confirmed by TLC. The enzyme was among the very few that could synthesize a wide variety of glycoconjugates.
Systemic application of compound 14, a novel mTOR inhibitor, significantly suppresses macroscopic and histologic abnormalities associated with chemically-induced murine ulcerative colitis.
A series ...of novel cyanopyridyl based molecules (1–14) were designed, synthesized and probed for inhibition of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) activity. Compound 14 was found to be a potent inhibitor of mTOR activity as assessed by enzyme-linked immunoassays and Western blot analysis. Most importantly, systemic application (intraperitoneal; ip) of compound 14 significantly suppressed macroscopic and histological abnormalities associated with chemically-induced murine colitis.
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