Extreme rainfall prior to a flood event is often a necessary condition for its occurrence; however, rainfall alone is not always an indicator of flood severity. Antecedent wetness condition of a ...catchment is another important factor which strongly influences the flood magnitudes. The key role of soil moisture in driving floods is widely recognized; however, antecedent conditions of deeper saturated zone may contribute to river floods. Here, we assess how closely the flood magnitudes are associated to extreme rainfall, soil moisture and baseflow in 70 catchments of Peninsular India for the period 1979-2018. Annual flood magnitudes have declined across most of the catchments. Effect of flow regulations is also assessed to understand the impact of human interventions on flood characteristics. Reservoir regulation has positive effect by reducing the flood peak and volume, whereas the duration of flood events has increased after the construction of dams. Baseflow exhibits similar patterns of trends as floods, whereas trends in rainfall and soil moisture extremes are weakly correlated with trends in flood magnitudes. Baseflow is found to be more strongly influencing the flood magnitudes than soil moisture at various time lags. Further analysis with event coincidence analysis confirms that baseflow has stronger triggering effect on river floods in Peninsular India.
Abstract Understanding the spatio-temporal evolution of streamflow droughts and their relationship with potential causative processes is critical for effective drought management. This study assesses ...spatial synchrony and temporal clustering of streamflow droughts in six major river basins of Peninsular India. The importance of baseflow, rainfall deficits, soil moisture deficits and high temperatures in triggering streamflow droughts is also investigated to identify the dominant driver during the period 1981–2015. Spatial synchrony of streamflow droughts is investigated using multivariate Ripley’s K function and temporal clustering is evaluated using univariate Ripley’s K at various timescales. The interactions of streamflow droughts with potential causative processes are investigated using event coincidence analysis. At regional scale, streamflow droughts in peninsular catchments show strong spatial synchrony even at longer timescales. However, at basin scale, droughts in the catchments show strong spatial synchrony only at smaller timescales, behave independently of each other and achieve asynchrony with time, especially at longer timescales. Streamflow droughts show the strongest temporal clustering at smaller timescales and the strength of clustering decreases after a 3 year timescale. Rainfall deficits primarily control streamflow droughts in Peninsular India at a range of lags, except just before the onset of drought events where baseflow dominates. In addition, trigger coincidence rates of baseflow are lower than rainfall deficits but higher than soil moisture deficits and high temperatures at longer time lags.
The impacts of concurrent droughts and heatwaves could be more serious compared to their individual occurrence. Meteorological drought condition is generally characterized by low rainfall, but impact ...of such an event is amplified with simultaneous occurrence of heatwaves. Positive feedback between these two extremes can worsen the rainfall deficit situation to serious soil moisture depletion due to enhanced evapotranspiration. In this study, the concurrence of meteorological droughts and heatwaves is investigated in India using Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) high resolution gridded data over a period of 60 years. Significant changes are observed in concurrent meteorological droughts and heatwaves defined at different percentile based thresholds and durations during the period 1981-2010 relative to the base period 1951-1980. There is substantial increase in the frequency of concurrent meteorological droughts and heatwaves across whole India. Statistically significant trends in the spatial extent of droughts are observed in Central Northeast India and West Central India; however, the spatial extent affected by concurrent droughts and heatwaves is increasing across whole India. Significant shifts are identified in the distribution of spatial extent of concurrent drought and heatwaves in India compared to the base period.
Hydroxypyridinones (HOPOs) are excellent class of chelators that have been gaining attention in the field of pharmaceutical drugs by their high chelating efficacy and specificity with different metal ...ions. Among all the metal ions, they exhibit a high binding affinity towards iron (III) and are clinically used as iron chelators nowadays. The HOPO family has different isomers, out of which 3,4-HOPO possesses applicability for designing drugs. The effect of methyl substitution on different positions of pyridinone ring also plays an essential role in deciding the pM values, thus describing the metal affinity. Several metal ions like Fe, Al, Cu, Zn, and some actinides are found to exhibit good chelation efficacy with HOPOs. In terms of denticity, there are various forms of HOPO. Among these, discussion on bidentate, tetradentate, hexadentate, octadentate, and dendrimers will be done here. This review systematically summarizes the various literature reports on the design and pharmacological activities of the newly developed HOPOs and their derivatives, including antibiotics, anticancer, and antineurodegeneratives.
Hydroxypyranones form very stable complexes and possess varied uses in medical applications. They are promising chelators for treating iron overload diseases as they form stable complexes with Fe
3+
.... A novel tripodal ligand tris(5-hydroxy-4-oxo-pyran-2-yl)methyl benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxylate (TBHPY) was synthesized and characterized by several spectroscopic techniques like UV–Vis, FT-IR,
1
HNMR,
13
CNMR and mass spectrometry. The coordination behavior of the ligand TBHPY was investigated with proton and trivalent metal ions viz., Fe(III), Al(III) and Cr(III) by potentiometric and spectrophotometric methods. The studies revealed four species viz., L
3−
, LH
2−
,
LH
2
−
and LH
3
for the ligand while ML, MLH and MLH
2
species for all the three metal ion complexes. In addition, only aluminium formed MLH
−1
, MLH
−2
and MLH
−3
. Quantum mechanical studies at DFT level validated the geometrical, spectroscopic, electronic and photophysical properties of the neutral and deprotonated states of the ligand, and its metal complexes. The ligand showed a scorpio-type geometry with the presence of face-to-face stacking and hydrogen bond, whereas the neutral metal–ligand complexes displayed a distorted octahedral structure.
Several spore-forming strains of Bacillus are marketed as probiotics due to their ability to survive harsh gastrointestinal conditions and confer health benefits to the host. We report the complete ...genomes of two commercially available probiotics, Bacillus coagulans S-lac and Bacillus subtilis TO-A JPC, and compare them with the genomes of other Bacillus and Lactobacillus. The taxonomic position of both organisms was established with a maximum-likelihood tree based on twenty six housekeeping proteins. Analysis of all probiotic strains of Bacillus and Lactobacillus reveal that the essential sporulation proteins are conserved in all Bacillus probiotic strains while they are absent in Lactobacillus spp. We identified various antibiotic resistance, stress-related, and adhesion-related domains in these organisms, which likely provide support in exerting probiotic action by enabling adhesion to host epithelial cells and survival during antibiotic treatment and harsh conditions.
Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based models have gained a lot of popularity due to their outstanding performance in image super resolution tasks. However, these networks have few inherent ...problems; such as, high computational complexity, large depth and vanishing gradient. Present work proposes a novel GAN based architecture, namely, Super Resolution with Inception Network (SRINet) to solve the above mentioned problems. Generator architecture of SRINet uses complex filter structure rather than the linear filter structure to increase the depth and width of network without increasing the computational cost. Complex filter settings, present in the architecture, helps it to attain locally distributed information along with hierarchical global information in an image. Hence, the proposed method approximates the most favorable sparse structures to foster the learning capability of network. Additionally, progressive two stage upscaling approach with dense skip connections are introduced in the generator architecture. This technique helps the proposed network to learn precise mapping to generate an output image from the low resolution image. To measure visual quality of an image, we use human visual system based visual information fidelity metric. Proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-art methods qualitatively (perceptually) and quantitatively on other GAN based methods.
•Proposed an Generative Adversarial Network based model for image super resolution.•Primitive and hierarchical feature learning with Complex filter structure.•Dense skip connections are introduced to increase the learning capability.•Progressive upscaling approach is used to obtain fine texture details.•Performance is evaluated with the state-of-the-art methods.
Steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome is a frequent cause of chronic kidney disease almost inevitably progressing to end-stage renal disease. More than 58 monogenic causes of SRNS have been discovered ...and majority of known steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome causing genes are predominantly expressed in glomerular podocytes, placing them at the center of disease pathogenesis. Herein, we describe two unrelated families with steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome with homozygous mutations in the KIRREL1 gene. One mutation showed high frequency in the European population (minor allele frequency 0.0011) and this patient achieved complete remission following treatment, but later progressed to chronic kidney disease. We found that mutant KIRREL1 proteins failed to localize to the podocyte cell membrane, indicating defective trafficking and impaired podocytes function. Thus, the KIRREL1 gene product has an important role in modulating the integrity of the slit diaphragm and maintaining glomerular filtration function.
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Every individual's perception of multimedia content varies based on their interpretation. Therefore, it is quite challenging to predict likability of any multimedia just based on its content. This ...paper presents a novel system for analysis of facial expressions of subject against the multimedia content to be evaluated. First, we developed a dataset by recording facial expressions of subjects under uncontrolled environment. These subjects are volunteers recruited to watch the videos of different genre, and provide their feedback in terms of likability. Subject responses are divided into three categories: Like, Neutral and Dislike. A novel multimodal system is developed using the developed dataset. The model learns feature representation from data based on the three provided categories. The proposed system contains ensemble of time distributed convolutional neural network, 3D convolutional neural network, and long short term memory networks. All the modalities in proposed architecture are evaluated independently as well as in distinct combinations. The paper also provides detailed insight into learning behavior of the proposed system.
Fibroproliferative disorders such as systemic sclerosis (SSc) have no effective therapies and result in significant morbidity and mortality. We recently demonstrated that the C-terminal domain of ...endostatin, known as E4, prevented and reversed both dermal and pulmonary fibrosis. Our goal was to identify the mechanism by which E4 abrogates fibrosis and its cell surface binding partner(s). Our findings show that E4 activated the urokinase pathway and increased the urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) to type 1 plasminogen activator inhibitor (PAI-1) ratio. In addition, E4 substantially increased MMP-1 and MMP-3 expression and activity. In vivo, E4 reversed bleomycin induction of PAI-1 and increased uPA activity. In patients with SSc, the uPA/PAI-1 ratio was decreased in both lung tissues and pulmonary fibroblasts compared with normal donors. Proteins bound to biotinylated-E4 were identified as enolase-1 (ENO) and uPA receptor (uPAR). The antifibrotic effects of E4 required uPAR. Further, ENO mediated the fibrotic effects of TGF-β1 and exerted TGF-β1-independent fibrotic effects. Our findings suggest that the antifibrotic effect of E4 is mediated, in part, by regulation of the urokinase pathway and induction of MMP-1 and MMP-3 levels and activity in a uPAR-dependent manner, thus promoting extracellular matrix degradation. Further, our findings identify a moonlighting function for the glycolytic enzyme ENO in fibrosis.
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