•CA-storage (1% O2+5% CO2) delayed browning and red color loss of litchi pericarp.•CA-stored fruit showed suppressed membrane leakage and malondialdehyde contents.•CA-storage maintained acidic ...pericarp pH and reduced POD & PPO enzymes activities.•CA-stored litchi fruit showed higher enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants.•CA-storage could be useful in delaying browning and maintaining litchi fruit quality.
‘Gola’ litchi fruits were stored under ten different CA-combinations at 5±1°C to investigate its effects on pericarp browning, biochemical quality and antioxidative activities. Control fruit turned completely brown after 28days of storage and were excluded from the study. Fruit-stored under CA7-combination (1% O2+5% CO2) showed reduced weight loss, pericarp browning, membrane leakage and malondialdehyde contents. Soluble solid contents, titratable acidity and ascorbic acid contents were higher in CA7-stored fruit. Activities of catalase and superoxide dismutase enzymes, levels of total anthocyanins, DPPH radical-scavenging-activity and phenolic contents were significantly higher in CA7-stored litchi fruit. In contrast, activities of polyphenol oxidase and peroxidase enzymes were substantially lower in fruit kept under CA7-combination. Fruit subjected to CA7-conditions also maintained higher organoleptic quality. In conclusion, 1% O2+5% CO2 CA-conditions delayed pericarp browning, maintained antioxidative activities and biochemical characteristics along with better organoleptic quality of litchi fruit for 35days.
Nickel (Ni) is a naturally occurring metal, but anthropogenic activities such as industrialization, use of fertilizers, chemicals, and sewage sludge have increased its concentration in the ...environment up to undesirable levels. Ni is considered to be essential for plant growth at low concentration; however, Ni pollution is increasing in the environment, and therefore, it is important to understand its functional roles and toxic effects on plants. This review emphasizes the environmental sources of Ni, its essentiality, effects, tolerance mechanisms, possible remediation approaches, and research direction that may help in interdisciplinary studies to assess the significance of Ni toxicity. Briefly, Ni affects plant growth both positively and negatively, depending on the concentration present in the growth medium. On the positive side, Ni is essential for normal growth, enzymatic activities (e.g., urease), nitrogen metabolism, iron uptake, and specific metabolic reactions. On the negative side, Ni reduces seed germination, root and shoot growth, biomass accumulation, and final production. Moreover, Ni toxicity also causes chlorosis and necrosis and inhibits various physiological processes (photosynthesis, transpiration) and cause oxidative damage in plants. The threat associated with Ni is increased as Ni concentration increases day by day in the environment, particularly in soils; therefore, it would be hazardous for crop production in the near future. Additionally, the lack of information regarding the mechanisms of Ni tolerance in plants further intensifies this situation. Therefore, future research should be focused on approachable and prominent solutions in order to minimize the entry of Ni into our ecosystems.
Identification of Influential nodes in complex networks is challenging due to the largely scaled data and network sizes, and frequently changing behaviors of the current topologies. Various ...application scenarios like disease transmission and immunization, software virus infection and disinfection, increased product exposure and rumor suppression, etc., are applicable domains in the corresponding networks where identification of influential nodes is crucial. Though a lot of approaches are proposed to address the challenges, most of the relevant research concentrates only on single and limited aspects of the problem. Therefore, we propose Global Structure Model (GSM) for influential nodes identification that considers self-influence as well as emphasizes on global influence of the node in the network. We applied GSM and utilized Susceptible Infected Recovered model to evaluate its efficiency. Moreover, various standard algorithms such as Betweenness Centrality, Profit Leader, H-Index, Closeness Centrality, Hyperlink Induced Topic Search, Improved K-shell Hybrid, Density Centrality, Extended Cluster Coefficient Ranking Measure, and Gravity Index Centrality are employed as baseline benchmarks to evaluate the performance of GSM. Similarly, we used seven real-world and two synthetic multi-typed complex networks along-with different well-known datasets for experiments. Results analysis indicates that GSM outperformed the baseline algorithms in identification of influential node(s).
•Ascorbic (AA) and oxalic (OA) acids effect was studied under controlled atmosphere (CA).•AA and OA reduced oxidative stress and oxidative enzymes activities during CA storage.•AA + OA delayed ...browning and maintained markedly higher total anthocyanins under CA.•AA and OA treatment showed better quality and antioxidant enzyme activities under CA.•Application of AA + OA under CA storage is suitable for browning reduction of litchi.
The effect of ascorbic acid AA (40 mmol L−1) and oxalic acid OA (2 mmol L−1) on browning of litchi fruit was investigated under 5% CO2 + 1% O2 controlled atmosphere (CA) and compared with air at 5 ± 1 °C for 28 days. The combined application of AA and OA suppressed browning index, soluble quinones, and activities of polyphenol oxidase and peroxidase under CA compared with control. The combination of CA along with AA + OA reduced weight loss and maintained higher anthocyanins, total phenolics, membrane integrity, ascorbate peroxidase, catalase, glutathione reductase and superoxide dismutase activities compared with control. In addition, AA + OA + CA combination showed markedly lower malondialdehyde, superoxide anion and hydrogen peroxide with substantially higher soluble solids content, ascorbic acid, titratable acidity and sensory quality compared with control. In conclusion, AA + OA combination could be considered appropriate to delay browning and to conserve litchi fruit visual appearance under CA storage conditions.
•Putrescine (PUT) suppressed the activities of mango cell wall enzymes (exo-, endo-PG, EGase and PE) during ripening and storage.•Changes in biochemical fruit quality characteristics were also ...delayed by PUT application.•PUT maintained higher activities of antioxidative enzymes during ripening and storage.
The role of putrescine (PUT) in regulating fruit softening, antioxidative enzymes and biochemical changes in fruit quality was investigated during ripening and cold storage of mango (Mangifera indica cv. Samar Bahisht Chaunsa). Fruit were treated with various PUT concentrations (0.0, 0.1, 1.0 and 2.0mM) and were allowed to ripen at 32±2°C for 7 days, or stored at 11±1°C for up to 28 days. Respiration rate and ethylene production were measured daily during ripening and cold storage. Cell wall degrading enzymes such as exo-polygalacturonase (exo-PG), endo-polygalacturonase (endo-PG), pectin esterase (PE), endo-1,4-β-d-glucanase (EGase), antioxidative enzymes including superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POX), and catalase (CAT), fruit firmness as well as biochemical fruit quality characteristics were estimated during ripening and cold storage at 2 and 7 day intervals, respectively. PUT treatments reduced respiration rate, ethylene production and maintained higher fruit firmness during ripening as well as cold storage. PUT-treated fruit exhibited significantly suppressed activities of cell wall enzymes (exo-, endo-PG and EGase), but retained higher PE activity during ripening and cold storage. Total phenolic and antioxidant contents were significantly higher in PUT-treated fruit during ripening as well in the cold storage period than in the controls. Activities of antioxidative enzymes (CAT, POX and SOD) were also significantly higher in PUT-treated fruit during ripening as well as cold storage. SSC and SSC:TA were lower in PUT-treated fruit, while TA and ascorbic acid content showed the reverse trend. In conclusion, pre-storage 2.0mM PUT treatment inhibited ethylene production and suppressed the activities of cell wall enzymes, while resulting in higher activities of antioxidative enzymes and maintaining better fruit quality during ripening and cold storage.
The investigation of optical solitons, a subject of significant interest in fibre optics and communications due to its importance in signal transmission and data processing, is the focus of the ...study. For the (2+1) hyperbolic Schrödinger equation (SE), the main goal is to find novel soliton solutions while taking nonlinear effects into account. The study uses the modified Khater method and sine-Gordon expansion method as two separate techniques to accomplish this goal. The purpose of selecting these techniques is to offer a thorough strategy for finding solutions for the SE. A number of closed-form solutions for the SE can be obtained using Mathematica software, which is one of the study’s important findings. These solutions offer valuable insights into the behavior of optical solitons in complex field.
Nowadays, increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a major threat for the environment and is a main reason for global warming. Variation in gas temperature and dissociation of CO2 into ...its by-products (CO and O) in a home-made dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor have been reported as a function of discharge parameters, i.e., applied voltage and gas flow rate. To estimate the dissociation fraction of CO2 in the DBD reactor, the optical emission actinometry technique is employed in which 5% N2 is used as an actinometer. Emission lines of the Angstrom band of CO at 451.09 nm (B1∑ +v′=0−A1π, v″=0) and the 2nd positive system of N2 at 337.01 nm (C3πuv′=0−B3πg,v″=0) are used for actinometry measurements. To estimate the rate coefficients used in actinometry measurements, gas temperature is measured using the Boltzmann plot technique, from the rotational spectra of the Q-branch of the Angstrom band CO (0–1). To avoid discrepancy in gas temperature measurements, rotational temperature of the 2nd positive system, the N2 (0–1) band, is also measured. For this, synthetic spectra have been fitted over the experimentally recorded spectrum of the N2 (0–1) band. A slight difference in gas temperature has been noted for the Angstrom band of CO and the 2nd positive system of nitrogen. Conversely, an increasing trend in the dissociation fraction of CO2 with an increase in the applied voltage is noted. About 34% dissociation fraction is achieved for 10 kV applied voltage at a flow rate of 25 SCCM. With an increase in the gas flow rate (25–200 SCCM), a decrease in the dissociation fraction of CO2 from 34% to 11% is noted.
The trend of E-commerce and online shopping is increasing rapidly. However, it is difficult to know about the quality of items from pictures and videos available on the online stores. Therefore, ...online stores and independent products reviews sites share user reviews about the products for the ease of buyers to find out the best quality products. The proposed work is about measuring and detecting product quality based on consumers’ attitude in product reviews. Predicting the quality of a product from customers’ reviews is a challenging and novel research area. Natural Language Processing and machine learning methods are popularly employed to identify product quality from customer reviews. Most of the existing research for the product review system has been done using traditional sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Going beyond the constraints of opinion and sentiment, such as a deeper description of the input text, is made possible by utilizing appraisal categories. The main focus of this study is exploiting the quality subcategory of the appraisal framework in order to predict the quality of the product. This paper presents a quality of product-based classification model (named QLeBERT) by combining quality of product-related lexicon, N-grams, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM). In the proposed model, the quality of the product-related lexicon, N-grams, and BERT are employed to generate vectors of words from part of the customers’ reviews. The main contribution of this work is the preparation of the quality of product-related lexicon dictionary based on an appraisal framework and automatically labelling the data accordingly before using them as the training data in the BiLSTM model. The proposed model is evaluated on an Amazon product reviews dataset. The proposed QLeBERT outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models by achieving an F1macro score of 0.91 in binary classification.
Cassia plants have a considerable position in conventional systems of medicine. The possible anti-nociceptive, anti-inflammatory, and anti-neuropathic properties of Cassia artemisiodes (CAD) extract ...were tested using the standard animal models. In this study, in vitro antioxidant, cyclooxygenase (COX-1 and 2), and 5-lipoxygenase (5-LOX) inhibitory assays were performed. The anti-inflammatory activity was evaluated using carrageenan, histamine, and serotonin-induced paw edema models. Antipyretic activity, thermally and chemically-induced nociception, and naloxone antagonistic activities were carried out. The CAD extract was tested for anti-neuropathic activity in the streptozotocin-induced diabetic neuropathy model. Suppressing the effect of CAD extract on the mRNA level of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), COX-2, and pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6) was determined by performing RT-PCR. The CAD extract inhibited COX-2 and 5-LOX enzymes, paw inflammation, and reduced nociceptive behaviors. The mRNA gene expression of iNOS, COX-2, and inflammatory cytokines was reduced significantly with increased DPPH scavenging activity. The extract significantly reduced the diabetes-induced neuropathic pain. In a nutshell, these results recommended that the CAD extract has anti-nociceptive and anti-neuropathic activities due to inhibition of inflammatory and oxidative signaling.
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•The Cassia artemisiodes (CAD) extract ameliorates peripheral and central nociceptive pain.•The CAD extract attenuates carrageenan, histamine, and serotonin-induced paw edema.•The CAD extract reduces diabetes-induced neuropathic pain.•The CAD extract reduces neuroinflammation and oxidative stress.