Nitric oxide (NO), a colorless gaseous molecule, is a lipophilic free radical that easily diffuses through the plasma membrane. These characteristics make NO an ideal autocrine (i.e., within a single ...cell) and paracrine (i.e., between adjacent cells) signalling molecule. As a chemical messenger, NO plays a crucial role in plant growth, development, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. Furthermore, NO interacts with reactive oxygen species, antioxidants, melatonin, and hydrogen sulfide. It regulates gene expression, modulates phytohormones, and contributes to plant growth and defense mechanisms. In plants, NO is mainly produced via redox pathways. However, nitric oxide synthase, a key enzyme in NO production, has been poorly understood recently in both model and crop plants. In this review, we discuss the pivotal role of NO in signalling and chemical interactions as well as its involvement in the mitigation of biotic and abiotic stress conditions. In the current review, we have discussed various aspects of NO including its biosynthesis, interaction with reactive oxygen species (ROS), melatonin (MEL), hydrogen sulfide, enzymes, phytohormones, and its role in normal and stressful conditions.
A poor diet, resulting in malnutrition, is a critical challenge that leads to a variety of metabolic disorders, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Mentha species are famous as ...therapeutic herbs and have long served as herbal medicine. Recently, the demand for its products, such as herbal drugs, medicines, and natural herbal formulations, has increased significantly. However, the available literature lacks a thorough overview of Mentha phytochemicals’ effects for reducing malnutritional risks against cardiovascular diseases. In this context, we aimed to review the recent advances of Mentha phytochemicals and future challenges for reducing malnutritional risks in cardiovascular patients. Current studies indicated that Mentha species phytochemicals possess unique antimicrobial, antidiabetic, cytotoxic, and antioxidant potential, which can be used as herbal medicine directly or indirectly (such as food ingredients) and are effective in controlling and curing cardiovascular diseases. The presence of aromatic and flavor compounds of Mentha species greatly enhance the nutritional values of the food. Further interdisciplinary investigations are pivotal to explore main volatile compounds, synergistic actions of phytochemicals, organoleptic effects, and stability of Mentha sp. phytochemicals.
In today’s liberalized electricity markets, modeling and forecasting electricity demand data are highly important for the effective management of the power system. However, electricity demand ...forecasting is a challenging task due to the specific features it exhibits. These features include the presence of extreme values, spikes or jumps, multiple periodicities, long trend, and bank holiday effect. In addition, the forecasts are required for a complete day as electricity demand is decided a day before the physical delivery. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the forecasting performance of models based on functional data analysis, a relatively less explored area in energy research. To this end, the demand time series is first treated for the extreme values. The filtered series is then divided into deterministic and stochastic components. The generalized additive modeling technique is used to model the deterministic component, whereas functional autoregressive (FAR), FAR with exogenous variable (FARX), and classical univariate AR models are used to model and forecast the stochastic component. Data from the Nord Pool electricity market are used, and the one-day-ahead out-of-sample forecast obtained for a whole year is evaluated using different forecasting accuracy measures. The results indicate that the functional modeling approach produces superior forecasting results, while FARX outperforms FAR and classical AR models. More specifically, for the NP electricity demand, FARX produces a MAPE value of 2.74, whereas 6.27 and 9.73 values of MAPE are obtained for FAR and AR models, respectively.
Advances in plant biotechnology provide various means to improve crop productivity and greatly contributing to sustainable agriculture. A significant advance in plant biotechnology has been the ...availability of novel synthetic promoters for precise spatial and temporal control of transgene expression. In this article, we review the development of various synthetic promotors and the rise of their use over the last several decades for regulating the transcription of various transgenes. Similarly, we provided a brief description of the structure and scope of synthetic promoters and the engineering of their
cis
-regulatory elements for different targets. Moreover, the functional characteristics of different synthetic promoters, their modes of regulating the expression of candidate genes in response to different conditions, and the resulting plant trait improvements reported in the past decade are discussed.
Polymer derived ceramic (PDC) composite coatings were deposited on AISI 304 substrates using siloxane based preceramic polymer polymethlysilsquioxane (PMS) and ZrSi
as active filler or Ag as passive ...filler. The tribological performance of the composite coatings was evaluated at room temperature and moderately high temperatures (150 °C, 200 °C, 300 °C and 400 °C). The composite coatings showed low coefficient of friction (COF), µ, from 0.08 to 0.2 for SiOC-ZrSi
composite coatings, and from 0.02 to 0.3 for SiOC-Ag composite coatings, at room temperature with increasing normal load from 1 to 5 N. High temperature tribology tests showed high COF values from 0.4 to 1 but low wear for SiOC-ZrSi
coating, and low COF from 0.2 to 0.3 for SiOC-Ag coatings at lower temperature ranges. Low load friction tests at room temperature showed negligible wear in SiOC-ZrSi
coatings, suggesting good wear resistant and lubricating properties due to formation of t-ZrO
and carbon. Low COF and high amount of wear was observed in SiOC-Ag composite coatings at room temperature due to high ductility of Ag and smearing of wear debris in the wear track. The coatings and wear tracks were characterized to evaluate the lubrication and wear behavior.
Over the past two decades, medical imaging has been extensively apply to diagnose diseases. Medical experts continue to have difficulties for diagnosing diseases with a single modality owing to a ...lack of information in this domain. Image fusion may be use to merge images of specific organs with diseases from a variety of medical imaging systems. Anatomical and physiological data may be included in multi-modality image fusion, making diagnosis simpler. It is a difficult challenge to find the best multimodal medical database with fusion quality evaluation for assessing recommended image fusion methods. As a result, this article provides a complete overview of multimodal medical image fusion methodologies, databases, and quality measurements.
In this article, a compendious review of different medical imaging modalities and evaluation of related multimodal databases along with the statistical results is provided. The medical imaging modalities are organized based on radiation, visible-light imaging, microscopy, and multimodal imaging.
The medical imaging acquisition is categorized into invasive or non-invasive techniques. The fusion techniques are classified into six main categories: frequency fusion, spatial fusion, decision-level fusion, deep learning, hybrid fusion, and sparse representation fusion. In addition, the associated diseases for each modality and fusion approach presented. The quality assessments fusion metrics are also encapsulated in this article.
This survey provides a baseline guideline to medical experts in this technical domain that may combine preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative imaging, Multi-sensor fusion for disease detection, etc. The advantages and drawbacks of the current literature are discussed, and future insights are provided accordingly.
Electricity demand and price forecasting are key components for the market participants and system operators as precise forecasts are necessary to manage power systems effectively. However, ...forecasting electricity demand and prices are challenging due to their specific features, such as high frequency, volatility, long trend, nonconstant mean and variance, mean reversion, multiple seasonalities, calendar effects, and spikes/jumps. Thus, the main aim of this study is to propose models that can efficiently forecast electricity demand and prices. To this end, the time series (demand/price) is divided into two components. The first component is considered a deterministic component that includes a trend, yearly, seasonal, and weekly periodicities, calendar effects, and lagged exogenous information and is modeled by parametric and nonparametric approaches. The second component is known as a stochastic (residual) component that is estimated using univariate autoregressive (AR) and multivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The estimation of these models is carried out by four different estimation methods, including ordinary least squares (O), Lasso (L), Ridge (R), and Elastic-net (E). The proposed modeling scheme is applied to Nordic electricity demand and price time series, and one-day-ahead out-of-sample forecasts are obtained for a whole year. Besides descriptive statistics, a statistical significance test is also used to evaluate the models’ forecasting accuracy. The results suggest that the proposed methodology effectively forecasts the price and demand for electricity. In addition, the choice of the estimation procedure used for both deterministic and stochastic components has a significant effect on the forecasting results. Furthermore, multivariate vector autoregressive gives superior performance compared to univariate autoregressive models.
This paper examines the nonlinear impact of oil prices and inflation on residential prices in the US, the UK and Canada using quarterly data from 1975 to 2017. The study uses nonlinear autoregressive ...distributed lag (NARDL) bounds testing approach that allows possible asymmetric effects in both short- and long-run. Our results highlight that oil prices, interest and inflation rates and income have asymmetric relationship with residential prices in US, UK and Canada; however, the extent and magnitude of this relationship varies. Long run coefficients of Inflation rate highlights significance for residential prices in all three economies i.e. US, UK and Canada. For international oil prices however, the asymmetric effect is more pronounced in US as compared with UK and Canada. In case of US, long-run asymmetric relationship of residential prices with inflation and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is also witnessed however, interest rate seems to influence residential prices in both UK and Canada. Our paper has implications for the investors in residential housing markets and government authorities regulating housing sectors.
Abiotic stresses lead to excessive crop yield losses and are a major threat to agriculture. It is essential to equip crops with multi-stress tolerance to mitigate the adverse effects of abiotic ...stressors and meet the demands of the increasing global population. The association between plants and symbiotic microorganisms is involved in key functions at the ecosystem and plant levels, and the application of microbial plant biostimulants (MPBs) is a sustainable strategy to augment plant growth and productivity, even under abiotic stress conditions. Several different microorganisms can be used as MPBs to enhance plant growth and produce progressive and reproducible effects on crops. In the present review, we assessed the current knowledge on the use of MPBs, discuss the diversity and characteristics of MPBs, and provide a meticulous assessment of the possible applications of MPBs in abiotic stress relief in crops.
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