Agriculture is an important source of human food. However, current agricultural practices need modernizing and strengthening to fulfill the increasing food requirements of the growing worldwide ...population. Genome editing (GE) technology has been used to produce plants with improved yields and nutritional value as well as with higher resilience to herbicides, insects, and diseases. Several GE tools have been developed recently, including clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) with nucleases, a customizable and successful method. The main steps of the GE process involve introducing transgenes or CRISPR into plants via specific gene delivery systems. However, GE tools have certain limitations, including time-consuming and complicated protocols, potential tissue damage, DNA incorporation in the host genome, and low transformation efficiency. To overcome these issues, nanotechnology has emerged as a groundbreaking and modern technique. Nanoparticle-mediated gene delivery is superior to conventional biomolecular approaches because it enhances the transformation efficiency for both temporal (transient) and permanent (stable) genetic modifications in various plant species. However, with the discoveries of various advanced technologies, certain challenges in developing a short-term breeding strategy in plants remain. Thus, in this review, nanobased delivery systems and plant genetic engineering challenges are discussed in detail. Moreover, we have suggested an effective method to hasten crop improvement programs by combining current technologies, such as speed breeding and CRISPR/Cas, with nanotechnology. The overall aim of this review is to provide a detailed overview of nanotechnology-based CRISPR techniques for plant transformation and suggest applications for possible crop enhancement.
In an increasingly competitive market, customer retention is imperative for businesses in the services sector, particularly banks. This study aims to understand how relationship quality as ...second-order impacts repurchase intentions based on the Theory of Repurchase Decision Making (TRD). The switching cost moderating role is addressed. The model was validated using empirical data from Pakistan. A regression modeling was adopted to measure the research hypotheses that underpinned a proposed conceptual model. Results show that relationship quality positively and significantly influences the repurchase intentions. Switching cost determined to be a moderator between relationship quality and repurchase intentions. The implication is that services industry professionals should not overlook the importance of relationship quality and switching costs, as they have a significant impact on repurchase intentions.
In this work we implement two numerical schemes namely continuous Galerkin–Petrov (cGP(2)) and Legendre Wavelet Collocation Method (LWCM) for the approximate solution of the mathematical model which ...describes the behavior of CD4+ T-cells, infected CD4+ T-cells and free HIV virus particles after HIV infection. The present study discuss and analyze the effect of constant and different variable source terms (depending on the viral load) used for the supply of new CD4+ T-cells from thymus on the dynamics of CD4+ T-cells, infected CD4+ T-cells and free HIV virus. Furthermore, the model is also solve using fourth order Runge Kutta (RK4) method. Finally, the validity and reliability of the proposed schemes are verified by comparing the numerical and graphical results with the results of RK4-method. Comparison of the numerical and graphical results of cGP(2) and LWCM with RK4-method confirmed that cGP(2) and LWCM performs excellent accuracy. The present study highlights the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed schemes with the other traditional schemes such as the Laplace Adomian Decomposition Method (LADM), Variational Iteration Method (VIM), Homotopy Analysis Method (HAM), Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Interior Point Algorithm (IPA), Active Set Algorithm (ASA), Multistep Laplace Adomian Decomposition Method (MSLADM) etc.
Soil salinization is one of the major environmental stressors hampering the growth and yield of crops all over the world. A wide spectrum of physiological and biochemical alterations of plants are ...induced by salinity, which causes lowered water potential in the soil solution, ionic disequilibrium, specific ion effects, and a higher accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). For many years, numerous investigations have been made into salinity stresses and attempts to minimize the losses of plant productivity, including the effects of phytohormones, osmoprotectants, antioxidants, polyamines, and trace elements. One of the protectants, selenium (Se), has been found to be effective in improving growth and inducing tolerance against excessive soil salinity. However, the in-depth mechanisms of Se-induced salinity tolerance are still unclear. This review refines the knowledge involved in Se-mediated improvements of plant growth when subjected to salinity and suggests future perspectives as well as several research limitations in this field.
Ciprofol, a newer entrant with similarities to propofol, has shown promise with a potentially improved safety profile, making it an attractive alternative for induction of general anesthesia. This ...meta-analysis aimed to assess the safety and efficacy of ciprofol compared with propofol during general anesthesia induction.
A comprehensive literature search was conducted using PubMed, Clinical Trial.gov, and Cochrane Library databases from inception to July 2023 to identify relevant studies. All statistical analyses were conducted using R statistical software version 4.1.2.
Thirteen Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) encompassing a total of 1998 participants, were included in our analysis. The pooled analysis indicated that Ciprofol was associated with a notably lower incidence of pain upon injection RR: 0.15; 95% CI: 0.10 to 0.23; I^2 = 43%, p < 0.0000001 and was non-inferior to propofol in terms of anesthesia success rate RR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.99 to 1.01; I^2 = 0%; p = 0.43. In terms of safety, the incidence of hypotension was significantly lower in the ciprofol group RR:0.82; 95% CI:0.68 to 0.98; I^2 = 48%; p = 0.03. However, no statistically significant differences were found for postoperative hypertension, bradycardia, or tachycardia.
In conclusion, Ciprofol is not inferior to Propofol in terms of its effectiveness in general anesthesia. Ciprofol emerges as a valuable alternative sedative with fewer side effects, especially reduced injection pain, when compared to Propofol.
Propofol, frequently utilized as an anesthetic, provides swift onset and quick recovery. However, it has drawbacks such as a narrow effective dosage range and a high occurrence of adverse effects, particularly pain upon injection. Ciprofol, a more recent drug with propofol-like properties, has demonstrated promise and may have an improved safety profile, making it a compelling alternative for inducing general anesthesia. This meta-analysis compared the safety and effectiveness of Ciprofol with Propofol for general anesthesia induction in a range of medical procedures, encompassing thirteen Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and 1998 individuals. The pooled analysis indicated that Ciprofol was associated with a notably lower incidence of pain upon injection RR: 0.15; 95% CI: 0.10 to 0.23; I^2 = 43%, p < 0.0000001 and was non-inferior to propofol in terms of anesthesia success rate RR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.99 to 1.01; I^2 = 0%; p = 0.43. In terms of safety, the incidence of hypotension was significantly lower in the ciprofol group RR:0.82; 95% CI:0.68 to 0.98; I^2 = 48%; p = 0.03. However, no statistically significant differences were found for hypertension, bradycardia, or tachycardia. In conclusion, ciprofol is equally effective at inducing and maintaining general anesthesia as propofol. When compared to propofol, ciprofol is a better alternative sedative for operations including fiberoptic bronchoscopy, gynecological procedures, gastrointestinal endoscopic procedures, and elective surgeries because it has less adverse effects, most notably less painful injections.
•Our meta-analysis found that Ciprofol was associated with a significantly lower incidence of injection-related pain compared to Propofol.•Ciprofol also demonstrated a lower risk of hypotension during general anesthesia induction when compared to Propofol, indicating improved safety.•However, there were no statistically significant differences between Ciprofol and Propofol in terms of hypertension, bradycardia, or tachycardia events during induction, suggesting a comparable cardiovascular safety profile.
Bearing fault diagnosis is imperative for the maintenance, reliability, and durability of rotary machines. It can reduce economical losses by eliminating unexpected downtime in industry due to ...failure of rotary machines. Though widely investigated in the past couple of decades, continued advancement is still desirable to improve upon existing fault diagnosis techniques. Vibration acceleration signals collected from machine bearings exhibit nonstationary behavior due to variable working conditions and multiple fault severities. In the current work, a two-layered bearing fault diagnosis scheme is proposed for the identification of fault pattern and crack size for a given fault type. A hybrid feature pool is used in combination with sparse stacked autoencoder (SAE)-based deep neural networks (DNNs) to perform effective diagnosis of bearing faults of multiple severities. The hybrid feature pool can extract more discriminating information from the raw vibration signals, to overcome the nonstationary behavior of the signals caused by multiple crack sizes. More discriminating information helps the subsequent classifier to effectively classify data into the respective classes. The results indicate that the proposed scheme provides satisfactory performance in diagnosing bearing defects of multiple severities. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms, i.e., support vector machines (SVMs) and backpropagation neural networks (BPNNs).
This paper presents a novel low-complexity full-duplex radio design, which only uses a single patch antenna without any duplexer or circulator for passive suppression of self-interference, and a ...computationally efficient technique for linear digital cancellation. The proposed full-duplex design is tested for IEEE 802.11g Wireless Standard on the WARP (v3) software-defined radio implementation platform. It is shown that this design provides a total suppression of 88 dB, which is sufficient for low-power or short-range full-duplex communication. The dual polarized slot coupled patch antenna used in our design provides an interport isolation as high as 60 dB in 2.4 GHz band. Additionally, the digital domain cancellation utilizes a frequency domain-based estimation and reconstruction approach, which not only offers up to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">61\%</tex-math></inline-formula> reduction in the computational complexity but also provides a <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">5-7 </tex-math></inline-formula> dB better digital cancellation performance in highly selective channel conditions, as compared to the time-domain-based techniques. The proposed full-duplex implementation can be easily applied in OFDM-based wireless systems, such as IEEE 802.11, which is the considered air interface in this paper.
In this paper, an explainable AI-based fault diagnosis model for bearings is proposed with five stages, i.e., (1) a data preprocessing method based on the Stockwell Transformation Coefficient (STC) ...is proposed to analyze the vibration signals for variable speed and load conditions, (2) a statistical feature extraction method is introduced to capture the significance from the invariant pattern of the analyzed data by STC, (3) an explainable feature selection process is proposed by introducing a wrapper-based feature selector-Boruta, (4) a feature filtration method is considered on the top of the feature selector to avoid the multicollinearity problem, and finally, (5) an additive Shapley explanation followed by k-NN is proposed to diagnose and to explain the individual decision of the k-NN classifier for debugging the performance of the diagnosis model. Thus, the idea of explainability is introduced for the first time in the field of bearing fault diagnosis in two steps: (a) incorporating explainability to the feature selection process, and (b) interpretation of the classifier performance with respect to the selected features. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated on two different datasets obtained from separate bearing testbeds. Lastly, an assessment of several state-of-the-art fault diagnosis algorithms in rotating machinery is included.
Textiles-oriented flexible strain sensors have been attractive in designing intelligent clothing materials to sense the human body postural changes. However, their efficacy towards sensing ...performance can be tailored through fabrication architectures variation. In this study knitted strain sensors have been engineered using novel double face fabric designs. Filament polyester, and conductive polyamide coated with silver colloidal particles were used to architect sensors. The sensors provide real-time electrical resistance variation as a sensing feature w.r.t mechanical changes happening in them. Two-dimensional strain testing and comfortability evaluations were carried out to ensure sensing performance and comfortable wearing longevity of sensors. Decreasing linking yarn accumulation per unit area increased the strain sensitivity i.e. changing knit stitches with tuck and miss the sensing capability increased 28% and 95%, respectively. Comfortability of sensors had a parabolic trend, decreasing yarn accumulation enhanced comfort up to tuck-linking courses. While increasing the percentage of conductive polyamide in the linking course improved strain sensitivity by 50%. The research presents such double-face intelligent strain sensors as a suitable solution to the long-term wearability of sensors with comfort.
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