Search

In Bangladesh, the peaking power plants that serve the peak time loads use conventional fossil fuels for power generation. These power stations remain idle for a good part of their operating life, which therefore results in a high overhead cost. Continuous integration of renewables into the grid is increasing the dependency on these, so far, feasibility of no other less-expensive options has been studied. In this context, this paper aims to analyze the financial feasibility of different alternative options. Three possible options were analyzed and the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) was compared with that of conventional peaking power plants. It was found that Battery-based storage systems are not financially feasible at this moment, while the nation’s lone hydro power plant promises financial feasibility if solar PV driven pumped hydro storage is implemented. We also report that if the nation continues to add solar PV power stations even with costly peaking power plants using traditional fuels, this hybrid option was counter intuitively found to be financially feasible.

India and Nepal have traditionally shared a unique relationship of friendship and economic cooperation. The relationship is characterised by an open and people-friendly border and is built on shared historical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic links between people residing in India and Nepal. With Nepal being a priority under India ‘Neighborhood First’ policy, strengthening the economic relationship holds immense significance and potential for both the countries. While the political relations between India and Nepal have been extensively studied, there is not much literature that explores the economic relationship between the two nations. This is an important issue to study, as India is Nepal’s largest export market, the biggest source of its imports, the top investor of foreign capital stock and among the largest donors of foreign aid. India also provides Nepal transit facility through its territory to access seaports for trading with the rest of the world. Given this, the main objective of this article is to suggest policy measures, which can increase bilateral trade and investment between India and Nepal. The article analyses the bilateral trade patterns and estimates the maximum additional trade potential. A wide range of issues of importance pertaining to bilateral trade, including tariffs, levy of an agricultural reform fee, under utilisation of the tariff rate quota, non-tariff measures, issues related to Rules of Origin (ROO) and physical barriers to cross-border movement of goods are discussed. The trends and changing sectoral composition of India’s investment in Nepal and barriers and opportunities for Indian investment in Nepal are also analysed. The article concludes by charting a way forward for bolstering economic cooperation between the two countries by listing down recommendations for enhancing trade, addressing non-tariff barriers, upgrading infrastructure to improve connectivity and enhancing Indian FDI in Nepal. JEL Classification: F10, F13, F15, F50, F53, P45

Febrile seizures are very common in pediatric practice. We need to differentiate between febrile seizures and other seizures due to central nervous system (CNS) infection by various means of investigation. Though approximately 30% of patients with febrile seizure have later epilepsy and the risk is around 20% even if electroencephalogram (EEG), and neuro-imagings are normal. But data regarding this is laking in developing countries like India.The primary objective of this study is to determine the hospital-based prevalence among various types and etiologies of seizures in children admitted to the pediatric department in a teaching hospital of a developing country, India. Besides, the different types of seizures were correlated with the EEG and neuroimaging findings along with the acute onset of seizures among children.In this prospective observational study, children from two months to 15 years of age admitted to the Pediatrics Department, KIMS, Bhubaneswar in India between September 2017 and September 2019 were taken. The patients having seizures were included in the study based on the inclusion criteria. Neurological and systemic examinations of the children were recorded and the neuroimaging reports were analyzed.A total of 19,553 patients aged two months to 15 years were admitted during the study period. Of that, 1,192 cases were diagnosed with febrile and unprovoked seizures. It was observed that the hospital-based prevalence of seizures among children in Odisha was 6%. Besides, it is found that generalized seizure disorder was the most common among the children. It was found that abnormal EEG, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computed tomography (CT) brain in 60% (202/340), 49% (113/230), and 47% (136/288) of cases, respectively. MRI is a better modality of investigation in partial seizure cases 22 (64%) to detect CNS abnormality. Also, MRI of the brain is better in evaluating CNS abnormality in complex febrile cases 4 (31%) than CT brain (0%).The study concluded that EEG must be the standard modality of test for patients' diagnosis of seizure in children with seizures. CT/MRI scan can give a better supplement to the results but MRI findings are more accurate in cases of complex febrile seizures.

Background: Newborn mortality is one of the most neglected health problems in the developing world, there are estimated 4 million neonatal deaths worldwide each year. Moreover, it is estimated to account for 40% of under five deaths and two-third of infant deaths.Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study included 120 primipara mothers of newborn from 2 to 28Day of life admitted in postnatal ward in Siliguri District hospital during the year 2022 in the month of June. Data was collected using face to face interview method.Results: The study showed majority of the mothers were having good knowledge 85.83% regarding neonatal danger signs followed by Fair knowledge 9.16% and only 5% of mothers were having Poor knowledge.Conclusions: Good knowledge of the mothers indicates that mother can identify the danger signs and early treatment makes the good prognosis.

Acinetobacter baumannii, a prominent pathogen responsible for chronic infections in the blood, urinary tract, and lungs, has a high mortality due to its virulence and limited preventive methods. The present study aims to characterize the pilus assembly protein of A. baumannii to offer leads for epitope-based vaccine development. FilF is the putative pilus assembly protein that reportedly plays a supreme character in the virulence of this WHO-listed ESKAPE bacterium. Implementing various bioinformatics tools, led to the recognition of many antigenic B and T cell epitopes. Most promising B and T-cell epitopes were selected based on their binding efficiency with commonly occurring MHC alleles. Finally, we stepped down to fourteen protective antigenic peptides. These epitopes were also revealed to be non-allergenic and non-toxic. As a result, a vaccine chimera was created by linking these epitopes with appropriate linkers and adjuvant such as β-defensins. Furthermore, homology modeling and validation were carried out, with the modeled structure being employed for molecular docking with the immunological receptor (TLR-4) found on lymphocyte cells. As a result of the molecular dynamics simulation, the interaction between human TLR-4 and the multi-epitope vaccine sequence was stable. Finally, in silico cloning and immune simulation were carried out to see the efficacy of the construct vaccine. This is the first study targeting the pilus assembly protein from A. baumannii to identify novel epitopes that hold potential for further experimental design of multi-peptide vaccine construct against the pathogen.

Microalgae are potential feedstocks for the commercial production of carotenoids, however, the metabolic pathways for carotenoid biosynthesis across algal lineage are largely unexplored. This work is the first to provide a comprehensive survey of genes and enzymes associated with the less studied methylerythritol 4-phosphate/1-deoxy-D-xylulose 5-phosphate pathway as well as the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway in microalgae through bioinformatics and comparative genomics approach. Candidate genes/enzymes were subsequently analyzed across 22 microalgae species of lineages Chlorophyta, Rhodophyta, Heterokonta, Haptophyta, Cryptophyta, and known Arabidopsis homologs in order to study the evolutional divergence in terms of sequence-structure properties. A total of 403 enzymes playing a vital role in carotene, lutein, zeaxanthin, violaxanthin, canthaxanthin, and astaxanthin were unraveled. Of these, 85 were hypothetical proteins whose biological roles are not yet experimentally characterized. Putative functions to these hypothetical proteins were successfully assigned through a comprehensive investigation of the protein family, motifs, intrinsic physicochemical features, subcellular localization, pathway analysis, etc. Furthermore, these enzymes were categorized into major classes as per the conserved domain and gene ontology. Functional signature sequences were also identified which were observed conserved across microalgal genomes. Additionally, the structural modeling and active site architecture of three vital enzymes, DXR, PSY, and ZDS catalyzing the vital rate-limiting steps in Dunaliella salina were achieved. The enzymes were confirmed to be stereochemically reliable and stable as revealed during molecular dynamics simulation of 100 ns. The detailed functional information about individual vital enzymes will certainly help to design genetically modified algal strains with enhanced carotenoid contents.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected 215 countries and territories around the world with 60,187,347 coronavirus cases and 17,125,719 currently infected patients confirmed as of the 25th of November 2020. Currently, many countries are working on developing new vaccines and therapeutic drugs for this novel virus strain, and a few of them are in different phases of clinical trials. The advancement in high-throughput sequence technologies, along with the application of bioinformatics, offers invaluable knowledge on genomic characterization and molecular pathogenesis of coronaviruses. Recent multi-disciplinary studies using bioinformatics methods like sequence-similarity, phylogenomic, and computational structural biology have provided an in-depth understanding of the molecular and biochemical basis of infection, atomic-level recognition of the viral-host receptor interaction, functional annotation of important viral proteins, and evolutionary divergence across different strains. Additionally, various modern immunoinformatic approaches are also being used to target the most promiscuous antigenic epitopes from the SARS-CoV-2 proteome for accelerating the vaccine development process. In this review, we summarize various important computational tools and databases available for systematic sequence-structural study on coronaviruses. The features of these public resources have been comprehensively discussed, which may help experimental biologists with predictive insights useful for ongoing research efforts to find therapeutics against the infectious COVID-19 disease., Graphical abstract Image 1, Highlights • This review presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of newly developed computational resources including tools and web servers focused on coronaviruses. • We have categorized these popular tools and databases depending on the utility and application such as for coronavirus detection, comparative genomics analysis, vaccine and drug discovery, molecular docking, tools for SARS-CoV-2 detection, and other applications in coronaviruses study. • The features of each of the tools have been discussed along with their application in recent coronavirus research studies.

Column-supported embankments provide a practical and efficient solution for construction on soft soil due to the low cost and short construction times. In recent years, geosynthetics have been used in combination with column systems to support embankments. The load transfer mechanism in these systems is a combination of soil arching and membrane effect of the geosynthetics. In this paper, numerical method was used to improve the understanding of the long-term performance of geosynthetic-reinforced embankments supported on end-bearing piles. The distribution of skin friction, axial force distribution, settlements on the embankment and foundation soil surface, and vertical stresses on the pile head and foundation surface were studied. Finally, the results from the numerical studies were compared with the results from different analytical methods. Based on the numerical results obtained, modified arching coefficient is presented for end-bearing piles.

Introduction:Sickle cell disorders were originally found in the African regions, Arabian Peninsula and parts of India. However, in today's age of globalization patients with homozygous or compound heterozygous Sickle cell disorders can be found all over the world. The objective of our study was to assess the distribution and clinical presentation of patients with Sickle homozygous or heterozygous diseases in the Eastern part of India. Methods:Patients who attended the Thalassemia Clinic in our tertiary care center, between 1st January 2018 to 31st May 2020 (2 years and 4 months) were retrospectively analysed and the ones with a component of Sickle haemoglobin(HbS), either in the form of Sickle cell anemia/homozygous Sickle cell disorders(SCA) or compound heterozygous diseases, like Sickle cell/β thalassemia(HbS/β), Sickle cell/Delta thalassemia(HbS/D), Sickle cell Haemoglobin/E thalassemia(HbS/E), were included in the study. People having Sickle cell trait (HbS trait), have also been included. Thorough history of painful crises, blood transfusions, family history and treatment history was elicited and every patient was clinically examined. The patients were diagnosed by High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) or Thalassemia Mutation analysis by Polymerase Chain reaction (PCR). Results:A total of 95 patients with a component of HbS were considered as our study cohort, with HbS/β thalassemia patients being the majority (53.7%), followed by SCA (30.5%). Age of the study cohort ranged between 2-50 years age. HbS/β thalassemia patients presented at a later age (median 17.5 years) than SCA patients (median 12 years). Their demographic distribution is depicted in Table 1. The most common clinical presentation was painful crisis (32,33.7%), be it abdominal pain (11,11.6%) or bone pain (13,13.7%). Other presenting complaints were pallor (26,27.4%), jaundice (12,12.6%) and fever (4,4.2%). Some rarer presenting manifestations were fatigue (4,4.2%), splenic infarction (1,1%), convulsions (1,1%), Raynaud's phenomenon (1,1%), headache (1,1%) or itchy skin lesions (1,1%). Few patients (4,4.2%) had recurrent pregnancy loss, and one patient was diagnosed incidentally during an antenatal check-up. Most patients had more than one complaint. Very occasionally patients required hospital admission, the reasons being, chest pain, fever, convulsions or abdominal pain. HbS trait was diagnosed incidentally during evaluation for other illnesses, most commonly during evaluation of pallor (3,60%): one patient was later diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia. Most patients who attended our center were from within the state or neighbouring states. The patients were treated with Hydroxyurea, with/without blood transfusions, chelation therapy with Deferasirox as required and Folic acid supplementation. People with HbS Trait continued to receive Folate supplementation. Discussion and Conclusions:This study highlights the varied distribution of HbS among the population attending a tertiary care center, irrespective of a specific area-based population. Till date most studies conducted in India have highlighted the prevalence of Sickle cell disorders among specific focused populations. HbS/β thalassemia was the most common sickle cell disorder in our study. This is in contrast to most findings in published literature from other countries, where SCA is the commonest. Only one other study conducted in eastern India, has depicted a finding similar to ours. The median age of disease presentation was at a later age in our study, in contrast to findings in published literature from other countries. There is a variation in the severity of disease manifestation in our study cohort. The most common painful crisis was bone pain, followed by abdominal pain. Pallor was also one of the commonest presenting symptoms. Stroke, a common manifestation of SCA in other countries, was rare in our study cohort. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

An integrating sphere has been specially designed using multiple white light LEDs mounted on both the inner and outer surfaces of the sphere to create improved uniform illumination inside a computer laboratory room. The LEDs are simultaneously used as optical transmitters of trans-receiver systems for indoor optical wireless communication. More uniformity of light helps to develop better access to wireless communication systems, comfortable movement inside the room and reduced shadowing effect in wireless communication. One integrating sphere fitted with LED arrays divided among outer and the inner surfaces of the sphere is able to create ideal uniformity conditions for illumination and data communication within a volume (3 × 3 × 3) m3 of laboratory space. The system is capable of bidirectional full-duplex communication using IR LEDs as source for uplink and silicon photodiodes as receivers for optical wireless communication links. The theory and the design principles of the integrating sphere and the optical wireless communication link design would be presented.

The blood test plays vital role in recognizing diseases. It gives the details about the general state of a person's wellbeing conditions. Based on data from blood test specialists, they choose the treatment for the patient required. White blood cells (WBC) are an important component of blood system. It is essential for good health and protection against disease. WBC contains fundamentally five parts and relies on its variety of size, count, shape. Based on variation in these features there can occur many diseases. Presently, we have confronted many issues in blood testing. One common issue is that a unique blood was getting an alternate and extraordinary estimation of cell check from the diverse lab technician. Most of the laboratory follows the manual counting technique, which is very tedious and less accurate. The proposed frameworks help to classification of each kind of white blood cells utilizing multi class support vector machine classification and convolutional neural networks (CNN). Identifying the Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, Monocytes, Eosinophil and Basophils variation can be identified using deep learning for diagnosis diseases. Likewise, discover the level of malignant cell in blood and leukocytes for different age domain.

In this paper, we address the problem of community detection in social networks. We present two maximum cost spanning tree-based community detection methods, namely P-SPAT and K-SPAT, for social networks. Communities are defined as dense subgraphs present in social networks. However, detecting communities in a social network can still be a challenging task, in terms of computational overheads and accuracy of the detected communities. Therefore, finding communities from a social network is considered to be an interesting problem. Again, due to practical applications of community detection techniques, it is a key area of research in social network analysis and is also well studied. Experimental results show that these methods can detect highly accurate communities faster than the state-of-the-art community detection techniques.

The insurance industries consist of more than thousand companies in worldwide. And collect more than one trillions of dollars premiums in each year. When a person or entity make false insurance claims in order to obtain compensation or benefits to which they are not entitled is known as an insurance fraud. The total cost of an insurance fraud is estimated to be more than forty billions of dollars. So detection of an insurance fraud is a challenging problem for the insurance industry. The traditional approach for fraud detection is based on developing heuristics around fraud indicator. The auto\vehicle insurance fraud is the most prominent type of insurance fraud, which can be done by fake accident claim. In this paper, focusing on detecting the auto\vehicle fraud by using, machine learning technique. Also, the performance will be compared by calculation of confusion matrix. This can help to calculate accuracy, precision, and recall.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by progressive death of dopamine producing neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta of the mid brain. Dysfunction of an E3 ligase protein, Parkin, encoded by PARK2 gene, results in accumulation of misfolded proteins in brain cells which lead to the onset of PD. Parkin is a multi-domain protein consisting of N-terminal ubiquitin-like domain (Ubl) followed by RING0, RING1, In Between Ring (IBR) domain and RING2 domain which is present at the C-terminal end of Parkin protein. Ubl domain is the smallest domain of Parkin and is involved in the binding of Parkin with E2 protein molecule required for proper Ubiquitination and functioning of proteins in the brain. Mutations in the Parkin protein are known to be associated with protein dysfunction leading to PD. This study aims to decipher the characteristics and effects of the different mutations in the Ubl domain by an in-silico analysis. The mutations were collected from PDmutDB and COSMIC databases. The pathogenic impacts of amino-acid mutations on Ubl structure and function were analysed by using various computational tools. Due to lack of proper full-chain structure of the Ubl domain, a homology model of the domain was reconstructed using Discovery Studio 2.5 (DS 2.5) software suite. We found that the mutations A31D, A46P, C59F, A46T, E28K, E49K, R42P, R42S, and Q63K were the most deleterious ones which might be associated with the onset of PD. In order to study the dynamic behaviour of the Parkin Ubl domain in cellular environment, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were carried out using the wild-type and mutant Ubl domains. Our analyses could predict the cellular dynamics of the mutations and therefore might help in predicting the hitherto unknown molecular mechanism of the disease onset and designing precision medicine for the treatment of PD.

Tumor necrosis factor receptor-associated factor 6 (TRAF6) is an E3 ligase which takes part in different cellular pathways. TRAF6 is seen to be highly expressed in various cancers and most importantly is known to drive cancer metastasis. This makes TRAF6 a potential therapeutic target. In our previous studies, we observed that the C-terminal domain of TRAF6 forms a mushroom shaped trimer structure. Lys340 and Glu345 were identified to be the most critical residues in the trimer interface. In this current work, we screened for more than 14000 small molecules derived from various natural sources and they were screened against TRAF6 C-terminal trimer interaction interface to prevent the formation of the interface. All the obtained molecules were tested for their drug-likeliness properties. The ligands which qualified the filter were considered for protein-ligand docking or structure based virtual screening in GOLD 5.2. Pose selection was carried out on the basis of GoldScore and ChemScore function of GOLD 5.2. Top 20 molecules binding the TRAF6 trimeric interface were tested for their ADME properties. From the top 20 molecules, top 3 ligands were chosen based on their abilities to pass the maximum numbers of ADME filters.

In the field o f Information Technology, security is the most important aspect to ensure confidentiality and avoid forgery. When we think about security, authentication is play an important role. To identify the authenticated person various biometric authentication techniques are used (like iris, fingers print, plum vain, signature authentication etc.). These techniques measures behavioral or physiological characteristics like a voice sample or a signature. In case of offline signature deals with the image of signature and the image is acquired by a digital camera or a scanner. In this case, the handwriting order, writing speed variation and skillfulness are the key points. Previously offline signature was verified u sing Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Support Vector Machine (SVM) or using some unique features of a signature. Some unique feature like global feature (like pixel density, pixel distribution and pixel axils), mask feature or grid feature. In any type of authentication technique three things are most important (i) False Acceptance Rate (FAR), (ii) False Rejection Rate (FRR) and (iii)Accuracy. In this paper, we deal with off-line signature and that signature was verified using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) u sing Back Propagation Neural Network; obtain satisfactory results when compared with existing approaches. Here after comparing target and predicted output, the error calculated is always less than 0.5.

Background/Objectives: This paper deals about the designing and development of a driver alert system based on EKG signals to detect the driver drowsiness and thus to reduce accident rate. Methods: Conductive sensor attached to the hand which continuously monitor driver’s heart rate and disseminate warning message through mail and SMS to the owner or respective authority. The structure system contains four parts including signal acquisition unit, signal conditioning unit processing unit and Message delivery system. Findings: The signal acquired from the conductive plate contains noises. Removal of the noise signals from the ECG signals is important and critical. One of the novel ideas in the work is the development of conductive sensor using conductive plates and integrated signal conditioning module AD8232 to measure the heart rate. Use of an integrated signal conditioning module makes the system small and cost effective. This system uses a Tiva C series microcontroller for processing unit and Raspberry-pi as message delivery system. Conclusion/ Improvements: Non intrusive nature of this system helps to detect driver’s heart rate without making inconvenience to him. Mail and message sending features of the system helps the respective authority to take immediate actions. Improvement can be done to the system by adding the GPS functionality for tracking the location of vehicle.