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The low fish meal (FM) diet commonly causes deteriorated palatability, and eventually leads to lowered feed consumption and growth performance of fish. This study was, therefore, designed to determine inclusion impact of the graded levels of jack mackerel meal (JMM) in olive flounder (P. olivaceus) diets replacing 50% FM with tuna by-product meal (TBM) on growth, feed availability, biochemical composition, blood chemistry, and economic efficiency. Six isonitrogenous (55.5%) and isolipidic (10.0%) diets were formulated. Sixty percent FM was incorporated in the control (Con) diet. In the Con diet, fifty percent of FM was replaced by TBM, and then 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50% JMM were included at the cost of FM, referred as the TJ10, TJ20, TJ30, TJ40, and TJ50 diets, respectively. Three hundred and sixty juvenile fish (18.0 ± 0.01g; mean ± SD) were delivered into 18, 50-L flow-through tanks. All diets were randomly assigned to triplicate groups of fish. Fish were hand-fed to apparent satiation twice daily for 56 days. Weight gain, specific growth rate, and feed consumption of fish fed the TJ30, TJ40, and TJ50 diets were significantly (P < 0.001, P < 0.001, and P < 0.002, respectively) greater than those of fish fed the Con and TJ10 diets, but not significantly (P > 0.05) different from those of fish fed the TJ20 diet. Feed utilization, proximate composition, amino acid profiles, and blood chemistry of fish were not significantly (P > 0.05) altered by dietary treatments. However, the TJ30 diet was the most recommendable to farmers in terms of economic profit index (EPI). Conclusively, 30% inclusion of JMM is the most recommendable in the olive flounder diet substituting 50% FM with TBM based on growth performance, feed availability, and EPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bangladesh is located in Southeast Asia that has a high population density. It is a lower‐middle‐income country. The COVID‐19 pandemic severely impacted the nation that slowed its economic growth. It halted major industries, crippling the nation's economy. The students were uncertain after the declaration of school closures. Hospitals could not treat other patients properly due to the vast health burden of COVID‐19. Bangladesh put up a solid fight during COVID‐19 as a lower‐middle‐income country. Prompt action, early vaccination drives, effective awareness campaigns, and widespread public involvement have enabled Bangladesh to bring more than 90% of its population into COVID‐19 vaccination coverage. It was possible by the effective diplomatic and local health strategy implemented by the Bangladeshi government, the country's extensive prior experience, and its long history of achieving a high success rate in other vaccination campaigns. Bangladesh was able to flatten the curve sooner than other developed countries. Therefore, the cogs of everyday social life and the economy begin to turn once more. The strategy Bangladesh used to combat the COVID‐19 pandemic through vaccination and diplomatic policy by calling on its prior experience has the potential to serve as a model for other low‐ and middle‐income countries and an example for developed nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tall fescue is a widely used cool season turfgrass and relatively sensitive to high temperature. Chemical compounds like melatonin (MT) and 24-epibrassinolide (EBL) have been reported to improve plant heat stress tolerance effectively. Results: In this study, we reported that MT and EBL pretreated tall fescue seedlings showed decreased reactive oxygen species (ROS), electrolyte leakage (EL) and malondialdehide (MDA), but increased chlorophyll (Chl), total protein and antioxidant enzyme activities under heat stress condition, resulting in improved plant growth. Transcriptomic profiling analysis showed that 4311 and 8395 unigenes were significantly changed after 2 h and 12 h of heat treatments, respectively. Among them, genes involved in heat stress responses, DNA, RNA and protein degradation, redox, energy metabolisms, and hormone metabolism pathways were highly induced after heat stress. Genes including FaHSFA3, FaAWPM and FaCYTC2 were significantly upregulated by both MT and EBL treatments, indicating that these genes might function as the putative target genes of MT and EBL. Conclusions: These findings indicated that heat stress caused extensively transcriptomic reprogramming of tall fescue and exogenous application of MT and EBL effectively improved thermotolerance in tall fescue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improvement in yield quantity and quality of bitter gourd, Momordica charantia L., cannot be accomplished through traditional methods. Heterosis breeding may be used to achieve this goal. A partial diallel mating design was used to evaluate standard heterosis to increase yield and quality by identification of a unique cross combination with desirable heterosis in bitter gourd. Five parents and 16 hybrids were evaluated from Oct. 2009 to Mar. 2010. Heterotic vigor was present for earliness, yield, and quality characters among hybrids. Significant differences for all characters indicated presence of genetic variability. The heterosis was negative for days to first harvest, fruit length and diameter, and single fruit weight and positive for number of fruit/plant and fruit yield/plant. Average fruit weight ranged from 115 to 249 g; the heaviest fruit were from hybrids from the crosses P1 × P3, P2 × P3, P3 × P1, P3 × P5, and P5 × P2; hybrids from the crosses P3 × P4, P4 × P3, and P5 × P4 had the smallest fruit. The longest fruit were from hybrids from the crosses P3 × P1, P2 × P3, and P1 × P3; the shortest fruit were from hybrids from the crosses P4 × P3, P4 × P2, and P3 × P4. The highest yield was from the hybrid from the cross P3 × P5 followed by hybrids from the crosses P4 × P1 and P4 × P3. Hybrids from crosses P5 × P4, P3 × P5, and P2 × P5 had 102%, 82.6%, and 82.4% higher heterosis over the better parent, respectively, for fruit yield/plant. Based on yield contributing characters and heterotic performance hybrids from crosses P5 × P4, P3 × P5, and P2 × P5 can be used to exploit develop improved commercial lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to propose a new feature and score fusion based iris recognition approach where voting method on Multiple Classifier Selection technique has been applied. Four Discrete Hidden Markov Model classifiers output, that is, left iris based unimodal system, right iris based unimodal system, left-right iris feature fusion based multimodal system, and left-right iris likelihood ratio score fusion based multimodal system, is combined using voting method to achieve the final recognition result. CASIA-IrisV4 database has been used to measure the performance of the proposed system with various dimensions. Experimental results show the versatility of the proposed system of four different classifiers with various dimensions. Finally, recognition accuracy of the proposed system has been compared with existing N hamming distance score fusion approach proposed byMa et al., log-likelihood ratio score fusion approach proposed by Schmid et al., and single level feature fusion approach proposed by Hollingsworth et al. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]