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Arsenic (As) is a bioactive metalloid that is highly toxic to humans, animals, and plants. Environmental contamination of As especially in groundwater increases due to natural and anthropogenic activities. The present study was performed to evaluate the potential of wild Tagetes species for the phytoremediation of As contaminated soil/water. This comparative research aims to analyze As accumulation and tolerance in two wild species of Tagetes, T. minuta and T. patula. The 20 days old seedlings were grown hydroponically and exposed to the different concentrations of As, 0, 50, 150, and 300 µM As2O3 for 1-, 4- and 7- days intervals. Effect of As stress was measured on the rate of seed germination, growth parameters like fresh and dry biomass weight, root/shoot length, chlorophyll contents and As contents in root and shoot in both Tagetes species. Increasing concentration of As restricts the growth activity of T. minuta with toxicity symptoms on leaves such as chlorosis. Accumulation of As in the shoot was significantly (p ≤ 0.01) high (634 µg g-1 DW) in T. patula as compared to T. minuta (397 µg g-1 DW) at 300 µM As2O3. Both Tagetes species exhibited high variation for As tolerance parameters as well as for As accumulation patterns. Comparatively good tolerance and accumulation of As in T. patula suggests that this species could be used in phytoextraction and re-vegetation in As contaminated sites.

For science to reliably support new discoveries, its results must be reproducible. Assessing reproducibility is a challenge in many fields—including the geosciences— that rely on computational methods to support these discoveries. Reproducibility in these studies is particularly difficult; the researchers conducting studies must agree to openly share research artifacts, provide documentation of underlying hardware and software dependencies, ensure that computational procedures executed by the original researcher are portable and execute in different environments, and, finally, verify if the results produced are consistent. Often these tasks prove to be tedious and challenging for researchers. Sciunit (https://sciunit.run) is a system for easily containerizing, sharing, and tracking deterministic computational applications across environments. Geoscience applications in the fields of hydrology, solid Earth, and space science have actively used Sciunit to encapsulate, port, and repeat workflows across computational environments. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive survey of geoscience applications that have used Sciunit to improve sharing and reproducibility. We classify the applications based on their reproducibility requirements and show how Sciunit accommodates relevant interfaces and architectural components to support reproducibility requirements within each application. We aim to provide these applications as a Sciunit compendium of use cases for replicability, benchmarking, and improving the conduct of reproducible science in other fields.

One of the major environmental problems is the fast accumulation of brick kiln emissions near the peripheries of almost all urban centers. An enormous quantity of substandard coal, wood, rubber tires, or saw wood is used as fuel in these brick kilns, creating environmental pollution through carbon and heavy metals present in the emissions. The present study was designed to determine the distribution pattern of heavy metals in a soil-water-plant system under the influence of brick kiln emissions. Ash, soil (0-15 cm), water, and plant samples were collected from the adjacent areas of the brick kilns. Geo-accumulation index and contamination factors were used to assess the toxicity of metals to soil and plants. It was found that the concentrations of Cd in water, soil, coal, and plant samples were found in the range of 0.004-0.024 mg L

Introduction: The HBV virus has its enveloped protein that surrounds nucleic acid for its protection. Hepatitis B DNA virus belongs to the Hepadnoviridae family and is similar to retroviruses. Globally, HBV infected people approximately 2 billion in the world, about 350 million people were chronic carriers. One million deaths are caused by the HBV virus every year. Each year, 400,000 new cases were reported in Latin America. Among all over the World, Pakistan was considered as one of the largest chronic viral hepatitis infection countries. Methodology: 975 samples were recoded from different districts of south Punjab. The sera of the patient’s sample were examined to analyze the LFTs, HBS serology, HBS ELIZA, anti-HBeAg, AFP, anti- HDV, HBC IgM, and HBV DNA EAL TIME PCR. An anticoagulant sample was used to analyze their prothrombin time, HB level, WBC count, PLT counts, and HBA1C. Data were analyzed by using Microsoft Excel 2019 and SPSS version 14.0. Results: 975 samples were collected from the Multan district of Punjab. Out of which 638(65.43%) patients were detected positive for HBsAg serology, 312(32.84%) were not detected. The HBA1C test values are higher in HBV patients and its normal value is below 6.4%. In 1st group 258 patients out of 638 are HBV PCR DETECTED, bilirubin 2.1+-5.7, ALP 425.1±575.1, AST 119.6±102.6, ALT 62.0±41.6, and albumin 3.5±0.9. in the 2nd group, 149 patients out of 638 are HBV PCR detected, bilirubin 1.4±1.9, ALP 488.1±339.2, AST 143.0±117.4, ALT 78.1±53.4, and albumin 4.4±0.6. Conclusion: The prevalence of HBV in diabetic patients is higher as compared to control diabetic patients. the patients with high serum AFP levels tend to be HBs-Ag-positive, and those who have low AFP levels are associated with cryptogenic cirrhosis. The positive HBc IgM is higher in anti-HDV-negative cases as compared to HDV-positive cases. The value of HBV DNA was higher in anti-HDV-negative cases. The HBsAg correlates with HBV DNA level and it’s a level higher in the IT phase and lowers in the IC phase.