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The article discusses research which aims to examine effect of ruminant kairomone 1-octen-3-ol on ixodid tick larvae from India. It reports experimental procedures performed including collection of engorged ixodid ticks from dogs and administration of Petridish bioassay. The tick species studied include Rhipicephalus sanguineus, Hyalomma marginatum, and Haemaphysalis bispinosa. It is noted that combining different tick pheromones and 1-octen-3-ol is effective for attracting ruminant ticks.

Identification of scripts from multi-script document is one of the important steps in the design of an OCR system for successful analysis and recognition. Most optical character recognition (OCR) systems can recognize at most a few scripts. But for large archives of document images that contain different scripts, there must be some way to automatically categorize these documents before applying the proper OCR on them. Much work has already been reported in this area. In the Indian context, though some results have been reported, the task is still at its infancy. This paper presents a research in the identification of Tamil, English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu scripts at word level irrespective of their font faces and sizes. The proposed technique performs the nine zones segmented over the characters based on their shape, density and transition features. Then script is determined by using Rule based classifiers containing set of classification rules which are raised from the zones. Results from experiments, simulations, and human vision encounter that the proposed technique identifies scripts with minimal pre-processing and high accuracy. It can also be extended for other scripts. Since this system can act as a plug-in, this can be embedded with OCR prior to the recognition stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extracellular, hydrophilic, thermostable phytotoxin was purified to homogeneity from culture fluids of Ganoderma lucidum. The phytotoxin was purified by solvent extraction, gel filtration on Sephadex G-75. Toxicity was evaluated with detached leaf sheath and electrolyte leakage bioassays. Purified phytotoxin induced visible symptoms of the disease, when applied to coconut leaves, fronds and roots even at a low concentration. The toxin is a glycoprotein with carbohydrate as the major component. The importance of the carbohydrate moiety for toxic activity was indicated by inactivation of toxic compounds after periodate oxidation. The toxin caused lesions on a number of other monocots and dicots and proved to be non-host specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Molecular diagnosis, chemo-diagnosis and physiological parameter have been applied for detecting the Ganoderma disease of coconut. Polyclonal antibodies (PAbs) raised against mycelial protein of Ganoderma, specific mycelial protein (62 kDa) of Ganoderma isolates and basidiocarp protein of Ganoderma were used for detection. All the PAbs could detect Ganoderma in diseased coconut root tissues in early stage of the disease before symptom expression by indirect - ELISA at the antiserum dilution of 1:1000 for mycelial protein, 1:700 for specific protein and 1:3000 for basidiocarp protein. Low cross reactions were observed with saprophytic fungi occurring in coconut roots and also with other basidiomycetous fungi. For polymerase chain reaction tests, the primer was generated from the internal transcribed spacer region one (ITS 1) of rDNA of Ganoderma, which produced a PCR product of 167 bp in size. Utility of this method was confirmed at the field level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aqueous extract (10%) from leaves of zimmu (Allium sativum L. × Allium cepa L.) when applied as foliar spray to first and second leaves of cotton plants induced systemic resistance in third and fourth leaves to a challenge infection with Xanthomonas campestris pv. malvacearum and reduced the number of lesions by up to 73% compared with water-treated control plants. The treated leaves exhibited significantly high activity of enzymes phenylalanine ammonia-lyase, peroxidase and polyphenol oxidase along with rapid accumulation of phenolics. The activities of chitinase and β-1,3-glucanase were greatly elevated in treated plants as compared to water-treated controls. An 11-fold increase in chitinase activity was evident 4 d after treatment. Western blot analysis revealed that a chitinase with an apparent molecular weight of 58 kDa that cross-reacted with a barley chitinase antiserum was induced in cotton leaves 3 d after treatment and the maximum induction of this chitinase was detected 4 d after treatment. The present study provides evidence for the induction of biochemical defence mechanisms in cotton leaves after treatment with leaf extract from zimmu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fungitoxic effect of various medicinal plants belonging to different families was evaluated in vitro on Rhizoctonia solani , the rice sheath blight pathogen. Of the various plant extracts, the leaf extract of zimmu ( Allium cepa × Allium sativum ) showed the maximum antifungal activity against R. solani and recorded an inhibition zone of 12?mm. The leaf extract of zimmu was also effective in inhibiting the growth of other agronomically important fungal and bacterial pathogens viz., Aspergillus flavus , Curvularia lunata, Alternaria solani , Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae , Xanthomonas campestris pv. malvacearum and Xanthomonas axonopodis pv . citri . The antimicrobial compound was dissoluble in methanol and the methanolic extract showed the absorption maxima at 210?nm and 230?nm. Phenolic compounds were present in greater amounts in methanol extract of zimmu. TLC analysis showed the appearance of two blue spots at R f ?=?0.65 and R f ?=?0.90. The compounds eluted at R f ?=?0.65 and R f ?=?0.90 by preparative TLC exhibited strong antifungal activity against R. solani . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sublethal concentrations of DDT and methyl parathion (MP) in the medium significantly affected the rates of feeding, absorption and conversion in Channa striatus. Fish exposed to 250 ppb DDT or MP consumed 23 or 50% less food than those exposed to pesticide-free water. Correspondingly, absorption rate also decreased from 120 cal/g live fish/day in the control to 88 and 59 cal/g/day in those exposed to 250 ppb DDT and MP. Efficiency to convert the absorbed food into body substance dropped from 30% in the control to 6 and 12% in the 250 ppb DDT and MP groups. Metabolic rate of the control averaged to 84 cal/g/day; whereas exposure to DDT did not significantly affect the metabolic rate, a concentration of 250 ppb MP depressed the rate to 52 cal/g/day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which investigates the association of lactoferrin gene polymorphism with mastitis. The study uses the California mastitis test for the examination of the presence of mastitis in the blood samples from 124 crossbred cattle. Results show that polymorphism at the gene promoter locus of lactoferrin can be used as a marker of susceptibility/resistance of cattle to mastitis.

Ticks and tick borne diseases pose enormous problems to man and domestic animals. The impact of ticks and tick-borne diseases on the livelihood of resource poor farming communities have been ranked high (Perry et al., 2002). These problems are closely associated with domestic animals and pets in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The direct and indirect effects of ticks are either through their role as vectors of disease or by their feeding activities. Direct losses include reduced weight gain, damaged hides, reduced milk production, loss due to tick toxicosis and tick paralysis (Graf et al., 2004). Indirect losses are due to the vector potentiality of the tick. In India, the economic losses due to tick and tick-borne diseases are estimated to be US$ 498.7 million per annum (Ghosh et aL, 2007) with a global annual loss of $109 billion (Jabbar et al., 2007).

MammaPrint® (MP) is a 70-gene based prognostic assay that stratifies early-stage breast cancer patients into low and high-risk of relapse. Recently, further stratification of the 70-gene risk results identified extreme low and high-risk subgroups with specific clinical outcomes (Delahaye et al. 2017) and treatment response characteristics (Wolf et al. 2017). However, the biological profiles of these extreme MP subgroups are not fully investigated. In this study, we aim to gain more insight into their biological significance using differentially expression genes (DEGs) analysis. We selected 400 samples from the whole MP range and defined 4 subgroups (Ultra high [UH], High risk [HR], Low risk [LR], Ultra low [UL]), for which FFPE microarray full-transcriptome data were available at Agendia. DEGs analysis was performed with limma and subsequent pathway analysis with Enrichr and GOrilla. Two separate comparative analyses were carried out to unravel biological processes associated with extreme risk subgroups: UL vs. LR and UH vs. HR. We found 101 DEGs (logFC > =0.485 & FDR <0.05) between UL and LR subgroups and 1714 DEGs between UH and HR subgroups. Based on the pathway analysis, our results showed that the UL subgroup was more homogeneous, with enrichment in pathways reflecting low proliferative and metastatic features. This is in line with the favorable long-term outcome characteristic of the UL group. Conversely UH exhibited higher heterogeneity, with the enrichment of more diverse pathways including immune response, cell cycle and proliferation, that could be associated with genomic instability. This would support the recent finding of UH samples being more sensitive to veliparib/carboplatin combination therapy compared to HR samples (Wolf et al. 2017)). Furthermore, clustering approach demonstrated UH and other subgroups as two distinct clusters. Our preliminary findings give additional insights into the biological processes associated with extreme MP groups, which might open new avenues for therapeutic intervention in breast cancer. Agendia Inc. Agendia Inc. R. Bhaskaran: Full / Part-time employment: Agendia Inc. C. Griffioen: Full / Part-time employment: Agendia Inc. D. Wehkamp: Full / Part-time employment: Agendia Inc. L. Mittempergher: Full / Part-time employment: Agendia Inc. A.M. Glas: Full / Part-time employment: Agendia Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]