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In view of the ethno medicinal use of Enhydra fluctuans for the treatment of kidney stones; the present study aimed to elucidate the molecular mechanisms involved in the amelioration of nephrolithiasis through a network pharmacology approach. The phytoconstituents were queried in DIGEP-Pred to identify the regulated proteins. The modulated proteins were then enriched in the STRING to predict the protein-protein interactions and the probably regulated pathways were traced in the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes. Further, the network was constructed using Cytoscape ver 3.5.1. Results showed that β-carotene was found to be regulating maximum targets i.e. 26. In addition, 63 proteins were triggered by the components in which the vitamin D receptor was targeted by the maximum phytoconstituents i.e. 16. The enrichment analysis identified the regulation of 67 pathways in which fluid shear stress and atherosclerosis-associated pathways (KEGG entry hsa05418) regulated ten genes. Further, protein kinase C-α was traced in 23 different pathways. In addition, the majority of the regulated genes were identified from the extracellular space via the modulation of 43 genes. Also, nuclear receptor activity had the maximum molecular function via the regulation of 7 genes. Likewise, the response to organic substance was predicted to trigger the top genes i.e. 43. In contrast, Stigmasterol, Baicalein-7-o-glucoside, and Kauran-16-ol were found to have a high affinity to bind with the VDR receptor confirmed by the molecular modelling and the dynamics. Hence, the study elucidated the probable molecular mechanisms of E. fluctuans in managing nephrolithiasis and identified the lead molecules, their targets, and possible pathways. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Scaling and root planning (SRP) is essential for preventing bacterial infection, it is always the first step of periodontal treatment. The treatment of periodontal pockets with excisional new attachment procedure (ENAP) and gingival curettage as an adjunct to SRP in the treatment of periodontitis represents yet another novel causative therapy

Antiviral drug discovery and its developmental processes happen to be the need of the hour. The break-out burden of complications and mortality caused by viruses like Influenza, Ebola, MERS, SARS and presently, the subtype SARS-CoV-2 are randomly growing in an exponential arc. Under such critical circumstances, there occurs an urgent paradigm shift in the research domain where antimalarial drugs like Hydoxychloroquine were given as a prophylactic treatment to improve the condition of the patients affected by the SARS-CoV-2-COVID-19 disease. For the use of emergency purposes in this global pandemic, a ground breaking development has taken place in vaccine therapy with mRNA-based technologies by pharma giants like Pfizer- BioNTech, Moderna Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc. All three newly launched successful mRNA vaccines, like Comirnaty, mRNA-1273 and AZD1222, in their late-phase clinical trials showed an effective rate up to ~ 95%. Many alternative approaches use translational medicines and artificial intelligence tools to mitigate clinical morbidities within a given timeframe. Hence in this particular book chapter, we tried to highlight the pros and cons of all the possible antiviral drug interventions and strategies that have been implemented from the past till the present to combat several epidemics and global pandemics. At present, the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic imposed a greater threat and unprecedented challenge in the antiviral drug discovery platform that needs to be focused on in detail.

Abstract: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was reported to be transmitted from bats to humans and, became a pandemic in 2020. COVID-19 is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide and still, the numbers are increasing. Further, despite the availability of vaccines, mutation in the virus continuously poses a threat of re-emergence of the more lethal form of the virus. So far, the repurposing of drugs has been exercised heavily for the identification of therapeutic agents against COVID-19, which led FDA to approve many drugs for the same e.g., remdesivir, favipiravir, ribavirin, etc. The anti-COVID drugs explored via other approaches include nirmatrelvir (used in combination with ritonavir as Paxlovid), tixagevimab and cilgavimab (both used in combination with each other) and others. However, these approved drugs failed to achieve a significant clinical outcome. Globally, natural bioactive have also been explored for anti-COVID-19 effects, based on their traditional medicinal values. Although the clinical findings suggest that FDA-approved drugs and natural bioactives can help reducing the overall mortality rate but the significant clinical outcome was not achieved. Therefore, the focus has been shifted towards new drug development. In line with that, a lot of work has been done and still going on to explore heterocyclic compounds as potent anti-COVID-19 drugs. Several heterocyclic scaffolds have been previously reported with potent antiinflammatory, anticancer, anti-viral, antimicrobial and anti-tubercular effects. Few of them are under consideration for clinical trials whereas others are under preclinical investigation. Hence, this review discusses the evidence of rationally designed and tested heterocyclic compounds acting on different targets against COVID-19. The present manuscript will help the researches and will serve as a pivotal resource in the design and development of novel anti-COVID-19 drugs.

A numerical study has been carried out on the two-dimensional flow past a circular cylinder. In this case, a splitter plate is provided at the rear stagnation point in the downstream direction. ansys fluent has been used to carry out the numerical simulations based on finite volume method approach. Grid independence was achieved and the numerical model was validated with results available in open literature at Reynolds numbers of 100, 5000, and 100,000 respectively. In the present investigation, the characteristics of vortex shedding due to the presence of splitter plate in the circular cylinder were investigated. The main focus of this research was to find the optimal splitter plate length for low, moderate, and high Reynolds numbers. It was observed that at low, moderate, and high Reynolds numbers, the drag coefficient (cd) for optimal plate length decreased drastically as compared to the baseline circular cylinder case. Moreover, the fluctuating nature of lift coefficient (cl) had also ceased. This research work has a good potential to decrease time-varying structural loads on bluff bodies by decreasing the vortex shedding frequency and consequently decreasing drag. The scope of our research extends to structures of bridges and large vehicles, radiator pipes of heat exchangers, landing gears of aircraft, and many more.

Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 301. ISBN: 978-1-316-62627-6 (Paperback).

Over the past few decades, emojis have emerged as a popular form of non-linguistic expression in computer-mediated communication. Various factors have been known to affect emoji usage patterns (suc...

Thiazole has widespread importance in materials and medicines. Several reviews are reported which cover essential properties of thiazoles such as pharmacological activities, structure-activity relationship studies, and various synthetic routes. However, synthesis based on a greener approaches, particularly metal-free reactions, usage of mild, nontoxic, recyclable catalysts, eco-sustainable protocols, efficient solvents have not been exclusively reviewed. Current review emphasizes green synthetic approaches for substituted thiazoles that have been performed within the last decade.

Chronic inflammation (CI) is a primary contributing factor involved in multiple diseases like cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, allergy, asthma, autoimmune diseases, coeliac disease, glomerulonephritis, sepsis, hepatitis, inflammatory bowel disease, reperfusion injury, and transplant rejections. Despite several expansions in our understanding of inflammatory disorders and their mediators, it seems clear that numerous proteins participate in the onset of CI. One crucial protein pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) much studied in cancer is also found to be inextricably woven in the onset of several CI's. It has been found that PKM2 plays a significant role in several disorders using a network of proteins that interact in multiple ways. For instance, PKM2 forms a close association with epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFRs) for uncontrolled growth and proliferation of tumor cells. In neurodegeneration, PKM2 interacts with apurinic/apyrimidinic endodeoxyribonuclease 1 (APE1) to onset Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. The cross-talk of protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) and PKM2 acts as stepping stones for the commencement of diabetes. Perhaps PKM2 stores the potential to unlock the pathophysiology of several diseases. Here we provide an overview of the notoriously convoluted biology of CI's and PKM2. The cross-talk of PKM2 with several proteins involved in stroke, Alzheimer's, cancer, and other diseases has also been discussed. We believe that considering the importance of PKM2 in inflammation-related diseases, new options for treating various disorders with the development of more selective agents targeting PKM2 may appear.

The development strategies of English-to-Bengali neural machine translation (NMT) systems are reported in this paper. Several attention mechanisms on the development of English-to-Bengali NMT system are reported transparently. Further, the translation system has been experimented with some preprocessing steps such as tokenization, truecasing to obtain a better translation. The automatic evaluation techniques are used to measure the performance of the translated systems followed by human judgment.

Methods to detect paramagnetic species in biochemical media are discussed in the context of computational approaches to their spectral simulation and property prediction. Theory is discussed throughout in order to guide the reader through fundamental ESR principles and describe the important role computational techniques play in understanding such spectral data. Examples are provided from the literature, including pedagogical studies in order to offer a breadth of coverage for these fundamental computational approaches in analytical science.

Large-scale production systems are well known to encounter node failures, which affect compute capacity and energy. Both in HPC systems and enterprise data centers, combating failures is becoming challenging with increasing hardware and software complexity. Several data mining solutions of logs have been investigated in the context of anomaly detection in such systems. However, with subsequent proactive failure mitigation, the existing log mining solutions are not sufficiently fast for real-time anomaly detection. Machine learning (ML)-based training can produce high accuracy but the inference scheme needs to be enhanced with rapid parsers to assess anomalies in real-time. This work tackles online anomaly prediction in computing systems by exploiting context free grammar-based rapid event analysis.We present our framework Aarohi1, which describes an effective way to predict failures online. Aarohi is designed to be generic and scalable making it suitable as a real-time predictor. Aarohi obtains more than 3 minutes lead times to node failures with an average of 0.31 msecs prediction time for a chain length of 18. The overall improvement obtained w.r.t. the existing state-of-the-art is over a factor of 27.4×. Our compiler-based approach provides new research directions for lead time optimization with a significant prediction speedup required for the deployment of proactive fault tolerant solutions in practice.

Introduction. Young women (20-35 years) are at high risk of HPV infection, although the majority of the infections are asymptomatic and are cleared spontaneously by the host immune system. These are also the group of women who are sexually active and are in the population of pregnant women. During pregnancy, the changes in the hormonal milieu and immune response may favor persistence of HPV infection and may aid in transgenerational transmission thereby furthering the cancer risk. In the present study, we determined the prevalence of vaginal HPV infection in early pregnancy and attempted to relate with pregnancy outcome. Material and Methods. Vaginal cytology samples were collected from the condoms used to cover the vaginal sonography probe during a routine first trimester visit to the hospital. All women were followed up throughout pregnancy and childbirth. Maternal and neonatal outcomes were recorded. Results. We found a prevalence of HPV infection around 39.4% in our population. Interestingly all HPV positive women were infected with one or more high risk HPV viruses with an overlap of intermediate and low risk in 43% and 7.3%, respectively. Women with preterm prelabor rupture of membranes (PPROM) showed a statistically higher incidence in HPV positive (7.3%) group as compared to the HPV negative (3.2%) group. Conclusion. The prevalence of genital HPV infection is high during pregnancy (around 40%) and was associated with higher incidence of PPROM.

Banana and plantain are one of the globally important commercial crops supporting livelihood and food security of millions across the globe. In view of environmental degradation, climate change, loss of diversity of crop plants and thereafter the need for diversity-based farming for the sustainable food system, the importance of conservation and utilization of genetic diversity of Musa are globally signified. The edible banana fruit is available entirely from section Eumusa and rarely from section Australimusa of the genus Musa under family Musaceae and developed from two ancestor species M. acuminata and M. balbisiana in the South East Asian centre of origin. The diversity and distribution of species, subspecies and groups are important aspects in evolutionary and conservation studies. There are so far three major geographical regions of distributions of cultivated bananas, viz. Asia and the Pacific (29%), Africa (35%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (36%). A large proportion (70–85%) of the gene pool of the domesticated banana is available within Asia and the Pacific regions. The conservation of Musa germplasm is the priority objective of programmes and activities related to Musa (Banana and Plantain) diversity. The strategy for Musa conservation has been developed by the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP). The international banana germplasm collection is managed by the International Transit Centre (ITC) with INIBAP/Bioversity International, having the world’s largest Musa germplasm collection and conservation with around 1500 accessions. Morphological and molecular characterization is useful in the classification of cultivars and newly discovered wild Musa species. There are two major utilizations of the collected and evaluated Musa germplasm, viz. use of accession in breeding and crop improvement programmes and secondly, boosting production through direct distribution of better accession to the small-scale banana growers. The International Musa Testing Programme (IMTP), coordinated by INIBAP with the NARS and breeding programmes, resulted in several promising banana hybrids. Direct use of Musa accessions by the farmers from the ITC also showed encouraging impact on small banana growers in Cuba, Northern Tanzania and Nicaragua for their food security and better income. There is a need for more intensification of Musa germplasm collection, conservation and utilization, so as to achieve the call of the ‘Delhi Declaration on Agrobiodiversity Management 2016’.

Today's large-scale supercomputers encounter faults on a daily basis. Exascale systems are likely to experience even higher fault rates due to increased component count and density. Triggering resilience-mitigating techniques remains a challenge due to the absence of well defined failure indicators. System logs consist of unstructured text that obscures essential system health information contained within. In this context, efficient failure prediction via log mining can enable proactive recovery mechanisms to increase reliability.This work aims to predict node failures that occur in supercomputing systems via long short-term memory (LSTM) networks that exploit recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Our framework, Desh1 (Deep Learning for System Health), diagnoses and predicts failures with short lead times. Desh identifies failure indicators with enhanced training and classification for generic applicability to logs from operating systems and software components without the need to modify any of them. Desh uses a novel three-phase deep learning approach to (1) train to recognize chains of log events leading to a failure, (2) re-train chain recognition of events augmented with expected lead times to failure, and (3) predict lead times during testing/inference deployment to predict which specific node fails in how many minutes. Desh obtains as high as 3 minutes average lead time with no less than 85% recall and 83% accuracy to take proactive actions on the failing nodes, which could be used to migrate computation to healthy nodes.

Food is one of the basic needs for every living being and very important aspect for life. But now day's foods are affected by different adulterants. Adulteration is a substance which reduces the vital importance of food. Some of the common adulterants are mineral oils, argemone oils, castor oils in edible oils; vanaspathi, mashed potato in ghee; invert sugar or jiggery in honey, kesari dal, lead chromate in pulses etc. which can leads to Epidemic dropsy, Glaucoma, Cardiac arrest, Lathyrism (crippling spastic paraplegia), Anemia, abortion, paralysis, brain damage, cancer etc. The aim is to evaluate the presence of adulterant from daily uses food materials like Milk , Butter, Edible oil, Honey, Pulses, Wheat Flour, Black Pepper, Chilli powder, Coffee powder which we collected from different departmental and local grocery stores and checked the presence of individual adulterants by biochemical qualitative analysis. The colour change of the sample indicate the according to the reagents is indicates the presence of different adulterants. This information can help to grow the food safety and also people can be aware about the food brands for a healthy life.

Rice water has been used for curing various ailments. The experiment was conducted to know the physico-chemical and cooking properties of six fine rice varieties. Length and breadth of the reported varieties ranges from 6–7.8mm and 4.5–5.5mm. The highest amylose (28%) was estimated in Gobindo bhog non - boiled rice followed by Sona Masori half boiled rice (24.2%) and lowest (18.6%) were Saffola arise active rice and Kerala rice. Alkali spreading value ranges from 3.0 to 3.9 of the tested varieties. Cooking time varied from 11min to 31min among the tested rice varieties. Elongation ratio of the fine rice varieties ranges from 1.5 to 2.4. Rice water of Kerala rice, Saffola arise active rice and full boiled rice had shown the significant zone of against diarrhoea causing bacteria. Overnight and 1 hr shocked rice water had shown the effective result against the dandruff causing fungi.

Within the net of child labour, there is a section of children who live their lives on the streets, without any kind of attachment with their family and maintain their livelihood through working as informal child workers. This study is based on these children who are termed here as ‘Roaming child workers’. It came out that apart from poverty of the parents there are other socio-economic reasons which force a child to come out from the family and work as child worker in the urban areas. It also came out from field survey that after leaving home a good number of children are economically better off and even able to keep themselves above the poverty line. But still they are very vulnerable. Through this study, effort has been made to prove that average monthly expenditure on substances of these ‘Roaming working children’ increases at a decreasing rate with their average monthly income, whereas, average monthly expenditure on entertainment shares a linear relationship with average monthly income.