Search

As part of a comprehensive study of lichen diversity of northern areas of Pakistan using molecular and morphological approaches, we found four species of the genus Rhizocarpon. The analysis revealed two new species in the lichen biota of Pakistan namely, Rhizocarpon lavatum and Rhizocarpon petraeum, while the other two, Rhizocarpon disporum and Rhizocarpon geminatum are reported for the second time, from new localities. In comparison to literature information and GenBank sequences of the same taxa, variation in the morpho-anatomical features and nucleotide differences in the ITS marker of nrDNA have been documented. Descriptions and phylogenetic analysis of the taxa are given, along with information on ecology and distribution.

In this study, a number of species of the genus Lecidella were collected from different areas of Pakistan and characterized using morpho-anatomical and molecular techniques. The present work revealed that collected specimens belong to four species of Lecidella. Among which L. tumidula is a new record for Pakistan while L. carpathica, L. patavina and L. stigmatea are being reported here from new localities, from Pakistan, representing their wider distribution. Complete morpho-anatomical descriptions, ecology and distribution, along with ITS-based molecular analysis is provided.

Respiratory sound (RS) attributes and their analyses structure a fundamental piece of pneumonic pathology, and it gives symptomatic data regarding a patient's lung. A couple of decades back, doctors depended on their hearing to distinguish symptomatic signs in lung audios by utilizing the typical stethoscope, which is usually considered a cheap and secure method for examining the patients. Lung disease is the third most ordinary cause of death worldwide, so; it is essential to classify the RS abnormality accurately to overcome the death rate. In this research, we have applied Fourier analysis for the visual inspection of abnormal respiratory sounds. Spectrum analysis was done through Artificial Noise Addition (ANA) in conjunction with different deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify the seven abnormal respiratory sounds—both continuous (CAS) and discontinuous (DAS). The proposed framework contains an adaptive mechanism of adding a similar type of noise to unhealthy respiratory sounds. ANA makes sound features enough reach to be identified more accurately than the respiratory sounds without ANA. The obtained results using the proposed framework are superior to previous techniques since we simultaneously considered the seven different abnormal respiratory sound classes.

Placolecis kashmirensis sp. nov. is described from Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan. It is characterized by a yellowish-brown thallus, hyaline, broadly ellipsoid ascospores, a relatively taller hymenium and pear-shaped pycnidia. The generic position is confirmed by a phylogenetic analysis based on nrITS sequences. Description, a phylogenetic tree, and identification key for all the known Placolecis species are provided.