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Thermophiles inhabiting high temperatures are considered primitive microorganisms on early Earth. In this regard, several works have demonstrated microbial community composition in geothermal environments. Despite that, studies on hot springs located in the Indian subcontinent viz., Surajkund in the district Hazaribag, Jharkhand; Bakreshwar in the district Birbhum, West Bengal; Tantloi in the district Dumka, and Sidpur in the district Pakur, Jharkhand are scanty. Nonetheless, the metagenomic analysis of these hot springs showed significant differences in the predominant phyla corresponding to geochemical properties. The Chloroflexi, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Deinococcus-Thermus, and Firmicutes were dominant phyla in all the samples. In contrast, Meiothermus was more in comparatively low-temperature hot springs. In addition, archaeal phyla, Euryarchaeota, Candidatus Bathyarchaeota, and Crenarchaeota were predominant in all samples. The canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) showed the abundance of Deinococcus, Thermus, Pyrobaculum, Kocuria, and Geodermatophilus positively correlated with the aqueous concentration of sulfate, fluoride, and argon in relatively high-temperature (≥ 72 °C) hot springs. However, at a lower temperature (≤ 63 °C), Thermodesulfovibrio, Caldilinea, Chloroflexus, Meiothermus, and Tepidimonas are positively correlated with the concentration of zinc, iron, and dissolved oxygen. Further, hierarchical clustering exhibits variations in its functional attributes depending on the temperature gradients. Metagenome analysis predicted carbon, methane, sulfur, and nitrogen metabolism genes, indicating a wide range of bacteria and archaea habitation in these hot springs. In addition, identified several genes encode polyketide biosynthesis pathways. The present study described the microbial community composition and function in the tropical hot springs and their relationship with the environmental variables.

In recent years, quantum image processing got a lot of attention in the field of image processing due to the opportunity to place huge image data in quantum Hilbert space. Hilbert space or Euclidean space has infinite dimensions to locate and process the image data faster. Moreover, several types of research show that the computational time of the quantum process is faster than classical computers. Encoding and compressing the image in the quantum domain is still a challenging issue. From the literature survey, we have proposed a DCT-EFRQI (Direct Cosine Transform Efficient Flexible Representation of Quantum Image) algorithm to represent and compress gray image efficiently which save computational time and minimize the complexity of preparation. This work aims to represent and compress various gray image sizes in quantum computers using the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and EFRQI (Efficient Flexible Representation of Quantum Image) approaches together. The Quirk simulation tool is used to design the corresponding quantum image circuit. Due to the limitation of qubits, a total of 16 numbers of qubits is used to represent the coefficient and its position of the grayscale image. Among those, 8 number of qubits are used to map the coefficient values and the rest are used to generate the corresponding coefficient XY-coordinate position. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed DCT-EFRQI scheme provides better representation and compression compared to DCT-GQIR, DWT-GQIR, and DWT-EFRQI in terms of PSNR(Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), and bit rate.

We report the draft genome sequence of Plesiomonas shigelloides strain PI-19, which was isolated from the intestine of freshwater pufferfish. The genome of strain PI-19 contain 3,146 protein-coding sequences and harbors virulence genes associated with pathogenicity.

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors have accrued an ever-increasing presence in the agricultural sector due to their non-destructive mode of capturing data. LiDAR sensors emit pulsed light waves that return to the sensor upon bouncing off surrounding objects. The distances that the pulses travel are calculated by measuring the time for all pulses to return to the source. There are many reported applications of the data obtained from LiDAR in agricultural sectors. LiDAR sensors are widely used to measure agricultural landscaping and topography and the structural characteristics of trees such as leaf area index and canopy volume; they are also used for crop biomass estimation, phenotype characterisation, crop growth, etc. A LiDAR-based system and LiDAR data can also be used to measure spray drift and detect soil properties. It has also been proposed in the literature that crop damage detection and yield prediction can also be obtained with LiDAR data. This review focuses on different LiDAR-based system applications and data obtained from LiDAR in agricultural sectors. Comparisons of aspects of LiDAR data in different agricultural applications are also provided. Furthermore, future research directions based on this emerging technology are also presented in this review.

The efficiency of a vineyard management system is directly related to the effective management of nutritional disorders, which significantly downgrades vine growth, crop yield and wine quality. To detect nutritional disorders, we successfully extracted a wide range of features using hyperspectral (HS) images to identify healthy and individual nutrient deficiencies of grapevine leaves. Features such as mean reflectance, mean first derivative reflectance, variation index, mean spectral ratio, normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) and standard deviation (SD) were employed at various stages in the ultraviolet (UV), visible (VIS) and near-infrared (N.I.R.) regions for our experiment. Leaves were examined visually in the laboratory and grouped as either healthy (i.e. control) or unhealthy. Then, the features of the leaves were extracted from these two groups. In a second experiment, features of individual nutrient-deficient leaves (e.g., N, K and Mg) were also analysed and compared with those of control leaves. Furthermore, a customised support vector machine (SVM) was used to demonstrate that these features can be utilised with a high degree of effectiveness to identify unhealthy samples and not only to distinguish from control and nutrient deficient but also to identify individual nutrient defects. Therefore, the proposed work corroborated that HS imaging has excellent potential to analyse features based on healthiness and individual nutrient deficiencies of grapevine leaves.

This paper demonstrates the potential of using hyperspectral imaging for detecting age and defects of grapevine leaves. For age detection studies a number of grapevine healthy leaves and for defect detection analysis 9 different defective leaves have been selected. Hyperspectral images of these leaves covered spectral wavelengths from 380 nm to 1000 nm. A number of features from the brightness in ultra violet (UV), visible (VIS) and near infrared (NIR) regions were derived to obtain the correlation of age and defect. From the experimental studies it has been observed that the mean brightness in terms of original reflection in visible range has correlation with different ages of grapevine leaves. Moreover, the position of mean 1st derivative brightness peak in VIS region, variation index of brightness and rate of change of brightness i.e., mean 1st derivative brightness at NIR provide a good indication about the age of the leaves. For defect detection whole area and selective areas containing the defects on the leaves have been experimentally analysed to determine which option provides better defect detection. Variation index of brightness was also employed as a guide to obtain information to distinguish healthy and unhealthy leaves using hyperspectral imaging. The experimental results demonstrated that hyperspectral imaging has excellent potential as a non-destructive as well as a non-contact method to detect age and defects of grapevine leaves.

Due to the powerful image editing tools, image integrity protection is becoming important, for instance, in a court of law, news reports, insurance claims or telemedicine. Digital image watermarking is a technique for detecting, localizing and recovering of tampered image but capability and accuracy of performance by the existing methods are still issues especially when tampering rate is relatively high. This paper proposes a novel blind fragile watermarking mechanism for effective image authentication and recovery. In the proposed scheme, not only the probability of detection and localization of tampering is increased because of embedding appropriate authentication code in the proper position but also there is an efficient post-processing of recovery in a way that any pixel has treated differently leading to higher quality of recovered image. Furthermore, embedding more fragile authentication code with a smaller number of bits can help to provide a second opportunity for content recovery while the quality of watermarked image is preserved. Thus, better results have been achieved in terms of accuracy of detection and the quality of recovered image after higher tampering rate compared with some of the state-of-the-art schemes.

Hypothesis Indolicidin (ILPWKWPWWPWRR-NH2), an antimicrobial peptide from bovine neutrophils, possesses significant antibacterial activity. An interesting feature of indolicidin is its unusually high content of Tryptophan and Proline residues. While the involvement of Tryptophan has been studied for its hemolytic and antibacterial activity, little is known about the roles played by Proline in these aspects. We herein investigate the structure and biological activities of indolicidin, where Proline at either one or more of the 3rd, 7th, 10th positions has been replaced by Alanine to better understand its structure and biological function. Experiments Structural aspects of Proline residues of indolicidin and its effect on antimicrobial activity were elucidated by replacing Proline residues with Alanine. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) experiments provide substantial evidence for the importance of Proline residues for antimicrobial activity and cell wall disintegration. Binding affinity of the peptides to Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was investigated using fluorescence spectroscopy and dynamic light scattering (DLS) in conjunction with 31PNMR spectroscopy and confirmed the disintegration of LPS layer. Findings Our study reveals that Proline residues are necessary for interaction of indolicidin with LPS and establishes the significance of the third and tenth Proline residues for its antimicrobial activity. We believe that the presence of so many Proline residues provides the molecule a selective advantage of adopting different conformations varying from a globular, closed conformation to an open extended conformation, and even to a wedge-shaped conformation, which account for the diverse mechanisms of action of indolicidin.

A prototype of a multilevel solar panel system with a real time clock (RTC) based automated solar tracker has been developed for its use in urban residential areas. The proposed system consists of three panels mounted in a rack one above another at a fixed distance from each other to minimize the floor area while shifted horizontally from each other by half the panel width to avoid shading of the lower panels. The panels will be fitted with the solar tracker to track the sun to maximize the energy collection. Experimental result shows that the developed system can harness about 20–23% more energy while occupying 33% less area than that by the conventional fixed panel system of same size. The proposed system will be useful for large urban city dwellers, especially in third world countries, where not only electricity is in short supply, availability of roof top space to install solar panels is also very limited.

A prototype multilevel solar panel system with an automated solar tracker has been developed for its use in urban areas. The system consists of three solar panels stacked one above another at some fixed distance to minimize the floor area and shifted horizontally from one another to avoid the shading of the lower panels. Experimental results show that the developed system can harness about 23% more energy while occupying 33 % less floor area than that by the conventional fixed panel system of same size. The proposed system is easy to construct and implement, takes less floor space and will be effective for urban areas where not only electricity is in short supply, availability of roof top space to install solar panels is also very limited.

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) technology is a subdivision of the vast field of wireless communications, which breaks the restrictions of DSL, cable-modem or T1 infrastructure based wire line of our broadband Internet connections [1]. Wireless networking has become an important area of research in academic and industry. The four high-speed intensive applications such as high-speed data, video, voice and streaming media are being served properly by the WiMAX network, which overcomes the term digital divide. It has a number of spearhead applications with at-home and dynamic internet accessibility along with large geographical coverage and relatively low expense to pursuit. Routing overhead, unidirectional link support, delay, throughput, QoS support and multicast are the analysable terms by whom we can define the WiMAX protocols. To attain best use of this technology selection of suitable protocol is very important. In our paper, most imperative protocols of 802.16 WiMAX network called AODV, DSDV and OLSR is ventilated as well as further criticized in accordance with their performance on WiMAX where AODV is a reactive (on demand) protocol and both DSDV and OLSR are proactive.

Machine vision is now being extensively used for defect detection in the manufacturing process of collagen-based products such as sausage skins. At present the industry standard is to use a LabView software environment to manage and detect any defects in the collagen skins. Available data corroborates that this method allows for false positives to appear in the results which is responsible for reducing the overall system performance and resulting wastage of resources. Hence novel criteria were added to enhance the current techniques. The proposed improvements aim to achieve a higher accuracy and flexibility in detecting both true and false positives by utilizing a function that probes for the color deviation and fluctuation in the collagen skins. After implementation of the method in a well-known Australian company, investigational results demonstrate an average 26i¾ź% increase in the ability to detect false positives with a corresponding substantial reduction in operating cost.

In this paper we perform an experimental investigation of the IEEE 802.11e TXOP facility to enhance the transmission of parallel multimedia streaming sessions through efficient bandwidth reservation and explicitly consider both the audio and video streams. The delay constraints associated with the audio and video streams that comprise a multimedia session pose the greatest challenge since real-time multimedia is particularly sensitive to delay as the packets require a strict bounded end-to-end delay. We show how the TXOPLimit parameter can be efficiently dimensioned to reduce the transmission delay for the video frames. Due to its frame-based nature, video applications are considered to be bursty as each video frame is typically transmitted as a burst of packets. The size of the burst is related to the size of the video frame and the number of packets required to transmit the video frame. The TXOP facility is particularly suited to efficiently deal with this burstiness since it can be used to reserve bandwidth for the duration of the packet burst. Through experimental investigation, we show that there is a significant performance improvement for the video streams by using the TXOPLimit parameter however there is no such improvement for the audio streams. We show that over-dimensioning the TXOPLimit parameter can cause the video stream to seize too much bandwidth which results in a deterioration in performance for the other competing traffic streams. This deterioration becomes more prominent as the number of parallel multimedia streams increases. We show that there is a performance improvement to all traffic streams by providing differentiated service to the constituent I, P, and B video frame types in conjunction with the TXOP facility.

In this paper the performance of streaming MPEG-4 video with a video server located on the wired network streaming to wireless clients is compared with the performance of a video server located in the wireless network streaming to wireless video clients. We experimentally investigate the performance for a number of concurrent video streams with varying video frame sizes, frame rates and packetisation schemes. The performance is measured in terms of the key parameters of bit rate, loss rate and mean delay. We show how that there is a trade-off for these parameters for a wired and wireless located server. We show that a wired located server is susceptible to high loss rates when there are a number of concurrent video streams whilst the wireless located server has greater performance in terms of a low loss rate but incurs greater delays due to having to compete with more stations in order to access to the medium