Efficacy of wild medicinal plant extracts against predominant seed-borne fungi of broad bean cultivars

Seed samples of four Egyptian broad bean cultivars were tested for seed-borne fungi. The deep freezing method was used to isolate twelve seed-borne fungi viz., Alternaria alternata, Aspergillus flavus, A. niger, Botrytis fabae, Cladosporium cladosporioides, Fusarium oxysporum, F. solani,, Penicillium italicum, Rhizoctonia solani, Rhizopus stolonifer, Stemphylium globuliferum and Trichothecium roseum from the broad bean cultivars viz., Giza 3, Giza 429, Giza 843 and Misr 1. Aspergillus flavus, Botrytis fabae, Fusarium oxysporum and Penicillium italicum were the most predominant fungal species. Aqueous extracts from five wild medicinal plants (Asclepias sinaica, Farsetia aegyptia, Hypericum sinaicum, Phagnalon sinaicum, and Salvia aegyptiaca) which were collected from the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt were tested against the predominant fungal pathogens. All the aqueous plant extracts significantly inhibited the mycelial growth of these fungi, but the extract of Asclepias sinaica exhibited the strongest antifungal activity. The maximum seed germination rate was observed in infested Giza 843 and minimum in Misr 1. Treating seeds with plant extract of Asclepias sinaica (10%) enhanced the percentage of seed germination of all cultivars in both laboratory and pot experiments. Maximum root and shoot lengths of seedlings were recorded in Giza 843 during fungal infestation or treatment by plant extract. In greenhouse experiment, the aqueous A. sinaica extract reduced disease severity and total pigments but increased total phenolics and fruit yield

Bichat guidelines for the clinical management of brucellosis and bioterrorism-related brucellosis

Interest in Brucella species as a biological weapon stems from the fact that airborne transmission of the agent is possible. It is highly contagious and enters through mucous membranes such as the conjunctiva, oropharynx, respiratory tract and skin abrasions. It has been estimated that 10-100 organisms only are sufficient to constitute an infectious aerosol dose for humans. Signs and symptoms are similar in patients whatever the route of transmission and are mostly non-specific. Symptoms of patients infected by aerosol are indistinguishable from those of patients infected by other routes. Regimens containing doxycycline plus streptomycin or doxycycline plus rifampin are effective for most forms of brucellosis. Isolation of patients is not necessary. Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and fluoroquinolones also have good results against Brucella, but are associated with high relapse rates when used as monotherapy. The combination of ofloxacin plus rifampicin is associated with good results. Even if there is little evidence to support its utility for post-exposure prophylaxis, doxycycline plus rifampicin is recommended for 3 to 6 weeks

Bichat guidelines for the clinical management of brucellosis and bioterrorism-related brucellosis

Interest in Brucella species as a biological weapon stems from the fact that airborne transmission of the agent is possible. It is highly contagious and enters through mucous membranes such as the conjunctiva, oropharynx, respiratory tract and skin abrasions. It has been estimated that 10-100 organisms only are sufficient to constitute an infectious aerosol dose for humans. Signs and symptoms are similar in patients whatever the route of transmission and are mostly non-specific. Symptoms of patients infected by aerosol are indistinguishable from those of patients infected by other routes. Regimens containing doxycycline plus streptomycin or doxycycline plus rifampin are effective for most forms of brucellosis. Isolation of patients is not necessary. Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and fluoroquinolones also have good results against Brucella, but are associated with high relapse rates when used as monotherapy. The combination of ofloxacin plus rifampicin is associated with good results. Even if there is little evidence to support its utility for post-exposure prophylaxis, doxycycline plus rifampicin is recommended for 3 to 6 weeks

Biological control of the predominant seed-borne fungi of tomato by using plant extracts

Aqueous extracts from five wild traditional medicinal plants (Achillea fragrantissima, Balanites aegyptiaca, Peganum harmala, Rumex vesicarius, and Urtica urens) which were collected from different locations in Egypt were tested against the predominant fungal pathogens (Alternaria alternata f. sp. lycopersici,  A.  solani, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici and Rhizoctonia solani) infested tomato seeds . All the aqueous plant extracts significantly inhibited the mycelial growth and spore germination of these fungi, but the extract of A. fragrantissima exhibited the strongest antifungal activity. The maximum seed germination, plant emergence and seedling vigor was detected after the treatment of tomato seeds with 10% A. fragrantissima extract. Pathogenicity testing of tomato seeds by predominant fungi indicated positive infection of tomato seeds but A. solani had the most aggressive infection. In greenhouse experiment, the aqueous A. fragrantissima extract reduced disease severity but increased total pigments, total phenolics and fruit yield

Animal rights

Most of educational projects are related with challenges of environmental issues and rarely taking under consideration that animals are part of life of land. Animals have a strong effect in our lives, as keep the life cycle balances. That is why in our project we decided to concern ourselves with Animal Rights, all around the world and in Greece. The main problems we are dealing with are: The living conditions of productive animals, the rights of stray animals, the abuse of animals, the torture of equine animals and animals which produce fur, the conduct of experimental medical tests on animals and the protection of endangered animals. In our project we have set some goals as well as the means of meeting them. When it comes to finding a solution to the problems mentioned above, after noticing what our classmates knew about them, we came to the realization that what is needed most of all is better information about these problems that can be found in an easy, fun and interactive platform. As a team, we made various games and activities with which people can learn about animals and the difficult situations they are dealing with

Incorporating prior knowledge improves detection of differences in bacterial growth rate

BACKGROUND: Robust statistical detection of differences in the bacterial growth rate can be challenging, particularly when dealing with small differences or noisy data. The Bayesian approach provides a consistent framework for inferring model parameters and comparing hypotheses. The method captures the full uncertainty of parameter values, whilst making effective use of prior knowledge about a given system to improve estimation. RESULTS: We demonstrated the application of Bayesian analysis to bacterial growth curve comparison. Following extensive testing of the method, the analysis was applied to the large dataset of bacterial responses which are freely available at the web-resource, ComBase. Detection was found to be improved by using prior knowledge from clusters of previously analysed experimental results at similar environmental conditions. A comparison was also made to a more traditional statistical testing method, the F-test, and Bayesian analysis was found to perform more conclusively and to be capable of attributing significance to more subtle differences in growth rate. CONCLUSIONS: We have demonstrated that by making use of existing experimental knowledge, it is possible to significantly improve detection of differences in bacterial growth rate

Low-grade inflammation, diet composition and health: current research evidence and its translation

The importance of chronic low-grade inflammation in the pathology of numerous age-related chronic conditions is now clear. An unresolved inflammatory response is likely to be involved from the early stages of disease development. The present position paper is the most recent in a series produced by the International Life Sciences Institute's European Branch (ILSI Europe). It is co-authored by the speakers from a 2013 workshop led by the Obesity and Diabetes Task Force entitled ‘Low-grade inflammation, a high-grade challenge: biomarkers and modulation by dietary strategies’. The latest research in the areas of acute and chronic inflammation and cardiometabolic, gut and cognitive health is presented along with the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying inflammation–health/disease associations. The evidence relating diet composition and early-life nutrition to inflammatory status is reviewed. Human epidemiological and intervention data are thus far heavily reliant on the measurement of inflammatory markers in the circulation, and in particular cytokines in the fasting state, which are recognised as an insensitive and highly variable index of tissue inflammation. Potential novel kinetic and integrated approaches to capture inflammatory status in humans are discussed. Such approaches are likely to provide a more discriminating means of quantifying inflammation–health/disease associations, and the ability of diet to positively modulate inflammation and provide the much needed evidence to develop research portfolios that will inform new product development and associated health claims

Detecting Objects with Context-Likelihood Graphs and Graph Refinement

The goal of this paper is to detect objects by exploiting their interrelationships. Contrary to existing methods, which learn objects and relations separately, our key idea is to learn the object-relation distribution jointly. We first propose a novel way of creating a graphical representation of an image from inter-object relation priors and initial class predictions, we call a context-likelihood graph. We then learn the joint distribution with an energy-based modeling technique which allows to sample and refine the context-likelihood graph iteratively for a given image. Our formulation of jointly learning the distribution enables us to generate a more accurate graph representation of an image which leads to a better object detection performance. We demonstrate the benefits of our context-likelihood graph formulation and the energy-based graph refinement via experiments on the Visual Genome and MS-COCO datasets where we achieve a consistent improvement over object detectors like DETR and Faster-RCNN, as well as alternative methods modeling object interrelationships separately. Our method is detector agnostic, end-to-end trainable, and especially beneficial for rare object classes