Optimization and Characterization of Thermostable Endo and Exocellulases by Humicola sp. SKESMBKU03

Humicola sp. SKESMBKU03, a cellulase producer was isolated from horse dung manure collected from Hyderabad, Telangana. In the present study, endo and exoglucanase production from Humicola sp. SKESMBKU03 was studied and optimization of the cultural conditions to enhance production of enzymes has been reported. Among the twenty fungal cellulase producers isolated from different thermogenic habitats, the fungal strain ‘HD3’ identified as Humicola sp. SKESMBKU03 exhibited highest cellulase activity by plate screening assay. To enhance the production level of the enzyme, different cultural conditions were optimized and observed that optimum pH and temperature for endo and exoglucanase production was 5.0 and 45oC respectively. Maximum growth as well as enzyme production was recorded on 3rd day of incubation period in shake flask (100RPM) containing Mandel’s Weber medium. Urea and malt extract among the organic nitrogen sources while ammonium chloride as inorganic nitrogen source were found to be the best nitrogen source (0.2%) for endo and exoglucanase production. The endo and exoglucanase activities are higher in media containing glucose as their carbon source (1%) followed by xylose and lactose. The organism showed maximum dry weight in pH of 9.0-10.0, temperature of 45oC, cellulose as carbon sources, yeast extract and malt extract of nitrogen source. The endo and exocellulases produced by the Humicola sp. SKESMBKU03 are highly stable at pH 8.0 and temperature of 750C. The results indicate that the endo and exocellulases produced by Humicola sp. SKESMBKU03 are more stable at high temperature and alkaline pH

EVALUATION OF MAXIMUM ENTROPY METHOD OF SPECTRUM ESTIMATION

The parametric models autoregressive (AR)/AR-moving average (MA)/MA are sometimes not capable of finding out the power spectral densities of random sequences. Under such circumstances, the non-parametric methods outperform the parametric ones because of the sensitivity of the latter to model specifications. The maximum entropy method (MEM) is regarded as the non-parametric method of spectrum estimation; it suggests one possible way of extrapolating the autocorrelation sequence so that a more accurate estimate of the spectrum can be obtained with better resolution. This paper investigates the work of realizing MEM method and evaluating its performance with minimum variance method

A NOVEL APPROACH TO STATE SPACE TIME DOMAIN AUTOREGRESSIVE SIGNAL PROCESSING USING OPTIMAL RECURSIVE ESTIMATOR

This work describes the concept of filtering of signals using discrete Kalman filter. The true state of constant, random constant having process noise and autoregressive (p) process when corrupted by measurement noise are estimated using discrete Kalman filter and results are presented using MATLAB

Family-led rehabilitation after stroke in India (ATTEND): a randomised controlled trial

Background: Most people with stroke in India have no access to organised rehabilitation services. The effectiveness of training family members to provide stroke rehabilitation is uncertain. Our primary objective was to determine whether family-led stroke rehabilitation, initiated in hospital and continued at home, would be superior to usual care in a low-resource setting. Methods: The Family-led Rehabilitation after Stroke in India (ATTEND) trial was a prospectively randomised open trial with blinded endpoint done across 14 hospitals in India. Patients aged 18 years or older who had had a stroke within the past month, had residual disability and reasonable expectation of survival, and who had an informal family-nominated caregiver were randomly assigned to intervention or usual care by site coordinators using a secure web-based system with minimisation by site and stroke severity. The family members of participants in the intervention group received additional structured rehabilitation training—including information provision, joint goal setting, carer training, and task-specific training—that was started in hospital and continued at home for up to 2 months. The primary outcome was death or dependency at 6 months, defined by scores 3–6 on the modified Rankin scale (range, 0 [no symptoms] to 6 [death]) as assessed by masked observers. Analyses were by intention to treat. This trial is registered with Clinical Trials Registry-India (CTRI/2013/04/003557), Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12613000078752), and Universal Trial Number (U1111-1138-6707). Findings: Between Jan 13, 2014, and Feb 12, 2016, 1250 patients were randomly assigned to intervention (n=623) or control (n=627) groups. 33 patients were lost to follow-up (14 intervention, 19 control) and five patients withdrew (two intervention, three control). At 6 months, 285 (47%) of 607 patients in the intervention group and 287 (47%) of 605 controls were dead or dependent (odds ratio 0·98, 95% CI 0·78–1·23, p=0·87). 72 (12%) patients in the intervention group and 86 (14%) in the control group died (p=0·27), and we observed no difference in rehospitalisation (89 [14%]patients in the intervention group vs 82 [13%] in the control group; p=0·56). We also found no difference in total non-fatal events (112 events in 82 [13%] intervention patients vs 110 events in 79 [13%] control patients; p=0·80). Interpretation: Although task shifting is an attractive solution for health-care sustainability, our results do not support investment in new stroke rehabilitation services that shift tasks to family caregivers, unless new evidence emerges. A future avenue of research should be to investigate the effects of task shifting to health-care assistants or team-based community care. Funding: The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia

An optimized TOPS+ comparison method for enhanced TOPS models

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background Although methods based on highly abstract descriptions of protein structures, such as VAST and TOPS, can perform very fast protein structure comparison, the results can lack a high degree of biological significance. Previously we have discussed the basic mechanisms of our novel method for structure comparison based on our TOPS+ model (Topological descriptions of Protein Structures Enhanced with Ligand Information). In this paper we show how these results can be significantly improved using parameter optimization, and we call the resulting optimised TOPS+ method as advanced TOPS+ comparison method i.e. advTOPS+. Results We have developed a TOPS+ string model as an improvement to the TOPS [1-3] graph model by considering loops as secondary structure elements (SSEs) in addition to helices and strands, representing ligands as first class objects, and describing interactions between SSEs, and SSEs and ligands, by incoming and outgoing arcs, annotating SSEs with the interaction direction and type. Benchmarking results of an all-against-all pairwise comparison using a large dataset of 2,620 non-redundant structures from the PDB40 dataset [4] demonstrate the biological significance, in terms of SCOP classification at the superfamily level, of our TOPS+ comparison method. Conclusions Our advanced TOPS+ comparison shows better performance on the PDB40 dataset [4] compared to our basic TOPS+ method, giving 90 percent accuracy for SCOP alpha+beta; a 6 percent increase in accuracy compared to the TOPS and basic TOPS+ methods. It also outperforms the TOPS, basic TOPS+ and SSAP comparison methods on the Chew-Kedem dataset [5], achieving 98 percent accuracy. Software Availability: The TOPS+ comparison server is available at http://balabio.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mallika/WebTOPS/.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fun

Chiral drag force

We provide a holographic evaluation of novel contributions to the drag force acting on a heavy quark moving through strongly interacting plasma. The new contributions are chiral in that they act in opposite directions in plasmas containing an excess of left- or right-handed quarks and in that they are proportional to the coefficient of the axial anomaly. These new contributions to the drag force act either parallel to or antiparallel to an external magnetic field or to the vorticity of the fluid plasma. In all these respects, these contributions to the drag force felt by a heavy quark are analogous to the chiral magnetic effect on light quarks. However, the new contribution to the drag force is independent of the electric charge of the heavy quark and is the same for heavy quarks and antiquarks. We show that although the chiral drag force can be non-vanishing for heavy quarks that are at rest in the local fluid rest frame, it does vanish for heavy quarks that are at rest in a suitably chosen frame. In this frame, the heavy quark at rest sees counterpropagating momentum and charge currents, both proportional to the axial anomaly coefficient, but feels no drag force. This provides strong concrete evidence for the absence of dissipation in chiral transport, something that has been predicted previously via consideration of symmetries. Along the way to our principal results, we provide a general calculation of the corrections to the drag force due to the presence of gradients in the flowing fluid in the presence of a nonzero chemical potential. We close with a consequence of our result that is at least in principle observable in heavy ion collisions, namely an anticorrelation between the direction of the CME current for light quarks in a given event and the direction of the kick given to the momentum of all the heavy quarks and antiquarks in that event.Comment: 28 pages, small improvement to the discussion of gravitational anomaly, references adde

Effects of demand-side financing on utilisation, experiences and outcomes of maternity care in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review.

Demand-side financing, where funds for specific services are channelled through, or to, prospective users, is now employed in health and education sectors in many low- and middle-income countries. This systematic review aimed to critically examine the evidence on application of this approach to promote maternal health in these settings. Five modes were considered: unconditional cash transfers, conditional cash transfers, short-term payments to offset costs of accessing maternity services, vouchers for maternity services, and vouchers for merit goods. We sought to assess the effects of these interventions on utilisation of maternity services and on maternal health outcomes and infant health, the situation of underprivileged women and the healthcare system

Human antibodies targeting Zika virus NS1 provide protection against disease in a mouse model.

Zika virus is a mosquito-borne flavivirus closely related to dengue virus that can cause severe disease in humans, including microcephaly in newborns and Guillain-Barré syndrome in adults. Specific treatments and vaccines for Zika virus are not currently available. Here, we isolate and characterize four monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) from an infected patient that target the non-structural protein NS1. We show that while these antibodies are non-neutralizing, NS1-specific mAbs can engage FcγR without inducing antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection in vitro. Moreover, we demonstrate that mAb AA12 has protective efficacy against lethal challenges of African and Asian lineage strains of Zika virus in Stat2-/- mice. Protection is Fc-dependent, as a mutated antibody unable to activate known Fc effector functions or complement is not protective in vivo. This study highlights the importance of the ZIKV NS1 protein as a potential vaccine antigen

Combined artificial bee colony algorithm and machine learning techniques for prediction of online consumer repurchase intention

A novel paradigm in the service sector i.e. services through the web is a progressive mechanism for rendering offerings over diverse environments. Internet provides huge opportunities for companies to provide personalized online services to their customers. But prompt novel web services introduction may unfavorably affect the quality and user gratification. Subsequently, prediction of the consumer intention is of supreme importance in selecting the web services for an application. The aim of study is to predict online consumer repurchase intention and to achieve this objective a hybrid approach which a combination of machine learning techniques and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm has been used. The study is divided into three phases. Initially, shopping mall and consumer characteristic’s for repurchase intention has been identified through extensive literature review. Secondly, ABC has been used to determine the feature selection of consumers’ characteristics and shopping malls’ attributes (with > 0.1 threshold value) for the prediction model. Finally, validation using K-fold cross has been employed to measure the best classification model robustness. The classification models viz., Decision Trees (C5.0), AdaBoost, Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Neural Network (NN), are utilized for prediction of consumer purchase intention. Performance evaluation of identified models on training-testing partitions (70-30%) of the data set, shows that AdaBoost method outperforms other classification models with sensitivity and accuracy of 0.95 and 97.58% respectively, on testing data set. This study is a revolutionary attempt that considers both, shopping mall and consumer characteristics in examine the consumer purchase intention.N/

Growth landscape formed by perception and import of glucose in yeast

An important challenge in systems biology is to quantitatively describe microbial growth using a few measurable parameters that capture the essence of this complex phenomenon. Two key events at the cell membrane—extracellular glucose sensing and uptake—initiate the budding yeast’s growth on glucose. However, conventional growth models focus almost exclusively on glucose uptake. Here we present results from growth-rate experiments that cannot be explained by focusing on glucose uptake alone. By imposing a glucose uptake rate independent of the sensed extracellular glucose level, we show that despite increasing both the sensed glucose concentration and uptake rate, the cell’s growth rate can decrease or even approach zero. We resolve this puzzle by showing that the interaction between glucose perception and import, not their individual actions, determines the central features of growth, and characterize this interaction using a quantitative model. Disrupting this interaction by knocking out two key glucose sensors significantly changes the cell’s growth rate, yet uptake rates are unchanged. This is due to a decrease in burden that glucose perception places on the cells. Our work shows that glucose perception and import are separate and pivotal modules of yeast growth, the interaction of which can be precisely tuned and measured.National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Pioneer AwardNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Graduate Fellowshi